Simon Gros

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1. Intro
2. Ontology
3. Illusion
4. Metaphilosophy
5. Disaster
6. Destiny
7. Censorship
8. Failure of Internationalism
9. Fragmentation of Ontology
10. Of the Abyss & the Void
11. Disgusting Sexuality
12. End of a War
13. Micropolitics of Borders
14. Metaphysical Implied Corporeal Hypothesis
15. Tutankamon, The Son-King
16. Acumen & Evil
17. Emerging Fields
18. With Us, Capitalism is Genocide
19. From Zizians to Zizekians

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Censorship is the strategic suppression of expression, a force that operates in the intercourse of power and knowledge, visibility and invisibility, silence and speech. It is at once an act of negation—the erasure of words, ideas, and images from the public sphere—and an act of production, shaping what can be thought, said, and ultimately, what can be known. More than a mere regulatory mechanism, censorship is a structuring principle of discourse, a means by which authority asserts itself and delineates the permissible contours of reality. The censored is never simply removed; it is displaced, transformed, dominated, gagged, or absorbed into the very apparatus that represses it, lingering in absentia as an unspoken yet ever-present counterforce.

Repression, in both the psychoanalytic and political sense, is the interiorization of censorship. Where censorship removes ideas from the field of explicit articulation, repression ensures that even the desire to articulate them is erased. If censorship functions as an external prohibition, repression infiltrates the subject, instilling within them an unconscious policing of their own thoughts. Thus, the power of censorship does not merely lie in its ability to delete material but in its capacity to shape subjectivity itself. The subject learns to anticipate the censor’s gaze, to modulate their words, to hesitate before transgression. Over time, what was once a prohibition imposed from without becomes an inhibition arising from within. In this way, censorship is not simply the excision of speech but the architecture of silence.

Every system of governance, of dominion, domination, fascism, from theocratic orders to liberal democracies, deploys censorship in some form. While autocratic regimes openly enforce it through coercive apparatuses—secret police, state-controlled media, prison sentences for dissidents—ostensibly free societies sustain it through more diffuse, yet no less effective, means. The modern state does not need to burn books or arrest writers if the mechanisms of the market, the pressures of social conformity, and the proliferation of media distractions accomplish the same goal. The illusion of free speech often masks more insidious forms of control: the overabundance of permissible discourse drowns out radical thought, fetish perversion drowns discourse, corporate monopolies dictate the limits of acceptable debate, and the spectacle of superficial controversy diverts attention from structural critique. In this way, the most sophisticated censorship is not the brute force of a censor’s red pen but the self-replicating logic of ideological hegemony. While gagging.

Censorship, then, is not merely a tool of the ruling class; it is a function of power itself. It is not limited to governments but pervades institutions, corporations, academia, and even interpersonal relations. In sexuality it can make you puke. The censor does not always appear as an external enforcer; often, it manifests as the internalized voice of the normative order, the invisible hand that guides discourse before it even reaches the point of explicit suppression. This complicates the classical image of censorship as an external force imposed on an otherwise free subject. Rather, subjectivity is constituted through censorship: to become a political being is to be inscribed within the boundaries of what can and cannot be said. Self-censorship might save us from oblivion.

But if censorship is a mode of repression, it is also the catalyst for revolution. The very act of suppression generates its own negation: the more vigorously a regime censors, the more it reveals the latent potency of what it seeks to silence. The more it gags the more it throws up. The censored text acquires a mythical aura, the forbidden discourse gains an allure that legitimized speech lacks. Underground networks emerge to circulate proscribed ideas; samizdat literature flourishes in the shadows; entire counter-publics form beneath the surface of official discourse. In this sense, censorship often proves dialectical—it negates expression in order to affirm, inadvertently strengthening the very forces it seeks to destroy.

Revolution is the moment when the suppressed erupts into visibility, when the structural prohibition of discourse collapses, when that which has been silenced demands to be spoken. Suffocation becomes revolution. Every revolutionary upheaval is preceded by an intensification of censorship, as power seeks to forestall the inevitable by tightening its grip on speech. But this tightening is also a sign of desperation, a recognition that the very act of suppression is a tacit admission of vulnerability. A state confident in its legitimacy has no need for censorship; it is only when power begins to fear its own instability that it seeks to repress discourse with brute force.

