The Cardozo Electronic Law Bulletin - Global Frontiers of Comparative Law, 2018

Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS), 2016

Agamben argues that a philosophical separation between “bare life” and “qualified, political life” has been pervasive from the time of ancient Greece through to the present day. This conception is not merely philosophical, but perniciously subtends even contemporary politics—democratic and otherwise—containing the threat of the concentration camp at its core. I use Agamben’s work to establish the inadequacy of this pervasive conception of life and death, illustrating this necessarily political and philosophical project through a case study of the medical treatment of comatose patients and the closely related need for organ donation. I then move beyond Agamben’s work by proposing the direction that a necessary rethinking of politics and ethics would have to take in accordance with the concept of a “form-of-life”, which I give a much-needed elaboration, culminating in new possibilities for doing justice to ways of life in their diversity.

Kali Tribune, 2021

"You don’t have to be religious … it’s just common sense” – one often sees this kind of preface to arguments against practices sometimes branded as fruits of what is sometimes called “culture of death”. But is this so? Compromise is unavoidable in political struggle, but can there be a compromise between mind and reality? In this two parts essay we’ll argue in favor of the negative answer. We take an example of the most consequent form of advocating for equality of death and life – the advocacy for the institutionalized euthanasia – and attempt to show how it runs directly contrary to primary act of knowledge – that most obvious, yet rarely examined, state of mind we call “being in touch with reality”. In the first part we examine the notion of reality and life as forms of ἐνέργειᾰ and why modern system based thinking, which is the presupposition of most modern and postmodern political debates about religious and metaphysical issues, runs counter to it and can never touch, let alone grasp, it.

2020

my lecture at the Bonn Universitat https://philevents.org/event/show/85166

Coming Back to Life: The Permeability of Past and Present, Mortality and Immortality, Death and Life in the Ancient Mediterranean. Edited by Frederick S. Tappenden and Carly Daniel-Hughes, with the assistance of Bradley N. Rice. Montreal, QC: McGill University Library, 2017.

The lines between death and life were neither fixed nor finite to the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean. For most, death was a passageway into a new and uncertain existence. The dead were not so much extinguished as understood to be elsewhere, and many perceived the deceased to continue to exercise agency among the living. Even for those more skeptical of an afterlife, notions of coming back to life provided frameworks in which to conceptualize the on-going social, political, and cultural influence of the past. This collection of essays examines how notions of coming back to life shape practices and ideals throughout the ancient Mediterranean. All contributors focus on the common theme of coming back to life as a discursive and descriptive space in which antique peoples construct, maintain, and negotiate the porous boundaries between past and present, mortality and immortality, death and life.

** This volume is open-access: http://comingbacktolife.mcgill.ca ** To the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, the lines between death and life were neither fixed nor finite. For most, death was a passageway into a new and uncertain existence. The dead were not so much extinguished as understood to be elsewhere, and many perceived the deceased to continue to exercise agency among the living. Even for those more skeptical of an afterlife, notions of coming back to life provided frameworks in which to conceptualize the on-going social, political, and cultural influence of the past. This collection of essays examines how notions of coming back to life shape practices and ideals throughout the ancient Mediterranean. All contributors focus on the common theme of coming back to life as a discursive and descriptive space in which antique peoples construct, maintain, and negotiate the porous boundaries between past and present, mortality and immortality, death and life. As the first fully digital book published by McGill University, this publication also establishes proof-of-concept for McGill’s eBook publishing initiatives.

Discourses on the edges oh life , 2020

Death inhabits our collective imaginary, even though sometimes, like a squatter, it hides discretely in order to avoid conflicts. It is undoubtedly a multi-faceted subject of study, which requires consideration from an interdisciplinary perspective. This book deals with this phenomenon, and more specifically with the discourses that surround – and construct our perspectives and understanding of – death and dying. Of course, the present volume does not attempt to be exhaustive, and considers the subject from several standpoints, including linguistics, anthropology, history of medicine, and importantly, literary studies. It combines various points of view and different methodologies of knowledge, in the hope that they come together to constitute a written dialogue –or more precisely, a polylogue. The ordering of the texts in this volume provides readers with an itinerary that begins with more general approaches, such as a historical presentation of the medicalisation of death and an in-depth reflection on the best way to die, and ends with studies of specific literary works from different periods. The itinerary that this book provides is framed by a discourse analysis-based overview that explores how different approaches to death and dying intersect and complement each other in an interdisciplinary endeavour. This analysis focuses on literary and non-literary genres in order to shed some new light on a topic that is inexhaustible because of its sociocultural relevance.

Between the Flesh and the Lived Body Henry and Falque on the Phenomenology of Incarnation, 2020

This paper will discuss how the theological turn within phenomenology has contributed to the further development of discussions concerning Husserl's distinction between the lived body (Leib) of the "flesh" and the extrinsically manifest "seen" body (Körper) by re-appropriating Christianity's emphasis upon incarnation, as exemplified in the work of Michel Henry and Emmanuel Falque. For Henry, an additional "reduction to the flesh" must be enacted in order to overcome the dualistic opposition between "phenomenal body" on the one hand, and the living medium of flesh on the other, for the sake of returning to the original givenness of life. Yet, Falque criticizes Henry's position as a kind of monism, just as problematic as the very dichotomy which it aims to criticize. Falque argues instead that the flesh must always be incorporated, "given back" to the body as a unity, possessing not only affect and life, but also solidity and visibility.