Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Subject of the Ethical Turn
- 2 Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality
- 3 Sexing the Ethical Subject
- 4 Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility
- 5 The Ethical Subject of New Media Communications
- 6 Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity
- 7 Censored Subjects
- 8 Suffering
- 9 Hospitality, Friendship and Justice
- 10 Death, or the End of the Subject
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Censored Subjects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Subject of the Ethical Turn
- 2 Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality
- 3 Sexing the Ethical Subject
- 4 Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility
- 5 The Ethical Subject of New Media Communications
- 6 Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity
- 7 Censored Subjects
- 8 Suffering
- 9 Hospitality, Friendship and Justice
- 10 Death, or the End of the Subject
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There is never any pure censorship or pure lifting of censorship, which makes one doubt the rational purity of this concept.
CENSORSHIP AND THE PRESENT CONJUNCTURE
The year 2011 saw a unique centenary – the centenial disestablishment of the Swedish Board of Film Censorship (Statens Biografbyrå – hereafter SBB). The SBB was established around fifteen years after films had first begun to be screened in public in Sweden. Since the earliest film performances in the last years of the nineteenth century the police authorities had been responsible for the licensing of such screenings, and had granted or refused licences in the context of the prevailing popular concerns about detrimental effects of the new medium on audiences, and, as is the case today, in the context of film classification regimes, with a view to the supposed dangers film images posed to minors. In 1905 in a move which initiated the transition of control of film performances to the state, the Office of the Governor of Stockholm published a declaration that included the following:
Exhibitions of films shall not include any material that is offensive to public decency or disrespectful to the authorities or private individuals, nor pictures depicting the commission of murders, robberies or other serious crimes, and exhibitions that are open to children shall not include pictures depicting events or situations that are liable to arouse emotions of terror or horror in the audience or for other reasons be considered unsuitable for children to look at. Furthermore, pictures that are liable perversely to excite children's imagination or otherwise to have an adverse effect on their mental development or well-being shall not be passed for exhibition at performances to which children under the age of 15 are admitted.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Culture , pp. 124 - 144Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013