MERAKI
An online magazine dedicated to publishing philosphical work excluded from the academy
From Our Editor-in-Chief
Our chosen name, Meraki, is a testament to the intense passion, skill, and commitment of everyone involved in its production. We would like to thank each and every one of you for your valuable contributions. While the focus of this project is our authors and their creative commitments, we also hope to stake a larger claim in a conversation which is so often...
Image by Vee Rodrigues.
Alain Badiou's The Insubordination of Joan of Arc: A translation by Valentin Cartillier
Badiou’s French text is on Joan’s life and posthumous legacy, and its largely florid and poetical mode eludes capture by the brutishness of English. The resistance of rendering one language into another that the task of translation places before us is in fact analogous to the problematic Badiou puts before us in the following article. Badiou poses the question: “Who is she?” The very enigma of Joan of Arc is precisely her...
Our Vision & Future
O
ur guiding principle at Meraki is that people think. We believe that philosophy occurs during our daily lives and struggles, and that the academic landscape is impoverished for excluding philosophical reflection on people’s lived realities. In a similar vein, our goal is to foreground philosophical traditions which are delegitimized by the norms of the academic. The separation of non-western philosophical traditions from philosophy "proper", and the consequent denigration of those same traditions, is an artifact of colonisation which is continually reproduced within the academy. In future issues we hope to continue to provide space for philosophical traditions and philosophical writing that are often excluded from the academy.
“These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.”
Audre Lorde
L´État, c'est moi?
Towards an Archaeology of Sovereignty in the Western epistémè(s)
We touch here on an apparently marginal problem that I think is nevertheless important, and this is the problem of theatrical practice in politics, or again the theatrical practice of raison d’ état.
Shall we blame it on Hinduism?
These are the signs held by young student protestors at the National Institute of Technology, Durgapur: “Stand 4 integration, no caste reservation,” “Youth for equality zindabad!” The year is 2006, and mass anti-reservation protests have...
Image by Zehra Rizvi
Why Not Nothing?
Take away matter and space and time,
Spiral down to a minimum condition.
We end with a state of no things, a
Round zero.
And, yet, such a state is itself something;
A defined condition with concrete properties.
“Whereas the great philosophers, the titans, have always been passionately interested in social reality and the welfare of humankind, many of their twentieth-century descendants in the West serenely settle down to a compilation of a dictionary of sentences as opposed to a dictionary of words; engulfed in their intellectual hermitage, they excuse themselves from philosophical comment on social progress or social oppression, on peace or war.”
by Kwame Nkrumah
Kierkegaard for Marxists:
Secularising the
Leap of Faith
I argue that it is possible to reconcile the Kierkegaardian life-structure and Marxist philosophy of ideology in a way which accounts for the fact of existential despair, as well as its solution, in a materialist context...
Telling Slip
into Madness
I look out the window of my second-floor apartment...I can see Myself now: a body double...One with gravity...It started weeks ago. I teach science in an all-girls school, they make fun of me. I have a long nose – too long...
What is Meaning? How much would it matter if we had none?
Asking such a question causes one to fall into a grammatical regression of thinking that every word must correspond to a substance, that every concept must have an essence. In the context of discussing the nature of...
“The personal is theoretical.”
by Sara Ahmed“We are always in motion towards or away from what is more real.”
by Iris Murdoch
The Library and the Emperor’s Garden
In Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, every possible book, the sensical and the nonsensical, exists within the geometric shelving that quite literally makes up the universe, such that, “the Library is ‘total’— perfect, complete, and whole—and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations…
The Albany Bulb: Fighting for Expression, Housing, and the right to Community Continuity
Since at least the 1970s, the Albany Bulb has been an outdoor guerrilla art museum and homeless community in the San Francisco Bay Area, adjacent to Berkeley. It is located on the unceded land of the indigenous Coast Miwok and Ohlone people.
Towards a Deleuzo-Marxist Conception of Politics; Or, Why Deleuze was a Marxist
A cursory reading of Deleuze, and more specifically his political philosophy, reveals a thinker associated at best with abstract anti-utopianism, and at worst, with active support for capitalism. His invention...
Submit your work for Issue #2
See something that makes your gut churn and rage, that makes your mind sharpen and rise to the challenge? We want to hear about it! Write your passion, write your meraki.