Points of View – serie

Short, rigorous intervention on history-writing in public life.How does the present reshape what a society chooses to remember as its past? Recent interpretations of India's history have replaced careful inquiry with narratives that mirror contemporary anxieties and ambitions, sidelining the evidence, debate, and plurality that once characterized India’s long intellectual tradition. At stake is a shift from understanding history as a method to treating it as a tool of identity and authority. In The Present Colonizes the Past, Romila Thapar asks: How have cultural and religious identities evolved through interaction rather than isolation? How have dissent and accommodation shaped social change? How have education and public discourse influenced what is accepted as knowledge? And, most urgently, how might weakened institutions and selective pasts redefine our heritage and citizenship?

A short, critical text by poet Yves Bonnefoy on the fraught relationship between poetry and photography, masterfully translated by Chris Turner. The international community of letters mourns the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France’s greatest poets of the last half-century. A prolific author, he was often considered a top candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a dozen major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of dreamlike tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. This volume introduces Bonnefoy's seminal essay on the intricate connections between poetry and photography as they play out against a background of major works in the history of literature. The activity of the photographer has a direct—and sometimes profound—influence on what poetry is seeking to be. And poets, in turn, are duty-bound to understand what that activity consists of and to express their reservations, worries, or approval when confronted with the varied and perhaps contradictory forms photography has taken since the days of the daguerreotype or of Nadar preserving the gaze of Gérard de Nerval, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, or Charles Baudelaire. Bonnefoy's compact essay focuses on one of the disturbing effects of the earliest photographs: their introduction of a notion of non-being—if not, indeed, nothingness—into the world of images. But it also foregrounds a tale which seems to have picked up figuratively on this effect and examined its dangers with a sense of horror: Guy de Maupassant’s extraordinary short story “The Night,” one of the nightmarish works of his last period of conscious creation.

One of the world's leading intellectuals dismantles the political and ethical justifications for institutional torture. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US government approved interrogation tactics for enemy combatant detainees that could be defined as torture, which was outlawed in Europe in the eighteenth century and forbidden by the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention Against Torture. In conjunction with these policies, the Bush administration vocally defended torture as a necessary tool in its Global War on Terror. Though the election of Barack Obama and his signing of the executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay signaled a considerable shift away from the policies of the Bush era, the lessons to be learned from the Global War on Terror will remain relevant and necessary for many years to come. In Torture and the War on Terror, Tzvetan Todorov argues that the use of the terms “war” and “terror” dehumanizes the enemy and permits treatment that would otherwise be impermissible. He examines the implications and corrupting impact of the attempt to impose “good” through violence and spread democratic values by unethical means. Todorov asks: Can violence overcome violence? Does the need to protect one’s own country justify violating human rights? Challenging one by one the political and ethical arguments in favor of torture, Todorov likens institutional torture to a cancer that is eroding our society and undermining the very fundamental democratic ideas of justice and right.