Is ‘knowledge society’ yet another empty slogan? More than ever, ‘knowledge is power’. But we can hardly affirm that the society we live in is based on the vigour of knowledge. The market price placed on knowledge fails to provide it with the needed qualitative impetus. Inequities remain the blind spot of technological systems. To be sure, we are living in an information society at higher scales of exchange, with ‘a great deal of information, but little knowledge’. We may indeed be restoring a sort of enlightened despotism of a technologically neo-positivistic type, a realm of experts whose ‘know-how’ is but another term for ‘doing without knowing’. In a truly democratic sense, the knowledge society is a basic human right. Knowledge is nourished in society. Conversely, societies find in knowledge a compass for their peaceful co-existence.

The rule of the Caesars, which for 500 years held sway over an empire of 5 million square kilometres of land, today distributed among 30 states, was very different from the monarchies, such as the medieval and modern ones that are more familiar to us. Before the Revolution French kings inherited a kingdom that was their family's property; this fiction concerning family and inheritance was calmly accepted and perpetuated with astonishing ease. Roman emperors, on the other hand, had a high-risk job; they did not occupy the throne as its owner but merely as the appointee of the community, which tasked them with governing the Republic, in the same way, I am informed, as the caliphs were appointees of the community of the devout and with the same bloody conflicts each time the ruler changed.

The teaching of an ‘imperialist’ language like English in a postcolonial era presents not only unprecedented difficulties to the teacher, it also raises disconcerting questions about the paradigms underlying the concepts of language, language teaching, and culture. This new perspective renders inadequate, on the one hand, the peda-linguistic categories of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language), and, on the other, the postcolonial critique in general of hegemonic languages.

Many people say that the world changed after 9/11 and that nothing is as it was. What does indeed appear true is that international politics has to change and come up with a new concept with new tasks and principles appropriate to the requirements of the situation.

This brief contribution aims to suggest an outline by tackling the transformation of the old concept of politics into a new politics, a politics adapted to the challenge thrown down by the events of 11 September 2001 that so shocked the world. A first draft of the tasks required will define the new principles on which these tasks are based, and will conclude with a short observation on the future political analysis of the university disciplines involved.

Such is the scale of information production today that the verb ‘to know’ may be heretofore declined in the impersonal. A new ‘subject of knowledge’ - the machine - is seen as removing from homo sapiens the so far uncontested role of ‘learned subject’. This calls for a rethinking of our notions of knowledge and democracy. To think of a knowledge society where every single person would be capable of knowingly taking any type of decision on community life, points to an incapacity to rethink the concept of knowledge. The fragmentation of knowledge transforms democracy into a simple possibility for each and every person to choose ‘the expert’ by whom he wishes to be guided. Kant had distinguished between ‘knowledge’ and ‘thought’, associating the latter with leisure. It appears today that pleasure and games may be the ultimate bulwarks of humanity. Perhaps we ought to be speaking of a leisure society rather than a knowledge society.

To say that globalization is on all our minds would be both trite and excessive. Yet for many years we have known that we live in the ‘global village’ and, as humanists, we have even rejoiced in the fact that the various technologies facilitating communications and travel have woven our world into one, concretely and visibly. We know that the Other is not out or down there but right here; that the suffering of the Other, for example that of the Third World, is with us constantly in images and statistics. In many ways this has been the fulfilment of many dreams: Christian, humanist, cosmopolitan dreams in which humanity is indeed one.

It is more than a century since what we call the ‘history of religions’ was discovered and has been studied. But only recently have we realized that the ‘geography of religions’ is just as important. East and West are essential geopolitical categories, determined by cultural, historical and even religious differences: an Indian and a Swedish Catholic (both of them members of a minority) display notable religious differences, as great as those that separate an Indonesian from a Saudi Muslim (both members of a majority). The ‘geography of religions’ cannot be ignored. Differences exist but simplifications must be avoided: we have to go beyond the cliché according to which the Orient is mystical and the West pragmatic. Logical thought is no more eastern than western. There is scholastic philosophy in the East as well as the West, magic and rationalism are found everywhere. But as human beings are intrinsically earthbound beings, even though they are more than ‘of this world’, East and West are categories that are not only geographical and historical but also anthropological. There is an East and a West in each of us. That is why it is possible for us to understand each other.

