–noun
| 1. | an outcast. |
| 2. | any person or animal that is generally despised or avoided. |
| 3. | (initial capital letter ) a member of a low caste in southern India and Burma. |
Origin:
1605–15; Tamil paṟaiyar, pl. of paṟaiyan lit., drummer (from a hereditary duty of the caste), deriv. of paṟai a festival drum.
Can one choose to be a pariah, to be marginalized. Not simply a question of language, you think...something done to you, not by you; to be taken out, or down, is not the same thing as to step out.
Workers of the world unite!
What unites us? Why should I stretch out my hand to you, jew..black.. woman..shia..homo..stranger...bum? Our common humanity, our common, suffering humanity? The needs of the body, the wounded body, or the spirit? Common experiences? Shared human nature? Do you believe in such words today?
Sameness or distinction? What are the philosophical grounds that bind me to you, and why the need for grounds anyway? But you want to avoid the religious connotations, Christian or Islamic. What, then? Blood and soil?
What can it mean to say our commonality is in our suffering, and can that be the basis of a communality? How can that form a world if it is intensely private? We have shared rituals for mourning, but for suffering?
This kind of humanity [fraternity, brotherhood] actually becomes inevitable when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world..this kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariahs..[but it] is dearly bought...
And in invisibility, ...only warmth and fraternity of closely packed human beings can compensate for the weird irreality that human relationships assume whenever they develop in absolute worldlessness, unrelated to a world common to all people.
The 'muslim community' or citizenship? Get the the.The former seems narrow, claustrophobic, and imposes its own hierarchies. In many ways, I think Jinnah was profound here. 'Muslim community' is not, for me anyway, the way forward. An Islamic state-mullahdom-Sunni or Shia, can only veer to totalitarianism given the level of backwardness. But in principle? Even then: no.
Now this human nature [humanity] and the feelings of fraternity that accompany it...[is] in political terms absolutely irrelevant.
Flight from the world, inner emigrants, may have strength but not power...strength and power are not the same; that power only arises when people act together.
It would scarcely have been a sign of humanness for two friends [A German and a Jew under the third Reich] to have said: Are we not both human beings? It would have been mere evasion of reality and for the world common to both at the time.
---citations, 'Men in Dark Times', Hannah Arendt.
Qadosh
out of place
1605–15; Tamil paṟaiyar, pl. of paṟaiyan lit., drummer (from a hereditary duty of the caste), deriv. of paṟai a festival drum.
Can one choose to be a pariah, to be marginalized. Not simply a question of language, you think...something done to you, not by you; to be taken out, or down, is not the same thing as to step out.
Workers of the world unite!
What unites us? Why should I stretch out my hand to you, jew..black.. woman..shia..homo..stranger...bum? Our common humanity, our common, suffering humanity? The needs of the body, the wounded body, or the spirit? Common experiences? Shared human nature? Do you believe in such words today?
Sameness or distinction? What are the philosophical grounds that bind me to you, and why the need for grounds anyway? But you want to avoid the religious connotations, Christian or Islamic. What, then? Blood and soil?
What can it mean to say our commonality is in our suffering, and can that be the basis of a communality? How can that form a world if it is intensely private? We have shared rituals for mourning, but for suffering?
This kind of humanity [fraternity, brotherhood] actually becomes inevitable when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world..this kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariahs..[but it] is dearly bought...
And in invisibility, ...only warmth and fraternity of closely packed human beings can compensate for the weird irreality that human relationships assume whenever they develop in absolute worldlessness, unrelated to a world common to all people.
The 'muslim community' or citizenship? Get the the.The former seems narrow, claustrophobic, and imposes its own hierarchies. In many ways, I think Jinnah was profound here. 'Muslim community' is not, for me anyway, the way forward. An Islamic state-mullahdom-Sunni or Shia, can only veer to totalitarianism given the level of backwardness. But in principle? Even then: no.
Now this human nature [humanity] and the feelings of fraternity that accompany it...[is] in political terms absolutely irrelevant.
Flight from the world, inner emigrants, may have strength but not power...strength and power are not the same; that power only arises when people act together.
It would scarcely have been a sign of humanness for two friends [A German and a Jew under the third Reich] to have said: Are we not both human beings? It would have been mere evasion of reality and for the world common to both at the time.
---citations, 'Men in Dark Times', Hannah Arendt.
Qadosh
out of place
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