Samuel Buchoul
PhD Candidate
French Philosophy
University of Cambridge
Samuel Buchoul is a doctoral student in the Department of French, University of Cambridge. His project studies how writing has changed us as a species. This question is explored through a dialogue between Derrida’s grammatology and the existential philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre. What he proposes to call an ‘existential grammatology’ would amount to a new understanding of individual empowerment for the challenges of subjectivity today. His articles have been published, or are forthcoming, in journals including Paragraph, Angelaki, Labyrinth and Contagion, and in edited volumes. Samuel is supervised by Prof. Ian James, and advised by Prof. Christina Howells (Oxford). He is also book review editor for Implications Philosophiques. Previously, he taught philosophy in high school, in France (2018-2023). Since the mid 2010s, then in Delhi, India, Samuel has founded several independent organisations offering alternative education and research programmes, including the Atelier des Pratiques Théoriques and the Institute for the Study of Texts. His university training was interdisciplinary, as he studied the social sciences, religion and philosophy, in France, the USA and India.
Mail · CV (EN) · CV (FR) · Online profiles: University of Cambridge · ORCID · Research Gate · HAL · Google Scholar · PhilPeople · Academia.edu · LinkedIn
Articles (peer-reviewed) & Book Chapters
Click on each title for more information
Thinking angst-serenity as an instance of différance generates a new framework to reflect upon, and through thinking, to act and live our existential condition slightly differently. When we start appreciating the existential dimension of grammatology, when the need for meaning escapes the restricted texts of linguistics, literature and philosophy, textuality shows its relevance anew to help us in our everyday life. But this does not resolve the hardship of angst: it points to another serenity that includes its play with anguish.
Paper exploring the theme of writing and existentialist desire, presented at the Colloque de Cerisy 2025.
Article on meaning-making and subjectivity after Derrida’s grammatology.
Article on existence and textuality in Sartre and Derrida, in the issue ‘Littérature et philosophie : entre théories et pratiques’.
This paper reviews the complex and nuanced treatment of metaphysics in the first major works of Jacques Derrida (1967–72), and it supplements deconstruction with existential themes in order to safeguard it from the accusation of nihilistic relativism. The critique of logocentrism, often systematized through a paradoxical ‘ontology of the trace’, has been embraced by phenomenology and post-deconstruction, but also seen as insufficient for today’s challenges. Returning to Derrida’s demonstrations, I explore why metaphysics must be textual if it is to produce two operations constitutive of thinking: a certain technology of forgetting and an experience of meaning as singularized in words. This textuality is, specifically, that of writing, which reveals how, beyond truth, it is meaning-making that is sought by metaphysics and its writers. The techne of writing, then, plays a special role in individual, existential empowerment, but this interpretation of the history of ideas as a power struggle does not amount to moral relativism, because writing can help us sustain a unique and constructive passion for the margins.
La voici, peut-être, la voie de sortie pour s’échapper de la vie la mort, entre logos et gramme, science et écriture : c’est ce drôle d’événement, la connaissance, trace d’un type particulier ou peut-être archétype de la trace, convoitée par les deux pôles, qu’il nous faut interroger.
Chapter of the collected volume Repenser la logique du vivant après Jacques Derrida, ed. G. De Michele et al, May 2024, Editions Hermann.
How far back in time can we trace Orientalism? Can it go beyond the period of colonisation? What would that mean if we find it already back in Ancient Greece?
I. Orientalism
I.1 Orientalism: The Theory
I.2 Orientalism: Influences
I.3 Orientalism: Resistances
II. The First Orientalist?
II.1 Ancient Greece and the Barbaros
II.2 An account of Egypt
II.2.1 Where is the Orientalist Hiding?
II.2.2 On the Neutrality of the Historian
II.2.3 Herodotus, or the Contagion of Foreignness
Becoming Foreigner
An attempt at connecting René Girard’s mimetic theory with Buddhist metaphysics and psychology.
