One of the central theses underlying the phenomenology of body is that of bodily subjectivity. It might appear as though by speaking of “bodily subjectivity” one is in effect assimilating “body” into “consciousness,” so that instead of the real body one is talking about thought or the idea of the body. Nothing could be farther removed from our intentions. Body is neither a modality of consciousness, nor is subjectivity coextensive with consciousness. In fact, one of the implications of the conce...
Jul 11, 2020•30 min
Frankfurt, 1797: at twenty-seven, Hegel plunged into a profound crisis. He no longer knew what he thought; he no longer knew what to think. The republic and the revolution had collapsed under the repeated blows of German history. Several years later, Hegel would speak of this episode as an attack of “hypochondria”. Hypochondria: literally, under the cartilage of the ribs, with one’s heart cramped. When the perception of the world is too closely concerned with chaos, the heart suddenly, without r...
Jul 11, 2020•30 min
Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice: “Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques Three! This is the witness encountered by appointment, by me, Jacques Four. He will tell you all. Speak, Jacques Five!” The mender of roads, blue cap in hand, wiped his swarthy forehead with it, and said, “Where shall I commence, monsieur?” “Commence,” was Monsieur Defarge's not unreasonable reply, “at the commencement.” “I saw him then, messieurs,” began the mender of roads, “a year ago this runn...
Jul 11, 2020•30 min
“What do you do at his place? What do you and he talk about?” asked Stolz. “You know, it’s so proper and cozy at his place. The rooms are small and the sofas are so deep, you sink so far down no one can see you. The windows are quite covered with ivy and cactus, and he has more than a dozen canaries and three dogs, such good ones! He always has something to eat on the table. The engravings all depict family scenes. You come and you never want to leave. You sit there without a care or thought in ...
Jul 11, 2020•30 min
Are you able to realize your potential? Is your country under-developed? Is development a kind of gradual unfurling? Could it then be an infinite, deliberate, process? Is urbanization industrialization? Is industrialization development? Is development, only, economic growth? Does urbanization ‘cause’ development? Did the moral values of ‘improvement’ come from religion? Does Science help make progress material by unlocking the mind of God? How did Development take off post WW2 as a new ontology?...
Feb 22, 2020•1 hr 18 min
How do you like your Matcha? Why do fine and coarse materials behave very differently? Is surface texture usually a sign of sub-structures? How does rock become clay? Is dry clay enough to understand wet clay? Could tea be smoked? Is it simple to keep every spoonful of your morning cereal mix similar? Do pure dry solids ‘flow’ in layers and parts? Is soil a definitive sign of life? How are dust and coarse-leaf teas different? Does mechanical agitation organize matter differently from Brownian mo...
Feb 02, 2020•1 hr 14 min
How old are passports? Are you a resident citizen? Are nations primeval or modern? Were the colonizers, such as England, the first nations? Are all countries multi-ethnic/multi-religious? Are there phases, then, in the process of the abstract negotiating with ground realities? How do nations reproduce, as some are born, some emerge, some mimic, & some are just put together? When are borders drawn? Why did Czechoslovakia split? Must nations be unitary? How central is ethnicity to national ide...
Jan 18, 2020•1 hr 9 min
Should Aristotle have also cooked? Would you eat dog meat? What does your food say about your conception of Reality? How is our gut first colonized? What are you allergic to? How/why do cultures select what to eat? Where are taboos found? Are you a non-believer? Who does your cooking? What are the techniques? How is identity produced? Does culture uniquely meet nature in food? Can anything be purified via rituals? Why do, both, fasting and feasting exist? Does fasting modify the idea of Self? Do...
Jan 11, 2020•1 hr 19 min
How quiet is the sea? Do you want to mine manganese? What makes certain interactions reactions? Are there reactions happening in your room? How is heat different from light? What does new Law come from? Can oceans ‘retain’ certain information for centuries? When do we say that a bond has broken? Can radio frequencies ionize molecules? Is your water from Greenland? Might an equatorial event in 1982 have impacted Japan in ~1992? Can physical pressure (alone) cause reactions? Does the deep seabed i...
Jan 05, 2020•1 hr 19 min
Have we over-adapted? How fit are you? Are our adaptive responses often too private? Is any fitness measure also always about the environment? How efficiently do you communicate with the changing environment? Are cultures always born on the boundaries? Can the First World, alone, help the world adapt? Are languages naturally selected? Are more frequent words shorter, & why? Similarly, do smaller organisms adapt, or perish, faster? Why are virus harder to control? Are the adaptive constraints...
