Latest news with #Foucault
The Hindu
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
Necropolitics: who is allowed to live and who may die
Have you ever noticed how an airstrike in Mumbai triggers national outrage, but a similar attack in Kashmir rarely breaks through the noise? We're so accustomed to hearing about violence there that it barely feels like news. It's as if deaths in these regions are already anticipated and normalised. These aren't just accidents of geography. They are symptoms of a deeper system, a politics that decides whose lives are worth grieving and whose deaths are simply part of the landscape. Necropolitics is the use of political power to determine who is allowed to live and who can be made to die. It describes how states and institutions manage death by exposing certain populations, such as refugees, the poor, or racialised communities, to violence, abandonment, or structural neglect. Coined by Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe in a 2003 essay and later expanded in his book Necropolitics (2019), the concept builds on Michel Foucault's notion of biopolitics but shifts the focus. While biopolitics is concerned with managing life and populations, necropolitics interrogates the power to let people die, deciding who is disposable, who may be sacrificed, and whose suffering is structurally ignored. Biopolitics versus necropolitics Foucault traces how the organisation of power changed over time: from sovereign power, where rulers exercised authority through public spectacles of death, to disciplinary power, which works through institutions like schools and prisons to train individuals using surveillance and routine. This evolved into biopower — the control of entire populations through the optimisation of life via vaccination, sanitation, census-taking, and reproductive governance. Biopower appears progressive, but as Foucault warned, it carries within it the power to 'make live and let die.' Mbembe takes this further. He asks: if biopolitics is truly about preserving life, why are so many still dying? Why are certain lives treated as expendable? Biopolitics tells only half the story. The other half is necropolitics, the deliberate exposure of certain populations to death, not by accident but by design. While biopolitics governs life, necropolitics governs death. It does not merely ignore suffering; it produces it with calculated precision. Necropolitics is not about letting people die, but about making them die. Unlike sovereign power, necropolitics does not rely on the will of a single ruler. It operates through policies, institutions, and global indifference that erases the value of some lives. These lives are stripped of dignity, reduced to statistics, and rendered disposable. This logic, Mbembe argues, has deep colonial roots. Consider the Bengal famine of 1943. Millions died not due to a lack of food, but because British colonial policies prioritised imperial interests over Indian lives. Death was systemic, not accidental. People were treated as tools for the empire, valued only in relation to others' survival. In necropolitical systems, people are not killed through spectacle but through slow, structural abandonment. Death is normalised and bodies become data. The people, whether in borders, refugee camps, or detention centres, are managed, contained, and forgotten. For instance, during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and '90s, queer people, especially Black, brown, trans, and working-class individuals, were abandoned by healthcare systems and denied dignity. As scholars like Judith Butler and Jasbir Puar note, only queer lives made respectable through whiteness or middle-class identity were grieved. Puar calls this queer necropolitics, where some queer lives are protected while others are left to die. Characteristics of necropolitics Necropolitics operates through several defining features that together create a system where certain lives are systematically devalued. First, state terror suppresses dissent through surveillance, violence, imprisonment, or elimination, even within democracies. Second, states collaborate with private militias or criminal groups, blurring the line between state and non-state violence. Third, enmity becomes a governing principle, making the right to kill a measure of authority. Fourth, war and terror become self-sustaining economies, fuelling global surveillance and arms markets. Fifth, active predation of certain social groups displaces entire communities, as seen in resource extraction projects. Sixth, death is administered in varied forms like torture, drone strikes, starvation, and disappearance. Finally, these acts are morally justified through ideologies like nationalism, religion, or utilitarianism. Creating a state of exception Necropolitics is sustained not only through violence but through the systematic invention of enemies. Modern states are driven by the desire for an enemy onto whom fear and blame can be projected. This enemy need not be real — the fantasy alone justifies surveillance, exclusion, and elimination. In neoliberal regimes, the threat turns inward, prompting expanded policing and emergency laws that target not just the accused but also those who resemble them. