‘Post-truth politics may have started on the left bank of the Seine, but they ended up in the White House… postmodernism is intended to be subversive. Since civilisation works by order and authority, challenging these things is bound to seem disruptive. The trouble is that neoliberalism challenges them too. Nothing is more fluid and flexible than… Read More Book review – How We Became Postmodern
You do not fight Hollywood with critical argument. You fight Hollywood with Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Suleiman, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Moufida Tlatli, Ousmane Sembène, Yasujirō Ozu, Guillermo del Toro, Mai Masri, ad gloriam. You do not battle misrepresentation. You signal, celebrate, and polish representations that are works of art…. The recent release… Read More Hamid Dabashi: Hollywood Orientalism is not about the Arab world. It's about the American world
A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state. This lesson… Read More The Owl of Minerva and the Spirit of Trust
NB: Given the state of affairs in many (there are exceptions) English language departments wherein ‘theory’ is shorthand for the ideas of Derrida and Foucauld, and where the notion of truth is sneered at, this newest upsurge of the antisemitic propaganda around the Dreyfus case ought to be an alert. I don’t think it will… Read More Jon Henley: Rise of far right puts Dreyfus affair into spotlight in French election race
The U.S. wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan showed imperial overreach beyond what even 20 years of war could manage. That the defeats were drawn out for so many years shows that domestic politics and the funding of the domestic military-industrial complex were, more than geopolitics, the key drivers of these wars. Empires can die… Read More Richard Wolff: How the troubled U.S. empire could quickly fall apart
The violence against the Hindu minority in Bangladesh is an ominous development. But it is also a reminder of one cardinal truth: All of South Asia is “tied together in a single garment of destiny,” to borrow Martin Luther King’s phrase from a different context. Violence in one place will spill over to another; freedom… Read More P. B. Mehta – Violence and communalism: South Asia’s disturbing commonality
Whenever there’s a leak of documents from the remote islands and obscure jurisdictions where rich people hide their money, such as this week’s release of the Pandora papers, we ask ourselves how such things could happen. How did we end up with a global system that enables great wealth to be transferred offshore, untaxed and hidden… Read More George Monbiot: Trashing the planet and hiding the money isn’t a perversion of capitalism. It is capitalism
NB: I agree with much of Gray’s argument about the fragility of liberal democratic values, but would like to underline one of his sentences, containing the phrase about earlier generations of ‘liberal and socialist thinkers downplaying the colossal human toll of communism in Russia and China‘. There’s no denying this, but let us also remember that… Read More The West isn’t dying – its ideas live on in China. By John Gray
At a gathering a couple of years ago in the Maharashtra hill station of Panchgani organised by Professor Rajmohan Gandhi, I was challenged by an angry young man: “Keep your Hinduism in your house. Why do you need to bring it into the streets?” The young man could have been a conservative Hindu offended by… Read More Sunita Viswanath: Why I feel the need to bring my Hinduism to the streets
NB: Although this essay focuses on American politics, it has broader relevance. There are two major points I would make: it does not provide an adequate definition of liberalism, a word that originates in ‘liberty’; and that it does not address the matter of the global domination of capital over economic and political life. There… Read More ANDREW O'HEHIR – Beyond the crisis of democracy: Does anyone still believe in liberalism?
