Can non-Europeans think? - Opinion. In a lovely little panegyric for the distinguished European philosopher Slavoj Zizek, published recently on Al Jazeera, we read: There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China. What immediately strikes the reader when seeing this opening paragraph is the unabashedly European character and disposition of the thing the author calls "philosophy today" - thus laying a claim on both the subject and time that is peculiar and in fact an exclusive property of Europe.
Even Judith Butler who is cited as an example from the United States is decidedly a product of European philosophical genealogy, thinking somewhere between Derrida and Foucault, brought to bear on our understanding of gender and sexuality. American Vignettes (I): Totalitarian Undercurrents. The airport is a totalitarian space; sometimes the truth is hyperbolic. You re-enter the United States, land of your birth, as part of the stream of arriving passengers. It is an everyday experience. You leave the airplane slowly, on stiff limbs, trickling with the mass of travellers into Newark airport. The imperatives are issued as soon as you enter the terminal building. No smoking. No cell phones. Stand in line. With the imperatives come the questions. “What were you doing in London?” With the questions comes the paperwork.
Your credit history, your financial information is passed between corporation and government when you buy your ticket. And this work of legibility renders us computable by the armed men, by their computers, by the networks of machines that monitor us. Once outside the terminal the undercurrent of control continues to carry you along. The imperatives, the questions, the paper work – the apparatus of order always carries a veiled threat.
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'Revolution' Greenblatt on civilization. Steven Greenblatt's recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is an ambitious widening of Greenblatt's intellectual palette. The title of the book refers to one of the central ideas in the metaphysics of Epicurus: the idea that atoms sometimes deviate from their straight courses, permitting collisions. This fact, according to Epicurus, is the only possible source of freedom of the will. So swerving is what takes determinacy out of nature and human action. That is why it is necessary to admit the same thing for the atoms, namely, that there is another cause of motion besides blows [from collisions] and weight, which is the source of our inborn capability [to act freely], since we see that nothing can come from nothing.
For the weight of the atoms prevents it from being the case that everything happens as a result of the blows [of collisions], which are like an external force. But this isn't primarily a treatment of Epicurus or Lucretius or philosophical ideas. Texts | 1.2 Modernity’s Fence. Before delving into these questions, it is perhaps helpful to recall the longstanding relation that fences have traditionally had with Modernity and, of course, with their philosophical reflection in liberal individualism. Today, dividing lines are not what they used to be either eighty years ago or in pre-modern times. Fences and walls have taken on new roles that their predecessors would hardly recognise.
In times past they simply fended off the enemy, and lightly imprinted the Empires’ footprint on the land. Before the ‘discovery’ of the autonomous individual, the ancient polis constantly dreamt of demolishing its walls or, at least, of never having to keep its gates closed. When a son of an ancient Greek city won an Olympics event, the elders ordered the demolition of part of the city walls. Only at times of crisis or degeneracy were the gates ordered shut. Fences took on a new role and character at the time European feudalism was running out of steam.
Questions of Modernity. Modernity has always laid claim to universal certainty—which meant assigning a different and lesser significance to anything deemed purely local, non-Western, or lacking a universal expression. This book makes those very non-Western, non-universal elements the tools for fashioning a more complex, rigorous, and multifaceted understanding of how the modern comes about. Focusing on the making of modernity outside the West, eight leading anthropologists, historians, and political theorists explore the production of new forms of politics, sensibility, temporality, and selfhood in locations ranging from nineteenth-century Bengal to contemporary Morocco. Topics include the therapeutics of colonial medical practice, the multiple registers of popular film, television serials and their audiences, psychiatrists and their patients, the iconic figure of the young widow, and the emergence of new political forms beyond the grasp of civil society.