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Abstract
Story and fact are always in uneasy tension with each other. No matter how carefully we line up the historical data or how honestly we report the actual events through which we have lived, these do not by themselves tell the story of our lives. To tell all is not to tell a tale. Getting the facts straight is not enough to find the story to which they belong. In fact, getting the facts straight is a very different activity from that of finding a story that can be ‘faithful’ to the facts. [Carse, James P. 1994. Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience, 171–172. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco.]
Notes
1 Nietzsche adds, ‘And this too is an interpretation’. Given a world constructed from human imagination cannot escape error and hubris, this should not fool us into believing one side is right.
2 This unnecessary divide has beleaguered Biblical studies in the form of a long-standing nineteenth-century fact-based or positivist historical paradigm and the voice from the postmodern margins taking their cue from Nietzsche's interpretive insight.
3 Story without fact is surely one-way to understand ideology, with the -ism that was used to define Indian religions in the nineteenth-century scholarship: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism (King Citation1999).
4 See http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-3439; accessed March 25, 2015.
5 ‘Hence the improved and modified descendants of a species will generally cause the extinction of the parent-species' (Origin of Species, Citation1859, XI, 5, 6).
6 This subtitle, by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for life, is most famously and concretely expressed by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, whose protagonist Kurtz translates it as: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ (Citation2012, 57).
7 See Mandair (Citation2009) in which he locates the ‘co-origination’ of religion and history in Hegel's works.
8 See Bhogal (Citation2001) where I show the conflation of impersonal Buddhist notions (nirbaan and sunn) with Hindu notions of a personal divine (Hari); as well as not choosing between ‘faith/grace’ and ‘work's in the compounds of nadar-karam.
9 For Darwin those complex forces were, of course, population pressure, variation and inheritance and natural selection – which combine to create new species.
10 Eagleton's humorous phrase combing Dawkins with Hitchens.
11 This is the title of Edward Said's important essay first published in the London Review of Books (Citation1984), and is currently (March 2015) being enacted in various ways through a theatre production organized by the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University, titled ‘Three Nights of Palestinian Plays' and curated by playwright Ismail Khalidi.
12 In this regard, Mandair proposes (in my interpretation) four key suggestions: (1) The need to politicize the translation process dominated by the West's reliance upon a general orientalist notion of translation and shift to a more equal exchange that elicits a co-contamination between colonizer and colonized; (2) The need to earnestly enter an encounter with the other, which demands a ‘border gnosis’ and ‘collateral being’; (3) The need for academics and others to seriously engage with philosophy and critical thought outside of the Euro-American canon; (4) The need to acknowledge the genealogical history of reason (and by extension the west's denial of other ‘aporetic’ logics as ‘irrational’) and thereby make an opening within the public sphere for the legitimacy of alternative logics. For elaboration of these points, see Bhogal (Citation2011).
13 See Singh (Citation2004a), O'Connell (Citation1997) and Adamson (Citation1995).
14 Cf. de Certeau's discussion of a ‘third way’ of the Indians
their specificity is no longer defined by a given, by their past, by a system of representations, an object of knowledge (and/or of exploitation), but finds its affirmation in a set of procedures – a way of doing things – exercised within an encompassing economic system which creates, among the oppressed, the foundations for revolutionary alliances.
15 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/why-has-race-survived/?_r=0 (accessed March 23, 2015).