Articles (other publications)
A look at the terror attacks in Europe through the lens of ancient Hindu cosmology and time cycles.
A biographical and theoretical (biotheoretical ?) take on foreignness.
Manuscripts (unpublished)
(The Embarrassment of Being in the World. Discovering existence with La Grande Bellezza)
A contemplative study of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (2013), as an expression of the existential burden and hopes of today, between sensuality, spirituality and truth.
An attempt at freeing foreignness from the sole categories of the political and the administrative, to explore its existential condition, and even, its metaphysics. A creative reading of works from Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.
Book I. Foreigner, There: History of a Political Capture
Stories from a History
I. Foreigners of the Antiquity
II. The Foreigner Enters Reason (1500–1800)
III. Centripetal Foreignness (1800–1920)
Book II. Foreigner, Here: Existentialist Foreignness
Particles of Foreignness
I. On Departing
II. On Being-Over-There
III. Here and Now: Being a Foreigner
Book III. Us, Foreigners: The Reconstruction of Foreignness
Language and Reconstruction
I. Hospitality: Ethics meets Culture
II. Language and the Written: The Tool of Foreignness
III. Philosophy: The Desire of Foreignness
Book IV. Beyond The I’s: A Foreigner’s Metaphysics
Metaphysics for Today
I. The Space of a Foreigner
II. The Time of a Foreigner
III. The Knowledge of a Foreigner
Opening. An Addressee’s Resolution
Articles (published on Samvriti)
Follow-up article to “The Non-Self of Girard”. Can this theoretical encounter help formulating a ‘Girardian ethics’?
I. The Mimetico-Buddhist Connection
II. Questioning the Supremacy of Reason
III. Mimetic Ethics, Ethics Embodied
III.1 Girard’s Ethical Silence
III.2 Non-Violence, Fundamental Ethical Principle?
III.3 In Search of the Middle Path: The Ethics of Distance
Bridges to Co-Responsibility
A review of three major conceptions of temporality within the phenomenological tradition.
An attempt, through the lens of some recent hypotheses in Indian historiography, to interrogate the Western conception of historical periods, as inherited from the Enlightenment.
A review of various critical feminist and queer perspectives on Emmanuel Levinas’ thought.
1850. 2010. Flaubert in Egypt. Myself in India. Two Frenchmen in the Orient.
If corruption is so prevalent around us and across history, there must be ways to justify it. A few theoretical propositions stemming out of three recent investigations from The Caravan Magazine.
What does it mean to speak like a foreigner? What is unique to the foreigner’s language?
I. Theoretical Tools
I.1 Defining the Foreigner: Existential Migration
I.2. Methods of Analysis: Late and Post-Phenomenology
I.2.1 Heidegger: The Unheimlich
I.2.2 Merleau-Ponty: Parole and Pensée
I.2.3 Derrida: The Supplement
II. The Language of Foreignness
II.1 The Humor of a Foreigner
II.2 Writing in a Foreign Language
II.3 When Foreign Becomes Home
II.4 On the Ethics of Not Understanding
Language, Foreignness and Philosophy
An attempt at applying several key ideas from Girard’s psychology and anthropology to the thorny field of pornography.
I. Pornography Today
II. “I see, therefore I come”: Pornography as Mimetic Desire
III. Pornography as Sacrificial Reminiscence
III.1 Public Sex in the Original Sacrifice
III.2 Ritualizing the Rape: the Everydayness of the Pornographic Ritual
III.3 The Mythical Dissimulation of Pornography
IV. Pornography in a Non-Sacrificial Modernity
Conclusion: On the idea of an ‘Ethical Pornography’
Differences and commonalities between Christianity and Buddhism, from reason to the senses.
Short articles (published on Samvriti)
A series of short articles on the encounter of singular philosophical figures with the methods and aims of the sciences.
