Contemporary capitalism relies on the ideology that everyone can make it in today’s society and that people are essentially free to choose the direction of their lives. This ideology has greatly contributed to people’s feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and guilt. At the same time, people also more and more engage in various forms of self-torture as well as violent outbursts towards others. The paper will look at the news forms of self-violence that we can observe in post-industrial capitalism as well as at the new forms of violence expressed in the society as such. It will also look at how the fantasy structure of contemporary capitalism has contributed to the new forms of ignorance that we can observe in the developed and developing world.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1578830
The monograph and author's subsequent inquiries are in various ways connected to the theme of the project. The main topic of the book is one of perhaps less prominent but nevertheless important and less analysed topics in the field of the research on human mind. On the basis of important philosophers of both past (Plato) and present (Deleuze, Foucault), the monograph shows how the researches of human mind cannot be fully successful without focusing also on the seeming opposite of reason, namely stupidity. In some authors (Deleuze) the latter is namely even conceived of as the transcendental condition of any sort of thinking. In more narrow sense the monograph is connected to the project-research following Foucault’s term of the “grotesque” used by Foucault in his critical analysis of the role of expert opinion in penal cases. One of the often overlooked Foucault’s thesis is namely that wherever interactions occur between different forms of power (law) and knowledge (science), these interactions always result in, and are at the same time conditioned by, a certain discourse that is by its nature grotesque. Various forms of these grotesque discourses present the focus of author’s current researches. The basic presumptions of these analyses are, however, already present in the monograph.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35081773