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Showing posts with the label Kierkegaard

From Lack to Loop: Boredom, Desire, and Consumption in Late Capitalism

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Introduction: No Escape from Boredom There is a familiar motif in Romantic literature: the restless subject who travels in search of relief, only to discover that what he flees has accompanied him all along. Lord Byron gives this intuition a memorable form—one may cross borders and seas, yet the inner condition remains unchanged. In this sense, boredom appears less as a situational inconvenience than as a persistent feature of human existence. If this condition has always been with us, however, why does it feel so different today? Is it simply a timeless psychological state, or has it been reshaped by modern social and economic structures? This article argues that boredom is not an invention of capitalism, but neither is it untouched by it. What begins as an encounter with lack —articulated in different ways by Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Lacan—is transformed, in late capitalist society, into a managed and monetized condition. Through the work of Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard,...

Reason at the Limit: A Lesson in Deconstructive Reading

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Roy´s  Derrida  &  Foucault. AI image Introduction: Beyond a Philosophical Dispute Jacques Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963) is often remembered primarily as a polemical intervention in Michel Foucault’s History of Madness . Read in that way, the essay appears to revolve around a disagreement concerning Descartes, historical method, and the possibility of giving voice to madness. Yet such a framing risks obscuring what is philosophically most instructive in Derrida’s text. Rather than functioning merely as a rebuttal, Cogito and the History of Madness operates as a demonstration of deconstructive reading itself. Derrida shows how a foundational philosophical opposition— reason versus madness —depends on language, unsettles its own hierarchy, and ultimately reveals that reason can only constitute itself by passing through what it seeks to exclude. The essay is less concerned with adjudicating historical claims than with exposing how a conceptu...