Speech can mislead us just as it can convince us of the truth. Clément Viktorovitch’s salutary book reviews the basic rules of rhetoric along with its pitfalls and persuasive resources.
Since the 18th century, India has been portrayed in contradictory ways. While scholarly knowledge is based on the philological study of texts, literary Orientalism expresses its fascination for a society well-known to preserve the values of order and hierarchy. For Roland Lardinois the anthropology of Louis Dumont illustrates the ambiguity of these discourses.
In this article derived from a conference given at Princeton University in November 2008, Pierre-Etienne Will discards culturalist arguments justifying the absence of a democratic regime in China and searches for “sprouts of democracy” in Chinese history.
The Politics of the Veil is an exemplary exercise in the critique of discourse, unearthing its intentional and subconscious meaning, and bringing to the surface its internal tensions and paradoxes; but the counter-discourse of toleration and recognition may turn out to be as problematic as the republican discourse of abstraction, denial and repression so eloquently criticised.
