One of the Enjoyment of the signifier is the enjoyment of the written or spoken word. The word is made of signifier pointing to the signified/ meaning. The relation between the signifier and the signified as thought by Ferdinand Saussure, the father of linguistics as arbitrary. To Lacan it is not just arbitrary, but is unstable, multivocal and never...
Juissance (Enjoyment) of a Christian
Desire is studied by psychoanalysis. We think desire mainly from the perspective of satisfaction. In India, Buddhists think that desire is the cause of all sufferings. Ancient Greek philosophy actually thinks desire from the point of its satisfaction of a lack. The lack that characterizes desire is supposed to refer to the original absence of lack. It presupposes an...
The Paradox of Freedom and Free Nation
Thinking freedom is an uneasy experience. Desire for freedom is endless. Everyone wants more freedom. But paradoxically, all political regimes proclaim that they are pro freedom. Even when the despotic nature of the regime is obvious to any keen observer. Freedom, therefore, may be denied in practice but it is never denied as a fundamental value of human existence....
The Untimely Arrival of Death
Gabriel Marcel says, ” when someone we love dies, we too die a little”. Somehow death disrupts our experience of life. Here, I wish to understand death through the thought of Maurice Blanchot, a French philosopher and literary theorist. Blanchot offers a unique perspective on the experience of death, particularly when it arrives untimely. Shakespeare’s Hamlet describes the untimely...
The Power of Silence: Gayatri Spivak’s Approach to Writing History
Gayatri Spivak, a renowned postcolonial theorist, has made significant contributions to way silence is used to serve power. In the light of her work we can study how use of silence produces history on the side of the power elite. Therfore, we have the challenge to explores Spivak’s approach to silence and its implications for historical narratives. The Subaltern...
The Society of Simulacrum: A World of Copies Without Originals
In his seminal work, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard introduced the concept of the “Simulacrum” to describe a society where copies, representations, and simulations have replaced reality. Eric Sadin, another French philosopher, has further developed this idea, arguing that we now live in a “Society of Simulacrum” where the distinction between reality and simulation has become increasingly blurred. We are...
History in the Singular and History in the Plural
All our experience is spatially marked. Immanuel Kant had indicated this. But he had internalized space to the point that it could not be held as objective. Reinhart Koselleck teaches that the understanding of our experience of the past is spacial. It has a logic of geography. It is assembled within a bonded geography. Even time, events, persons are...
Ethics of Care
Feminist thinkers tell us that our traditional ethical theories are sexist. They are male-centric. Moreover, traditional ethic is individual-centric. The deontology of Emanuel Kant is one such theory. It is reason based and is thought to be dispassionate basing our ethical actions in universal principles and ideals. Similar individualist ethical theory is found in the Aristotle’s virtue ethics. An...
Hope and the After/Post-Future Societies
When we perceive a failure of the future, when we begin to feel that we have no future, and we lose hope and experience acute anxiety. We do not like to have a dead end to our future. Shakespeare’s Hamlet portrays this anxiety through a scene where Halmet on encountering his dead father says : ‘ time is out...
Thinking Hope
Thinking has a deep relation to hope. All thinking is hopeful thinking. Even conservative thinking is hoping that change will not happen and works to prevent it. Philosophizing is a way of hoping. Usually hope enables us to imagine a different life from a present circumstances. The catch is in the circumstances. It is in the manner we view...