Dec 29, 2019•1 hr 18 min
Do you aspire to write good English? What was Ranjit Singh’s official language? Where do your narratives come from? Is it possible to think rationally while living in a village and practicing caste? Was India (only) a land of static isolated villages? What does colonialism do to social and political formations? Are tribes expected to evolve into castes, & then into class? What has been the epistemic relationship between caste and class? Is caste truly a religious notion? Is colonialism the c...
Dec 28, 2019•1 hr 20 min
Are you a part of the underworld? Would you like the society to applaud you? Do you gamble? Or, consume illicit liquor? Is the disorderly the underbelly? Will you inherit property? How has dowry existed in many societies for centuries? What changes the valuation of grooms? Are the values of criminals and police often very similar? Is there something fundamentally criminal about sex-selective abortion? Why do (some) women prefer to have a son? Are there power hierarchies inside prisons? What is t...
Dec 21, 2019•1 hr 20 min
Are words valuable things? When did you last search for a word? Is the seed of language also the seed of the world? How does art work? Is direct (unmediated) observation possible? Does language have a (biological) organ that works with other cognitive faculties? What is a ‘word’? Does it have an internal structure? Do speakers find various affixes psychologically real? Why is there such a thing as grammar? Are words beginning-less? Does grammar change more slowly than words and phrases? Why? Whe...
Dec 14, 2019•1 hr 18 min
How difficult is it to pick berries from a tree? Do green flowers exist? Is blue still blue if it is not being known? ‘Where’ are your eyes? ‘Who’ needs colour vision? Is colour an elemental, physical, measure of the world? Is colour also mind- (or, sensor-) dependent? Do name-ability and know-ability go together? Is lustre similar to colour? Why is there a ‘three-ness’ to colours? How is it even possible to mix colours to get new ones? Are certain colours harder to make than others? Does every ...
Nov 23, 2019•1 hr 19 min
Are wars entertaining? Who is responsible for your security? What is the role of military force in life? Is history violent? Do all cultures have a historical consciousness? Are all orders political orders? Are in-group solidarity and out-group hostility built into human civilizations? However, are we neither violent nor non-violent? Are human nature and international order related? Is the propensity to use violence higher in ‘central’ geographies? Are there structured steps between peace and wa...
Nov 01, 2019•1 hr 10 min
Do ‘birds that fly instinctively swim’? Are self-evident truths easy to prove? When is ‘want to’ not ‘wanna’? Is verification easier than proof? Are proofs explanations? Is that why proofs are supposed to be elegant? Is reasoning algorithmic? Is there one Method to all reasoning? Are all ungrammatical sentences also unacceptable? When do sentences have ambiguous meanings? Can statements with long proofs be obvious? Does economy play a significant role in language constructions? Can human beings ...
Sep 28, 2019•1 hr 20 min
Do cheaters survive? Do you find joy in competing (& cooperating)? Are teams mechanisms or organisms? How do teams coordinate layers of emotions, energies, and purposes to acquire a coherent ‘personality’? What, then, keeps teams together? Is there scarcity of common purposes in the world? Is teaming essential for bacteria? Might teams, across scales, be both emergent as well as designed systems? How are cost-benefit analyses performed when group and individual goals diverge? Is your life on...
Sep 22, 2019•1 hr 16 min
Is counting just a special case of measuring? Is any kind of measuring, & scaling, dimension dependent? Do lungs ‘have’ a non-integer dimension between 2 and 3? Can you list all the numbers between 0 and 1? Do both the size and number of cells/organelles change with biological growth? Is Euclidean geometry sufficient to describe things in nature? What does thickness ‘mean’? Is size a good indicator of ‘the outer world’? How many times can one cell become another cell? ‘How’ do cells count? H...
Sep 21, 2019•1 hr 13 min
Is there a rhinoceros in the room? Is the quantum world aesthetically weird? Are quantum systems only small? What is macroscopicness? Is there quantum behavior, but no quantum objects? Why is (?) there randomness, but not superposition (say), in the manifest world? Is the World one unified physical system? Are there local hidden variables? Can reality/realism be local? Can detectors detect determinate outcomes while themselves not being in a determinate state? Is interaction free measurement pos...
Sep 07, 2019•1 hr 21 min
Are only boring people bored? How standard are your windows? How did the trivial, marginal, & everyday come to the foreground in literature, architecture, language, & ‘living’? Does space emerge ‘from’ living? Has your built environment been handed down to you? Must tragedy only be about high-born individuals? Are you ‘free’ to be bored? Has modernity produced a certain kind of boredom? How have we come to expect agency over the world? Can ‘having tea’ be the point of a novel? Can one ex...
