The mentioning of Foucault often reminds one of the ways of understanding and analyzing the disciplinary technologies and discourses at play in various institutions—be it prisons, hospitals, or asylums—that the modern citizen is subject to. And so, throughout his works, one is also presented with the relationships between...
The Sovereign Right to Maim and Repair
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 →
This Too is a Mindless Self-expression
It is quite a curious matter that throughout the human history, the farther we go back from the present, the more outward and far-flung our gaze seems to have been. The earliest sciences have been concerned with phenomena that are physically the most distant from our very selves. Astronomy, natural philosophy, geometry… In contrast, the... 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 →