Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Is a secret a lie? That is, in and of itself, are secrets lies?

This thought was engendered by the events of the last week about previously classified court orders and data mining programs at the NSA, and the larger world of classified activities.

In “history of the lie” Derrida states that a lie is not an error. You can be in error about something, mistaken about it (“why did you miss the meeting at 1pm?”, “oh I thought we were meeting at 2pm“) without lying. As he also says, one does not lie simply by saying something that is false, as long as “one believes in good faith in the truth of what one believes” (p. 31).

Instead, “to lie is to want to deceive the other, sometimes even by saying what is true” (31). Is that what a secret does? A secret withholds, it withholds the…

Torre Agbar in Barcelona. Photo from http://www.nextstop-barcelona.com/torre-agbar-barcelona/

In order to continue the recent thread of posts on sex and the city, I am sharing the following excerpt from an article I wrote in 2009 that can be found here.

The space of power has traditionally imitated the masculine form and has been occupied according to the logic of masculine values. The association of power with the male member finds expression in the city, as Lefebvre observes, through “the use and overuse of straight lines, right angles, and strict (rectilinear) perspective” (410). Not only is the space of power phallic in terms of form but also in terms of practice. According to Elizabeth Grosz, men occupy space “as territorialized, as mappable or explorable,” conceive space in terms “according to the logic of penetration, colonization and domination,” and do not “respect spaces and places which are not theirs” (57). Phallocentric thought as performed…