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Showing posts with the label Human Rights

Questioning the Familiar: The Shortest Words Have the Longest Histories

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Derrida & Foucault in Roy's Style. AI image I. The Words We Think We Understand Self. Subject. Freedom. Truth. Human. Reason. Normal. These are words we use constantly, and precisely for that reason they can seem transparent. We hear self and think we know what it refers to; we hear freedom and assume that its meaning is already clear. The familiarity of the vocabulary makes the concepts behind it easy to overlook. But familiarity is not the same as transparency. A useful interruption is therefore: What makes this word mean what it seems to mean? The mistake is to treat the term as the starting point of the analysis. Instead of beginning with What is the self? , we can ask a different question: How did this particular idea of the self become intelligible to us? The shift may seem small, but it changes what we are looking for. Rather than taking the concept as a fixed point and building an argument from it, we investigate the conditions that make a particular ...

From Non-Places to Non-Places of Communication: Marc Augé and the Digital Irruption

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Identity and Human Rights, Marc Augé. AI image Introduction When Marc Augé published Non-Places in 1995, he offered one of the most influential accounts of what he termed supermodernity. Airports, highways, and shopping malls embodied an experience of the world shaped by transit, anonymity, and contractual logic. More than two decades later, in 2016, Augé delivered the keynote lecture Identity and Human Rights at the ENAH. The temporal gap is far from insignificant: by then, the world was already deeply permeated by the internet. Yet the digital does not occupy the center of his exposition. Instead, it appears—significantly—in the questions raised by the audience. This displacement is not incidental. In that final exchange, the concept of the non-place is pushed onto new terrain: that of contemporary communication. There, under the pressure of the present, thought is compelled to reformulate itself. The Non-Place in 1995: Space and Circulation In Non-Places , Augé defines these...