NB: During World War II, Albert Camus joined the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation; and worked as editor of the underground resistance journal Combat. In 1943, he began writing a series of letters to a hypothetical German friend. In a time when justice and truth seem helpless before ideology and hatred, Camus’ 81 year… Read More Albert Camus: Letters to a German Friend (1943)
First posted August 15, 2013 “Yes, I know all that. I should be modern” – begins Ramanujan’s ‘Conventions of Despair’. Others in India have felt this impulse, and it has pulled them in different directions. In politics, it has drawn them towards nationalism, socialism and fascism. In religion, it has had similarly contradictory effects: either… Read More Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council
The homogenic national society is the most artificial society to have ever been created and is the result of the “social engineering project… Due to its bureaucratic nature, Statism needs the homogenisation of space and time to function. It requires that within its borders, cultures and ways of life are melted into one singular artificial… Read More Against homogenisation: Advancing diversity through Democratic Confederalism
From Heidegger’s Nazism to Habermas’s Zionism, the suffering of the ‘Other’ is of little consequence. GAZA casualties live statistics We must be forgiven if we thought what Germany had today was not Holocaust guilt, but genocide nostalgia, as it has vicariously indulged in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians over the past century Hamid Dabashi Imagine if Iran, Syria, Lebanon,… Read More Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt / South Africa is testing the west’s claim to moral superiority
Before me there was no time, after me there will be none With me it is born, with me it will die Daniel von Czepko, Sexcenta Monidisticha Sapientum III, II (1655) the feeble artifice of an Argentine adrift on a sea of metaphysics . . . A word on the title: I am not unaware… Read More J. L. Borges: A New Refutation of Time
The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why Alexander T Englert As the foremost logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorems and contributions to set theory, the publications of which changed the course of mathematics, logic and… Read More Kurt Gödel to his mother: We’ll meet again
Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, 2012 Reviewed by Ben Watson Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but her ideas remain alive and to-be-lived-by today, a permanent reproach to thought’s accommodation to an intolerable present. Dunayevskaya inspired and inspires a special enthusiasm, evidenced here by… Read More The Raya Dunayevskaya – Herbert Marcuse -Erich Fromm Correspondence
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates always pursues truth with others. Dialectics therefore is a communal inquiry that aspires to be collaborative, with various participants contributing to a better understanding of the truth. It requires people to reflect on their own point of view and then proceed to understand the viewpoint of others which hopefully leads to… Read More From the Multiversity Cave: Plato and Periagoge
NB: The rebellion against reason, the cults of nostalgia or particularity are not new, these ways of thought have been with us a long time; and are a consequence of the divorce of reason from goodness, virtue, beauty and justice. Romanticism is a consequence of the elevation of scientific reason to a status above the… Read More The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms
Louis Althusser – an Intellectual Adventure (2017) This documentary traces the development of the thought of the Marxist French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990), who influenced a whole generation of philosophers, including Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Badiou and Zizek. Famous for his Definition of ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Althusser is credited with reinterpreting Marx in a… Read More Louis Althusser: An Intellectual Adventure (2017)
After the truth-shower 