order/dis-order

order/dis-order

the play of order and dis-order can be seen as an important motif in the work of many philosophers, social commentators, and cultural theorists. Thinkers such as NIETZSCHE, FREUD, KOJEVE, BATAILLE, LACAN, DELEUZE, DERRIDA, GIRARD, BAUDRILLARD, and LYOTARD have all addressed the relation between structure and the disintegration of organization. For the poststructuralist writers like Bataille, Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida, Nietzshe's philosophy emphasised the idea that the absence of order should be seen as a space for the formation of non-repressive/ oppositional identities and cultures. Similarly, the postmodern writers, Lyotard and Baudrillard, have developed their ideas surrounding the end of modernity, the collapse of metanarratives, and the crisis of scientific legitimation out of the Nietzsche/Kojeve reading of Hegel's phenomenology. Like Freud's theory of the unconscious and Girard's analysis of the scapegoat mechanism, these thinkers showed how disorder lurks at the heart of order.

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000