Research Projects
"Knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows."
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1999)
Topos
(Short Monograph, in-progress)
Tracing an Itinerary of the Native Informant
(Journal Article, under peer-review)
Totality-qua-Totality: Rethinking Totality Today
(Journal Article, under peer-review)
Janus-Faced Cosmopolitics, including the case of Singapore and some Counter-Readings
(Literature Review, in-progress)
"Black Square", Kazimir Malevich (1915)
Space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience." - Martin Heidgegger, Poetry, Language,, Thought (1971)
This short book-length monograph attends to the various notions of space (topoi) as they have evolved across modern critical thought, from the early phenomenological conceptions of space vis-a-vis being, to the more recent structuralist interventions.
"African/American", Kara Walker (1998)
“To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture.” - Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (1967)
This article traces the aetiology of the conception of the native informant in postcolonial thought, especially as promulgated through the work of Gayatri C. Spivak, and as it forced its trajectory onto the stage of wider postcolonial studies.
"Movement in Squares", Bridget Riley (1961)
"The true is the whole." - G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1977)
This article interrogates the notion of "totality" as it stretches from early-Marxist and Frankfurt School thinkers to the ideation of more contemporary critical approaches, cued by Achille Mbembe's predilections on the implications of a borderless world.
"World Trade Center", Hiroshi Sugimoto (1997)
"The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere." - Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (1795)
This literature review takes stock of leading theorists in the field of cosmopolitics, considering the two distinct notions that have emerged (of a united and diverse world, or of micro-universes), while considering the case study of Singapore.
Research Projects (Cont.)
"The life of the mind is not the life that shrinks from the negative, but one that endures it."
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
The Luminous Academy of Lagado
(Monograph, in-progress)
The Ethics of Intimacy: Critical Theory and the Pedagogical Lineage of Transgression
(Journal Article, in-progress)
The Bicentennial and the Treatment of Memory in Singapore
(Journal Article, currently shelved)
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Illustration: "The Engine", Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
"Writing is a kind of machine, a play of differences with no simple origin" - Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1976)
TBA
"The Incredulity of Saint Thomas", Caravaggio (1602)
“Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance." - Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1977)
TBA
"Approaching Shadow", Ho Fan (1954)
"Memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history attaches itself to events" - Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire" (1989)
This article, supervised and edited by Dr. Connor Graham, ARI, NUS, draws on recent work in the philosophy of memory to approach the historical forces at play in the 2019 "Bicentennial" celebrations in Singapore, which event traces its genesis in the 1819 arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles in Singapore.