The term, ‘heterotopia’, was used by Michel Foucault in a brief text – titled ‘Of other spaces’ – published in Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité (October, 1984; translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec). It is a richly suggestive text, although academics who can’t deal with poststructuralist thinkers’ complex writings have generally derogated it with all kinds […]
Utopia
Posted inGeneral
Žižek and that strange animal, the human
A fascinating discussion of jealousy, fantasy, animals and utopia, by Slavoj Žižek — the “most dangerous philosopher in the West” (New Republic) — in Living in the End Times (Verso, London, 2010), helps one understand the reasons for our fascination with animals in their “natural” state. This fascination is well-known to most of us — […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Time to put a cork in Australian hypocrisy
For centuries, white South Africans blissfully mythologised their history and the effects that their arrival on the southern tip of the continent had on the indigenous people. White Australians engaged in a similarly elaborate myth-making concerning conquest. However, unlike here, whites are a majority in Australia – the white Aussie extermination of the indigenes was […]