A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

Review of THE CHENWEI RIDDLE: TIME, STARS, AND HEROES IN THE APOCRYPHA. By Licia Di Giacinto. (Deutsche Ostasienstudien, vol. 13). Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2013. Pp. xi + 332. 25 Figures, 40 Tables, 4 Appendices, List of Illustrations, Bibliography.

This paper deals with the political ideology of late pre-imperial and early imperial China as documented by remnants of an under-explored genre known in English as weft (wei 緯) writings or “Confucian Apocrypha”. It focuses on the transcendence of hierarchy and sovereignty, the transfer of dynastic legitimacy, and the pragmatic vehicle of “tang…[Read more]

Few of Arendt’s writings have drawn more criticism from her own supporters than “Reflections on LIttle Rock,” in which she opposes the federally mandated desegregation of schools. I take Arendt’s comments as a way of opening up problems in her conception of the relationship among political storytelling, plurality and judgment. I do this through a…[Read more]

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways
to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group
have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political
theories in developing their basic normative concepts…[Read more]

The British State has been terraformed over recent decades through the changing spatio-temporal dynamics of capital accumulation in the world-system entailed in financialisation, neoliberalsiation, and the emergence of global cities. A new post-industrial constellation of political domination has thus emerged in that state that requires urgent…[Read more]

The household as a social formation is being assigned a renewed function in
the provision of social welfare via neoliberal austerity politics. Government inaction regarding
housing provision is forcing millions of young adults into “parental co-habitation”. In
contrast to the dominant ideological view of the family as a school of liberty thr…[Read more]

Given the transformation in the government of academic life over recent decades, the
article attempts to derive a political critique of the changing psychosocial conditions of academic
life via a historical juxtaposition with the nomos of the labour camp in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
Archipelago. The aim is to address the need to think beyond n…[Read more]

This article attempts a properly critical and political analysis of the “police power” immanent to the form and logic of academic rankings, and which is reproduced in the extant academic literature generated around them. In contrast to the democratising claims made of rankings, this police power short-circuits the moment of democratic politics and…[Read more]

The article interrogates the concept of Multitude in capitalist society and challenges the simple notion of social exclusion as an operative force in contemporary social formations and their spatial dispositions. The Shadow will be offered as a spatial and psychosocial relational horizon of differentiation systemically inscribed into the social…[Read more]

Book chapter of: Dejouer le silence: contre discours sur les femmes haïtiennes

In this article, I will be focusing specifically on cryopreservation and two of the American biotechnomedical tenets introduced by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John in their technocratic model of medicine: the “body as machine” and “death as defeat.” These axioms are embraced by both the biotechnomedical establishment as well as the cryopre…[Read more]

This chapter discusses the inaugural dissertation of the first ex officio professor of natural law in Denmark, Andreas Hojer: the 1735 Dissertatio iuris publici universalis de eo quod iure belli licet in minores. In doing so it seeks to shed light on a little known figure in the early Danish enlightenment, albeit one who was very influential in…[Read more]

On the untenable and unaccountable legality of this definition, and the dangers it poses to free speech, minority rights, and democratic legitimacy. Summarizes some points in “Legal Form and Legal Legitimacy: The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism as a Case Study in Censored Speech,” Law, Culture and the Humanities (2018) but with additional ref…[Read more]

Book Review Swaraj: Thoughts of Gandhi, Tilak, Aurobindo, Raja Rammohun Roy, Tagore & Vivekananda by Amulya Ranjan Mohapatra

Book Review Social Philosophy of Swami Vivekananda by Amulya Ranjan Mohapatra

Book Review, Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility, eds. Tim Harper and Sunil Amrith, Prabuddha Bharata March 2015

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi, is credited with having rekindled the ancient Indian discourse of an interrelation between spirituality, religion, and politics. This has been mostly studied from the perspective of faith or spirituality. The last five decades or so have seen rising scholarship on the not-so-spiritual…[Read more]

François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy is necessary for the survival or popularity of philosophy according to Laruelle: ‘Philosophy can only really become “for all” or “popular” by becoming non-philosophy’ (cover). Non-philosophy is not no philosophy but a different approach to philosophising where philosophy is not the main thing but the ‘real’ is.

This book is about the coming together of two great polyglot geniuses who were also autodidacts, who were concerned with the other’s nation, but though glorified in their own countries, remain relatively unknown in the nations of the other. Their friendship is, in many ways, a representation of the friendship of the East and the West, albeit m…[Read more]