In her book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Jasbir Puar looks into the settler-colony of Israel in Palestine to bring forth a crucial understanding of sovereignty and its relation to the body. She specifically analyses the deliberate maiming techniques used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) which attempts to keep Palestinian casualties low... Continue Reading →
Book Summary: The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences / Michel Foucault
Preface Foucault’s inspiration of writing the book originated from a joke by Borges, who provided various definitions from a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ that divided animals into categories such as belonging to the Emperor, embalmed, tame, sucking pigs, sirens, drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, that from a long way off look like flies… Having... Continue Reading →
Art and Structural Violence: A Reflection on ‘The Act of Killing’
Foucault states that power’s success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms (1978: 86). But what happens when power, acquired with means of violence, not only hides itself but is applauded by masses? What if violence becomes a trait of an identity that is celebrated? The documentary ‘The Act of Killing’ precisely... Continue Reading →
Fear Opposed to Illusive Power
When the two words ‘fear’ and ‘love’ come together in a sentence, it often causes ambiguity as such feelings are at times intertwined with each other. Do people fear God because they are afraid of losing his love? Do people love their parents due to their strict guidance of their kids’ lives? Such vagueness and... Continue Reading →
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison / Michel Foucault
What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its ‘useful’ object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point of penal... Continue Reading →