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Sex and sexuality play an important role in the theories of biopolitics of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. A theoretical division of biopolitics into two domains: zoopolitics (politics of bodies) and etopolitics (politics of behavior) exposes the differences between the two philosophers: Agamben focuses on zoopolitics, while Foucault – on etopolitics. This is why their research interests diverge: Foucault analyzes rather „typical” (etopolitical) medicine, sexology, or psychiatry, and Agamben – (zoopolitical) Nazi eugenics. Both thinkers have different attitude towards the body and conceptualize the political divergently. These differences in the basic assumptions result in different concepts of sexual bioresistance, however, Foucault and Agamben do not propose competing projects but rather operate on different levels – Foucault is focused on sexual practices of bioresistance, while Agamben – on a philosophical sexual utopia. Furthermore, both thinkers share the belief that non-normative, deviant sex has potential of bioresistance.
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The subject of this review is the book published in 2008 of the Hungarian historian Béla Borsi-Kálmán, which is dealing with issues of Hungarian sports history. The central figure of the book is represented by the legendary soccer player, Ferenc Puskás, but it is also dealing with the biographies of other players. Through the mirror of these players’ life, we also receive a complex image of Hungarian sports and social life through the socialist era.
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The main scientific objective of the paper is to investigate the problematization of protest, resistance, and explosions of social discontent in the discourse of European symbolic elites. The analysis of three dimensions of the intellectualization of protest serves to answer the following questions: how is protest shaped as an object of intellectual discussion, how it gains the attention of symbolic elites, and how intellectuals support social protest and make it a subject of public attention. The second objective is to identify the paradoxes and dilemmas of the intellectualization of protest on the example of Michel Foucault and the organization Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. Following Foucault’s case, the author argues that the protest cannot avoid symbolic appropriation by those who claim to be its greatest advocates, and elites declaring themselves to be social critics are often uncritical towards their ideological positions.
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Michel Foucault is one of those authors who significantly impacted upon broadening the meaning of the term “power, ” including realms in which one is to look for its symptoms. Foucault’s contribution to the developmental tendency within the studies of power is especially striking. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault was to openly claim that power was plainly everywhere. For years Foucault had been elaborating two ways of legitimizing this view, which is named here “a prevalence of power” thesis. For the sake of the below analysis, the first justification is going to be called historiosophical, and the second—social differentiation justification. The article aims at criticizing both of them and, although indirectly, the very thesis they support. Since the boundaries of all Foucauldian analytics of power are outlined by these two justifications, their reconstruction and critical consideration are of crucial importance for the post-Foucauldian current in social sciences.
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The basic purpose of the text is a reflexion on the problems with methodological directives that stem from the works of Foucault. Simultaneously, this voice imprints itself into the general understanding of styles of reception of an idea and Foucauldian concepts of social studies. By the use of the term “method” the author refers both to the varieties of methodological premises present in the literature concerned with methodological social studies and to the strategies of reading they represent. The analysis of the reception of “Foucault’s methodology” leads us to a conclusion that it posits itself between two opposite poles. The first pole attempts to provide precise methodological guidelines allowing a faithful reconstruction of Foucauldian ways, while applying them to a different sphere of inquest (the transcription strategy). Located on the other pole are methodological varieties of different type—transformations, redefinitions of Foucauldian categories, and syntheses of various approaches (the fugue strategy).
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The aim of this paper is a critical reflection on Michel Foucault’s concept of dispositive and its application in social research. Dispositive means a heterogenic composition of discursive and non-discursive elements of social reality linked together with the dynamic relations of power. Since two decades in the frames of post-Foucauldian discourse analysis the attempts at operationalizing the category of dispositive have been made. As an analytical category dispositive refers to the mechanisms of socially dispersed power, which can be studied empirically on the basis of discursive and non-discursive data. A research perspective of dispositive analysis has emerged as a result of an interest in dispositive. This paper presents the main guidelines of this perspective, as well as a typology of applications of the Foucauldian category of dispositive in empirical research, illustrated with chosen examples of German and Polish scholars’ works. This presentation is accompanied by a consideration of inconsistencies and deficiencies of such methodological approach.
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Hungarian successes at the Winter and Summer Olympic games preceding 1945 have been linked in numerous cases to athletes who have been, at the same time, officers or sub-officers of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army, respectively the Royal Hungarian Army. The reason for this close association between military and sports life lies in factors pertaining to military education and the various military education institutes, as well as the specific education of the military officers. Physical education and sports have always been an important part of military training in Hungary. During their preparation for military service, the recruits have gained proficiency not only in the so-called “military sports” (such as marksmanship, fencing and horse riding), but sports such as swimming or gymnastics have also played a major role in their military training.
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Sports have become the most encompassing and characteristic cultural formation of modern societies in the past century, functioning at the same time as mass movement and entertainment, popular pastime and spectacle, hobby, profession, industry and commercial business. Modern sports culture was born in England, from where it spread worldwide through such means as aristocratic sports life, college sports, mass sports companies, sports clubs and associations, as well as the pacifist Olympic ideal and the sport cult of totalitarian states, until it has finally become, in the last decades of the 20th century, one of the most profitable branch of the global entertainment industry.
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On his 70th birthday, Kádár could count social consensus among the achievements, yet only because he was aware of the fact that time began to erode social peace, which has been so difficultly realized. The reasons for this erosion were twofold. For one, the economy has stagnated for years. For a large part of the intellectual community, the status quo and the levelling social politics associated with it began to seem unsatisfactory, because it limited them in the actualization of their full potential. These groups were increasingly cramped by the inhibition of private initiative and by the lack of political freedom. On the other hand, the contrast between the situation of Hungarians within and beyond the borders also increased. The public opinion of intellectuals urged the Hungarian government to take action against the oppression of Hungarian minorities living abroad, yet the government remained cautious. The regime of Kádár did not take violent measures against the civic opposition during its process of formation, because the recourse to dictatorial measures would have signified an admission of the crisis. Hungary, as well as Kádár himself, could not take the step back to a practice already transcended, and neither Hungarian society, nor the international public opinion would have tolerated it.
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A Petõfi Sándor eltûnésérõl, illetve halálá- ról szóló, némi hitelt érdemlõ visszaemlékezéseknek van két állandó elemük: az egyik szerint az illetõ szerzõ beszélt (utoljára) a költõvel; a másik szerint az illetõ szerzõ majdnem megmentette Petõfit, de aztán különbözõ tényezõk miatt ez mégsem sikerült neki. Az 1849. július 31-ei segesvár-fehéregyházi ütkö- zetrõl szóló tucatnyi leírás között ugyanakkor van egy, amely ugyan már több mint 130 éve napvilágot látott, azonban sem a had-, sem az irodalomtörténet-írás nem foglalkozott külö- nösebben a forrásértékével, holott mindkét elemet megtaláljuk benne. Ez Teleki Sándor gróf, ezredesnek, Petõfi barátjának, „az erdé- lyi összes hadsereg fõfelügyelõjének” 1888- ban megjelent visszaemlékezése, az Utolsó találkozásom Petõfi Sándorral
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