Tag: history

The Lover of Che and Marx


Samudrala Avinash Rahul Vamshi KrishnaWhat a long name. Does not sound at allLike the name of someoneWho belongs to the … More

“They are no philosophical race”: Nietzsche’s Critique of the Englishman’s Philosophy


Nietzsche reserved special contempt for the English philosophical tradition, seeing in its utilitarianism and empiricism a triumph of mediocrity over greatness. “Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does,” he declared — skewering Bentham and Mill’s reduction of morality to mere comfort and calculation. For Nietzsche, British moral philosophy was herd morality dressed in academic clothing: it flattened human hierarchy, punished excellence, and mistook survival for nobility. Even Darwin’s legacy, filtered through Spencer, pointed downward toward the average. The English, he charged, were industrious but philosophically shallow — incapable of the dangerous, self-overcoming thought true philosophy demands.

Nava-Dvara Pura: Why the “Nine Gates” Body Metaphor in Indian Philosophy Is Inherently Patriarchal


The ancient Vedic concept of Nava-Dvara Pura — the human body as a city of nine gates — is one of Indian philosophy’s most sophisticated metaphors for embodied consciousness. But there is a profound problem hiding in plain sight: the template body is male. The female body possesses a tenth gate, the vaginal canal, yet the tradition universalizes nine as the human count, silently erasing female anatomy. Worse, in the Bhagavata Purana’s Puranjana allegory, the female principle appears not as the soul inhabiting the city, but as an object encountered within it — intelligence subordinated to a male sovereign.

Social Text thirty years after the Sokal affair


Social Text still exists. In the spring of 1996, when the journal was the object of an enthusiastically publicized hoax by the physicist Alan Sokal, its survival seemed a bad bet. You published an essay arguing that gravity is a “social and linguistic construct?” Really? The mainstream media, hitherto unaware of the existence of this very little, very marginal magazine, were uncertain what exactly they were mocking. Was Social Text’s foolishness postmodern? Left wing? Cultural? Academic? They were certain, however, that what they smelled in the water was blood. On their side, and for a not insignificant portion of the left, jubilation. On the other side, humiliation. (I should know: I was the journal’s coeditor at the time.) We seemed like the stupidest people in the world, or the stupidest people who had been pretending to speak on behalf of the most avant-garde sociopolitical views. One friend of the journal suggested that we fall on our swords. If we owned no swords, swords could be made available.

The journal did not fold. One reason was that it had published a lot of good work, none of it remotely resembling Sokal’s gravity-is-a-construct nonsense, and those who cared about such things knew it. Edward Said’s “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” had come out in the first issue in 1979; for U.S.-based critiques of Zionism, 1979 was early. Other issues contained Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and Aijaz Ahmad’s Marxist critique of Marxist (and Social Text cofounder) Fredric Jameson.

Losing Ourselves to “The They”: Heidegger’s Warning to the Modern Mind


Heidegger’s Being and Time unveils a quiet tragedy of modern life — our surrender of authentic existence to what he calls “the They.” In our average, everyday way of living, we speak, think, and act as others do, letting social norms and public opinion define who we are. This conformity numbs our individuality and hides the deeper question of Being itself. The comfort of belonging replaces the courage to be. To live authentically, Heidegger urges, one must awaken from this anonymous existence and face one’s own finite self — not as “they” live, but as I truly am.