De L’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics
Book I — Foreigner, There : History of a Political Capture
— Introduction
What is the history of ‘foreigner’? The question is obvious, and fundamental…
Tag: Foreign
De L’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics
Book II — Foreigner, Here : Existentialist Foreignness
— Introduction
Back to the foreigner proper. What has the first-person voice of a foreigner to do in a philosophical exploration of foreignness ? …
Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Introduction
There was everywhere amongst Orientalists the ambition to formulate their discoveries, experiences, and insights…
– Edward Said, Orientalism
Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 1
The genesis of a diary. I did not even look for being a foreigner. The travel as coincidence. No need to repeat that I was not feeling ‘good in my own skin’, as the French formula says…
Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 2
The most recurrent – and delightful – materials found in Flaubert’s stories from Egypt are precisely the author’s reflections on the very act of writing. Flaubert basically writes about writing. … But one would not deny that there is also a more humanistic interest in the project of travelling…
Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 3
Since I have been abroad, quite a few travelers have gotten in touch with me. Whether friends who had promised (often in vain) to pay me visit, or complete strangers, they show an enthusiasm that reminds me, not without nostalgia, of my early days here…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.1
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) argues that human life is profoundly marked by its existence in time. The human being (Dasein, “being-there”) is “thrown in the world” (Sein-in-der-Welt), a world which is in time. Temporality is a source of angst and worry since it is the plane of realization of the fundamental incompletion of Dasein…
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…