Newsletter September 2015

“For without exception the cultural treasures [the historian] surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Walter Benjamin)…

“… form has acquired its own content: tacking back and forth between the vernacular near and the cosmopolitan far, and the vivid sense of commensurability this modulation generates, are the objective correlates of a much larger politics of culture” (Sheldon Pollock)…

On January 3, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche, an unknown, eccentric and disillusioned German philologist, throws himself on the neck of a horse to save him from being flogged. The philosopher collapses on the ground. Thus started eleven years of dementia; a last phase, a severe and ultimate punishment, for Nietzsche’s already agitated existence…

The idea of applying the composite anthropologico-historical theory of French philosopher René Girard (born 1923) to Indian society and its mythology is not a new project. The complex Indian civilization possesses undoubtedly certain historical features liable to a fruitful analysis through his theory…

What is common to an Indian mole in Pakistan, an international arms agent and an alcohol mogul in North India? 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…

“Few pleasures are as robust as the simple country pleasure
of sneezing.
 The whole body ripples in orgasmic delight.”
Diane Ackerman.

“Orgasm is a metaphor.”
Julia…

In “Women,” the fourth chapter of her The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia attempts a focus on the misadventures of the feminine gender during and after the Partition. It is actually a mise en abîme, within a book, which is already mostly a representation of women and their centrality in that event…

While it is a well-known fact that the whole lifestyle of Ancient Greece was entirely imbued with theological elements, via the importance of the Greek pantheon, it is more rarely clarified that this spiritual life was a very unique type of religion. The understanding and practices revolving around the relations between humans and God was such that calling it a “religion” is in itself a controversy…

The Sarvastivāda is one of the ancient schools of Hinayana Buddhism. The term Sarvastivāda is composed of three words: sarva (all), asti (exist) and vada (discussion, talk). Therefore, Sarvastivāda is the theory that holds that everything exists, in the present but also in the past and the future…

The original texts of Buddhism are usually divided into two great traditions, each with its proper language. Canons of the early Hīnayāna Buddhism are gathered in the Buddhist hypothetical original language called Pāli…

“Monks, whether or not there is the arising of Tathagatas, this property stands — this steadfastness of the Dhamma, this orderliness of the Dhamma: All processes are inconstant (anicca)…”