Search Results (57)

This paper examines how young adults integrate generative artificial intelligence chatbots into everyday life and the implications of these engagements for the constitution of selfhood. Whilst existing research on AI-mediated subjectivity has predominantly employed identity frameworks centered on social positioning and role enactment, this study foregrounds selfhood—understood as the organization of subjective experience through narrative coherence, interpretive authority, and practices of self-governance. Drawing upon Paul Ricœur’s theory of narrative self and Michel Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self, the analysis proceeds through in-depth qualitative interviews with sixteen young adults in Norway to investigate how algorithmic systems participate in autobiographical reasoning and self-formative practices. The findings reveal four dialectical tensions structuring participants’ engagements with ChatGPT: between instrumental efficiency and existential unease; between algorithmic scaffolding and relational displacement; between narrative depth and epistemic superficiality; and between agency and deliberative outsourcing. The analysis demonstrates that AI-mediated practices extend beyond instrumental utility to reconfigure fundamental dimensions of subjectivity, raising questions about interpretive authority, narrative authorship, and the conditions under which selfhood is negotiated in algorithmic environments. These findings contribute to debates on digital subjectivity, algorithmic governance, and the societal implications of AI systems that increasingly function as interlocutors in meaning-making processes. Full article

In this article, the philosophical (critical) continuity between ancient Greek skepticism (Pyrrhonism) and postmodern political theory is pointed out. This continuity (philosophical reincarnation) is demonstrated by referring to Sextus Empiricus’ writings on Pyrrhonism, as well as two different approaches that are considered to reflect postmodern political theory in its most salient features, such as anti-fundamentalism: Chantal Mouffe’s “project of radical democracy” and the “art of doubt” in Ulrich Beck’s “reflexive” modernity. The content of the identified continuity is basically the following: Just as the Pyrrhonian philosopher aspires to achieve serenity of spirit by suspending judgment through doubt (“epoche” and “ataraksia”) [epəkē –αταραξία], the postmodern theorist aims to end organized political violence by doubting all modern truth allegations. In other words, the individual hope of the Pyrrhonian philosopher is reproduced in the postmodern mind as a socio-political ideal. In Michel Foucault’s terms, the “regime of truth” or the “politics of truth” is an option that often leads to the “terror of truth”. The politics of doubt, on the other hand, is a peaceful, tolerant alternative. According to the postmodern theorist, skepticism is a highly strategic element of a pluralist (libertarian) democratic order. The intellectual way to make modern democracy even more democratic is, first and foremost, through a skepticism that makes absolutely no concessions to truth allegations. In this respect, the most uncompromising skeptic in the history of philosophy is the Pyrrhonian philosopher. Pyrrhonism is the summit of anti-dogmatism. This means that the postmodern theorist is not so much a postmodern agent. In other words, postmodern political theory is the theory of an innovation that is already obsolete. Full article

Institutional violence against transgender individuals in healthcare is a structural phenomenon with multifactorial roots and is embedded in social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the microphysics of power, this study analyzes how such violence unfolds within Brazil’s healthcare system. For Foucault, power is not solely exercised through centralized institutions but is diffuse and present in everyday practices, relationships, and discourses. Institutional violence, while often manifesting in individual acts, is defined by its persistence and systematic occurrence over time. In healthcare settings, this violence assumes symbolic, structural, psychological, and physical forms ranging from neglect and verbal abuse to sexual violence. Foucault’s framework allows for a deeper understanding of how power relations perpetuate exclusionary and dehumanizing practices. By interpreting these dynamics through the Microphysics of Power, the study reveals that institutional violence against transgender individuals extends beyond explicit acts, encompassing routine interactions that reproduce inequality and restrict access to fundamental rights such as healthcare. These practices sustain a logic of control and exclusion that operates subtly but effectively within healthcare systems, reinforcing the marginalization of trans people and undermining their right to dignified and equitable care. Full article