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this condition the state of exception, when the law suspends itself in the name of preserving itself. Mbembe expands this to show how, for many populations, the exception is not temporary but permanent. In such spaces, legality becomes hollow and rights are applied selectively. What governs is not justice but logistics, such as who gets care, who receives compensation, who can cross a border, and who is punished for trying. These decisions may seem administrative, but they are deeply necropolitical, revealing how life and death are unequally distributed. The living dead Mbembe also introduces a haunting concept within necropolitical thought — the living dead: people who are not killed outright but are forced to live in conditions so degraded, unstable, and violent that life becomes a slow, continuous dying. These are individuals and communities who may remain biologically alive but are stripped of political, social, and moral recognition. We saw this during India's COVID-19 lockdown, when migrant workers were left to walk for days without food, shelter, or transport. Many collapsed and died on highways or railway tracks, not from the virus, but from state neglect. Their deaths were quietly processed and bureaucratically explained and largely unmourned. Mbembe calls these zones death worlds — spaces where populations are exposed to abandonment or sudden violence. Drawing from Agamben's 'state of exception,' Mbembe shows how these spaces operate outside the usual rule of law. Here, death is not a breakdown of governance but its very method. Gaza is one of the starkest examples. After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, Israeli strikes flattened hospitals, aid centres, and homes. Even the deaths of children were dismissed as collateral damage. The silence that followed reveals necropolitics at its clearest: some deaths are not just permitted but framed as necessary for political strategy and national security. In everyday life Necropolitics does not always come with bombs or guns. More often, it takes the form of law, policy, and bureaucracy — sterilisation drives targeting Dalit and Adivasi women, police databases that profile Muslim names or Black people, drone strikes that label civilians as 'targets,' or detention centres where children sleep on cold floors. These are not failures of a protective system, but features of one designed to discard. It also exists in silence — in the world, including states and global institutions — looking away as thousands of civilians, including women and children, are killed in places like Gaza, while the rest of us carry on with our daily lives. Necropolitics is not confined to war zones. It thrives in the slow violence of poverty, caste, racism, and displacement. So, if power today functions through abandonment and death, what does resistance look like? The goal must not simply be to survive, but to live lives that are recognised, valued, and grieved. Rebecca Rose Varghese is a freelance journalist.
The Hindu
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
The technocratic calculus of India's welfare state
With a billion Aadhaar enrollments, 1,206 schemes integrated into the Direct Benefit Transfer system, and 36 grievance portals across States/Union Territories, India's welfare orientation is transitioning into a technocratic calculus. The promise to deliver social welfare at scale, bypassing leaky pipelines and eliminating ghost beneficiaries, might have led to a 're-casting' that delivers 'efficiency' and 'coverage' at the cost of 'democratic norms' and 'political accountability'. An offloading Are we witnessing the emergence of a post-rights based welfare regime? Is the Indian digital welfare state headed towards a systemic impasse? What is the technocratic calculus behind all this? Recent game-theoretic work shows that technocratic rule thrives where parties are polarised. Evidently, our questions have changed. We have shifted from 'who deserves support and why?' to 'how do we minimise leakage and maximise coverage?' Our politicians across party lines have rationally offloaded hard-choices onto data-driven algorithms without questioning the complexities of constitutional values. Contextualising Habermas's 'technocratic consciousness' and Foucault's 'governmentality', India's welfare architecture is increasingly shaped by measurable, auditable, and depoliticised rationality. Schemes such as E-SHRAM and PM KISAN embody a uni-directional, innovation-led logic that is streamlined, measurable, and intolerant of ambiguity or error. Conversely, we have deliberative calls for participatory planning and local feedback embodying the long forgotten core of democratic thinking resonating Giorgio Agamben's notion of homo sacer — a life stripped of political agency. Seemingly, welfare, in the contemporary context, has ceased to exist as a site of democratic deliberations. On a microscopic level, a rights-bearing citizen has been replaced by the auditable beneficiary. Thus, it calls for an urgent need for the state to revisit (in a Rancierean sense) whether it is curating who is visible, who can complain, and whose suffering is computable. Despite claims of a 'socialistic state', we observe a decade-low decline in India's social sector spending that has dwindled to 17% in 2024-25 from the 2014-24 average of 21%. Further, there are some interesting observations beyond plain statistics. Key social sector schemes have borne the brunt of such decline where minorities, labour, employment, nutrition and social security welfare saw a significant decline from 11% (in the pre-COVID-19 phase) to 3% (in post-COVID-19 phase). Parallely, social commentators often comment the Right to Information (RTI) regime to be in 'existential crisis' and further uncovering the cloak on RTI exposes a critical issue within the institution of dysfunctional information commissions. As of June 30, 2024, the number of pending cases crossed the four lakh tally across 29 Information Commission's (ICs), and eight CIC posts were vacant (annual report of CIC, 2023-24). The Indian welfare regime must recover its capacity for reflexivity and situated knowledge, elements that are very peculiar to gram sabhas and frontline bureaucratic discretions. To draw Rancière's critique on