If you don’t know about the categories of Being, what are you even talking about?! Check out the first part of a two-part series on how a young Alexander the Great learned how to take over the world.
What can Game of Thrones teach us about how societies function? Which is more important: Knowledge or Power? Let’s take a look with philosopher Michel Foucault at how medieval societies were structured to answer these questions & compare the differences to today’s capitalist society.
Citations: Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: an Introduction. Translated by Robert J. Hurley, Vintage, 1990. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon, by Michel Foucault, Longman, 1980, pp. 109–133. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
One of my favorite scenes from Game of Thrones is a conversation between Lord Petyr of House Baelish a.k.a. Littlefinger & Queen Cersei of House Lannister-Baratheon. Here we see a clash between two individuals of different classes. Cersei represents the monarchy the top of the social order during the medieval period, while Littlefinger represents the capitalist merchant. In medieval societies, merchants were far below the monarch in social rank, below the aristocracy, the knights, and only slightly higher than the peasantry. And, while Littlefinger is nominally a member of the aristocracy with his own sigil & banner, his house lacks the foundation of centuries of generations which give the great houses a sense of necessity—the idea they are essential to the functioning of society which in turn guarantees their power. Lord Baelish has gained the status & power he has not from his house, but from the sale of flesh and his ability to manage money. (view more)
Why exactly does R Kelly continue to sell concert tickets? What “truth” is he living by? In this video, I use Foucault’s concept of ‘regimes of truth’ to try to make sense of Kelly’s continued success. (see full article here)
This essay was originally published in The Mantle on October 22, 2019.
As R. Kelly sits in a federal jail in Cook County awaiting trial on an almost endless flurry of sex crime charges, the 52-year-old singer must be wondering to himself in his orange jumpsuit where it all went wrong. Why, after 30 years of him remaining almost untouchable, do the people no longer believe him? For a time, he seemed to be a famous individual who had merely been accused of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia–but, at least he was innocent until proven guilty. Now, his reputation seems to be as a famous rapist and pedophile who just so happens to be a popular artist. What happened?
It is here in this perspectival distinction–between the accused famous person & the famous abuser–that we want to answer the question for R. Kelly by focusing on regimes of truth. We’re not concerned about the individual truths or facts that can be discovered or excavated and therefore definitively determine whether R. Kelly, for example, is a rapist and pedophile. When talking about the regimes of truth, we’re talking about the political relations surrounding truth, relations that regulate or allow statements of fact to be imbued with a truth-content that itself reinforces the rule or norm responsible for regulations in the first place. By first examining regimes of truth we can then understand why it is that R. Kelly was able to remain successful despite decades of allegations of abuse, sexual assault, and pedophilia swirling about; and, perhaps more importantly, why the stories of his survivor’s are beginning to gain traction in society dismantling the tower of success that R. Kelly dwells in. (read more)
Heidegger’s theory of truth is one of the most complex in his philosophy, yet it is also one of the most important. Only recently has his understanding of truth been illustrated in greater detail through the publications of his numerous lecture courses. Heidegger states that the primordial origins of truth are to be found not in the correspondence of subject and object, but in the concept of uncovering, in the sense of the Greek word aletheia. Heidegger contends that the truth of a being is uncovered from out of its hiddenness when it is asserted. However, because Dasein (the ontologically neutral term for a human) is finite, any entity which is uncovered will still be partially covered and remain unavailable to Dasein… (view more)
