Tag: Post-Structuralism

May 9, 2014

De L’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics

Book III — Us, Foreigners : The Reconstruction of Foreignness
— Introduction

Foreignness starts with the foreigner. The argument would be unsurprising, acceptable, evident, perhaps commonsensical…

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
February 17, 2014

Ethnocentrism is the feared ghost of the anthropologist’s good conscience. The colonial agenda of early anthropology, in the 19th century, would soon be complemented by the conscientious methodological and ethical concerns of mid 20th century ethnologists, within which the structuralist lineage would quickly acquire a leading position…

November 18, 2013

Is ‘thinking outside the box’ necessarily opening another box? Such is the question that the reader could reflect upon after following Debjani Ganguly in her ambitious study Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005)…

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

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 1.2.3
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…

October 1, 2012

When Michel Foucault addresses the question of the author, his horizon is already that of the systems of ideological controls of modern society. In 1969, Foucault presented a lecture entitled “What is an Author?” echoing the postmodern considerations of Barthes’ “Death of the Author”, published two years before…