democracy, we highlight one major impending concern, that 'democracy depends on whose suffering is rendered visible and contestable, not merely computable'. This concern is further highlighted in Justice D.Y Chandrachud's Aadhaar dissent (2018), that warned precisely against such decontextualisation of identity which served as a caution against reducing citizens to disembedded, machinic data who are devoid of care, context, or even constitutional assurance in some cases. Another instance of algorithmic insulation Another worrisome trend is the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System's flattening of the federal hierarchies into ticket-tracking systems. Although it is a novel initiative resolving tickets and routing complaints across state agencies, empirical data show that lakhs of grievances were disposed of between 2022-24. But on a closer examination it might just be centralising the visibility but not the responsibility — a form of algorithmic insulation that renders political accountability increasingly elusive. These observations are not to dismiss the value of such initiatives. Rather, they invite a deeper conversation on how welfare governance can evolve for a more resilient and responsive state. The government should now think along the lines of 'democratic antifragility' so that our systems built on perfect data and flawless infrastructure do not fail catastrophically under stress (consider Taleb's 'hyper-integrated systems'). We need to empower States to design context-sensitive regimes where federalism and welfare push for pluralism as a feature. Institutionalising community-driven impact audits (as reiterated by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty), by looping in the Rashtriya Gram Swaraj Abhiyan and Gram Panchayat Development Plans should be the core target. All States must be made capable to build platform cooperatives where self-help groups act as intermediaries; functionally, lessons can be learnt from Kerala's Kudumbashree. Civil society must be incentivised to invest in grass-roots political education and legal aid clinics in order to strengthen the community accountability mechanisms. Lastly, it is time we strengthen and codify our offline fall-back mechanisms, human feedback safeguards, and statutory bias audits by embedding the 'right to explanation and appeal' — as proposed by the UN Human Rights for digital governance systems. Focus on the citizen We, as citizens of India, must realise that a welfare state stripped of democratic deliberations is a machine that works efficiently for everyone except those it is meant to help. For a Viksit Bharat we will have to reorient digitisation with democratic and anti-fragile principles so that citizens become partners in governance, and not mere entries in a ledger. Anmol Rattan Singh is the Co-founder of the PANJ Foundation, a Punjab-based policy research think tank. Agastya Shukla is a Programme Associate at the PANJ Foundation, a Punjab-based policy research think tank
Medscape
13-06-2025
- Health
- Medscape
France's Prisons Are Overcrowded — With Psychiatric Patients
Eric Kania, MD Eric Kania, MD, who has been a psychiatrist at Baumettes Prison in Marseille, France, for 25 years, has witnessed an increasing proportion of inmates being treated for psychiatric disorders. In an interview with Medscape's French edition, he explains how care teams are organizing treatment in often overcrowded prisons and describes the special monitoring implemented for inmates at highest risk for suicide. How did you become a prison physician? I studied medicine in Marseille and specialized in psychiatry. During my residency, I completed a 6-month internship at Baumettes Prison, which greatly interested me. After completing my thesis and working in hospitals, I returned to the prison because I wanted to continue this work. I now work half-time at Baumettes and half-time in private practice. Why this attraction to prison work? Prison is a place that requires dedication. It sits at the confluence of multiple issues: social, sociologic, medical, and judicial. I'm particularly interested in the criminal responsibility of offenders with psychiatric disorders. Like many of my colleagues, I've read the work of Michel Foucault — particularly his 1975 book Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) — which helped shape my thinking around justice, mental illness, and social structures. These reflections played a significant role in my decision to work in the prison system. How are psychiatric services organized at Baumettes? We are a team of seven psychiatrists — some of us, like myself, working part-time. We collaborate with a nursing team of eight for level 1 psychiatric care, and a second team handles level 2 care. Baumettes is a very old facility, originally opened in 1930, and it has housed a regional medico-psychological service since 1980. Today, we provide psychiatric care for more than 1000 inmates. The renovated section of Baumettes, which opened in 2017, was designed to accommodate 580 men and 200 women. However, overcrowding became an issue almost immediately. Although the cells were intended for single occupancy, additional fold-out beds had to be added owing to limited space. The older part of the facility previously held up to 2000 inmates in a space built for 1300. Currently, two detention buildings are in use, and three more are under construction, expected to open within 1-2 years. In the long term, the total capacity at Baumettes will once again double. Although we hope this will help relieve overcrowding, experience has shown that any new space tends to fill up very quickly. What are the main psychiatric disorders among inmates? There is an overrepresentation of psychiatric disorders in prisons. Epidemiologic studies