Georg Simmel’s work on culture |Urs Fuhrer

The origins of the term “culture” can be traced back to the Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, who claimed in his Tusculum Disputations, 2000 years ago: “Cultura animi philosophia est.”

This formulation makes sense only if “cultura” denotes a process, as it also does in “agri cultura.”

The cultivation of land, plants, and animals was the congenial basis on which Cicero postulated a cultivation of the mind, which we called philosophy.

Cicero’s approach had long receded into the collective memory of the European nations when the Baltic vicar Johann Gottfried Herder took it up 1800 years later in his Ideas towards a Philosophy of History of Mankind, which appeared in 1778.

For Herder, culture also denotes a process, but one which he relates to the central goal of his age, i.e. enlightenment.

Along the Herderian line of reasoning, Hegel came up with his idea of culture as “objective spirit.”

The era of the “cultured individual:” the 1840s to the 1920s

Hegel’s “objective spirit” inspired metaphors for a new orientation towards culture.

The guiding metaphor of the theories of objective spirit, was that culture was the “coagulated spirit” that, through the hermeneutic-understanding view of the subject, becomes re-subjectifiable.

Excerpted from: Cultivating Minds: Identity as Meaning-making Practice, Routledge, 2004.

Know Thyself!

Celebrating “YOU!” | Ideas from Great Minds

The ‘Courage’ to be Yourself!

We, as human beings in general, and as learners in particular, always regard the ‘cultured’ self, which is conditioned by the society in which we live, as the true form of self-identity that establishes our individual worth, truth and merit!

Any personal development, professional growth or career advancement is always seen from this ‘vantage’ point of view, that we fear and dread the very fact to be different!

‘Why did you take to Engineering?’

“My parents forced me into it. So I had no other option.”

‘But why-o-why?’

“That’s the way of the world, they say!”

‘What do you mean by the ‘way of the world’?’

“The way society goes about doing things in general.”

‘What if you don’t go by the ‘normative’ dictates of ‘society’?”

‘I probably would be stereotyped as a ‘cultural misfit’!’

Many of us are, like this pavapetta learner, easily swayed by the ‘dictums of society’ imposed on us, the restrictions and the clutters, the pressures and the pulls, from parents and kith and kin, that inhibit and retard our free selves, the stale, clichéd normatives of society that stifle us from celebrating the true, liberated ‘self’ within us all!

‘Society’ hates it with such fierce hatred, when you try to celebrate your own personal space, by stepping aside and gently moving away from the ‘basic givens!’

‘Society’ looks down upon you with contempt when you attempt at venturing into a field that people would call ‘highly insane’!

‘Society’ would even call you a ‘misfit’ if your thoughts, your ideas, your way of life and your sense of self, are way out of the box!

But you can’t blame society for it!

That’s because, that’s the way society has always been!

At the same time, there have been great thinkers, stalwarts, philosophers and motivational authors down the ages who have always exhorted us hard to celebrate our sense of ‘self’!

To Aristotle, “Knowing oneself is the beginning of true wisdom!”

To Pythagoras, ‘Only if you know yourself, you can then know the universe and God!’

To Jiddu Krishnamurti, ‘To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself’ and so, ‘the more you know yourself, the more clarity there is’!

Similarly, there have also been a host of motivational experts who have exhorted us all to ‘dare to be different’!

From Edward de Bono, who’s given us tips to go out of the box in our thinking,

To Steven Covey who’s given us motivation enough to prioritise the individual ‘character ethic’ over the ‘personality ethic’,

To Daniel Goleman who has prioritized the ‘emotional’ over the ‘Intellectual’,

To Malcolm Gladwell, who’s given us the 80/20 principle, where the 80% of the work are done by the 20 percent of the participants,

To Norman Vincent Peale, who’s waxed eloquent on the power that comes along with positive thinking, to help people suffering from huge inferiority complexes and those having lost faith in themselves to come out of these quagmire stuff, and regain self-esteem and faith.

To Luminita D. Saviuc, author of the inspirational book titled, 15 Things You Should Give Up to be Happy, she quotes a very interesting study done by Professors at Harvard University who found out that,

‘All children are born geniuses; 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently degeniusized by grown-ups’.

This study proves a very interesting and inspiring thought, she says!

That -  

Intelligence is not an inherited trait, nor is it something that only special people possess, but rather there is genius in each and every one of us.

