recourse to discourse

Speech and the stage

The theater of cruelty:

'Speech will cease to govern the stage, but will be present upon it. Speech will occupy a rigorously delimited place, will have a function within a system to which it will be coordinated.'

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), pp. 301-302.

 

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The cyclical logic of paranoid sexual jealousy

You love the object.
You fear the object does not love you.
You are paranoid the object loves someone else.
If the object loves someone else you do not want the object.
You do not love the object.
It does not matter that the object loves someone else.

 

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Foucault on the death penalty

To disambiguate my personal feelings, I provide here a link: http://www.amnesty.org/

'Hence capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility, and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those who represented a biological danger to others.'

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 138.

 

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Freudian psychoanalysis as a timeless unfalsifiable paradigm

Freudian psychoanalysis proposes a model of human behaviour based on a subconcious and repression mechanisms. To deny the theory is to affirm it; it is anti-positivist and unfalsifiable. Furthermore, because it posits an absolute truth that is undisputable it can be applied retrospectively to historical periods beyond its temporal reach; the past can be explained by psychoanalysis because, regardless of the fact that they did not know what they did not know, we know what they did not know they did not know.

 

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Theology and golf course management

I proposed to a friend that theology had no place in a university and that it should be subsumed into philosophy. We argued fiercely. I argued that theology works off a false presumption, the existence of God, and that it is non-falsifiable. She argued that falsifiability is merely the new name for God and that this is the doctrine under which selection for worthiness is made and that it is no better than the selection criteria used by medieval popes to repress and restrict. I abandoned the argument. Having a selection criteria does not make academia oppressive, it merely prevents golf-course management from becoming recognised as valid academia - no bad thing in my book.

 

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