Short article in response to Disgrace (Coetzee, 2000), and the question of ethics in postcolonial societies.
Short article in response to Caste, Colonialism and Counter-modernity (Ganguly, 2005).
Short article attempting an analysis of the undated Telugu myth of Kumararamuni Katha, through the anthropological theory of myth-making by René Girard.
Short article presenting key aspects and debates surrounding symbolism in Early Buddhist Art.
Short article presenting the Sarvastivada school of Hinayana Buddhism.
Short article presenting philological debates on the nature of the Buddhist Sanskrit language found in some Buddhist texts.
Short article presenting the Three Characteristics of Existence according to Buddhism.
Short pieces (published online)
Short piece on Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet, 1929), creativity and determinism.
Short piece on a passage from Derrida (Letters, 1967) and the (im)possibility of love stories.
Short piece on a passage from Artaud, quoted by Derrida (Writing and Difference, 1967), and the dream to let the body speak.
Short piece reviewing Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014) and the question of the master-disciple relationship.
A look at the political, economic and societal relevance of the 2014 Football World Cup, for France and its intellectual heritage.
Short piece on the imperceptible importance of crowds to philosophical traditions.
Short piece reviewing Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) and the play-love of romance.
Short piece responding to the ‘Kiss of Love’ protest that spread through India in 2014.
Short pieces exploring the existential and metaphysical signification of the emergence of ISIS.
A Kid Dreams (Web archive)
ISthetics, Westhetics (Web archive)
Short piece reviewing Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier, 2013), and the becoming-asexual of sex.
Short piece reviewing Tokyo Reverse (Simon Bouisson et Ludovic Zuili, 2014), and the experience of temporal multi-directionality.
Short piece in response to What is nature? Culture, politics, and the non-human (Kate Soper, 1998).
Short piece in response to Philosophy of Biology (Elliott Sober, 2000).
Short piece in response to Myth and Thought among the Greeks (Vernant, 1965).
Short piece on the political function of religion and the needs for ‘purification’ in Ancient Greece.
Short piece in response to Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka, 2002).
Short piece in response to “Four Quartets” (T.S. Eliot, 1941).
Short piece. A linear reading of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats, 1819).
Short piece reviewing “Cogito and the History of Madness” (Derrida, 1967), and the debate that ensued with Foucault.
Short piece in response to The Concealed Art of the Soul (Ganeri, 2007).
Short piece discussing the reading of VD Savarkar’s national vision through the critique of Ashis Nandy.
Short piece in response to Textures of Time (Narayana Rao, Shulman, Subrahmanyam, 2001).
Short piece in response to The language of the gods in the world of men (Pollock, 2009).
Short piece in response to The jungle and the aroma of meats (Zimmermann, 1999).
Short piece on the similarities between the philosopher and the madman.
Short piece reviewing “What is an Author?” (Foucault, 1969).
Original English translation of “Tomb for an innocent tourist” (2010), and an analysis of the place of imagination in Philippe Muray’s poetry.
Short piece reviewing Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tykwer, 2006).
Short piece analysing the similarities and differences of the Buddhist approach with philosophy.
Short piece in response to Literary Radicalism in India (Gopal, 2005).
Short piece in response to Priyamvada Gopal’s analysis of the poem “Khushia” by Saadat Hasan Manto.
Short piece in response to The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Butalia, 1998).
Op-eds
56 op-ed pieces (2014–2015) written in introduction to weekly debates on current affairs and cultural issues between two specialists, as editor of the online platform LILA Inter-actions.
Passing Over: Beyond Fait(h) Accompli
Tibet Recall: Meandering Concerns
The Islamic State: Hiding in Plain Sight?
The Union Budget: The Rules and the Divides
Land Acquisition: Tectonic Shifts
Delhi: Capital Sprawl
Paanch Saal: Out of the Chrysalis of Dissent
The Lankan Observer: Indefinite Vigil
Fascism: (De)fences
Constituting Nepal: From Cultures to Nation?