This is something you should never doubt. Something you should never forget. And even though at times your mind will try to convince you that there’s nothing unique and special about you, you should never doubt that there truly is.

You should never doubt that there is something in you that is unique, powerful and of great value, that there is a beautiful reason for your existence and a great purpose for your life, because there is.

We are all born gifted; we are all born geniuses.

There is something unique, valuable and very precious in each and every one of us.

We all possess unique gifts and talents that are meant to be our gifts to the world.

And in time we will be able to realize that who we are matters, and that the work we hold in our hearts is of great value and of great importance.

There’s no such thing as intelligent and less intelligent people.

There’s no such thing as worthy and unworthy people.

There’s no such thing as valuable and less valuable people.

There’s no such thing as people who can make the impossible possible and people who can’t.

There’s no such thing as special and less special people.

These are nothing but mind-created barriers and limitations - limitations that are meant to keep us stuck in a very dark, lonely and unhappy place.

There’s something unique and precious about each and every one of us.

We are all valuable human beings; we are all intelligent and capable of achieving many beautiful and wonderful things.

We each have a very important role to play in this world, and who we are matters.

Who you are matters.

What you know matters.

Your unique gifts and talents matter.

Your presence and your work matter, and whether you believe it or not, the world needs you.

The world needs you to be you, to do your part and to play your role as beautifully as possible.

That’s the challenge!

And that’s the first step, the baby step, towards living an authentic life!

Yes! An authentic life!

There are quite a few possible ways to celebrate your sense of self-worth!

I would like to enumerate just two for the moment, down below –

First and foremost,

Cultivate your Personal (Sacred) Space!

Yes! It IS a sacred space!

Every individual who wishes to have a high sense of self-esteem must needs do this in their life for sure!

People who tend to follow the crowd, the passive majority, are always known for their fickle-mindedness! (Julius Caesar, Shakespeare)! They ain’t gonna have a sense of self-esteem anytime, anywhere!

But people with a good sense of self-esteem will always cherish their personal space!

A Personal space, is one’s cherished sacred space, where there ain’t gonna be any intruders of any sort!

Celebrate this personal space, - a minimum of say, one hour a day, or two hours a day, every day of the week, every week of the month, and every month of the year, until you gently exit this dwelling!

So what exactly do I do with this thingy called a ‘personal space’, you may ask?

Well, you can literally do anything.

Simply put, be yourself. Indulge yourself in whatever you like doing the most! In your own treasured private space!

A Space where you are not gonna have any dictates from anyone!

The mantra to celebrating your personal space is this:

Dare to come out of anything that clutters your life.

Rightaway!

Anything that exercises an uninterrupted power over your little lovely life, cut it off rightaway!

Don’t be a slave to anyone! To anything! You weren’t born to be a slave to anyone, anything, and anywhere!

Secondly,

Discuss Ideas, NOT people!

As the good old adage goes, “Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas.”

Well, there’s more to this quote than meets the eye!

SMALL MINDS DISCUSS PEOPLE!

So how do we identify a “small mind”? Quite simple!

A “Small mind” is a person, who, when he/she gets to know something about someone else that no one else knows, they get such great inspiration and a huge boost to their lowly, lackluster, wayward lives!

And when they share it with another person, they experience such a great sense of satisfaction, or a sense of accomplishment, and this alone forms the basis for establishing a shared intimate connection with the other person!

And the obnoxious cycle just goes on and on amongst these small, petty minds!

Their very existence on this planet hinges on these little gossips that rule their lives with an iron hand, all through their small, petty lives!

In fact, discussing people is never a bad proposition after all!

But we should ask ourselves the reason for going ahead and sharing the information about another person!

Is it for slander, for gossip, for maligning their character, or for telling/celebrating the little good things that we have observed in that person?

Yes! it’s the intention that matters!

AVERAGE MINDS DISCUSS EVENTS!

This is not the Derridean ‘event’, but it could be any ordinary event like your friend’s wedding, betrothal, or birthday!

Average minds excel in discussing the little uneventful things that happened in these ‘auspicious’ occasions, and revel with happiness in highlighting the negatives and the weaknesses that happened at the event/s.

When this event is shared or discussed with their ‘friend’, opinions are given, criticisms are made and judgments are pronounced, and even verdicts are passed with such intense joy and mirth!

GREAT MINDS DISCUSS IDEAS!