show five to eight times more severe psychiatric disorders (bipolar disorder or schizophrenia) among inmates than in the general population. We also manage more common pathologies, such as depression and anxiety. Sometimes, people with no prior psychiatric history develop anxiety reactions owing to the prison environment. Do you have enough resources to care for everyone? Resource availability is a complex issue. It's reasonable to assume that there aren't enough mental health professionals working in prisons. This shortage was one of the reasons behind the creation of specially adapted hospital units, located within public health facilities, to provide care for incarcerated individuals. These units represented real progress, but they also had an unintended consequence: The more mental health staff we place in prisons, the more it appears that mental illness is prevalent in these settings. Is this a reality? The reality is that society, the justice system, and law enforcement are now more likely to send individuals with mental illness to prison, partly because they know that mental health professionals are available there to manage them. I've been practicing in prison since 2000. In the past, it was rare to see a person with schizophrenia incarcerated after committing an offense during an escape from a psychiatric hospital. Today, that scenario has become unfortunately common. Psychiatric patients are being sent to prison because understaffed hospitals are increasingly unwilling, or unable, to take them back. Should we conclude that France's psychiatric crisis is increasing the prison population? Penrose's law, named after an English psychiatrist, suggests that in several countries, reductions in psychiatric hospital beds have been associated with increases in the prison population. In France, the decrease in psychiatric inpatient capacity has coincided with a rise in both overall incarceration rates and the number of inmates with psychiatric disorders. Although correlation does not imply causation, the pattern is worth considering. Of course, other factors may also contribute to the growing number of individuals with mental illness in prison. What are those factors? Many believe that the 1994 reform of the French Penal Code, which introduced the concept of partial criminal responsibility, contributed to an increase in the number of mentally ill individuals in prison. Previously, under the 1810 Penal Code, a person deemed to be in a state of insanity was exempt from criminal responsibility and was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. The 1994 reform amended this principle, specifying that individuals whose judgment is impaired, but not completely abolished, by mental illness can still be held criminally liable. This change led to convictions that might not have occurred under the previous legal framework. Sociologist Caroline Protais has shown that the number of rulings of criminal irresponsibility has decreased since the reform. Another policy that has significantly contributed to the increase in mentally ill inmates is comparution immédiate (immediate appearance), a legal procedure introduced in 1983 and strengthened in the mid-2000s under then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. This fast-track process has been a major driver of prison overcrowding, particularly among individuals with serious psychiatric disorders that often go unrecognized at the time of sentencing. By the time their condition is identified in prison, the sentence has already been handed down, making transfer to a psychiatric facility no longer possible. How are inmates cared for? Can a patient request to see you? Are there mandatory check-ups? Every inmate undergoes a medical consultation upon arrival, typically with a general practitioner. If needed — whether due to existing psychiatric care or observed concerns — they are referred the same day for a psychiatric evaluation. If we identify signs of 'carceral shock' (a psychological reaction to incarceration) during this initial assessment, we schedule follow-up and initiate appropriate care. Additionally, if an inmate requests to see a psychiatrist or psychologist at any point during their incarceration, or if someone in their environment alerts us to an urgent situation, we make arrangements to see the patient promptly. What are your main concerns? Are inmates treated differently than other patients? The context for providing care in prison is very specific, and we have to account for that. Inmates often reach out to us because the prison environment intensifies their psychological distress. At times, we need to coordinate with the prison administration to adjust detention conditions, even though that falls outside our formal responsibilities. If an inmate expresses suicidal thoughts, we inform the administration so that special monitoring can be implemented. At night, correctional officers check through the cell's observation window to ensure the inmate is safe. Every 2 weeks, a multidisciplinary committee reviews the cases of these at-risk individuals. How far does this special monitoring go? If inmates are at high risk for suicide or attempt to hang themselves during the night, the prison administration may transfer them to the emergency department. They can also place the individual in an 'emergency protection cell' designed to ensure safety until appropriate care can be arranged. These cells are smooth and free of any anchor points. In many cases, an emergency protection system is also activated, which consists of making the prisoner wear a tear-away gown to avoid any risk for hanging. The following morning, the inmate is seen by the regional medico-psychological service, which determines — based on clinical assessment — whether hospitalization is