Taxing Taxonomies: Governments, States & Tehsils
Pravasi: Indian from the Outside
Inter-actions: Dialogues in B·h·a·k·t·i
Beyond the Seen: Santa-Clause
Ferguson, etc.: Attention!
Burial of the Unknown: Tragedies of Toxic Leadership
Records & Scratches: History Lessons from Ayodhya
HIV/AIDS: Closing the Legacy
Ganga Rejuvenation: Old Water in a New Bottle?
Children’s Day Out: Bringing Up Parents
Brave New World: Order in Place?
October, 1984: Spectres of Our Past
Light: Sparks and Streams
Fiji: Lessons in Democratic Creativity
Internet Slowdown Day: Speeding Access
Gandhi: Experimenting With
Ebola: Treating Viral Cultures
Dividing Waters: The Valley in Distress
Fortifying the Brew: The Highs and Lows of Moderation
Smart City: No Man’s Methodology?
Ananthamurthy: Hearing the Here
Our Warring Moves: Space, Conflict, Beauty
Trans-Creating the Body: Allying the Human and the Cosmic
The Promise of Gaza: Outstripping Confrontation
Echoes of the Queer: Blurring the Frame
Season Round-Up: Refractions off the Spheres
Forced Labour: Over-timed Feudalism?
Crimea: The Heart of Russian Pre-Occupation
Football: Beauty on the Defensive?
Haiku & Ghazal: The Metaphysics of Beauty
Government: Of, By, For the People?
Counting on Beauty: The Quantum of Our Values
Us, Sex Workers: Means for a Meaning
Vital Beauty: Of Stones, Flesh and Raptures
Sri Lanka Times: Nations and Narratives
See Lanka Today: Trapped Between Footprints and Voices?
Contemporary Media: Tuning into Mis/Trust Channels
Kathputli: A Vision of Urban Reinvention
Plurality: Co-Writing the Wider History
Northeast India: The Internal Other?
Section 377: Responding
Dhasal: Beyond Words
From Khap to AAP: Encountering Dissent
Liu Xia: Poet Planting Signs
Muzaffarnagar: A Winter in Exile
Conference presentations & invited talks
Public discussions
At Cambridge
Secondary Education
Open Education Initiatives
At Manipal
L'Atelier des Pratiques Théoriques is an association created in 2020 with Laurie Haffas. The Atelier offers philosophy seminars online, with a conscious pedagogical effort towards participative practices. Each group of study, intentionally small in size, approaches its corpus in view of coming up with new practical answers to a set problem. Visit the Atelier.
The Institute for the Study of Texts is an organisation created in Delhi, India, in 2017. The Institute offers term courses, crash courses, film analysis programs and writing workshops, through a network of civil society stakeholders. At the IST, every person with an original and rigorous vision can propose and lead a program of textual study. Visit the Institute.
The Institute for the Study of Texts is an organisation created in Delhi, India, in 2017. The Institute offers term courses, crash courses, film analysis programs and writing workshops, through a network of civil society stakeholders. At the IST, every person with an original and rigorous vision can propose and lead a program of textual study. Visit the Institute.
Readers' Break is a gathering of readers, online and offline. Between 2015 and 2019, ninety-nine free, open and participative events were organised to discuss major works of literature and philosophy, first in public spaces in Delhi, and then online. Visit Readers' Break.
Writing Derrida is a series of fifteen public programs organised in Delhi between 2014 and 2016, on the works of Jacques Derrida, around the Facebook community of the India Derrida Group. Visit the community.
Writing Derrida is a series of fifteen public programs organised in Delhi between 2014 and 2016, on the works of Jacques Derrida, around the Facebook community of the India Derrida Group. Visit the community.
Samvriti is a personal publication platform presenting twelve long format, serialised articles on philosophy, literature, art, etc., alongside over forty short pieces, written between 2011 and 2016. Visit Samvriti.