Great minds always take delight in indulging themselves with meaningful conversations, intellectual chatter, ideas that question the status quo, that critique the present by presenting alternative ‘what if’s, and create pathways or policies that can chart a delightful future ahead, for others to follow!

Great minds are ennobling minds, who ‘apply thought’ to whatever they do, are so intellectually mature, that they do not have the time to talk about gossips, about people, about events etc.

They think it below their dignity to stoop to the levels of gossiping, or wasting their precious time talking stuff about people or events!

That’s because their thoughts are always focused on the betterment of themselves and the society at large!

Thirdly,

Avoid Negative People!

It’s an innate quality within us all to strive to be happy and to make others happy, and thereby attain happiness, peace and joy in our little, beautiful lives on this planet!

However, there are people who are an embodiment of negativity, who are always lurking behind us, trying to kill the chirpy, happy spirit within us!

They can never ever produce any positive vibes or happiness around them, and they will take away all your precious attention, all your valuable time, and all your vibrant energy, even as they pull you deeper and deeper into their bottomless pit of negativity!

And yesss!

Always surround yourself with people who inspire you, encourage you and help you realize your value and your potential.

Oprah Winfrey vouches to the success of this great method! She says,

“Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.”

And, as the saying goes – “Life is simply too short to be friends with negative people! -  and added,  there are a lot of great people out there”!

Most importantly, ‘It’s time for you to be saying ‘Yes’, only when you feel it in your heart that you should be saying, ‘yes!’ and ‘No’ when ‘no’ is needed. It is time for you to Love, Honour and Respect Yourself once more!’

‘Always remember that life is too short to live a life that is not yours to live. So yes! Let go of your fears, and Be Yourself fully!’

Because, that’s the apt definition of the word ‘Courage’ for you!

The Courage to be Yourself!

I chanced upon a lovely read, titled, The Courage to Be Yourself, edited by Al Desetta, a book that celebrates true stories from 26 young minds, teens to be specific, on how they all faced peer pressure, teasing, bullying, exclusion, or just feeling “different” from everyone else.

Giving a peek from the delightful Introduction to the book, for y’all, and then, me thought of suggesting a story for you to read, by Dwan Carter, which was such a huge inspiration to me, and a must-read for us all!

Just excerpts from the Introduction –

Nadishia gets harassed because she doesn’t wear the latest designer clothes. Rana, who is Arab American, becomes the target of hate after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Cassandra’s friends make fun of her for sitting with kids from other races in the school cafeteria. Yen gets teased for being Chinese, Jeremiah for being gay, and Jamel for not wanting to smoke marijuana. One anonymous teen is so afraid of being ridiculed for liking musicals that he keeps his tastes a secret. All these writers ask themselves tough questions: Why does everyone have such a problem with me? How come people can’t accept me for who I am? Is it okay to be different? Should I change myself to fit in?

This book, The Courage to Be Yourself is about the conflicts that teens go through when they get labeled and judged because they seem different. Differences can be threatening. Most people trust what they’re familiar with and fear the unfamiliar.

Labels are hard to avoid. You make statements by the friends you choose, where you sit at lunch, where you hang out, the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, the way you talk, and even the way you walk. At the same time, people make assumptions about you because of things you don’t choose or have control over, such as your race, physical appearance, where you live, or your sexual orientation. People are quick to judge by using labels because, in a sense, what else do they have to go by? We’re all limited by our own points of view and the groups we belong to—our families, neighborhoods, schools, and cultural backgrounds.

It’s okay, and even important, to belong to a group, because groups help people feel secure. But it’s important not to let groups define individuals. When race or dress or sexual orientation—or another label—is all you know about an individual, that individual becomes less of a person. And that can lead to conflict.

The underlying message is that, one way teens can solve conflicts with each other is by understanding and respecting the differences among themselves. And part of that process involves understanding and respecting yourself.

The teens in this book have used conflict to become stronger, better people, and you can too.

The choices and changes they made weren’t easy—their stories don’t always end happily, with all difficulties solved. Some writers lose friends who mean a lot to them, others continue to be teased and harassed, and many continue to struggle with difficult emotions.

As Jonathan Lear says, "To be human is necessarily to be a vulnerable risk-taker; to be a courageous human is to be good at it. That is, a courageous person has the psychological resources to face the risks with dignity and to make good judgments in the light of them." (Radical Hope, 123). 

How trueeey! 

But that is exactly also the value of The Courage to Be Yourself.