This study examines the factors that motivate viewers to financially support streamers on the Twitch digital platform. It proposes a conceptual framework that combines the uses and gratifications theory (UGT) with Michel Foucault’s concept of the practice of freedom (PF). Using a cross-sectional quantitative survey of 560 Portuguese Twitch users, the model investigates how three core constructs from UGT—entertainment, socialization, and informativeness—affect the intention to donate, with PF acting as a mediating variable. Structural equation modeling confirms that all three UGT-based motivations significantly influence donation intentions, with socialization exhibiting the strongest mediated effect through PF. The findings reveal that Twitch donations go beyond mere instrumental or playful actions; they serve as performative expressions of identity, autonomy, and ethical subjectivity. By framing PF as a link between interpersonal engagement and financial support, this study provides a contribution to media motivation research. The theoretical integration enhances our understanding of pro-social behavior in live streaming environments, challenging simplistic, transactional interpretations of viewer contributions vis-à-vis more political ones and the desire to freely dispose of what is ours to give. Additionally, this study may lay the groundwork for future inquiries into how ethical self-formation is intertwined with monetized online participation, offering useful insights for academics, platform designers, and content creators seeking to promote meaningful digital interactions. Full article

This article investigates the role of space in the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides, focusing on The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002) through the lens of spatial theory. Drawing on key thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Doreen Massey, the study explores how Eugenides constructs spatial environments that not only frame but actively shape the identities, desires, and traumas of his characters. In The Virgin Suicides, suburban domestic spaces are shown to function as heterotopias—sites of surveillance, repression, and mythologized femininity—while Middlesex engages with transnational and urban spaces to narrate diasporic and intersex identity as dynamic, embodied, and liminal. The analysis reveals that Eugenides uses space as both a narrative device and a thematic concern to interrogate gender, memory, and power. Rather than passive backdrops, the novelistic spaces become charged arenas of conflict and transformation, reflecting and resisting dominant socio-cultural discourses. This study argues that space in Eugenides’ fiction operates as a critical register for understanding the politics of belonging and the production of subjectivity. By situating Eugenides within the broader field of literary spatiality, this article contributes to contemporary debates in literary geography, gender studies, and American fiction. Full article

This article investigates the paradox of disappearance as both an aesthetic and a political phenomenon. Taking inspiration from Radiohead’s song “How to Disappear Completely,” it argues that aesthetic representations of disappearance never achieve total erasure; instead, they give rise to new forms of visibility. A true aesthetics of disappearance does not exist. Through case studies such as H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, the article demonstrates that disappearance is always mediated: the invisible man becomes hyper-visible through his clothing, bandages, and mask, while the spectacle conceals marginalized lives only to expose them through mechanisms of institutional control (e.g., prisons, medical facilities, schools—as analyzed in Michel Foucault’s work). An investigation of the “novel of the institution” (Campe), especially as it appears in the works of Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, eventually explores the nexus between aesthetic representation and institutionalized forms of coerced visibility. Ultimately, the essay argues that disappearance, as an aesthetic and political event, destabilizes regimes of visibility—not by erasure alone, but by exposing the fragility of appearance itself. The tension between opacity and exposure suggests that resistance lies not in pure absence but in subverting the very mechanisms of representation. Full article

This article addresses the epistemic and political problem of self-referentiality in theology within the context of post-secular societies as a demand for public relevance of faculties of theology within the 21st-century university. It focuses on the epistemological emergence of public theology as a distinct knowledge, such as human rights, and ecological thinking, contributing to the public mission of knowledge production and interdisciplinary engagement. This study applies Michel Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods in dialogue with Michel de Certeau’s insights into the archaeology of religious practices through a multi-layered analytical approach, including archaeology of knowledge, apparatuses of power, pastoral government, and spirituality as a genealogy of ethics. As a result of the analysis, it examines the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of a public theology and how it needs to be thought synchronously with other formations of knowledge, allowing theology to move beyond its self-referential model of approaching dogma and the social practices derived from it. This article concludes programmatically that the development of public theology requires an epistemological reconfiguration to displace its self-referentiality through critical engagement with a public rationality framework as an essential task for the public relevance and contribution of theology within contemporary universities and plural societies. Full article