Samuel Buchoul is a doctoral student in the Department of French, University of Cambridge. His project studies how writing has changed us as a species. This question is explored through a dialogue between Derrida’s grammatology and the existential philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre. What he proposes to call an ‘existential grammatology’ would amount to a new understanding of individual empowerment for the challenges of subjectivity today. His articles have been published, or are forthcoming, in journals including Paragraph, Angelaki, Labyrinth and Contagion, and in edited volumes. Samuel is supervised by Prof. Ian James, and advised by Prof. Christina Howells (Oxford). He is also book review editor for Implications Philosophiques. Previously, he taught philosophy in high school, in France (2018-2023). Since the mid 2010s, then in Delhi, India, Samuel has founded several independent organisations offering alternative education and research programmes, including the Atelier des Pratiques Théoriques and the Institute for the Study of Texts. His university training was interdisciplinary, as he studied the social sciences, religion and philosophy, in France, the USA and India.
Mail · CV (EN) · CV (FR) · Online profiles: University of Cambridge · ORCID · Research Gate · HAL · Google Scholar · PhilPeople · Academia.edu · LinkedIn
Articles (peer-reviewed) & Book Chapters
Click on each title for more information
Thinking angst-serenity as an instance of différance generates a new framework to reflect upon, and through thinking, to act and live our existential condition slightly differently. When we start appreciating the existential dimension of grammatology, when the need for meaning escapes the restricted texts of linguistics, literature and philosophy, textuality shows its relevance anew to help us in our everyday life. But this does not resolve the hardship of angst: it points to another serenity that includes its play with anguish.
Paper exploring the theme of writing and existentialist desire, presented at the Colloque de Cerisy 2025.
Article on meaning-making and subjectivity after Derrida’s grammatology.
Article on existence and textuality in Sartre and Derrida, in the issue ‘Littérature et philosophie : entre théories et pratiques’.
This paper reviews the complex and nuanced treatment of metaphysics in the first major works of Jacques Derrida (1967–72), and it supplements deconstruction with existential themes in order to safeguard it from the accusation of nihilistic relativism. The critique of logocentrism, often systematized through a paradoxical ‘ontology of the trace’, has been embraced by phenomenology and post-deconstruction, but also seen as insufficient for today’s challenges. Returning to Derrida’s demonstrations, I explore why metaphysics must be textual if it is to produce two operations constitutive of thinking: a certain technology of forgetting and an experience of meaning as singularized in words. This textuality is, specifically, that of writing, which reveals how, beyond truth, it is meaning-making that is sought by metaphysics and its writers. The techne of writing, then, plays a special role in individual, existential empowerment, but this interpretation of the history of ideas as a power struggle does not amount to moral relativism, because writing can help us sustain a unique and constructive passion for the margins.
La voici, peut-être, la voie de sortie pour s’échapper de la vie la mort, entre logos et gramme, science et écriture : c’est ce drôle d’événement, la connaissance, trace d’un type particulier ou peut-être archétype de la trace, convoitée par les deux pôles, qu’il nous faut interroger.
Chapter of the collected volume Repenser la logique du vivant après Jacques Derrida, ed. G. De Michele et al, May 2024, Editions Hermann.
How far back in time can we trace Orientalism? Can it go beyond the period of colonisation? What would that mean if we find it already back in Ancient Greece?
I. Orientalism
I.1 Orientalism: The Theory
I.2 Orientalism: Influences
I.3 Orientalism: Resistances
II. The First Orientalist?
II.1 Ancient Greece and the Barbaros
II.2 An account of Egypt
II.2.1 Where is the Orientalist Hiding?
II.2.2 On the Neutrality of the Historian
II.2.3 Herodotus, or the Contagion of Foreignness
Becoming Foreigner
An attempt at connecting René Girard’s mimetic theory with Buddhist metaphysics and psychology.
