Return to Saussure

The Birth of Venus (Sandro Botticelli). Sorce: Wikipedia Introduction Images no longer occupy a stable place within contemporary culture. They circulate at unprecedented speed, detach from their original contexts, and operate across domains once held apart—art, documentation, entertainment, commerce. The question is no longer simply what images show, but how they function and what we believe they do. At the intersection of medium, referent, circulation, and belief, the image becomes a site of uncertainty rather than representation. This article approaches that uncertainty through a theoretical lens informed by Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, using the case of Australian photographer Bill Henson as a symptomatic example rather than a moral controversy. Medium and Ontology: Painting versus Photography The distinction between painting and photography has long rested on assumptions about their relationship to reality. Painting is conventionally understood as interpretive: it pa...

The Debate. AI image Introduction The 1971 televised discussion between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, later published as Human Nature: Justice versus Power , has become one of the most frequently cited philosophical encounters of the late twentieth century. The debate is often presented as a confrontation between biological universalism and historical relativism, or between Enlightenment rationalism and post-structuralist critique. Yet readers and viewers regularly report a lingering dissatisfaction. Despite the clarity and rigor of both speakers, the exchange never quite arrives at a point of resolution. This article argues that the frustration generated by the debate does not stem from intellectual failure or rhetorical evasion. Rather, it arises from a deeper and largely unexamined assumption: that the same words— human nature , justice , subject —carry the same meaning across theoretical systems. Once this assumption is questioned, the debate appears less as an unresolved d...

Introduction Not everything that can be thought can be said, and not everything that is said is destined to circulate. This intuition, formulated with particular clarity by Michel Foucault in his analysis of the order of discourse, remains a privileged key for understanding the present. In the contemporary digital landscape, shaped by networks, platforms, and systems of algorithmic feedback, the problem no longer takes the classical form of socially enforced censorship. What is changing is the locus at which control over what counts as admissible in the public space operates. The filter has not disappeared; it has been displaced. To grasp this displacement, and its effects on power, enunciation, and the constitution of the subject, requires a return to Foucault, not in order to apply his concepts mechanically, but to read in his work the mutations of a discursive regime that today manifests itself in unprecedented forms. The Policing of Discourse In L’ordre du discours (1970), F...

Andy´s Icons. AI image Introduction Andy Warhol’s work presents a peculiar challenge to interpretation. It seems to arrive fully formed, immediately legible, and strangely resistant to depth. His images do not invite prolonged decoding; they circulate, reproduce themselves, and persist. Warhol’s success, both artistic and commercial, coincided precisely with this condition. This essay argues that such success was not accidental: Warhol’s work operates within the same cultural logic that Jean Baudrillard later described as simulation, where images function less as representations than as circulating surfaces. Read alongside Baudrillard, not as an analytical method but as a theoretical horizon, Warhol’s art appears not as a critique of spectacle but as its most lucid articulation. Following Hegarty’s caution that Baudrillard’s ideas are “very difficult to put to use, or to apply directly” (Hegarty, 2004, p. 2), this essay does not attempt to apply Baudrillard to Warhol. Instead, it ...