Migration is a multidimensional process that reshapes identities and communities. This article adopts a polyhedral framework inspired by Pope Francis’s Laudato si’ and Michel Foucault’s concepts of “subjectivation” and the “polyhedron of intelligibility”. Both emphasize spirituality as a transformative force in individuals’ lives and a concept that connects philosophy and theology to support resilience among migrant populations. Using Portugal as a case study, the research examines migration’s historical and contextual landscape and its discursive framework. Through a Lisbon-based research project of interviews with migrants, the study explores the concept of spiritual integration by presenting how spirituality functions to preserve cultural identity while facilitating integration without full assimilation into the host community. Spirituality includes many rules and choices regarding ways of life; therefore, the interview projects’ migrants interpret the concept of spiritual integration in a subjective and polyhedron manner. Creating strong ties to their homes, traditions, cultures, spirituality, sports, and culinary practices, as well as practicing, sharing, and teaching these practices, protects them from total subjection, while learning the host society’s customs and rituals helps them to fit in. The findings show that spirituality serves as an integrational tool, a coping mechanism, and a form of resistance, providing a space for migrants to address and overcome challenges. The article emphasizes the importance of integration policies to create a “safe place” of inclusivity within host communities. Full article

The word “curiosity” has an opaque history with contradictory attitudes and connotations acquired ever since Antiquity. This poses an interesting problem in the case of Leo Africanus, who never uses the word in his Cosmographia de l’Affrica yet exhibits curiosity at every turn as a traveler and a writer. This essay relies on a distinction that Michel Foucault makes regarding types of curiosity: that which produces conventional knowledge (which he rejects) and that which seeks extraordinary knowledge that “enables one to get free of oneself”, resulting in “the knower’s straying afield of himself”. Both as a traveler and a writer, Michel de Montaigne demonstrates that such an attitude was a living reality in sixteenth-century Europe. Montaigne’s many reflections on his “straying afield of himself” provide a bridge to interpreting Leo Africanus’s practices of traveling and writing. Leo’s profession as a diplomat, his economic expertise and his training as an Islamic legal expert all led to his far-reaching journeys, particularly in Islamic Africa but also Asia as of a young age, bringing about his many encounters with historical figures and events while also granting him access to uninhabited nature, as well as every sort of human settlement, from remote villages to great cities. His will to knowledge—curiosity that leads him to ‘stray afield of himself’ by seeking out the unusual and the unknown—proves to be the key to his travel and his writing. Full article

In this article, I consider the narratives framing Italian-language accounts of ecclesiastical censorship in early modern Italy and its impact on the modern Italian state. I set out Adriano Prosperi, Vittorio Frajese and Gigliola Fragnito’s interpretations of the significance of the Roman Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index. Although each of these historians engaged with the theories of modernity developed by such scholars as Max Weber and Michel Foucault, I argue that their narratives were informed by a desire to explain a different historical problem. Weber and Foucault sought to demonstrate that the achievements of modern society were achieved through the creation of structures of social discipline that impinged upon individual liberty. The historians I consider here addressed a different question. They were seeking to consider whether the suppression of individual liberty enacted by the Catholic Church’s disciplinary structures prevented Italy’s progress to modernity and statehood. These arguments were initially formulated during the mid-to-late nineteenth century by such scholars and politicians as Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco de Sanctis, whose thought had been shaped by exposure to Hegelian historical and philosophical thought. In this paper, I argue that in Italian historical discourse, accounts of the nature and effects of ecclesiastical censorship have been framed by what is, in effect, an inverted Protestant narrative of progress. Full article

