Ethnocentrism is the feared ghost of the anthropologist’s good conscience. The colonial agenda of early anthropology, in the 19th century, would soon be complemented by the conscientious methodological and ethical concerns of mid 20th century ethnologists, within which the structuralist lineage would quickly acquire a leading position…
Tag: Derrida
Phenomenologies of Time – Part 3
Like a Happy Families card game: as Emmanuel Levinas undertakes his own creative interpretation of phenomenology, he too inherits of a keen attention to the central question of time. A student of both Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg in the year 1928, his indebtedness to them is sufficiently proved through the numerous translations and commentarial works that he dedicated to them for nearly two decades afterwards…
Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Conclusion
If the aim of a scholarly work of quality is to present a problem in its diverse complexities, and, in some situations, to take a position or defend one of the views, it could appear, here, as judicious to use Verter’s demonstration as the last words of this discussion…
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.3
While this question could certainly meet no satisfactory answer in the case of visual arts, our intention here is to speculate a few ideas in the analogous case of the loved Other. To permit this, we must first realize that this spatial model applies to two moments of the relation to the loved Other…
Is ‘thinking outside the box’ necessarily opening another box? Such is the question that the reader could reflect upon after following Debjani Ganguly in her ambitious study Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005)…
Even though Michel Foucault’s critical readings of health and health institutions have proved infinitely insightful and in turn, inspiring for the updating of these institutions, his enterprise did not only receive praises. One of the most rigorous and thorough critiques came from a budding celebrity, Jacques Derrida, who used to be a student of Foucault…
Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Conclusion
Questioning the responsibility of Herodotus in the Orientalist project is asking the question of alternatives. Saïd himself seems to praise the curiosity and adventurous mind of Herodotus. Herodotus’ very presence in the debate is also liable to his enterprise of not only travelling to foreign places, but also of maintaining records of them…
The Language of Foreignness – Introduction
“I could not live in India: I don’t know the language.” Foreign language is for many the first thing to which foreignness is synonymous. Being a foreigner would mean not just living in a foreign country, but more immediately, more stressfully, living in a different and foreign linguistic environment…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.3
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty, and directly influenced by Phenomenology: his first university works were on Husserl. The phenomenological heritage is perhaps not visible in the content of Derrida’s work – Derrida is not remembered for his use of the phenomenological method in any of his main studies – but in the form of the philosophical approach already adopted by Heidegger and by another direct inspiration of Derrida’s, Emmanuel Levinas…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.2
And as for the language, well I don’t know. English is comfortable, or rather, comforting. A foreign language, for the one who always found himself to be the foreigner. The easy foreign language, so foreign that it is even foreign to most people one encounters in India. Funny thing. And foreign to me, indeed. A safe terrain to express my thoughts…