Tag: Language

May 9, 2014
May 9, 2014

De L’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics

Book III — Us, Foreigners : The Reconstruction of Foreignness
— Part 2

Heidegger’s Being and Time opens with an intriguing vocable. The German philosopher asks a very particular question : what is the meaning of Being ? …

May 9, 2014
August 26, 2013

Even though Michel Foucault’s critical readings of health and health institutions have proved infinitely insightful and in turn, inspiring for the updating of these institutions, his enterprise did not only receive praises. One of the most rigorous and thorough critiques came from a budding celebrity, Jacques Derrida, who used to be a student of Foucault…

May 10, 2013

Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Part 2.1
The modern word barbarian integrates both the ideas of the foreign, and of a lower value. Where is it coming form? The Greek βάρβαρος (barbaros) was conceived as antonym to πολίτης (polites), the “citizen” or inhabitant of the city. In Ancient Greece, a complex geopolitical order made of city-states, not belonging to the city meant being outside of the main form of community…

May 10, 2013

Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Conclusion
Questioning the responsibility of Herodotus in the Orientalist project is asking the question of alternatives. Saïd himself seems to praise the curiosity and adventurous mind of Herodotus. Herodotus’ very presence in the debate is also liable to his enterprise of not only travelling to foreign places, but also of maintaining records of them…

May 10, 2013

The Language of Foreignness – Introduction
“I could not live in India: I don’t know the language.” Foreign language is for many the first thing to which foreignness is synonymous. Being a foreigner would mean not just living in a foreign country, but more immediately, more stressfully, living in a different and foreign linguistic environment…

May 10, 2013

The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.1
Asking a foreigner for a definition of the foreigner  is a guarantee of failed objectivity. My status as a foreigner, and further, my particular historical and spatial context, as well as my experiences as a foreigner, necessarily influence my intellectualizations of this situation…

May 10, 2013

The Language of Foreignness – Conclusion
Alain Badiou’s mention of philosophy as foreignness is not an unprepared statement. For the thinker, the foreign is truly a character, if not, the main character, the main aspect, of the philosophical approach: “I think it is very important to understand this: genuine philosophical commitment, in situations, creates a foreignness…”

April 1, 2013

Four Quartets has been considered as one of the major works of the naturalized British poet T.S. Eliot. It represents the later part of his life and creations, where his inspirations and themes reached mystical conclusions, contrasting with the overwhelming and suffocating atmosphere of the Second World War…