Silence as Resistance in Aamer Hussein’s Stories
Like the addict, the immigrant–the foreigner visible as foreigner–has a compromised subjectivity and does not have the right to stay silent. Speech is demanded at every moment–the confessional speech of self-identification, of naming what one is, confirming and reinforcing through such speech that one is indeed the suspected Other. The position of the migrant of colour in the West is a position of hypervisibility, of a constantly and ubiquitously denied privacy. Every moment is policed. The confession is extracted constantly, demanded as the extractor’s right. Violence embedded in the fabric of the everyday, in life’s minutiae, its smallest moments, its most mundane. Forced speech–the denial of the right to stay silent–is, for the foreigner, an organising principle of everyday life in the West.
By Ali Raz.
Celebrating Philosophy in Monaco
Doubtless passions can bring difficulties to our lives and as Robert Maggiori says we can certainly live passions in a way damaging to our lives and the lives of others but, as he sagaciously adds, without passion life cannot be lived well at all. The manner and mode by which we live our passions and affections, that is ever and always the key–and in this sense, precisely, a manner and mode of truth. Philosophy is not indispensible in helping us find a way to live in the best and most just of ways ethically and existentially, but in its proper and supple manners it can be a boon and benefit.
Steve Light on the Philosophical Meetings of Monaco.