Articles (other publications)
A look at the terror attacks in Europe through the lens of ancient Hindu cosmology and time cycles.
A biographical and theoretical (biotheoretical ?) take on foreignness.
Manuscripts (unpublished)
(The Embarrassment of Being in the World. Discovering existence with La Grande Bellezza)
A contemplative study of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (2013), as an expression of the existential burden and hopes of today, between sensuality, spirituality and truth.
An attempt at freeing foreignness from the sole categories of the political and the administrative, to explore its existential condition, and even, its metaphysics. A creative reading of works from Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.
Book I. Foreigner, There: History of a Political Capture
Stories from a History
I. Foreigners of the Antiquity
II. The Foreigner Enters Reason (1500–1800)
III. Centripetal Foreignness (1800–1920)
Book II. Foreigner, Here: Existentialist Foreignness
Particles of Foreignness
I. On Departing
II. On Being-Over-There
III. Here and Now: Being a Foreigner
Book III. Us, Foreigners: The Reconstruction of Foreignness
Language and Reconstruction
I. Hospitality: Ethics meets Culture
II. Language and the Written: The Tool of Foreignness
III. Philosophy: The Desire of Foreignness
Book IV. Beyond The I’s: A Foreigner’s Metaphysics
Metaphysics for Today
I. The Space of a Foreigner
II. The Time of a Foreigner
III. The Knowledge of a Foreigner
Opening. An Addressee’s Resolution
Articles (published on Samvriti)
Follow-up article to “The Non-Self of Girard”. Can this theoretical encounter help formulating a ‘Girardian ethics’?
I. The Mimetico-Buddhist Connection
II. Questioning the Supremacy of Reason
III. Mimetic Ethics, Ethics Embodied
III.1 Girard’s Ethical Silence
III.2 Non-Violence, Fundamental Ethical Principle?
III.3 In Search of the Middle Path: The Ethics of Distance
Bridges to Co-Responsibility
A review of three major conceptions of temporality within the phenomenological tradition.
An attempt, through the lens of some recent hypotheses in Indian historiography, to interrogate the Western conception of historical periods, as inherited from the Enlightenment.
A review of various critical feminist and queer perspectives on Emmanuel Levinas’ thought.
1850. 2010. Flaubert in Egypt. Myself in India. Two Frenchmen in the Orient.
If corruption is so prevalent around us and across history, there must be ways to justify it. A few theoretical propositions stemming out of three recent investigations from The Caravan Magazine.
What does it mean to speak like a foreigner? What is unique to the foreigner’s language?
I. Theoretical Tools
I.1 Defining the Foreigner: Existential Migration
I.2. Methods of Analysis: Late and Post-Phenomenology
I.2.1 Heidegger: The Unheimlich
I.2.2 Merleau-Ponty: Parole and Pensée
I.2.3 Derrida: The Supplement
II. The Language of Foreignness
II.1 The Humor of a Foreigner
II.2 Writing in a Foreign Language
II.3 When Foreign Becomes Home
II.4 On the Ethics of Not Understanding
Language, Foreignness and Philosophy
An attempt at applying several key ideas from Girard’s psychology and anthropology to the thorny field of pornography.
I. Pornography Today
II. “I see, therefore I come”: Pornography as Mimetic Desire
III. Pornography as Sacrificial Reminiscence
III.1 Public Sex in the Original Sacrifice
III.2 Ritualizing the Rape: the Everydayness of the Pornographic Ritual
III.3 The Mythical Dissimulation of Pornography
IV. Pornography in a Non-Sacrificial Modernity
Conclusion: On the idea of an ‘Ethical Pornography’
Differences and commonalities between Christianity and Buddhism, from reason to the senses.
Short articles (published on Samvriti)
A series of short articles on the encounter of singular philosophical figures with the methods and aims of the sciences.
Short article in response to Disgrace (Coetzee, 2000), and the question of ethics in postcolonial societies.
