Tradition
Continental
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Sartre’s “look” and Fanon on being fixed by another’s gaze
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre describes the moment of being caught looking through a keyhole: suddenly I am an object for someone else, and I feel shame. The look of the other gives me an outside I can't control. Fanon's Black…
Started by Claire Dubois2 replies -
Automated cranes at my port: freedom from drudgery, or the end of what gave the day shape?
The port where I operate a gantry crane has announced that the new terminal will be automated: cranes run remotely from an office, straddle carriers without drivers. Some of us will retrain to sit at screens. Most won't be needed. As a…
Started by Hugo MarchettiReply first (no replies yet) -
Arendt’s “Truth and Politics”, read in a newsroom
In 1967 Arendt published "Truth and Politics" in The New Yorker. She distinguishes rational truth (mathematics, philosophy) from factual truth (what happened). Factual truth is the more fragile, because it depends on testimony and records, and it is always vulnerable to being…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Camus begins with suicide. Was he right to start there?
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by saying the fundamental philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Everything else, he says, comes afterwards. The absurd, for Camus, isn't in us or in the world but in the confrontation between our demand…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
What Arendt actually meant by “the banality of evil”
The phrase comes from the subtitle of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). It is often misread as meaning that evil is ordinary, or unimportant, or that anyone would have done the same. As I read her,…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and I'm finishing a new translation of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It opens with the famous sentence that there is only one really serious philosophical problem, suicide: judging whether life is worth living. And it…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Teaching bad faith to sixteen-year-olds: Sartre’s waiter and the school prefect
The lesson that works best with my class every year is Sartre on bad faith, from Being and Nothingness. Sartre describes a café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, a little too quick, who bends forward a little too eagerly.…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies -
Automated cranes at the port, and Ellul’s idea that efficiency decides for us
Terminals around the world, including mine in Marseille, are moving to cranes operated remotely from an office, and some yards are fully automated. Management's word for it is "inevitable". The union's word is "choice". I want to think about which word is…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Davos, 1929: was the split already visible in the room?
The Davos disputation of 1929 has become a small obsession of mine, living as I do in Heidegger's city. In the spring of that year, at a university course in the Swiss resort, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger debated how to read…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Genealogy and the genetic fallacy: can the history of a value ever count against it?
Every introductory logic course warns against the genetic fallacy: where a belief came from does not settle whether it is true. Your racist uncle may believe the earth is round, and it is. And yet a whole style of moral philosophy works…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt5 replies -
‘The Fact of Blackness’ or ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’? What a translation choice did to Fanon
Rereading Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I noticed something I'd missed for years: the fifth chapter has two different titles in English. Fanon's French is ‘L'expérience vécue du Noir’. The 1967 translation called it ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The 2008 translation calls…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
Two accounts of perception seem to me to speak to the moment just before a word arrives, which is where a translator spends her days. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, defines perception as cognition free…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Heidegger’s standing-reserve and Zhuangzi’s machine heart are two different worries
People often put two passages side by side as if they said the same thing, and I think the comparison hides more than it shows. In chapter 12, Confucius's disciple Zigong meets an old man watering his garden by carrying jars from…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
My brother’s conversion: can an experience be real and its interpretation wrong?
My younger brother is an engineer, a careful and slightly dry man, raised like me without religion. Last spring he spent a week at a Benedictine abbey, mostly because a colleague recommended the silence. He came back saying that during the night…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies