In 1991 the Indian government officially sanctioned the country’s definitive entry into the global market and into a new era. This study focuses on the generation that epitomizes this new era and is based on fieldwork among young English-speaking, educated, Delhi-based men involved in occupations such as tourism, Internet, multinationals, journalism and sports. These young men construct their role in society by promoting themselves as brokers in the ongoing exchanges between India and the outer world. Together they constitute a heterogeneous whole with different class-, caste- and regional background. Yet, they can all be seen as members of the ‘middle class’ occupying a relatively privileged position in society. They consider the opening of India to the global market as the key-event that has made it possible for them to live an “interesting life” and to avoid becoming “boring people”. This exploration into the life-world of these young men addresses in particular how they construct their identities facing the messages and images that they are exposed to through work- and leisure-networks. They understand themselves and what surrounds them by invoking terms such as ‘India’ and ‘West’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, mirroring the debates on change that have gone on in India since colonization. Yet, they imaginatively re-work the content of these discourses and give the quoted terms new meanings. In their usage ‘being Indian’ is turned into a ‘global’, ‘modern’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ stance while ‘being Westernized’ becomes a marker of ‘backwardness’ and lack of sophistication. Their experiences mark out the popularity of notions of ‘Indianness’ in contemporary metropolitan India. The study focuses on how social actors themselves experience their self-identity and how these experiences are influenced by the actors’ involvement with international flows of images and conceptualizations. It will primarily approach cultural identities through labels of belonging to abstract categories with shifting reference (referred to them as ‘phantasms’) such as ‘India’, ‘West’, etc. The study suggests that the ‘import’ of trans-national imagination into everyday life gives birth to sub-cultural formations, new ‘communities of imagination’. Their members share a similar imagination of themselves, of Delhi, their country and the world.

L'épistémologie péripatéticienne de l’Aquinate suppose l'existence d'une distinction ontologique entre la partie sensitive et la partie intellective de l'âme. L'âme sensitive est mobile et corruptible alors que l'intellect est immobile et incorruptible. Considérant cela, il semble évident que la saisie des données de l'intellect, à savoir les espèces intelligibles, ne devrait pas être affectée par la corruption du corps. Or, la réalité est tout autre: les pertes de mémoire sensible affectent l’activité de la mémoire intellective. Étant donné que l’intellect est immuable, le fait que celui-ci puisse oublier laisse présager une dépendance structurelle de l'intellect en regard à son corps, qui serait le foyer de l’oubli. Cette recherche tente de mettre au jour la nature et la logique de cette dépendance structurelle. Plus précisément, elle tâche de répondre à la question suivante : est-ce que l’âme doit toujours se tourner vers les phantasmes lorsqu’elle pense les intelligibles et, si tel est le cas, comment le fait-elle? Les littératures premières et secondaires montrent sans équivoque que Thomas croit que l’intellect doit toujours se retourner vers les phantasmes pour penser. Or, déterminer la manière dont ce retour s’exécute est une autre paire de manches. Comme le montre Piché (2019), la conversio ad phantasmata, ou reflexio, est décrite de deux manières différentes tout au long du corpus thomasien : soit le retour aux phantasmes s’effectue par accident lorsque l’intellect agent saisit l’universel, soit la conversio est un processus d’autoréflexivité de l’intellect sur son propre acte d’intellection. Bien que les commentateurs (Gilson, Kretzmann, Lonergan et Pasnau) n’aient pas catégorisé dichotomiquement les explications de Thomas tel que l’a fait Piché, tous semblent abonder dans le sens de la première explication que fournit l’Aquinate. Nous entendons construire notre texte selon le plan qui suit : après une brève introduction, nous exposerons les traits saillants de l’épistémologie telle que développée par Thomas d’Aquin afin de révéler les liens structuraux présents entre les puissances de l’intellect et de la sensibilité. Ensuite, nous montrerons que l’intellect effectue toujours un recours aux phantasmes lors de son activité. Puis, nous confronterons les explications possibles quant à la manière dont s’exécute ce recours. Enfin, en guise d’ouverture, nous exposerons l’aporie, relative aux modalités, qui découle nécessairement du rapport existant entre la sensibilité et l’intellect. / The Peripatetic epistemology of Aquinas supposes an ontological distinction between sensitivity and the intellect within the soul. The sensitive soul is mobile and corruptible while the intellect is immobile and incorruptible. In regard to this, it seems evident that the grasp of intellectual data, the species intelligibiles, shouldn’t be affected by the body’s corruption. However, it isn’t the case : the sensible memory losses affect the intellective memory’s activity. Since the intellect is immutable, the fact that it forgets points to a structural dependency of the intellect to its body, which would be the origin of omission. This research tries to excavate the nature and the logic of this structural dependency. More precisely, it tries to answer the following question : does the soul always need to turn towards phantasms when it thinks the intelligible species and, if so, how does it do it? The first and second literature show distinctly Thomas’ belief that the soul must always turn toward phantasms to think. Nevertheless, how it happens is a whole different issue. As shown by Piché (2019), the conversio ad phantasmata, also called “reflexio”, is described in two different ways all along the Thomasian corpus : either the return toward phantasms happens by accident when the intellect grasps the universal, either the conversio is an autoreflexive process achieved by the intellect toward its own intellectual act of thinking. Although the commentators (Gilson, Kretzmann, Lonergan and Pasnau) haven’t categorized Thomas’ explanations in terms of a dichotomy as Piché did, they all seem to agree with the first explanation provided by Aquinas. We will build our text according to the following plan : after a brief introduction, we will expose the salient features of Thomas Aquinas’ epistemology to reveal the structural links in between the intellect and the sensible soul. Then, we will show that the intellect always turns toward phantasms while it’s active. Thereafter, we will confront the possible explanations relative to the way this turn occurs. Finally, we’ll expose the modality aporia, as I call it, which ensues necessarily from the relationship in between the sensible soul and intellect.