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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...

The cobbler’s mold. AI image   From Saussure to Derrida — Unseen Structures of Meaning Both Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida challenged the notion that meaning or identity arises from within the sign or subject itself. For Saussure, linguistic value does not stem from an intrinsic connection between sound and concept but from a network of differences within a system. Derrida extends this insight, showing that identity—whether linguistic, artistic, or subjective—is never self-present but depends on prior traces and frames. This essay proposes that Derrida’s forme en bois (wooden form), introduced in his reading of Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes , operates as a tangible metaphor for these pre-existing structures. Just as the shoe cast gives shape to the absent foot, so too do unseen frameworks—linguistic, cultural, or material—shape meaning and identity. The forme stands where the subject is not; it is the condition of presence through absence. Van Gogh’s Shoes: The Thr...

Nietzsche’s dice throw Introduction The history of philosophy is marked by an obsession with identity. From Plato’s ideal Forms to Hegel’s dialectic, difference has traditionally been defined as a derivative — a deviation, a negation, or a limit imposed upon the identical. Gilles Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition (1968/1994), turns this order upside down. His project is nothing less than a new ontology: one in which difference precedes identity, and being itself is understood as a field of differentiation rather than a collection of stable substances. Deleuze’s challenge to metaphysics consists in thinking difference “in itself,” without reducing it to comparison or opposition. What appears as identity, permanence, or repetition is, for him, only the visible pattern of an underlying movement of becoming. Through this reversal, Deleuze opens the possibility of an affirmative philosophy of life, one that celebrates creation, transformation, and multiplicity. The Reversal of M...