The paradox of censorship and revolution is that the former, in attempting to sustain the status quo, accelerates its own demise. The history of revolutionary thought is, in large part, the history of censored thought. The writings of revolutionaries—whether banned pamphlets, clandestine newspapers, or encrypted messages—are forged in the crucible of censorship, imbued with a radical urgency precisely because they have been deemed too dangerous to be spoken aloud. Deepthroat always tricked the observer. The revolutions of 1789, 1917, 1968, and countless others were fueled not only by material conditions but by the intellectual ferment of suppressed ideas, the forbidden doctrines that circulated beneath the surface of official discourse until they could no longer be contained.

Yet the revolutionary overthrow of censorship does not guarantee freedom from it. The moment a new order is established, it inherits the very problem it sought to destroy: the need to determine the limits of speech, to adjudicate between the legitimate and the illegitimate, to define the permissible. Every revolution that seeks to abolish censorship must confront the reality that power, once attained, generates its own imperative to regulate discourse. The revolutionary regime, having once been the voice of the suppressed, now finds itself in the position of determining what must be silenced. The cycle repeats: the liberators become the censors, the formerly censored become the new underground.

This is not a historical accident but an ontological condition of discourse itself. Language, in its very structure, both reveals and conceals, includes and excludes. The dream of a society without censorship is, in a sense, a contradiction in terms: to establish a discourse is already to delimit what is sayable. Thus, censorship is not merely a political phenomenon but a condition of language itself. Structuralist and poststructuralist thought reveal that meaning emerges not only from what is articulated but from what is left unsaid, from the absent signifiers that haunt the visible text. To speak is to choose, and to choose is to exclude; every discourse carries within it a shadow of censorship, a horizon of silence that structures its intelligibility.

But this does not mean that all censorship is equivalent. There remains a fundamental difference between the suppression of speech as an instrument of domination and the necessary constraints that shape meaning within discourse. The former seeks to prevent thought, to foreclose critique, to render dissent impossible. The latter is the inevitable byproduct of signification itself, the way in which language orders the world. Recognizing this distinction is crucial: the struggle against censorship must be directed at its oppressive forms without succumbing to the illusion that a world without exclusions is possible.

The contemporary moment reveals new forms of censorship that blur the lines between repression and proliferation. In the digital age, where information circulates with unprecedented speed, the traditional mechanisms of censorship—banning books, silencing newspapers—are increasingly supplanted by more insidious techniques. Rather than simply suppressing discourse, power now drowns it in an ocean of distraction, rendering radical ideas invisible not through prohibition but through oversaturation. Algorithmic suppression, deplatforming, and the corporate monopolization of communication channels introduce new modes of control that operate not by erasure but by manipulation, steering discourse rather than outright forbidding it. The old models of censorship—bonfires of books, blacklists of dissidents—are replaced by the far subtler methods of algorithmic exclusion, attention manipulation, and the calculated amplification of triviality.

And yet, as always, censorship breeds its own opposition. The digital underground emerges in encrypted spaces, decentralized networks, and counter-hegemonic platforms. The struggle against censorship continues not only in courtrooms and parliaments but in the hidden recesses of the internet, in the encrypted archives of dissident thought, in the clandestine conversations that refuse to be silenced. The dialectic of censorship and revolution persists, evolving with each new historical moment but never ceasing. As long as power seeks to regulate speech, the drive to resist, to transgress, to utter the forbidden, will remain an ineradicable force.

Censorship, repression, revolution—these are not separate events but interwoven tendencies in the grand unfolding of history. They are, in the end, not simply political acts but existential conditions, structuring what can be known, what can be said, and what can be imagined. The struggle against censorship is thus never only about the right to speak but about the possibility of thought itself. To resist censorship is to resist the foreclosure of the future, to keep open the space where new worlds can still be imagined.

Is suffocation a category of immigration? What does it mean to breathe fresh air?