If we are to have a relational view of taxonomy and discourse — the explosive myth of contextualization and positionality — then ‘sites’ should also bear out their relative differences. There are ‘in sites’ and there are ‘out sites’ (ones you see and ones you don't), and borderzones in-between. The present chapter is located in this unchar-tered borderzone, though its critique is intended to be ‘radical’ without the frothy ambiguities, equivocations, hybrid-speakages more usually than not associated with the two ‘sites’ I wish here to bring into confrontation. What are these sets of ‘sites’?
First though a brief remark on the term ‘sites’ or ‘site’ (in the singular). The Latin root ‘situ’, semantically linked to the Greek ‘topos’, denotes a fixed position where an object, structure or tissue is placed or where something occurs. In geographical and architectural usage its reference is usually to the place, space, location, setting or situatedness of a very particular or distinctive structure or tissue in an open-ended plot that also marks it off from similar ‘site’ elsewhere. If another structure is erected or imposed in that particular spot then the site is said to have been erased. There could be related parallel or deeper, invisible structures or ‘locale’, (the session next door) that remain out of sight (out of this site, i.e. in another place). In other contexts, the latter may acquire connotations of care and securedness (home, community, nation) the sacred and mythical (land, ritual altar, location of the temple as ikos), moral or ethical (‘life-world’, ‘form of life’, dharma as that which holds), surrogate or virtual (dreamspace, doughnut hole, cyberspace, web-sites), or quasi-mystical (Heidegger's ‘locale of the truth of Being’, totality, absence), cosmological (dharmakaya, infinite empty space or nothingness), even metaphysical (Omni-Presence, Void or Absolute Nothingness, sūnyatā).
After the beginning there appeared some stranger texts
West's Orientalism objectified the corpus's otherness
And Modernity's philology rendered their syntax as his own;
Thence followed the postmodern disruption of the aporia
Re-citing the alterity and the ousia of the Other's face;
But it awaited the hybrid-angst of postcolonialism's site
Whence the interrupted texts begin miming an-other meaning.
Authorless Revelation
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Bilimoria, P. (2009). Postcolonial Discontent with Postmodern Philosophy of Religion. In: Bilimoria, P., Irvine, A.B. (eds) Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2538-8_17
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