required. A recent study by the penitentiary administration shows rising suicide rates among inmates. Are you concerned? We have always been concerned about this issue. There have been several suicides at Baumettes in recent years; some involved patients we were actively treating, while others were unknown to us. Each case is a tragedy. Importantly, suicides are not limited to individuals who previously expressed distress; many had no diagnosed psychiatric illness. In some cases, the act may have been a way to protest or attempt to change detention conditions. Fortunately, not all suicide attempts result in death. Psychiatric care for the approximately 80,000 incarcerated individuals in France is organized into a three-tiered system. Level 1 care is available in all 187 prisons across the country and provides outpatient psychiatric services. Inmates leave their cells to attend appointments in the prison's health unit, where they may be seen by a psychiatrist, psychologist, psychiatric nurse, and, when appropriate, a social worker or educator. When level 1 care is insufficient owing to the severity of the condition, inmates can access level 2 care through day hospitals. Twenty-six prisons are equipped with both level 1 and level 2 services, including a day hospital as part of the regional medico-psychological service. If level 2 care is still inadequate — typically when a patient is highly unstable — they may be transferred to level 3 care, which involves full-time inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. This may occur in a nearby psychiatric hospital when the patient is experiencing an acute emergency, such as a psychotic episode or suicidal crisis. The inmate may remain hospitalized for several days and can be admitted to one of the nine specially adapted hospital units located in Lyon, Nancy, Toulouse, Villejuif, Lille, Rennes, Orléans, Bordeaux, and Marseille. These units accept inmates under voluntary or compulsory care, based on a decision by a state representative when the patient is deemed incapable of providing informed consent. These secure facilities — equipped with video surveillance, barbed wire, and security checkpoints — are dedicated healthcare environments. Prison staff only intervene in cases of agitation or violence; otherwise, all care is provided exclusively by medical professionals.
BBC News
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Five works that reveal the philosophy of Banksy
Banksy's new mural in Marseille is not the first image he has connected to the history of ideas. From Plato to Foucault, a Banksy expert reveals the philosophy behind these popular artworks. Which is the real you, the person you are now or the one you are capable of becoming? It's a heady question, to be sure, and not one you would expect to be confronted with while strolling down a street in Marseille in the waning days of May. Yet it's precisely the existential dilemma that Banksy, who once asserted "being yourself is overrated" – has surreptitiously installed in a cloistered stretch of the quiet Rue Félix Fregier, the site of a new work – the latest installment in the elusive artist's decades-long career as a provocative philosophical prankster. For more than 30 years, Banksy has spiked many of his most iconic works – from his girl reaching hopelessly for a heart-shaped balloon to his masked rioter hurling a bouquet of flowers – with barbed allusions to Old Masters, from Michelangelo to Monet, Vermeer to Van Gogh. But there's more. Beneath his stealthy stencils lies a deep and deliberate engagement with the history of ideas as well, from classical Stoicism to postmodern deconstructionism. On 29 May, Banksy posted on Instagram a photo of his first new piece in more than five months, piquing the internet's interest by withholding its precise location. Discovered shortly thereafter in the major port city in southern France, Marseille, the mural is, at first glance, deceptively simple: a tall silhouette of a lighthouse spray-painted on to a blank beige urban wall; a rusting street bollard positioned nearby; and a painted shadow stretching across the pavement, joining the real-world object to its augmented, if two-dimensional, echo. Stencilled across the black lighthouse are the words: "I want to be what you saw in me." Anyone keen to find a source for the ideas that inform Banksy's new work needs merely to flip open any history of philosophy to Plato's seminal allegory of the cave (from the Fourth-Century BC treatise The Republic), then flip the ancient metaphor on its head. In Plato's parable, prisoners chained inside a cave mistake shadows on the wall for reality, unaware of the truer forms that cast them outside. But here, Banksy, being Banksy, baits us by switching the set-up, reversing the relationship between essence and shadow. In Banksy's mural, the drab bollard casts not a diminished imitation of itself, but something far grander – a lighthouse, a symbol of illumination and guidance. Here, it's the silhouette, not reality, that's true. Banksy's inversion urges us to ask where reality really resides: in what is, or in what might be? His poignant phrase – "I want to be what you saw in me" – is alluringly elastic. Is this the bollard dreaming of being more than it appears? Or the shadow wishing to become light? Or is it all of us – Banksy included – struggling to live up to the better versions imagined by those who believe in us? The answer is surely yes to all of the above. And it's a yes too to the question: 'is this new work a lamp capable of shining light on further levels of meaning in Banksy?' What follows is a brief look back at some of the artist's best-known works and how they too are invigorated by, and often upend, many of the most important philosophical tenets – both social and