We are so terribly ill. Our ailment is enervating, though we are astir. It leaves us completely constricted, but perpetually frenzied and almost always restless. We do everything and go nowhere, do nothing and go everywhere. The tissue of our bodies tenses up and loosens exactly as expected. A refined symptom, to be sure. Though,Continue reading “Writhe, Moan”
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The Echoes of Utility and the Rumblings of Disability
The Weight of a Canon: While the likes of Mill and Bentham were erecting moral schemata, governments of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were using these same constructions of utility and value to discipline and organize populations. However, there were key operative distinctions. The maximization of utility did not come down to examining relationsContinue reading “The Echoes of Utility and the Rumblings of Disability”
A Brief Note on the Confession
(this is a reworked section of a larger piece) Confessions of the Self in Butler’s Reading of Foucault: Judith Butler, in their beautifully written Giving an Account of Oneself, posits that Foucault changed his political tune between volume 1 of his History of Sexuality and volume 3. “In the last years of his life, FoucaultContinue reading “A Brief Note on the Confession”
Habermas, Foucault, and the Communicating Subject
Habermas Contra Foucault In the “contemporary history of philosophy”, the Habermas-Foucault debate is most likely overrepresented, given the two never directly interacted on the matters present. However, it is a crucial element of Jürgen Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse on Modernity. It is important to note that, in his Foucault lectures, Habermas is heavily reliant on HubertContinue reading “Habermas, Foucault, and the Communicating Subject”
Sade, Adorno, and Ressentiment
Sade and Dialectic of Enlightenment The Enlightenment has a despotic, totalizing tendency to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. There must always be a common denominator in instrumental reason. “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence” (Adorno & Horkheimer 1992, 51). All mystifications, cultural codes, bodies, and motions share the same referent under the grip of theContinue reading “Sade, Adorno, and Ressentiment”
Concepts in Focus: Docile Bodies
Michel Foucault’s genealogical work is both that of history and political philosophy, for this reason it is often difficult to condense the vast array of material analysis present in his work into a simple conceptual argument. What I will try to do here is to expound on one particular concept in his work Discipline andContinue reading “Concepts in Focus: Docile Bodies”