Aug 31, 2019•1 hr 12 min
Do you talk to the Divine? Are feelings facts? Do you accept things as they are? What are you feeling at the moment? Are you agitated? Is sound the earliest primordial? However, do (say) colours, gestures, & silence also speak? Do emotions, fundamentally, emerge in cinema with the arrival of sound? How do we learn to say that we are not feeling well? Can emotions be thought of as objects? Which is the most ‘emotional’ part of the brain? Do words (& emotions) fall from heaven? How social ...
Jul 13, 2019•1 hr 19 min
Are you neutral? Is neutral inert? Do you practice hypocrisy? What does it mean to be (an) opposite? Are capitalism and socialism always incompatible? Do opposites always attract (even in natural systems) – why not? How might opposites be brought together? Are (certain) paradoxes culturally contingent? Can the cultural be told apart from the religious? Where did the very notion of religion emerge from? Does every enzyme always have a precise lock-key relationship with its specific substrate? How...
Jul 06, 2019•1 hr 9 min
Do you (only) like people like you? Is belonging ‘necessary’? Are communities homogeneous? How do communities become political actors from being social entities? Are community identities a way of becoming legible for the State? Does the idea of nations pre-suppose the idea of communities? Conversely, how do countries or communities fall apart? Are societies modern, & communities pre-modern? Can communities self-determine themselves as such? How much can communities scale? How is the communit...
Jun 22, 2019•1 hr 5 min
What would you have bought – an air pump, or a printing machine? What can you read? Does the idea of ‘writing’ automatically lead to the idea of ‘book’? Do you worship books? But, also immerse them in rivers? ‘Who’ has written the divine texts, & why? Do you (still) read aloud? Does the nature of support (say, clay tablet…) determine the writing style (…cuneiform)? Are media effects deterministic? What made paper cheap? What made/makes it to books? Why did the printing press not take off in ...
Jun 01, 2019•1 hr 13 min
Have you ever touched the feet of a dead body? Who will you die in the company of? Where do dogs go to die? Do they grieve others’ death? Is fear of death universal? What causes delirium? What role does religion play in dying? When do children first begin to understand that death is permanent, & that even they would die someday? Is every dying person also a living person? Could grieving turn into a disease? How ‘complicated’ can grief be? Do people who deny death often have horrible ends? Do...
May 11, 2019•1 hr 11 min
What came first – the nuclear power plant or the nuclear bomb? Do you fear nuclear power(s)? What was our experience of encountering coal? What is the relationship between energy consumption and well-being? What drives demand? Is more (always) better? Why did human population grow steeply from c. 1698? Where did the muscular Uncle Sam come from? Does pollution kill more people than wars? Is nuclearization value-neutral? How are human beings a part of nuclear power systems? How does (any) technol...
May 04, 2019•1 hr 20 min
Are ‘things’ (truly) suppressed? What does it mean to act? (How?) is the fan in your computer doing something to you? Are there many kinds of intentionalities in the world? Do animals and machines also act? Are language, metaphysics, politics, agency – all – reserved only for us? Could politicization of the material world be thought of as depoliticization of the human society? What cannot interact? Is mediation a sub-species of action? Are definitions also actions? Is a detailed description iden...
Mar 17, 2019•1 hr 18 min
Are nomads free? Are nations stable? Do you take the ground for granted? Where are your ancestors from? Why did modern humans leave Africa? Are empires and nations products of circulatory processes? What circulates, & how? Have you heard of nomadic empires? Do nomads make good citizens? Is their relationship with the settled often symbiotic? Are the nomads not settled because the animals (that they live off) are not settled? Does culture reproduce the spaces of circulation via (say) music, h...
Mar 09, 2019•1 hr 9 min
Why is that body heading the other way? Do different objects fall differently? Is it a mystery why bodies attract each other? What is the ontology of gravity? Did Newton find his own idea of universal gravitation absurd? When was Space first believed to be unlimited? Do belief systems and knowledge systems always influence each other? Does experience form intuition? Is a simultaneous process of falling in and falling out always ongoing in the Universe? What is it like to fall into black holes? A...
Feb 24, 2019•1 hr 21 min
Can you do whatever you want at home? Do you own private property? Do you hold (private) opinions? ‘What’ do you care for? Why & how do boundaries shift between the private and public realms? Do you have a right to health (& to smoke?)? Does economic development influence how public-private distinction is thought of? Is the process of drawing lines always political? Does increasing GDP always work automatically for publicly desired outcomes? Must private property also (eventually) be see...
Feb 23, 2019•1 hr 8 min
