As we began to approach the modern era, doing philosophy was a task of a vagabond and out-law. One had to cross boundaries and enter cross-roads as a thinker. Against this novelty seeking effort of the philosophers, came a book, Principles of Philosophy, that denounced philosophers who crossed borders and sought to put the house of philosophy in order...
Histor(ies) of Philosophy and Historiography
Every intellectual work has a sense of the past. It is made of several adventures, original sins, discoveries, disputes, decisive battles, that lead up to the present state of affairs . Here, we draw our attention to an intellectual work that we call history. Often, this sense of the past is linear and progressive. Moreover, linearity is privileged and...
Other Writings
One of the puzzles that I faced is that some of my friends have told me that my writings are difficult to understand. Although, sentences and words that I write hang together, somehow they say that it is difficult to decipher the meaning of the texts. This lack of transparency does haunt my writings. This may be because my...
Ethics of Sharing
Emanuel Levinas begins his ethics basing himself on call of the Other. Martin Heidegger seems to start the same from the deep inner voice of conscience that calls the falling-self back to authentic life. Away from this two approaches, Jean-Luc Nancy has a starting point in the potentiality of relationality. Rather than starting with the primacy of the Other...
Between the Mathematical and the Numerical
The numbers are mathematical. But the mathematical is not numerical. This means the mathematical is not reduceable to numbers. When we see things quantitatively, we tend to think that numbers correspond to things. Often, we confuse the forest for trees. The mathematical is the forest and the numbers are merely the trees. In our everyday world, the forest stands...
Toward the measure of Politics
Is there a relationship between politics and number? Is politics founded in our ability to measure? These questions are very important because we in India are facing an important predicament today. The supreme court has outlawed electoral bonds. The way resistance is being built to their public disclosure has raised the question of relations between politics and numbers. Democracy...
Deconstruction and Sex
Jean-Luc Nancy deconstructs sex. What does deconstruction tell us about sex other than psychoanalysis? Nancy took up the thinking of sex at a time of ‘me too’ movement in Europe and the scandal of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church ( somewhere around 2018). He thinks deconstruction can enable us to think sex. For Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is a...
Philosophy, Community and Democracy
With communism losing currency, philosophers like Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot thought it fit to examine the very basis of community. The notion of community is operative in everyday life but has several layers of meanings. It has religious, linguistic, national , ethnic, economic, regional, gender , racial, caste tinges of meanings. Hence, we might say that the way...
Hautology : Past in the Present Searching a Future
Derrida contests totalitarian and essentialist thinking. His method of contestation is famously called deconstruction. Closed meanings are opened through textual deconstruction. Time is also deconstructed and rendered unfixed through the notion of hauntology. Derrida seems to indicate that we are ill-adjusted to the present or the contemporary. Derrida calls is a disjuncture or dischronia of the present. The present...
On Love
There is less discourse on love among philosophers. Philosophers remain tongue-tied and silent about love. Some even considered love as an illusion. Jean-Luc Nancy indicates that the silence of philosophy on love is because of exhaustion. This exhaustion is due to at least two reasons. The first being that we lack novel and meaningful things to say about love....