Short article in response to Caste, Colonialism and Counter-modernity (Ganguly, 2005).
Short article attempting an analysis of the undated Telugu myth of Kumararamuni Katha, through the anthropological theory of myth-making by René Girard.
Short article presenting key aspects and debates surrounding symbolism in Early Buddhist Art.
Short article presenting the Sarvastivada school of Hinayana Buddhism.
Short article presenting philological debates on the nature of the Buddhist Sanskrit language found in some Buddhist texts.
Short article presenting the Three Characteristics of Existence according to Buddhism.
Short pieces (published online)
Short piece on Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet, 1929), creativity and determinism.
Short piece on a passage from Derrida (Letters, 1967) and the (im)possibility of love stories.
Short piece on a passage from Artaud, quoted by Derrida (Writing and Difference, 1967), and the dream to let the body speak.
Short piece reviewing Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014) and the question of the master-disciple relationship.
A look at the political, economic and societal relevance of the 2014 Football World Cup, for France and its intellectual heritage.
Short piece on the imperceptible importance of crowds to philosophical traditions.
Short piece reviewing Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) and the play-love of romance.
Short piece responding to the ‘Kiss of Love’ protest that spread through India in 2014.
Short pieces exploring the existential and metaphysical signification of the emergence of ISIS.
A Kid Dreams (Web archive)
ISthetics, Westhetics (Web archive)
Short piece reviewing Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier, 2013), and the becoming-asexual of sex.
Short piece reviewing Tokyo Reverse (Simon Bouisson et Ludovic Zuili, 2014), and the experience of temporal multi-directionality.
Short piece in response to What is nature? Culture, politics, and the non-human (Kate Soper, 1998).
Short piece in response to Philosophy of Biology (Elliott Sober, 2000).
Short piece in response to Myth and Thought among the Greeks (Vernant, 1965).
Short piece on the political function of religion and the needs for ‘purification’ in Ancient Greece.
Short piece in response to Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka, 2002).
Short piece in response to “Four Quartets” (T.S. Eliot, 1941).
Short piece. A linear reading of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats, 1819).
Short piece reviewing “Cogito and the History of Madness” (Derrida, 1967), and the debate that ensued with Foucault.
Short piece in response to The Concealed Art of the Soul (Ganeri, 2007).
Short piece discussing the reading of VD Savarkar’s national vision through the critique of Ashis Nandy.
Short piece in response to Textures of Time (Narayana Rao, Shulman, Subrahmanyam, 2001).
Short piece in response to The language of the gods in the world of men (Pollock, 2009).
Short piece in response to The jungle and the aroma of meats (Zimmermann, 1999).
Short piece on the similarities between the philosopher and the madman.
Short piece reviewing “What is an Author?” (Foucault, 1969).
Original English translation of “Tomb for an innocent tourist” (2010), and an analysis of the place of imagination in Philippe Muray’s poetry.
Short piece reviewing Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tykwer, 2006).
Short piece analysing the similarities and differences of the Buddhist approach with philosophy.
Short piece in response to Literary Radicalism in India (Gopal, 2005).
Short piece in response to Priyamvada Gopal’s analysis of the poem “Khushia” by Saadat Hasan Manto.
Short piece in response to The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Butalia, 1998).
Op-eds
56 op-ed pieces (2014–2015) written in introduction to weekly debates on current affairs and cultural issues between two specialists, as editor of the online platform LILA Inter-actions.
Passing Over: Beyond Fait(h) Accompli
Tibet Recall: Meandering Concerns
The Islamic State: Hiding in Plain Sight?
The Union Budget: The Rules and the Divides
Land Acquisition: Tectonic Shifts
Delhi: Capital Sprawl
Paanch Saal: Out of the Chrysalis of Dissent
The Lankan Observer: Indefinite Vigil
Fascism: (De)fences
Constituting Nepal: From Cultures to Nation?
