Stories are profound as they provide a room for us to exist through reconfiguring memories. In this sense, memory is not simply the mechanism of storing and recalling certain knowledge and experiences but it is a social and political process that comes to being within interpersonal relationships and takes shape through stories. The anthropologist Michael... Continue Reading →
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 →
What is the purpose of punishment? A tool for justice? Or a legitimate way of taking revenge? When justice is sought, why do we ask the question 'who should we punish' instead of asking 'why do we punish'? As Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, institutions of law take revenge out of the... Continue Reading →
Hypocrisy is the vice through which corruption becomes manifest. And Hannah Arendt, In her book On Revolution, writes about her reflection of the topic by looking into the Latin word persona, which in its original meaning signified the mask ancient actors used to wear in a play. And the mask had two functions: "it had... Continue Reading →
Hannah Arendt writes in her book On Revolution: Quite apart from the threat of total annihilation, which conceivably could be eliminated by new technical discoveries such as a ‘clean’ bomb or an antimissile missile, there are a few signs pointing in this direction. There is first the fact that the seeds of total war developed... Continue Reading →
In Lectures On Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt, it is written: "Thinking, as Kant agreed with Plato, is the silent dialogue of myself with myself , and that thinking is a “solitary business” (as Hegel once remarked) is one of the few things on which all thinkers were agreed. Also, it is of course... Continue Reading →
The liberal writer, concerned with history and the progress of freedom rather than with forms of government, sees only differences in degree here, and ignores that authoritarian government committed to the restriction of liberty remains tied to the freedom it limits to the extent that it would lose its very substance if it abolished it... Continue Reading →
Thinking Prismatically 