Author: Samuel Buchoul

December 6, 2013

An Ethics of Love – Part 2
The loved Other is external to me. She is what comes before me, in front of my eyes, just like my near future is before me, unveiling before my mere observation. The loved Other is the one who will call for all my hopes and expectations. Hope (espoir in French) is a wait (esperar in Spanish), that is, hope is irremediably a turn to the future…

December 6, 2013

An Ethics of Love – Part 3
The extent of inspiration from the Jewish tradition is particularly visible throughout Levinas’s œuvre. Some of his later works are, precisely, Talmudic commentaries. But the ‘metaphysics’, or the ‘flavour’ of the Semitic is already perceptible, even in his more ‘secular’ works of phenomenology…

December 6, 2013

An Ethics of Love – Overture
In place of a conclusion: an overture. Indeed: would separation, the death of love, be the necessary conclusion of love? Is love bound to follow the path of deceit, solitude and separation that we have drawn here?…

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Introduction
What have in common an Indian mole in Pakistan, an international arms agent and an alcohol mogul in North India? This rhetoric is clumsy but the point is even more evident: many, many would be all those who have corruption as their common denominator. A classical target of the utopian dreams of the Enlightenment Century, corruption is, four hundred years later, ubiquitous, present in multiple and complex forms all around the globe…

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Part 1
“The mafia doesn’t care about generating revenue for the government. In my case, I care a lot about the government. I run this business and add huge sums to the state exchequer.” — Ponty Chadha

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…