Tag: Existentialism

May 10, 2013

The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.2
Two decades after Heidegger’s Being and Time, and not without the mediation of Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) attempted a profound application of the German fathers of phenomenology to one particular question: perception…

May 10, 2013

The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.3
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty, and directly influenced by Phenomenology: his first university works were on Husserl. The phenomenological heritage is perhaps not visible in the content of Derrida’s work – Derrida is not remembered for his use of the phenomenological method in any of his main studies – but in the form of the philosophical approach already adopted by Heidegger and by another direct inspiration of Derrida’s, Emmanuel Levinas…

May 10, 2013

The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.2
And as for the language, well I don’t know. English is comfortable, or rather, comforting. A foreign language, for the one who always found himself to be the foreigner. The easy foreign language, so foreign that it is even foreign to most people one encounters in India. Funny thing. And foreign to me, indeed. A safe terrain to express my thoughts…

May 10, 2013

The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.4
Three years in Delhi and another one in South India. Enough Hindi to maintain a two-minute rudimentary discussion, not to mention anything in Kannada besides uttha, neer and illa. If one is to focus on the matter of foreignness and language, one question should be addressed in priority: any language, in a situation of foreignness, is in general an unknown language…