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 ? …
Tag: Behind the Glim
Essay Series
Behind the Enlightenment and its lumières : darkness. A small glim, but already enough to blind us. These many lights, popping from all sides — heritage of the Enlightenment and its impressive symbolics. Forever after, the metaphor is consumed and digested, and if the image behind it is made blurry by the flame, we consider that the contrast speaks for the background alone. But another process has already started. Recent historians in India have shown a path to think differently the Enlightenment, to transcend the duality of pre-modern and modern, and to reconceptualise the very hypothesis of historical periods altogether.
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…
Behind the Glim — Part 2
Centuries from now, when the monopoly of post-Enlightenment western values, imaginations and institutions will have shied away before what will have become, hopefully, multi-centered global cultures, we will probably remember the Enlightenment project as a serpent that ended up biting its own tail…