Night School

In this episode, we discuss the famous Slovenian psychoanalyst, Marxist and philosopher, Slavoj Zizek! Fuad is joined by Douglas Shang, a Masters student from the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, who provides a general overview of Zizek's method, ideas and flamboyant style as well as the factors behind his rapid rise to fame and notoriety. Among other things we discuss the importance of popular culture and jokes as a way of conveying complicated theoretical ideas about the world around us.

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A full recording of the forum “Handling The Heat - Is Media Freedom A Requirement For Democracy?”. Sponsored by the British High Commission, KL, and the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus as part of their Great Debate series. The forum was held on the 19th of June 2014, at the Malaysian Tourism Center, Kuala Lumpur.

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“All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place,” wrote Edward W. Said, author of the seminal “Orientalism”. In this episode we walk through some of the key points in the analysis of the historical construction of the Other of Western civilization, and therefore of itself.

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“The Discovery of India” is the title of a work by India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during his imprisonment between 1942-1946. In this episode we attempt our own discovery of India with the help of our guest. A native of the state of Assam, he guides us through the country’s North Eastern states. It is an area which he characterises as black hole in the Indian imaginary. We look at the notion of “Indic Civilisation”, narratives which marginalize and exclude, and the bloody fate of North-Easterners in contemporary India.

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“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially,” wrote French philosopher Roland Barthes in “Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography”. Today we explore why and how the photographic image has come to be such a ubiquitous part of our lives and reference many thinkers who has sought to theorize this phenomenon.

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Hannibal Lecter, from whom the title quote comes, is the protagonist in the crime thriller “Silence of the Lambs”. He represents the ‘return of the repressed’ in human society. But in the larger Animal Kingdom, cannibalism, once thought to be a rare behavior, is now understood to be common. It is not the issue moral repugnance or repressed desires that animates this discussion by the question of evolutionary biology. Does it make evolutionary sense to eat your own kind? Sharpen your knives.

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“Download some good books or bring one or two good book. Please, no *hardcore* topics. I personally downloaded few iBooks like Pride and Prejudice and some english novels beside books written by Ibn Qayyim - and it helped a lot. You wont have much activities in the makkar and these books can keep you *alive*.” This is from the Tumblr-based diary of (as far as we know) a Malaysian woman doctor who joined the proto-state organization, the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant. She calls herself the Bird of Jannah and her daily accounts of life in Iraq go by the title “Diary of a Muhajirah”. In this episode we try to re-frame the discussion around the much vilified group and the people attracted to its cause.

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“Sensation without commitment”, “life like a permanent wank inside you” and “a sort of dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk”: turns of phrase and ideas from Richard Hoggart’s ‘The Uses of Literacy”. A pioneer of Cultural Studies – “a combination of literature, sociology and moral uplift” – Hoggart’s 1957 classic on the British working-class broke new ground and launched his career which included helming UNESCO. "Sex in Shiny Packets" is the title of a chapter in that book. In this episode we learn of his significance both as a scholar and a public intellectual who famously took the stand at the trial on the banning of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. 

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“French laicite is probably aggressive and antagonistic to religion, but there are other models of secularism in the world where there could be reconciliation between religion and secularism,” suggests the Tunisian political professor Rashid Al-Ghannushi. But what is the history that produced this notion and practice of the separation of Church and State. We also explore the resistance to ‘the separation’, the specific issue of Muslims in contemporary France and the rejection of the politics of multi-culturalism.

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In this episode we explore the study of French – its language, literature, and cinema. We also take time to delve into the work of one of the francophone world’s most celebrated and influential minds, Michel Foucault. His milieu illuminates the intellectual challenges facing Europe in the political and socially heady years, from the 1950s to the 1970s. “The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play), ” he wrote. Precisely, what Night School aims to do.

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