The Theme of Protest and Freedom in Cry, the Peacock

The conflict between social institutions and individuals is a complex and perplexing issue for many scholars. While reflecting on this issue, some scholars propagate the privilege to individuality, the others to the social institutions. Many scholars consider it as a matter of mutual coordination and interest. The need for a relative space for an individual and the requirement of the social institutions for regulating control over an individual’s uncensored wills are equally important. However, safeguarding or maintaining the margins of both entities is complex work. Regulating uncensored wills or reducing excessive encroachment of institutional authorities is a difficult task; it needs to be addressed with a scientific approach. The Indian social system is conservative and has been maintaining its dominance over the women’s class from the time unknown. The society, after allotting all the privileges to male members, refuses to consider women as individuals, having space and freedom. It expects women to be timid, docile, submissive and obedient. As a result, they feel tyrannized and experience untold sufferings. When the patriarchal system becomes over oppressive, it leads women to absolute confinement; the life of complete closure is highly disappointing and frustrating. The forces that obliterate their rights include gender discrimination, marriage-system, orthodox traditions, customs, rituals and class status. A woman is born with a destitute to experience a collision with the subjugating elements in her life and while wrestling against it she has little success. She goes through a perpetual war against the controlling institution while creating a space for her individuality and freedom. The factors like these rob women characters of happiness and advantages and lead women to live an insignificant life, full of suffering.

US Drug Policy and Perpetual War against the Drug Trade in Mexico

Globalization of drug consumption has generated a highly lucrative market for illegal traffickers. The US launched a worldwide campaign against illicit drug use, forcing many countries to comply with the ‘War on Drugs.’ We describe this historical process as a perpetual war resulting in violence, criminality, forced displacement, and disappearances in Mexico and other countries. For instance, despite economic, political, and military coercion in Mexico, the “drug problem” shows little sign of going away, unless a new approach regarding drug production and trade is adopted.

Interrogating the Doctrine of the Univocity of Being

This paper attends to Emmanuel Levinas’s criticism of the univocity doctrine as it pertains to Baruch Spinoza and in view of Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation. The analysis will have a narrow focus on univocity because it will exclusively treat the univocity of cause in Spinoza and its ethical and political implications. Narrowing the approach will illustrate the importance of the doctrine in Levinas’s minor engagements with the modern philosopher and its convergence with Deleuze’s project in Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy: namely, the univocal relation between Substance and the modes. Although both Levinas and Deleuze will converge on basic observations about the univocity of cause, they will depart at significant moments on the implications of the doctrine itself. The analysis will acknowledge Deleuze’s reflections on the Ethics, but it will focus on Levinas’s critique and indictment of Spinoza’s thought—that it eliminates singularity and that it is in itself a justification of perpetual war.