Year: 2013

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Part 2
Indeed ― corruption often finds a comfortable seat at the forefront of the democratic machine, when a widespread capitalist economy can be disguised as a market benefitting the socialist needs of the state. Other major areas of developments, entirely initiated by the state, can boost markets worth thousands of crores, and thus call for its own respective profit-oriented economic actors…

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Part 3
An agent who changes suits. We are not very far from the imagery of secret agents, of James Bonds and other Mata Haris. And there is an easy connection: the use of illegal means to obtain information. In a way, the diplomatic field of agents under cover is today at par with international public-private economies such as the aforementioned defence: in both cases, the ultimate means of the intermediary is information…

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Conclusion
In such a light, the game seems particularly rigged, between an economic model that has found no major alternative in the last half a millennium, and deeply constitutive bureaucratic architectures. In both cases, corruption is not an abnormal evil but a necessary mechanism to make up for the incredibly idealistic principles of their common origin: the humanism of Europe’s Enlightenment…

December 6, 2013

Behind the Glim — Introduction
Why do we need the past ? What is the category of the past offering us ? How is the past helping us to better grasp or conceptualise present and future ? If the present is understood as self-evident reality, is the past, similarly, an objective category ? …

December 6, 2013

Behind the Glim — Part 1
The dual concept of pre-modernity and modernity is a curious object of historiography. Not just original, it becomes double-edged, as soon as one realises its repercussions. Sufficiently unquestioned in our days, it can support an array of divisive, reductive and ideologically oriented positions…

December 6, 2013
December 6, 2013
November 18, 2013

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)…

November 16, 2013

An Ethics of Love – Annex
Why? Why, and how? Why should I talk, today, in this place, about love? Why love, and why the ethics of love? How could I manage to mention, in 15 minutes, more than what we all already know about love? Is love even a philosophical question?…

November 4, 2013