Taxing Taxonomies: Governments, States & Tehsils
Pravasi: Indian from the Outside
Inter-actions: Dialogues in B·h·a·k·t·i
Beyond the Seen: Santa-Clause
Ferguson, etc.: Attention!
Burial of the Unknown: Tragedies of Toxic Leadership
Records & Scratches: History Lessons from Ayodhya
HIV/AIDS: Closing the Legacy
Ganga Rejuvenation: Old Water in a New Bottle?
Children’s Day Out: Bringing Up Parents
Brave New World: Order in Place?
October, 1984: Spectres of Our Past
Light: Sparks and Streams
Fiji: Lessons in Democratic Creativity
Internet Slowdown Day: Speeding Access
Gandhi: Experimenting With
Ebola: Treating Viral Cultures
Dividing Waters: The Valley in Distress
Fortifying the Brew: The Highs and Lows of Moderation
Smart City: No Man’s Methodology?
Ananthamurthy: Hearing the Here
Our Warring Moves: Space, Conflict, Beauty
Trans-Creating the Body: Allying the Human and the Cosmic
The Promise of Gaza: Outstripping Confrontation
Echoes of the Queer: Blurring the Frame
Season Round-Up: Refractions off the Spheres
Forced Labour: Over-timed Feudalism?
Crimea: The Heart of Russian Pre-Occupation
Football: Beauty on the Defensive?
Haiku & Ghazal: The Metaphysics of Beauty
Government: Of, By, For the People?
Counting on Beauty: The Quantum of Our Values
Us, Sex Workers: Means for a Meaning
Vital Beauty: Of Stones, Flesh and Raptures
Sri Lanka Times: Nations and Narratives
See Lanka Today: Trapped Between Footprints and Voices?
Contemporary Media: Tuning into Mis/Trust Channels
Kathputli: A Vision of Urban Reinvention
Plurality: Co-Writing the Wider History
Northeast India: The Internal Other?
Section 377: Responding
Dhasal: Beyond Words
From Khap to AAP: Encountering Dissent
Liu Xia: Poet Planting Signs
Muzaffarnagar: A Winter in Exile
Conference presentations & invited talks
Public discussions
At Cambridge
Secondary Education
Open Education Initiatives
At Manipal
L'Atelier des Pratiques Théoriques is an association created in 2020 with Laurie Haffas. The Atelier offers philosophy seminars online, with a conscious pedagogical effort towards participative practices. Each group of study, intentionally small in size, approaches its corpus in view of coming up with new practical answers to a set problem. Visit the Atelier.
The Institute for the Study of Texts is an organisation created in Delhi, India, in 2017. The Institute offers term courses, crash courses, film analysis programs and writing workshops, through a network of civil society stakeholders. At the IST, every person with an original and rigorous vision can propose and lead a program of textual study. Visit the Institute.
The Institute for the Study of Texts is an organisation created in Delhi, India, in 2017. The Institute offers term courses, crash courses, film analysis programs and writing workshops, through a network of civil society stakeholders. At the IST, every person with an original and rigorous vision can propose and lead a program of textual study. Visit the Institute.
Readers' Break is a gathering of readers, online and offline. Between 2015 and 2019, ninety-nine free, open and participative events were organised to discuss major works of literature and philosophy, first in public spaces in Delhi, and then online. Visit Readers' Break.
Writing Derrida is a series of fifteen public programs organised in Delhi between 2014 and 2016, on the works of Jacques Derrida, around the Facebook community of the India Derrida Group. Visit the community.
Writing Derrida is a series of fifteen public programs organised in Delhi between 2014 and 2016, on the works of Jacques Derrida, around the Facebook community of the India Derrida Group. Visit the community.
Samvriti is a personal publication platform presenting twelve long format, serialised articles on philosophy, literature, art, etc., alongside over forty short pieces, written between 2011 and 2016. Visit Samvriti.