'Life is a state of Mind' - Fiction, Society and Trump

The article undertakes an allegorical double reading of Being There and Trump as instances of what we call socio-fiction. Crucially in this respect, reality and fiction are not two opposed realms. The two realms always interact in subtle ways, which is why cinema can be a resource for diagnostic social analysis. We first articulate a general commentary on the relationship between cinema and society, introducing the concept of ‘socio-fiction’. Secondly, we analyse Peter Sellers’ Being There, an interesting film focused on the relationship between reality and fiction. In this analysis, we elaborate on different ways of approaching fiction in a sociological prism. And finally, we discuss Trump as a fallout effect of Being There. After all, a film is not just an image of a reality, a shadow or appearance of a social fact; sometimes the reality itself seems to have become an appearance of an appearance, a shadow of a shadow

From war to war:'Lord Of The Flies' as sociology of spite

A reading of Golding's Lord of the Flies as an allegory of a biopolitical or postpolitical society that elevates “security” to the most sacred principle of organization as a permanent state of exception and attempts to combine it with consumerism. It is in this context that spite, an impotent and self-sacrificial violence, reemerges as a postpolitical strategy

Becoming Abject: Rape as a Weapon of War.

Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic cleansing and war rape. In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide. This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded

Zones of indistinction : camps of security and terror.

Since the late 1970s, the focus on the "urban question" has shifted from the question of social movements to the question of social control and violence, from political struggle to "postpolitical" risk management. In this context, the city is increasingly transformed into a "network city": fragmented space held together by technologies of mobility and flexible forms of power. The transition from "disciplinary society" to "societies of control" is decisive. It is increasingly evident that post-politics, based on technologies of control, is not a peaceful social order and brings with it new forms of violence: terror. The article elaborates on the relationship between these three successive forms of power (discipline, control, and terror) by focusing on their common denominator, that is, the creation of spaces of "indistinction." With Agamben, it is argued that the "camp," the logic that combines discipline, control, and terror, is becoming the biopolitical paradigm of today's societies