After Anatta : Towards a Girardian Ethics – Part 3
For Girard, imitation is primal and unavoidable: “There is no solution to mimetism aside from a good model.” For Buddhism, it is interdependence that is universal. As I have argued, imitation and interdependence are but the same thing: imitation is subsumed within interdependence, and perhaps the most common evidence of interdependence is mimesis. So much so that certain arguments can hardly be categorised in one concept or the other…
Tag: Philosophy
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…
After Anatta : Towards a Girardian Ethics – Part 3.2
Girard’s explicit views on ethics are quite sparse, if not absent, but one particular principle seems to be coming back regularly in his writings: non-violence. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World contains a few unambiguous statements such as: “The definitive renunciation of violence, without any second thoughts, will become for us the condition … for the survival of humanity itself and for each one of us.”…
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…
After Anatta : Towards a Girardian Ethics – Part 3.3
Is the ethical life thus in fact essentially the deep awareness of the universalism of interdependence and mimesis? Caution: such realisations, while potentially liberating, could also backfire. One could believe so much in one’s profound connection with a mimetic model, or in her profound interdependence with another human being, to the point of fully ‘surrendering’ to this other…
After Anatta : Towards a Girardian Ethics – Conclusion
When I presented some of these reflections at a COV&R conference in 2012, I felt a certain movement of excitement and interest, from a community of scholars very familiar with Girard’s thought. It is central, today, to address the question of Girard and ethics, and, while it has been done in other realms (political philosophy, theology), it is also necessary to try to translate the ethical stance stemming from mimetic theory into the language of philosophy, and in particular, within the traditions of ethics…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.1
“India… what a beautiful country.” An awkward situation; the flagrant exposition of one of India’s many calamities before our eyes. My friends are Indians, born in this country and they are its foreground actors as young citizens of the democracy…
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…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.3
Spring 2013. The never-ending heat of Manipal has fallen for a few hours. Early evening at End Point Road, for a session of frisbee. The decreasing attendance of our classmates pushed some of us to resort to other players. A community of foreign students from Malaysia comes at an impressive regularity, almost everyday, and seems to end up always very numerous – fifteen, sometimes twenty players…
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…