LitFest'18 @ MGR University! Revised Dates - 3, 4, 5 October

Teacher's Day Musings from Literature!

At the dawn of yet another delightful Teachers’ Day that acknowledges and celebrates the power and the charm of the teacher, their esteem and their value, and how they shape and mould and impact and influence their students for eternity, here’s a small gleaning from some of literature’s most endearing teachers, both in writers and in their writings.

I believe these personal literary gleanings, would sure motivate all of us to becoming better teachers in the delightful and noble service of dispelling the ‘darkness of ignorance’ from the students entrusted in our noblest care, towards making them better human beings and better citizens of this great nation.

Here’s wishing y’all a Happy teachers’ day and happy inspirational reading too!

Here goes -

1. Teacher Recommends his prodigious Student Achebe!

In 1957, Achebe went to London to attend the British Broadcasting Corporation Staff School. One of his teachers there was the British novelist and literary critic Gilbert Phelps, who recommended Things Fall Apart for publication.

2. To Amis, School life was more rewarding than even family life

To Kingsley Amis, thanks to his teachers, his School was more rewarding than family life. Amis attended Norbury College, where at the age of eleven he had his first story, ‘‘The Sacred Rhino of Uganda,’’ published in the school magazine.

Amis writes enthusiastically about his years at this excellent day school, recalling the broad range of social strata from which its students were drawn and its humane spirit of tolerance: ‘‘I have never in my life known a community where factions of any kind were less in evidence, where differences of class, upbringing, income group and religion counted for so little.’’ Academic standards were high, and Amis, specializing first in classics and then in English, maintained a level that earned him a scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford.

3. Aristotle, the “most brilliant student” of his master Plato!

Teacher nicknames student as ‘the reader’!

At age seventeen, Aristotle was sent to Athens to attend the most famous school in Greece, the Academy of the great philosopher Plato. At the time, Athens was the intellectual center of the world, and Plato’s Academy was the center of Athens.

Aristotle won recognition as the master’s most brilliant student, and his energetic gathering of research and general love of books led Plato to nickname him ‘‘the reader.’’ During his time at the Academy, Aristotle studied mathematics and dialectic, a form of argumentative reasoning. Aristotle spent twenty years at the Academy, until Plato’s death in 347 B.C.

4. Camus inspired to read widely by his teacher

Albert Camus was greatly inspired to read widely and deeply by his high school teacher, philosopher Jean Grenier, Camus was well versed in the classics of Western philosophy, including the works of Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche—all of whom influenced his work.

5. Chesterton says, ‘I prefer to change society through my teaching’

As a literary journalist, Chesterton was very much in the tradition of the Victorian sage. He was at once a teacher and a literary artist. He sought to change society through his teaching, using symbol, parable, and religious allegory as the most effective way of doing so. Like his close friends George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, he preferred the role of teacher and prophet to that of literary man.

6. Plato’s Treatise in honour of his Teacher

The Republic is a philosophical treatise by Plato. In this text, Plato outlines much of the political theory of his teacher, Socrates.

7. For Dahl, it will be harsh memories of school days!

Roald Dahl recalled in his short autobiographical story ‘‘Lucky Break’’ that the ‘‘beatings at Repton were more fierce and more frequent than anything I had yet experienced.’’ Standing six feet, six inches tall, Dahl played soccer and served as the captain of the squash and handball teams but did not excel in academics. One teacher commented on the fourteen-year-old boy’s English composition work: ‘‘I have never met a boy who so persistently writes the exact opposite of what he means. He seems incapable of marshaling his thoughts on paper.’’

INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR | S B COLLEGE

Post-Graduate and Research Department of English

“Marx Today”

Call for Papers

The Post-Graduate and Research Department of English, S B College, Changanacherry, Kerala, is organizing a two-day International Seminar on 3rd and 4^th of September 2018 on the Topic: “Marx Today”.

The conference on Marx is organised around the life and works of Karl Marx in the context of the two hundredth year of his birth and the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Das Kapital.

Political thought and philosophy are incomplete without a Marxian dimension. Marx’s 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy posits a notion of politics that sets subjective agency in relation to its objective determinants. Marx here contends that human society “inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.” The problem of politics, in other words, is how to correlate specific sites of struggle to the deeper structures that condition them.

