This blog will, I hope, function as a way of exploring and experimenting with new ideas. Power, subjectivity, ideology, ontology and critical theory form my main areas of interest, but following such threads necessarily leads in multiple, unpredictable directions.
Blogging is not entirely new to me – for a few years I’ve run a blog focusing on extreme metal – but writing on philosophy/theory is a first. Having taken a full year out from academia between my LLM and PhD it seems to me that getting into the habit again of not just reading but putting pen to paper again (so to speak) would be a good habit to relearn.
A few ideas are already gestating. I will likely begin by outlining the some of the overlap between Carl Schmitt and Derrida on the problem of authority and sovereignty as a way of introducing some of the key ideas animating the research I will shortly be commencing.
I’ll leave you with a paragraph from Foucault which I have been mulling over recently and which brings together at least a few of the themes to be explored on this blog.
Power functions. Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never simply the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 29
Destratified 