According to Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge theory, knowledge is not produced in a vacuum; the construction of any knowledge system implicitly contains power relations. The “knowledge strategies” for Indigenous studies on intercultural communication should evolve and improve in response to shifts in the global power structure. With the development of globalization and the evolution of communication technologies, this study interprets the current global power structure as a “dual structure” in which the international society and the world society coexist and develop together. This structure leads to a complex trend of simultaneous “centralization” and “decentralization”, as well as “homogenization” and “hybridization” in the global cultural order. For scholars from non-Western countries, Indigenous studies on intercultural communication need to interpret the new global power structure, expanding their research perspectives and topics to a global dimension. This approach links Indigenous conceptual resources and methodologies with an open and diverse global cultural order. This study proposes “knowledge strategies” for Indigenous studies on intercultural communication in non-Western countries and introduces a third level of significance for intercultural communication beyond daily interaction and cultural interaction: community building. Regarding the research purpose, this study aims to provide a new perspective for the study of intercultural communication theory, promoting an equal dialogue between Western and non-Western knowledge systems of intercultural communication, and enhancing the inclusiveness and humanistic awareness of this discipline. Full article

The fiction of Hassan Blasim addresses the horrors of contemporary Iraq and centers on the crisis of identity that is part of the immigrant’s experience. Blasim’s protagonists try to forget past traumas related to their homeland by developing new identities ingrained solely in the present. Yet, the past resurfaces in the form of nightmarish dreams, madness, and fractured narratives where fiction and reality intersect and overlap. Inhabiting a constant state of liminality imprints itself on the body and psyche of the border crossers and leads to their physical or mental demise. Drawing on theories of madness, liminality, and narration advanced by Shoshana Felman and Michel Foucault, I analyze Blasim’s two short stories “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” and “Why Don’t You Write a Novel Instead of Talking About All These Characters?” I argue that the imaginative space of literary narration, an in-between, liminal space between reality and fiction, is the space where ethico-political paradoxes and the absurdity of real-life trauma, death, and chaos are transformed into a meaningful literary dialogue that can expand reality and offer new spheres of understanding of the trauma that shapes the lives of Blasim’s characters. Full article

This paper focuses on installation art and its potential to employ and elaborate psychological concepts. As Claire Bishop argues, installation art has a psychologically absorptive character because it activates and immerses the viewing subject. To analyze this immersive experience, she refers to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the premise that subject and object are intertwined and reciprocally interdependent. In this paper I refer to these registers of artistic perception in order to explore the concept of ‘excursive object’, which was introduced by the contemporary artist and theorist Peter Tzanev in a site-specific installation (Credo Bonum Gallery, Sofia, 2018). It refers to both Elizabeth Helsinger’s term ‘excursive sight’ and to Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘discursive object’. Whereas the latter is a discursive textual formation, which consists of apparent internal relations inside a statement, the excursive object of art emerges as a less perceivable configuration of elements. It does not result in a clear perceptual experience and reflects the unstable phenomenological interdependence of subject and object. Thus, Tzanev’s novel excursive objects depart from the usual modes of perception. His concept reveals the viewer’s particular experience of unstable configurations of elements in installation art. Furthermore, it could be explored as a resourceful term to describe perceptive situations in the psychology of contemporary art. Full article

This paper explores the intertwinement of ontology and history that happened after the idealist turn of Kantian transcendentalism, particularly in classic German idealism and later in American pragmatism. The paper focuses on the less remarked-upon consequence of this intertwinement, namely the possibility of a new reading of history based on changes in concepts and habitual mentality. The paper proposes a new take on historiography that vindicates Hegel’s insight but changes his approach to a pragmatist one, more apt to face historical changes in a technical way and less easily twistable into ideological frameworks. The paper argues that the notion of habit, as phenomenologically and semiotically described by Peirce, is the fundamental cellule of the pragmatist take on the entanglement of history and ontology. The paper elaborates on the notion of habit, singling out a special form of it called “gesture” that can be a useful tool for reading the history of the human spirit without incorporating Hegel’s dialectic and Absolute. The paper compares the notion of gesture as it originated in the pragmatist tradition with the parallel use of the term in the early studies of Michel Foucault and argues that the notion of gesture is better equipped to tackle a theoretical reading of history. Full article