I watched a movie a while back about a communist Russia where comrades were required to denounce one another in order to get ahead. If everyone was denouncing someone, you had to get on the bandwagon, lest you were next. Dissent was not allowed, at least not in the communism this movie chose to portray. […]
truth
Posted inNews/Politics
Charlie Hebdo, laughter, dogma and ‘truth’
The recent “terrorist” attacks at the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, in Paris, France, is a stark reminder of something that the Italian semiotician, philosopher, novelist and universal scholar Umberto Eco thematised in his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1998), namely, the supposedly negative, mutually exclusive relationship between what is taken to be absolute, […]
Posted inGeneral
Foucault on the functioning of discourse in society
If Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers are right (and I believe they are), one is never outside of countervailing power relations in society, which means that, ineluctably, one is always enmeshed in multilayered, overlapping grids of discourses that function in an ambivalent manner to enable, and simultaneously control, direct, disseminate and domesticate human action and […]