To imagine a language means to imagine a life-form.We mind about the kind of expressions we use concerning these things; we do not understand them, however, but misinterpret them. When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw... Continue Reading →
The nervousness about speaking for others grows out of the introspections induced in anthropologists by the massive decolonization after the Second World War. That most of the classic field studies were carried out in colonial or semi-colonial settings, settings in which being white and Western conferred in itself a certain privilege and involved, willy-nilly, a... Continue Reading →
The recent European discourse on blasphemy as applied to the behavior of Muslim immigrants in Europe serves, paradoxically, at once to confirm and to deny difference. Angry Muslim responses to the publication of the Danish cartoons are seen by secularists as attempting to reintroduce a category that was once a mea ms of oppression in... Continue Reading →
"The media’s evacuation of the human through the image has to be understood, though, in terms of the broader problem that normative schemes of intelligibility, establish what will and will not be human, what will be a livable life, what will be a grievable death. These normative schemes operate not only by producing ideals of... Continue Reading →
In the interview he granted me shortly after the riots of 2005, the chief of police for the district in which I was then carrying out research expressed his amusement and surprise at the attitude of youngsters from the projects who, he said, would routinely run away when they saw a police car. “So they’re... Continue Reading →
What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its ‘useful’ object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point of penal... Continue Reading →
Consider the example of a highly intelligent seven-year-old child whom I wish to teach to play chess, although the child has no particular desire to learn the game. The child does however have a very strong desire for candy and little chance of obtaining it. I therefore tell the child that if the child will... Continue Reading →
In this eye-opening book of Talal Asad, a genealogy of secularism and secular concepts are made. Asad first asks questions such as "what might an Anthropology of Secularism look like?". then digs deeper into concepts such as agency, pain, cruelty and torture. He digs into these concepts in a way that his words unearth the... Continue Reading →
"This fit of passion for the colonizer’s values would not be so suspect, however, if it did not involve such a negative side. The colonized does not seek merely to enrich himself with the colonizer’s virtues. In the name of What he hopes to become, he sets his mind on impoverishing himself, tearing himself away... Continue Reading →
Hannah Arendt writes in her book On Revolution: Quite apart from the threat of total annihilation, which conceivably could be eliminated by new technical discoveries such as a ‘clean’ bomb or an antimissile missile, there are a few signs pointing in this direction. There is first the fact that the seeds of total war developed... Continue Reading →
Thinking Prismatically 