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Showing posts with the label Power

Human Nature and the Illusion of Shared Meaning: Rereading the Chomsky–Foucault Debate

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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...

Power, Discourse, and the Displacement of the Filter in the Digital Age: A Foucauldian Reading

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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...

The Gaze and the Modern Subject: From Nietzsche to Foucault

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Panopticon Introduction What happens when the self is no longer master of itself? Across the twentieth century, philosophers and theorists repeatedly confronted this unsettling question. Whether through existential anxiety, psychological fragmentation, or mechanisms of institutional control, thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault each explore how subjectivity unravels when exposed to forces beyond comprehension or mastery. This article traces how these figures—each in his distinct idiom—articulate the destabilization of identity in the presence of what is alien, indifferent, or watchful. From Nietzsche’s abyss to Foucault’s surveillance machine, a shared insight emerges: the self is not a sealed interiority, but something shaped, split, or constructed through its encounter with the Other. Nietzsche: Gazing into the Abyss In Beyond Good and Evil , Nietzsche famously warns: “He who fights with monsters should look ...