There are times when two essential human rights may appear to be in conUlict, or need to be balanced against one another. This paper examines the right of a party, such as ofUicials, a group of people or an individual, to ‘privacy and conUidentiality’ when others may have a conUlicting ‘right to know’ about them. Although this conUlict has already been studied by other researchers, there is a lot of controversy about a rightful balance in new technology driven situations. I (...) conducted a survey on the views of college students over an actual case of a university associate professor whose immoral conduct had been reported to a few of the faculty by a PhD student who had given birth to his child on the promise of marriage while the teacher was already married and had a child. I asked the students if they believed protecting the privacy of the teacher was more important than the school’s right to know. I also asked if they believed a child born to the single mother in such a relationship has the right to know about his father, or the single mother has the right to keep that information conUidential. Finally I asked the students if they believed in general that the ‘right to privacy and conUidentiality’ was more important than the ‘right to know’. This paper reports on the results of this survey on 222 students at an international university in Japan. (shrink)

There is a wide spectrum in reading Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, ranging from thinkers who explore literary, historical, to ethico-ontological and political aspects. I confine the study by strictly retrieving the subjectivity of the human rights victim as not rested in its being a subject and victim, hence as a specter that haunts or ‘retaliates’ into exposing its victimization. This article attempts to read the spectral nature of this victim using Derrida and Žižek. The Derridean reading grounds the central (...) spectrality on his hauntology and what it says about the victim’s ghostly character. Later, I expound on the act of haunting from a Žižekean standpoint by hinging on the notion of ‘drive’ that exposes the nature of victimization as depoliticizing the subject. (shrink)

This article aims to present a Žižekian reading of the British author David Herbert Lawrence. The contemporary continental philosopher has tackled each of the British author’s reoccurring themes individually and thus may be used as a keystone for a valid literary interpretatio n. The paper begins by shedding light on the representation of Western ideology, moves further into the comprehension of the impacts of modern cultural capital and the limitations of industrialization. While at the same time the dissertation targets another (...) component of the romantic poet’s many writings which are characterized by the regeneration of the subject’s carnal presence as a defense mechanism against the prevalent culture of de-humanization. The argument at hand is that the reconstruction of the bodily image rendered through Lawrence’s erotic literature is not one that portrays promiscuity, but rather demonstrates a transgression of the Lacanian symbolic and the attainment of a partial rendition of a Hegelian totality. Lawrence’s six novels and set of poems are thoroughly analyzed from a strictly Žižekian p erspective to demonstrate that th e two authors share thematic representations, a common worldview and propose a manifestation of how literary analyses may be conveyed using Žižek as a philosophical lens for literary interpretation. (shrink)

The Übermensch, the overcoming of man, is one of Nietzsche’s debated concepts to be situated in posthumanism. In Žižek’s posthumanism, the human as subject can not only be read in Nietzsche’s understanding of the last man, but is inherently tied to the concept of trauma. This is so that trauma, as I exposed before, is a crucial element in advancing a posthuman. This article argues that trauma is, tout court, not enough to realize a posthuman Übermensch. It faces paradoxes that (...) render it a transitory jolt. First, trauma still relies on the fiction of an afterworld. Second, trauma can be further traumatized and that there is a transitoriness of choice that belies its function between dream and fiction. Later, following from the traumatic standpoint of the Real, I provide a clarificatory corollary why the posthuman project also cannot work as a Lacanian fantasy. (shrink)