Reflections On the Present

This short essay touches on the misadventures of language, a theme we’ll explore further in our upcoming course, Language and Semiotics: Psychoanalysis, Structuralism and Literature . We live in a world made of words, and yet we rarely stop to ask what it means for something to “make sense.” We assume meaning is simply there, tucked inside our sentences like objects in a box, ready to be passed from one mind to another. Gilles Deleuze’s 1969 book The Logic of Sense asks us t

We often talk about life as if it were a fixed and recognizable biological fact. A cell, a genome, an organism, a species. We picture inheritance as a clean line, evolution as a slow march of bodies and traits, and development as the unfolding of an internal program. But what if none of this is quite right? What if life is less a machine following instructions, and more a shifting mesh of relationships, exchanges, and borrowed organs? What if our bodies are not where life beg

In his famous 1954 text The Question Concerning Technology Martin Heidegger famously insisted that “the essence of technology is nothing technological,” meaning that modern technology is not just about tools or machines, but about a mode of revealing, a way in which reality is made to appear. French philosopher Gilbert Simondon went in the opposite direction: machines are  technical; that is their essence. They evolve, change, and individuate. In the late 1950s, Simondon wrot

We often imagine science as the art of order: equations on a board, graphs, predictions. But the world that science meets at the threshold is not orderly. It is chaos, not just mess or confusion, but a zone of infinite speed where forms flicker into existence and vanish before they can be named. The question is: how does science ever gain a grip on such a world? The answer proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1991 book What is Philosophy?  is striking. Scien

We live in a world that runs on messages. They flash across our screens, pulse through cables under oceans, ripple through our cells, and shape our relationships, economies, and decisions. But what do we really mean when we say information ? Nearly a century ago, Norbert Wiener - the mathematician who founded cybernetics - was asking a question that still defines our time: what is information, and what does it mean for life itself? For Wiener, information wasn’t simply a bypr

We usually imagine politics at a distance: parliaments, parties, polls. But there is another scene where power works more intimately, closer to the skin. Deleuze and Guattari call it micropolitics, and it asks a simple, disarming question: what if the decisive struggles of the present take place not only in constitutions and courts, but in tones of voice, seating plans, login screens, and phrases that pass between us almost unnoticed. Micropolitics does not replace the macro.

Traditionally, “style” has meant individuality. From classical rhetoric to modern aesthetics, we are taught to recognize an artist’s signature as a deviation from a norm: the brushstroke that resists the conventions of composition, the musical phrasing that bends harmony, the sculptural form that unsettles proportion, the cinematic cut that breaks narrative flow. Style, in this sense, is what makes a work distinct - its surplus, its residue of personality or genius that remai

This short essay revisits Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?”  and Foucault’s response to it - a glimpse into our upcoming Foucault course . In 1784, Immanuel Kant was asked a deceptively simple question: What is Enlightenment?  His answer, compressed into a few pages, became one of the founding texts of modern thought. But rather than describing a historical event or a period in European history, Kant proposed something far more radical: Enlightenment, he wrote, is man’s exit fr

“Ideology” is one of those terms that never seems to die. We keep declaring its end - the death of ideology in the 1960s, the “end of...

When governments talk about us, they rarely speak in the language of individuals. They speak in rates, curves, and averages. Birth rates....

Desire is often thought of as a hunger for something we don’t have - the missing object we long to possess. But philosophers Gilles...

When we talk about community, we usually mean belonging - a sense of shared identity, values, or history that ties us together. Modern...

In the mid-1970s, Michel Foucault found himself in a strange position. He had just published the first volume of The History of Sexuality , a book that captured more than a decade of work on power, discipline, and biopolitics . By this point he had already revolutionised how we understand prisons , medicine, madness, and knowledge. He had shown that power is not simply something wielded from the top down, nor merely a negative force of prohibition. Instead, power is diffuse,

Continental Philosophy refers to a diverse and dynamic tradition of thought that developed across mainland Europe from the 19th century...

In what is often called the "post-truth" era, language has assumed an increasingly complex role. The term "post-truth" implies that...

Imagine walking through a city without any barriers, walls, or locked doors. You can go anywhere you like, do anything you want. No one...

In 1976, Michel Foucault delivered his Society Must Be Defended lectures, where he turned Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that “war...

In his 1979 lectures titled The Birth of Biopolitics , Michel Foucault explored how modern governments manage and influence human life at...