Since Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the phrase ‘Copernican revolution’ has been used in many fields to illustrate an event equivalent to the one Kant brought to philosophy, a revolutionary change in perspective. And Thierry Marchaisse, who questions the philosopher and Sinologist François Jullien in the book Penser d'un dehors (la Chine), entretiens d'Extrême-Orient, writes that the book proposes ‘nothing less than a relaunch of the great work of decentring that defines our modernity - in effect a new “Copernican reversal”‘. Jullien explains that ‘the confrontation between China and the West is one of the great contemporary issues’, that ‘Chinese thought reveals to us different coherences’, that it ‘also makes us go back to the preconceived ideas behind our Reason’, that it is thus ‘in the best position to intrigue today's thinking and shake philosophy up’ … China as philosophical tool.

A liquid modernity, where the traditional certainties have become fluid and blurred, presents a major challenge for education. The world is changing so quickly that homo sapiens, learning animal par excellence, can no longer rely on strategies acquired through learning experiences, let alone those derived from traditional values or wisdom. The excess of useless information creates a glut. When saturation level is reached, accumulation ceases to be a sign of wealth and becomes undesirable. Knowledge is confined - discarded like refuse - in the infinite capacity of cybercomputers. What should we humans keep and what should we reject in this process? In times of liquid modernity, how and what should our children be taught in order to be able to develop survival strategies throughout their lives?

At the dawn of the new millennium religion is going through some radical changes: the first of these is related to the fact that the processes of secularization have had an influence on traditional religions, are doing so today and will continue to do so, starting with Christianity in its different forms, but they have not precipitated the decline of religion as an institutional and public factor and still less the decline of faith as a private phenomenon.

What we are experiencing is rather a huge process of transformation and adaptation of the religious as a private dimension and religion as an institutional factor, resulting in a profound metamorphosis of the socio-cultural situation (see Lyon, 2000). The two main elements of the change are as follows: the triumph of the mass media and consumer society and the processes of globalization (Kurz, 1995) are radically changing the very face of religion: groups and movements with a clear religious identity are involved in a relentless process that is at the same time a process of adaptation and resistance to these changes. The outcome of this process is uncertain, but there is no doubt that it is only where religions prove they are capable of using and adapting their messages of salvation to the new mass media system that they will be able to survive and maybe even spread.

In a world post-September 11 2001, with seemingly endless escalations of war and violence in so many places, engaging one's time in literary research may appear futile and perhaps even self-indulgent. Scientific research has obvious and immediate outcomes that directly benefit the human condition (although it can of course have the reverse effect in certain fields - developments in weapon technology for example). Medical research helps to cure diseases. Social research facilitates planning for the future in all sorts of ways. Comparatively, it may certainly seem that literature and research in literature - exploring texts for what they say and how they say it, tangling with ideas of different takes or ‘comprehensive grasps’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 408) on the world - have no such directly observable beneficial outcomes. On the surface at least, they indeed may appear removed from everyday needs. In reality, however, literature, literary research and literary researchers need to play an increasingly significant and creative role in a troubled world.

Japan today projects an external image in which harmonious coherence provides a basis for technical efficiency and cultural excellence. Indeed there is much justification for this image. At the same time there are significant internal tensions which have a long history. Politics and religion have been intertwined for centuries. Political need has often been a powerful motor for religious developments. For example, the major Buddhist denominations were used to register the population and provide stability during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867). Subsequently, the political modernization of the Meiji Restoration (dating from 1868) set this aside and pushed up a new form of ideologized Shinto as a focus of national consciousness. Looking at it from the other side, religions themselves have often provided identities and loyalties, and therewith a motivation for political conflict. This applies to various forms of Buddhism, to Shinto, and to some of Japan's new religions. Thus while Japanese society in some respects appears to be very coherent, its history has frequently been one of internal tension and strife. Factionalism is strong even today, and takes both political and religious forms.

This paper is situated in the broader context of an examination of the relationship between East and West from the particular perspective of our experience of the body. It is therefore based on two specific traditions, one belonging to the East - a particular strand of Tibetan Buddhism - the other to the West - the Orthodox tradition of the heart prayer - in order to try to show the similarities and differences in their approach to the body and attempt to compare them in the light of their respective ‘phenomenology’. In this sense phenomenology, as a western philosophical discipline, plays a pivotal role in this comparison and hopefully helps to bring new light to bear on this investigation. The early Eastern church evokes the concrete experience of the body as a holy body and sees it as an exemplary route to deification via the mystical practice of the ‘heart prayer’ (hesychasm). As regards Tibetan Buddhism, it advocates the gradual experience of the body as a rainbow body, defined as a path towards illumination, by means of ‘sitting meditation’ which brings liberation in bardo. In order to carry out this analysis, I shall refer to two recent books that are authorities in both these fields, Corps de mort et de gloire, Petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps by O. Clément and Rainbow Painting: A Collection of Miscellaneous Aspects of Development and Completion by Tulku Urguyen Rinpoché.

