scholarly journals Diversidade sexual e de gênero, Estado nacional e paisagens heterotópicas no Irã: Foucault e depois

Afro-Ásia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabiano Gontijo

<p>No final da década de 1970, o mundo acompanhou os acontecimentos revolucionários que levaram à destituição da monarquia e à instauração de uma república islâmica no Irã. Michel Foucault viu nesses acontecimentos, caracterizados pela “espiritualidade política”, um potencial crítico à modernidade ocidental. Trata-se aqui de produzir uma reflexão sobre o impacto dessa “espiritualidade política” na construção de um Estado nacional baseado em tecnologias de poder/saber geradoras de distopia e conformadoras de uma ideologia nacional teocrática preocupada com o controle dos corpos e a imposição da heteronormatividade. Será possível, assim, abordar os modos criativos de resistência ao regime de verdade vigente e de produção de formas de subjetivação alternativas, principalmente no que diz respeito às experiências da diversidade sexual e de gênero. Esses modos compõem paisagens heterotópicas que desafiam a distopia reinante, como sugerido por minha experiência etnográfica no Irã em fevereiro de 2019.</p><p> </p><p>Gender and Sexual Diversity, National State and Heterotopic Landscape: Foucault and Beyond</p><p>At the end of the 1970s, the world followed the revolutionary events that led to the end of the monarchy and the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran. Michel Foucault saw these events, characterized by a “political spirituality”, as a potential critic of Western modernity. This study presents a reflection on the effect of this “political spirituality” in the construction of a national State based on technologies of power/knowledge that generate a dystopia and shape a national theocratic ideology concerned with the control of bodies and the imposition of heteronormativity. This article shows the original ways of resistance established to counter the regime of truth and to produce an alternative way of being, especially regarding the experiences of gender and sexual diversity. These ways compose a heterotopic landscape that challenge the reigning dystopia, as suggested by observations in Iran in February 2019.</p><p>Sexuality | State | Nation | Heterotopia | Iran</p>

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-254
Author(s):  
Renee Lockwood

As the descendant of Werner Erhard's 1970s Human Potential group est (Erhard Seminars Training), Landmark Education has continuously denied being a religious organization. Despite ample discourse on the religious nature of the group within popular online and print media, a conspicuous void within academia - particularly within Religious Studies - speaks volumes. Rarely are the boundaries of what constitutes a ‘religion’ expanded in order to explore those groups that, though not understood to be ‘religious’ in a traditional sense, clearly contribute to contemporary 'spiritual' life. And yet, that Landmark Education is perceived as being somehow religious demands deeper analysis. This article highlights the problematics of 'religion' within late Western modernity as illustrated by the contention surrounding the religious status of both Scientology and Transcendental Meditation. A discussion of Landmark Education is offered in light of these issues, along with a dissection of the religio-spiritual dimensions of the organisation and its primary product, the Landmark Forum. Incorporating several eastern spiritual practices, the highly emotional nature of the Landmark Forum’s weekend training is such as to create Durkheimian notions of 'religious effervescence', altering pre-existing belief systems and producing a sense of the sacred collective. Group-specific language contributes to this, whilst simultaneously shrouding Landmark Education in mystery and esotericism. The Forum is replete with stories of miracles, healings, and salvation apposite for a modern western paradigm. Indeed, the sacred pervades the training, manifested in the form of the Self, capable of altering the very nature of the world and representing the 'ultimate concern'.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAVI GITA MAULIDA

The Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI) based on the historical trajectory of the struggle, has the only state construction in the world where the nation is born first, then forms the state. The first President of the Republic of Indonesia Ir. Soekarno emphasized that the Unitary State is a National State. The purpose of the Indonesian nation to be born, independent, and to form a state has one goal, the will to elevate the dignity and life of the Indonesian people (Indonesian People's Sovereignty). Through an analysis of the reality of today's life, the Indonesian nation has lived in a condition of life order as if it were the same as a democratic state, namely that the first state was formed and the nation was born later. So that the sovereignty of the Indonesian people based on the principles of deliberation and representation has not been able to be realized.


Author(s):  
Marina Kameneva ◽  
Elena Paymakova

The article notes that the theme of culture and cultural policy for modern Iran is not a marginal issue. Culture is seen by the country’s leadership as an important component of its state political and ideological doctrine. There is analyzed the role of the Islamic factor and cultural heritage in the cultural policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran over four decades of its existence. Particular attention is paid to the role of the theory of the dialogue of civilizations proposed by M. Khatami as well as to the changing attitude towards it in the public consciousness of Iranian society. It is emphasized that the theme of “Iran and the West” is becoming particularly acute in the country today, contributing to its politicization. An attempt is being made to show that Iranian culture is increasingly becoming an important factor in the foreign policy activities of the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, contributing to the strengthening of the country’s position in the world arena as a whole and the country’s leading role in the region, the realization of the idea of exporting the Islamic Revolution and implementing Iranian cultural expansion outside the country.


