The Other Malaysia

Mid-Term Essay Question for Students of IR6901: An introduction to Discourse Analysis. Taking into account all that we have covered thus far, and in particular with reference to the late Wittgensteinian theory of language-games; Saussure’s fundamental principles of Linguistics and the discussion of religio-political discourses in Laclau/Mouffe and Bobby Sayyid, here is your mid-trimester essay [...]

(*Note: I was invited to write a think-piece for an upcoming project and I thought I’d share it with anyone interested) The past decade has witnessed a period of intense speculation on the subject of Muslim subjectivity; often prompted by reasons that have less to do with academic concerns and more with politics instead. We [...]

Laclau and Mouffe: The A, B, C of Discourse Analysis Now as we discussed in class yesterday, for our purposes we need not be overly concerned with the politics of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) but rather more concerned about the theoretical schema as it was laid out [...]

Laclau and Mouffe: Discourse Analysis and the realities of shifting politics I. Explaining the context of Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Shifting social dynamics and the demise of traditional class-based politics. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985) was written at a time when many [...]

Post lecture notes for students of IR 6901: (Week 6) Introduction to Discourse Analysis, with a special reference to religio-political discourse: Foucault: Writing the history of discourses and discursive economies This week we read Michel Foucault’s (d.1984) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, 1975). Along with [...]

Post lecture notes for students of IR 6901: (Week 5, notes b) Introduction to Discourse Analysis, with a special reference to religio-political discourse: Wittgenstein’s Language Games: Implications for discourse analysis. From this point onwards in the course, we will be referring a lot to Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games (as rule-governed context-bound modes of language use [...]

Post lecture notes for students of IR 6901: (Week 5) Introduction to Discourse Analysis, with a special reference to religio-political discourse: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: Rule-following and the theory of Language-games. A. Why I cannot praise the Tractatus on its own terms: I would like to praise Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and say that it is a [...]