However, the enduring relevance of Marxist intellectual thought remains a point of spirited debate in the ideological history of the late twentieth century. With the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union, the emergent currency of postmodern concepts, and the rise of new social protest movements in the spheres of race, gender, and sexual orientation, Marxism came to appear the ‘signifier par excellence of theoretical hubris, redundancy and

error’ (Pendakis and Szeman 2014).

In the twenty-first century however, propelled by the succession of economic and ecological crisis scenarios, Marxist criticism has experienced a critical resurgence. Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and Alex Callinicos have provided new formal readings of Marx’s seemingly ‘inexhaustible’ text (Jameson 2011). 

Accompanying the apparent epistemological exhaustion of post-structuralist approaches, what palpably remains are the visible signs of an underlying crisis – secular stagnation, intensification of racism, sexism and xenophobia, militarised state repression, ecological collapse, deepening inequality and general human suffering for vast segments of the population.

In the face of what some have argued is capital’s terminal crisis, our political world seems singularly unable to tackle the problems it has created and desperately needs to solve.

But times of crisis are also times of possibility and the conference seeks to posit both questions and answers that address the matter of “The relevance of Marxism Today”.

Proposals on all topics of relevance to Marxist theory and practice are welcome, including but not limited to:

Subalterninty

Postcoloniality

Economic Thought

Cultural studies

Marxian Literary Criticism

Political Thought

Marxism and aesthetics

Protests, Political Movements, Manifestos

Literature as praxis and theory

Marxism, ecology, and the Anthropocene

Papers from teachers, research scholars and students of Universities and Colleges in India are invited.

Dates to Remember

Confy @ BITS, Goa

Region/Nation/Trans-Nation: 

Literature-Cinema Interface

January 31-Feb 2, 2019

 BITS Pilani, Goa

Call for Papers 

This conference traces the various modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, without limiting itself to the age-old domain of adaptation. It tries to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-nation. These three locations work as contact zones where the literature-cinema interface manifests in various forms. With the emergence of transnationalism and comparative film studies as methods in cinema studies, multiple modes of literature-cinema negotiation are becoming increasingly evident with cinema studies borrowing concepts such as ‘world literature’ and ‘comparative morphology’. In the Indian/South Asian context, these locations are entangled with issues such as the language question, regional nationalisms, the crumbling idea of a federal republic with an increasingly stronger unitary governance, linguistic identity politics as manifested in popular cinemas and literatures, translational politics and the formation/development of certain national centres for the production of various modes of translation, India’s cultural/literary/cinematic negotiations with the trans-nation before and after globalization/economic liberalization etc. 

With contemporary India as its primary site of inquiry, the conference moves towards inter-continental geopolitical engagements without considering Indian regional/national and literary/cinematic questions in isolation. Apart from thematic and ideological associations with the trans-nation, it involves participants beyond the borders of the Indian nation (from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh), transforming itself into a discursive space where the conceptual apparatus meets with the narratives that inform and shape the former. Narratives from the margins will also significantly feature in the conference, with panels and plenaries on and from the Indian North-East. Moreover, a panel and a plenary will be devoted to Goa and its distinctive history of colonial and postcolonial politico-cultural engagements as manifested in indigenous literature and art.

Possible topics for presentation might be, but are not limited to, the following:

Transnationalism as Method

Comparative Cinema Studies and the transnational question

South Asia’s Cultural Engagement with the ‘West’

Cultural/Literary/Cinematic Migration within South Asia 

Environmental Humanities: Theory and Praxis in Australia and India

Seventh International Conference

          

Organized by

Indian Association for the Study of Australia, Eastern Region

12-13 January, 2019

Astor Hotel, Kolkata

Concept Note

With the publication of Lawrence Buell’s Environmental Imagination in the late 1990s and consequent debates on the relevance of Environment to humanities disciplines, there emerged a growing consciousness of linkages between humanities and environment. In other words, this critical mode of studying literary/political/historical texts in terms of environmental activism opened up a whole range of interdisciplinary studies. Gradually, Environmental Studies came to open up a new interdisciplinary space which could inflect on environmental issues in terms of history, political science, literature, law, philosophy and so on.

