Newsletter October 2015

Le temps — time and weather, when weather encounters time. In Delhi too, just like anywhere else, complying to the shivers of these times, the first whisps of winter tickled our tips. Autumn was certainly the favourite season of Nietzsche: chromatic patchworks of all pastels, recalling the immediate heritage of Romanticism, unavoidable bedrock, necessary quicksands for the impulsion of his affirmative life philosophy. Contemplation of the time-less season, temptation of entering an eternal pause, reinvigoration of energy and will.
The Romantic and its day-after: An Ethics of Love, already old of its third spring, of its third autumn too, invites Levinas and his ethics turned towards the Other, at the table of love, its memories and its transformations. Active or reactive thought — once again — the thinker caught between the honesty of experience and the force of ambition. Philosophy as the writing of, writing off of memory, but one day too, philosophy as the reading of old memories. Philosophy in the present day too, always, veiled too, behind the prose of a writer, and the rhymes of a poet. Philippe Muray left us a decade back, but his bitter puns at the many faces of the French good conscience point towards a cultural landscape that has only worsened through the years. Elsewhere praised for his tingly portrayal of 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royale, Muray here attacks the “alter-globalised” ethos of a string of French humanitarianism, in what is here the first English translation of the poem.
Other traces of another time: Michel Foucault on the disappearance of the author, the comedies of historical records in pre-Colonial India, the Oedipean killing of philosophy’s birth in Greece. Saadat Hansan Manto finds another romantic, near a car repair station, while the Perfume turns sour in its orgiac fantasies. And finally a few words, shy and tentative, about all the small silences that marked a certain history of spirituality.

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Samuel