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....
De-onto-theologizing Otherness
Emanuel Levinas is hailed as a thinker of otherness. He developed his thought though a creative critique of Martin Heidegger. Due to the work of Levinas, Heidegger appears to be a thinker of sameness that desires to eliminate all shades of otherness. But is that really so? Is Levinas thinking the other within onto-theology that Heidegger wishes to overcome?...
Limits of Communicative Action
Jurgen Habermas was no ivory tower theorist but was visible public intellectual who participated in public discussions across the world, particularly in Germany. Habermas is well known for his theory of communicative action. He distinguishes four kinds of actions of rational actors: teleological actions, normatively regulated actions, dramaturgical actions, and communicative action. Teleological action is where an actor makes...
The Theatre of Forgetting
From the time of Socrates and Plato we have seen a tremendous bias against writing. They privileged speech because it occurs in the presence of those who are engaged in conversation while writings are read in the absence of the author. There is another important drawback of writing. Both Socrates and Plato tell us that writing promotes forgetting. Once...
Seeking a Method of Philosophizing
Emmanuel Kant did overcome the passivity of the mind in the event of production of knowledge to some extent. He did restore the dynamism of the mind in the project of knowing. But his theory of the apriori categories of the mind has put back static passivity in the mind as it produces knowledge. W. H Hegel seems to...