intellectual – that underwrite who we are and who we might be. Girl with Balloon, 2002 Banksy's new mural in Marseille is not the first to be accompanied by an affecting caption connecting the piece to the history of ideas. Among his most famous murals, Girl with Balloon, which portrays a child reaching towards a heart-shaped balloon drifting away from her, first appeared in 2002 in various locations in London, including on the South Bank, alongside the consoling assertion, "there is always hope". That conviction, which fuels the ceaseless striving for an ideal that is seemingly unobtainable in the mural (there's no way that balloon is coming back) rhymes richly with aspects of 19th-Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's ideas concerning an unquenchable and irrational "Will" as a fundamental force that drives humanity. When, years later, Banksy mischievously concealed a remote-controlled shredder in the frame of a version of Girl with Balloon that came up for auction in 2018, and sensationally destroyed the work before the eyes of aghast auction-goers, he succeeded in upping the ante on Schopenhauer's belief in the futility of desire by boldly manifesting it himself. Where there's a will there's a fray. Flower Thrower (or Love is in the Air), 2003 Banksy's famous mural of a masked man frozen forever in the instant before he unleashes not a brick or a bomb but a bouquet of flowers may seem, at first blush, to exemplify a pacifist's commitment to peaceful disobedience. The work appears to echo the precepts of Mahatma Gandhi's Satyagraha – a philosophy of non-violence that the Indian ethicist coined in 1919. Banksy's fully flexed figure, incongruously armed with a fistful of beauty, appears to epitomise Gandhi's insistence on wielding moral, not physical, strength. Doesn't it? Or has Banksy slyly subverted the philosophical assertion of pacifistic force by portraying his hero as an enraged rioter? The figure's anger has not been tempered by an appeal to the higher ideals of beauty and truth. Instead, those ideals have been weaponised by Banksy. Here, beauty and truth are not disarming, they are devastatingly explosive. One Nation Under CCTV, 2007 Banksy's mural in Marseille employs a tried-and-true technique to ensure the work protrudes into the urban space in which we'll encounter it – elevating its philosophical potential from something flimsy and flat to something undeniably urgent. It's a tactic he used in a 2007 work that appeared near London's Oxford Street in which he depicts a boy atop a precariously high ladder, spray-painting the penetrating observation that we are "One Nation Under CCTV" in outlandishly outsized letters. Also portrayed within the mural is a uniformed officer and his obedient police dog who surveil the young vandal, while above them all an actual CCTV camera, presumably recording everything, juts out from the wall. The endless layers of surveillance-within-surveillance to which the work attests – as we watch the state watch an officer watch the boy – captures with uncanny precision the philosophical contours of the vast and all-encompassing prison machine in which the French poststructural philosopher Michel Foucault believed everyone in society was now irredeemably enmeshed. In Foucault's study Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, he resuscitates a blueprint for a prison proposed by the British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th Century, "The Panopticon" (meaning "all seeing"), and uses it as a menacing metaphor for how no one can escape the perniciously penetrating eye of the panoptical state. Mobile Lovers, 2014 Banksy's witty 2014 work Mobile Lovers shines a chilling light on the state of contemporary relationships. The mural depicts a couple whose almost affectionate embrace is interrupted by the deeper fondness they have for the warm glow of their smartphones. The French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who died in 1986, may not have lived long enough to witness the emergence of mobiles. Yet her profoundly influential 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity – published exactly 60 years before the iPhone was launched in 2007 – with its exploration of the devastation that detachment and disconnection can wreak on the realisation of our truest selves, is profoundly proleptic of our modern predicament. To be free, de Beauvoir insisted, requires a deep attentiveness to each other. She believed in the authenticity of human encounters, without which life is a futile performance, dimly lit by disposable devices, rather than something profound and meaningful. How Banksy Saved Art History by Kelly Grovier, published by Thames & Hudson, is out now. -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Spectator
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
What Alasdair MacIntyre got right
Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last week, was one of the most influential thinkers of the past 50 years. It is hard to think of any other philosopher writing in the late 20th-century who has had such an impact. He might be less famous than Foucault or Derrida, but it is his conservative brand of postmodernism that launched a fairly coherent intellectual movement. For a few decades its adherents were mostly academics; now it has become politically influential too. Like those aforementioned Frenchmen, he was a powerful critic of the rational Enlightenment. And like them, his thought was strongly shaped by Marxism, and its critique of liberal political assumptions. But unlike them he decided that it was not enough to be suspicious of all ideologies. The task was to reconstruct meaning, amid the chaos and nihilism of modern thought. This bold proposal is set out in his book of 1981, After Virtue.