But what led to the development of Environmental Humanities as against Environmental Studies?  Ursula K Heise  posits a distinctive argument: “…quite a few environmentally oriented humanists and social scientists have felt disgruntled with environmental studies programmes that, for all their pathbreaking interdisciplinary work, have often limited their reach to the natural sciences, civil engineering and a few experts on law and policy”( Introduction: The Routledge Companion to Environmental Humanities, 2017)

Under the general rubric of Environmental Studies, a new intersection of critical orientation began to develop. Critics began to distinguish between “nature writing” and “ecopoetics”. “Nature writing” seemed to be looked upon as a genre articulating just an imaginative perception of nature as it is. But “ecopoetics” began to question the ways how nature has been ravaged and destroyed by mankind. This even gave rise to another sub-genre “ecofeminism” which created a binary between “man” and “nature” (envisaged as woman). In this way, it called for a gendered perception of nature.

It is possible to locate three distinctive phases of the study of environment: Environmental philosophy in 1970s, environmental history in 1980s, ecocriticism as well as ecofeminism in 1990s, thereby negotiating multiple forms of interdisciplinary domains in the context of the study of environment. Such collaborative paradigms gradually led to the development of Environmental Humanism as an interdisciplinary genre.  

Ideological State Apparatus | Peter Brooker

A description introduced by the French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser in an important essay in his Lenin and Philosophy.

The concept develops Antonio Gramsci's emphasis on the operation of ideology in civil society, and has been extremely influential on a range of work within Literary, Film and Cultural Studies.

Althusser distinguishes between two kinds of state apparatus: repressive state apparatuses (or RSAs - for example, the penal system, police and army) and ideological state apparatuses (ISAs - including religion, the legal system, education, the family, culture and communication).

The first are coercive in their operation, while the second function to unify society through ideology and reproduce a regime through consent.

The latter are relatively independent of the state, though they serve to ratify and legitimize it, and to function, says Althusser, 'beneath the ruling ideology which is the ideology of "the ruling class".

Althusser's concept is an important aspect of his critique of traditional Marxism and his re-reading of Marx.

Deterritorialization | Peter Brooker

A key concept in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guatarri, and especially elaborated in their Anti-Oedipus (1984) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987).

Their philosophy depends on a particular lexicon, including, in addition to the current term, rhizome, flows, nomadism, strata and assemblages.

The concluding section of A Thousand Plateaus comprises a brief summation of some of these terms. Here 'assemblages' are described as always 'basically territorial' composed of different contrary aspects:

In the first instance they are both non-discursive bodies and discursive utterances ('content and expression'); in the second, they are defined by their constitution as 'territories' and by a counter 'deterritorializing' interior movement that agitates for change.

Animal, social and political assemblages are therefore seen as dynamic combinations of reterritorializing forces that seek stability and the 'lines of flight', creative energy or DESIRE, that 'cut across' or deterritorialize a given assemblage and 'carry it away'.

The 'Conclusion' of A Thousand Plateaus further distinguishes in abstract fashion between 'relative' and 'absolute' types of deterritorialization.

The first takes place in the actual world and can take a 'negative' form when the lines of flight are blocked, or 'positive' when the lines of flight escape the forces of repressive reterritorialization.

'Absolute' deterritorialization refers to a deeper movement in the 'virtual' order of things, acting on the 'molecular' rather than 'molar' plane of existence.

'Deterritorialisation is absolute,' write Deleuze and Guattari, 'when... it brings about the creation of a new earth'.

Essentialism | Peter Brooker

A term describing the assumption that human beings, objects or texts possess underlying essences that define their 'true nature'.

This illustration from Amy Hayes Stellhorn and her team, i guess, sums it up quite elegantly!

An 'essence' is fixed and unchanging, but has a double existence: as both the inherent or innate property of an individual object or being, and the abstract, external essence governing the type to which all examples conform.

From Aristotle onwards there has been a long debate in European philosophy on the very existence of essences, their relation to appearances or natural forms, and the accessibility of this essence to human knowledge or perception. A common recourse - to a secular age, a last resort - has been the idea of the creator in whom the essence and knowledge of all things are seen to reside.

The most thorough-going critique of this tradition has been made by Jacques Derrida who argues that western philosophy as a whole is founded on a 'metaphysics of presence' - that is to say, upon a belief in a transcendent first cause or point of pure origin. All such thought, he argues, is 'centred' upon 'an invariable presence ... (essence, existence, substance, subject)... transcendentality, consciousness, God, man and so forth'.

Derrida's method of Deconstruction has inspired a wide critique of the binary oppositions that invest a first term in a series - such as speech/writing, nature/culture, man/woman, God/human, the real/representation – with the authority of a governing fixed point.