This passage by Jorge Amado appeared in an article entitled ‘Livros para crianças’ 13 years before he wrote O Gato Malhado e a Andorinha Sinhá.

In times of crisis, when democracies are under threat, our lessons of justice and equality are best learnt from those who are marginalized or oppressed. There could be hope for democracy if responses to the attacks of September 11, for example, were characterized not by blind revenge but by democratic solidarity. To think of democracy in terms of non-realized ideals does not adequately challenge the failures of its promises. ‘Not to respond’ is often a strategic necessity for democratic discourse, which recognizes failure as part of its evolutionist and utopian narrative. The internal dialectic of the unrealized finds in the negative instance of failure a strange moral coherence. Thus it is proposed to consider democracy as something de- realized rather than unrealized. The term ‘de-realized’ places the democratic experience at a distance, in a context not of its making, in order to de-familiarize it and to block its natural or normative reference. The idea is to see the potential of democracy in translation or in an extraterritorial sense. Democracy's potential lies not in its failure but in its frailty.

Delicately and with a voluptuous spiral movement the leaf from the tall beech tree detached itself from its branch and landed on the flaming bed made by its companions.

That autumn, that morning, while I was observing this unique event, I began to reflect on the emotion I felt in its probably universal connotation. Like aesthetic feeling, a great many concepts affect living beings in the deepest part of themselves, and come from the depths of the cognitive processes, those determinants that are innate dispositions to feel and know. Those depths have a reality and a meta-historical, infra- and extra-verbal dimension.

The attacks of September 11 oblige us to revise a prevalent view of religion as harmless and incompatible with rational forms of knowledge. Three modes of knowledge coexist today: theological knowledge involves adhesion to a system of beliefs; technological and natural science knowledge is value-free and neutral with regard to beliefs; lastly, knowledge in philosophy, social and human sciences relates to values, transcends national and cultural specificities and involves freedom and reason. Is this latter form of knowledge more apt to preserve one's critical conscience than other modes of knowledge? History does not, alas, corroborate this theory. All three knowledge modes, taken separately, lack both a wider rationality which would enable them to legitimize their actions in light of universal criteria, and the properties of democratic debate, the only way to avoid pathologies in thought, be they of a religious or scientific nature. In a post-secular society, religions resist all forms of secularizing influences. A true secular society is, however, able to preserve the contents of religion without destroying them.

The flutter of a swooping butterfly. The feverish rush of readers as they move from poem to poem, text to text, as if from flower to flower, pursuing a personal pleasure guided by the law of desire and by reasons that reason has no knowledge of. In the Dictionnaire universel of 1690 Antoine Furetière illustrated the word with the following remark: ‘On dit proverbialement qu'un homme court après les papillons quand il s'amuse à des bagatelles’ (The proverb has it that a man is chasing butterflies when he takes pleasure in trivial things). We are also familiar with the words of Jean de La Fontaine, who did not mince epigrams when, four years earlier, he addressed his old friend thus:

Toi qui crois tout savoir, merveilleux Furetière. (p. 646)

(You who think you know it all, marvellous Furetière.)

The work of those scholars who see an implicit relationship between religion and violence has of late assumed greater prominence and relevance. For example, in a recent volume entitled Religion and Violence, Hent de Vries states: ‘[v]iolence … finds its prime model - its source, force, and counterforce - in key elements of the tradition called religious. It can be seen as the very element of religion. No violence without (some) religion; no religion without (some) violence (Vries, 2001: 1). He elaborates further: ‘“religion” is the relation between the self (or some selves) and the other - some Other … “religion” also stands for the other - the Other - of violence. It evokes its counter-image, its opposite, its redemption, and critique’ (ibid., my emphasis). Similarly, Bruce Lincoln, writing of the social and political processes that underpin cultural, especially religious, groups, states that ‘“culture” is the prime instrument through which groups mobilize themselves, construct their collective identity and effect their solidarity by excluding those whom they identify as outsiders, while simultaneously establishing their own internal hierarchy, based on varying degrees of adherence to the values that define the group and its members’ (Lincoln, 2000: 411, my emphasis).