Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

I don’t speak French; I have no idea what he is saying. Presumably something to do with nihilism and absurdity, but I find it interesting to see Camus’s mannerisms and hear his voice. It’s odd, having seen photos of him and imagined from that (and his work) what kind of man he was, to see him move.

Michel Foucault (2002, p. 343) once wrote: “a society without power relations can only be an abstraction”. In contemporary sociology, the ubiquity of power is beyond contestation and forms a fundamental axiom of the field. Beyond this however, the exact nature and dimension of power dynamics are subject to varied interpretations and formulations. Foucault’s discussion of power, disciplinary society, panopticism, and related concepts offer substantive contributions to further studies of relations and economies of power within advanced capitalist societies. The notion of panopticism has enjoyed particular resonance, and contributed to the development of surveillance studies (Simon, 2005, p. 2). Moreover, Foucault’s metaphoric use of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon is a standard reference for theorists who advance the “surveillance society” thesis; such theorists contend that the primary mechanism of social control in modern society is surveillance and the internalization of surveillance by...

"People say reading Nietzche (sic) changed me". Drawn by Ann Debono, March 30th, 2007. Update (13/04/2016): some newer stuff from Ann: here .

Croesus remembers Solon's point: Call no man happy until he is dead .

Aristophanes, the Athenian comedic playwright is famous for lambasting politicians during the Peloponnesian war. But also according to Plato’s “Symposium” he put forth a theory of love, in a short mythopoeic narrative. Expressing the idea that human-beings are inherently incomplete, wanting for another individual who represents their other half. This theory was counterpoised with several other conceptualizations of what constituted love. Socrates in the “symposium’’ also postulated a conception of love advocating that love constituted the “desire for perpetual possession of the good”. The purpose of this paper will be to render an account of both Aristophanes and Socrates account of love in more detail. Furthermore discussing the contention between the two theories and critically evaluating which if at all these theories adequately elucidate the nature of love. The story delivered by Aristophanes started with the idea that originally human-beings had three genders (Plato, 2005, p 2...

Hemingway didn’t deliver his own acceptance speech. He had been seriously injured in Africa and couldn’t attend. This recording was supposedly made years later in Cuba.

The first time I tried to read Hemingway I ended by throwing the book across the room. It wasn’t until I read ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ that I started to appreciate Hemingway’s work. ‘A Movable Feast’, unlike ‘A Farewell to Arms’, didn’t end up in the far corner of the room. There is a certain emotional authenticity in his sketches of Paris between the wars. I particularly enjoyed the anecdotes and observations made of Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, which are the most developed characterizations of the memoir. The notion of “the lost generation” and Hemingway’s meditation upon Stein's point was enjoyable and Fitzgerald’s problems with measurement left me in stitches. This new edition contains a lot more than earlier editions, but is not without controversy as to certain editorial alteration. Supposedly, some remarks that are uncomplimentary to Hemingway’s first wife Hadley have been removed. Nevertheless, this is still a great and evocative read.