Contemporay capitalism relies on the ideology that everyone can make it in today's society and that people are essentially free to choose the direction of their lives. This ideology has greatly contributed to people's feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and guilt. At the same time, people also more and more engage in various forms of self-torture as well as violent outbursts towards others. The paper deals with the new forms of self-violence that we can observe in post-industrial capitalism, but also with the new forms of violence expressed in the society as such. The article tries to show how the specific fantasy-structure of contemporary capitalism has contributed to the new forms of ignorance which we can find in the developed and developing world.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1578830
The old theme of "crime and punishment" is undoubtedly quite important for understanding so called (pos)transitional societies. The concept of "crime" has been used as a powerful ideological weapon in the extremly hurried process of destructively constructing a capitalist post-socialist society. The defunct "socialist" system has been almost unanimously condemned by victorious contra-revolutionary and bourgeois forces as a "totalitarian regime", that is to say as the "crime of all crimes". Consequently, basic transitional experiences (such as denationalization, privatization, intimidation, extortion and humiliation of the "work force") could be interpreted as a collective punishment for the abhorrent crime(s) of "socialism". On the other hand, "crime" (encompassing various forms of predatory, fraudulent and corruptive activities) has funcioned as a more or less "normal" means of accumulating capital, wealth and prestige and also for solving more trivial - material and "moral" - problems. Hence, the distincion between legitimate and illegitimate acquisitive activities or between legally and illegaly "organized crime" has become increasingly blurred. However, it is essentially "structural violence" (e.g. unjustifed inequalities, socially unnecessary heteronomous work, ecological destruction, irrational organisation of prfit-oriented economy, etc.) that is the most harmful phenomenon in actual political formations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1559630
The article deals with the recent transformations of the image of West in the political imagination of post-socialist countries. The paper shows that we can take a genuinely psychoanalyst approach on the constant back and forth between fear, rejection and identification with West. Focusing mainly on the reaction to the 9/11 attacks, the paper suggests that the paradigmatic exclamation "We all are Americans" in fact stems from the jealousy/identification structure as was exposed by Freud in his theory of "Einzige Zug". On the other hand, the pathological identification with West goes hand in hand with the much deeper fear of Western Capital, which is slowly replacing the old nationalist fears. The paper shows that the fear of Capital is actually based on the same structure as the nationalism of the Milosevic kind, building on the the paradoxical existence of the inner and outer enemy, the supposed social parasite or the "inner alien". The fear of hyper-capitalism, the paper suggests, is therefore a new formation of political paranoia, which is always located on the precarious threshold between the inner and the outer of the body politic.
COBISS.SI-ID: 9046089
On the basis of Lyotard's theory of the differand, text shows how wrongs are being commited in judicial processes where one genre of discourse tries to force its criteria of judgment on other, different genres of discourse. In this context, author mainly focuses on two issues: on the one hand, he demonstrates that wrongs arise from situations where a party which suffers a wrong is unable to present this wrong in court because the genre of discourse in which the wrong is presented is not recognized by the court; on the other hand, he also shows that wrongs arise from situations where the genre of discourse applied to make judgments proclaims itself as a universal genre of discourse, i.e. a genre of discourse which supposedly has the juridiction to judge all different, incommensurable genres of discourse. In order to integrate Lyotard's theory of judgement into a wider framework, author also - first - introduces Agamben's interpretation of situations where individuals become victims due to the lack of a means by which they could present the wrongs they have suffered; and - second - he demonstrates the forms of exclusion/inclusion which originate from Kant's (or Kafka's) definition of formal law.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1589326
While many EU countries are seeing an increase in the number of prisoners being recalled to prison from release on parole, Slovenia presents an exception: although the Slovenian system does legislate for revoking parole the measure is hardly ever used in practice. This article explores legal and practical aspects of parole revocation in Slovenia, the role of the judiciary, the attitudes to revocation of the parole shaped by Slovenia's legal culture, and possible reasons for the rarity of parole being revoked in Slovenian penal practice.
COBISS.SI-ID: 12226897