Author(s):  
Jim Ife

The reality of the Anthropocene hangs over our heads as we enter the 2020s. Humanity is facing multiple crises, and it has become clear that political and government structures are incapable of dealing with them adequately and equitably. We are seeing the erosion of the liberal democratic state and its institutions, the appeal of populism, mistrust both of politicians and of political institutions, and powerful interests responding by increasing surveillance, secrecy, and control. The Anthropocene also challenges the anthropocentrism that has been taken for granted in the world view of Western modernity, but is proving to be unsustainable and indeed harmful to human and non-human flourishing. This presents a new set of challenges for social work, if it is to remain relevant to the needs of the society, and also to remain true to its value base. This chapter argues that social work needs to explore and adopt theory/practice that is community-based, political, anarchistic, decolonised, matriarchal, and grounded in an ecological epistemology that is both Indigenous and post-human.


Author(s):  
Alistair Graeme Fox

This essay explores how Ben Okri’s most recent novel, In Arcadia(2002), attempts to reconstruct the possibility of utopia in the face of a fragmentation of identity and destruction of determinate certainties affecting contemporary society in the aftermath of postmodernism. By tracing the intertextual relations existing between this work and earlier works in an intellectual/literary tradition that extends from Theocritus and Virgil through Dante, More, Milton, Sannazzaro, Sidney and others, Fox shows how Okri develops the proposition that men and women confronting an ‘empty universe where the mind spins in uncertainty and repressed terror’ can recover sanity through art. Even though, in Okri’s vision, the world may be ‘a labyrinth without an exit’, presided over by Death without any hint of transcendence, men and women, he concludes, can recover paradise through the ‘painting of the mind’ which can creative complete forms that can be fed into ‘spirit’s factory for the production of reality’. This generative activity, which is at the heart of the Arcadian vision, in Okri’s view, has the power to make life a place of ‘secular miracles’, despite the limitations imposed upon it by the realities of finitude and death. The essay concludes by suggesting that Okri’s concept of utopia is very close to Kant’s idea of Aufklärung as expounded by Michel Foucault –– that is, neither a world era, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment, but rather a process of which men and women are at once elements and agents, and which occurs to the extent that they decide to be its voluntary actors. While in some respects Okri’s vision is strikingly similar to certain of its antecedents, it is thus nevertheless distinctively postmodern in the ways in which it is inflected.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-71
Author(s):  
Andrea Rossi

This article analyses the set of ethical questions underlying the emergence of the modern politics of security, as articulated, in particular, in the work of Thomas Hobbes. An ethic is here understood – in line with its ancient philosophical use and the interpretation advanced by authors such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot – as a domain of reflections and practices related to the cultivation and conversion of the self ( askēsis, metanoia). The article aims to demonstrate that, besides attending to the physical safety of the state and its citizens, modern apparatuses of security are also crucially implicated in the formation of their subjects as ethical and autonomous individuals. To substantiate this thesis, the article first illustrates how, since the first appearance of the term in the vocabulary of Western thought – and in Seneca’s work in particular – theories of security have been intimately tied to the cultivation of the self. It thus interprets Hobbes’s reflections on the subject as the upshot of a substantive, if implicit, re-articulation of Seneca’s ethic of security, by focusing on the two authors’ respective understandings of (a) autonomy, (b) the world, (c) ascesis, and (d) politics. Overall, it is suggested that the differences between the two authors testify to a wider political-historical shift: in modern regimes of governmentality, the ethical dimension of security no longer defines the rightful exercise of political power, but rather appears as an object of social and economic governance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-358
Author(s):  
Andrew Scull

Michel Foucault remains one of the most influential intellectuals in the early twenty-first century world. This paper examines the origins and impact of his first major work, Folie et déraison, on the history of psychiatry, particularly though not exclusively in the world of Anglo-American scholarship. The impact and limits of Foucault’s work on the author’s own contributions to the history of psychiatry are examined, as is the larger influence of Madness and Civilization (as it is known to most Anglophones) on the nascent social history of psychiatry. The paper concludes with an assessment of the sources of the appeal of Foucault’s work among some scholars, and notes his declining influence on contemporary scholars working on the history of psychiatry.


2019 ◽  
Vol 118 (812) ◽  
pp. 343-348
Author(s):  
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Today it is hard to imagine the connection between the world that revolutionary impulse envisioned and the actuality it generated in the Islamic Republic.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-154
Author(s):  
Mark Louie Tabunan

Abstract World Heritage, a project of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that aims to protect and preserve tangible and intangible inheritances of mankind, enables the construction of 'distributed, "polycentric" networked economy of cultural production and exchange'. This article focuses on Calle Crisologo in northern Philippines, analysing the ways in which it has been creatively produced as World Heritage Site from postcolonial Vigan's built space. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, and capital and reading ordinances and an architect's plans, I argue that the World Heritage project reconfigures the once local space into a global spectacle. While World Heritage is a western construct and a result of the experience of late modernity, how it is manifested in Calle Crisologo also shows how vernacular modernity developed in Vigan as a colonial city. With the syncretic mixing of cultures in everyday Calle Crisologo as a resource, western modernity, supposed to be unitary and linear in its aims of progress and development, gets deflected.


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