CENSORS AND CENSORSHIPS OF MODERNITY
CENSORS AND CENSORSHIPS OF MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: Even if one of the most important emblems of our modern world is the Declaration of Human Rights, Modernity revealed its inventiveness when it came to devising means of censoring what was considered to flagrantly go against the main stream. This paper aims at analysing the ambiguous concept of censorship and the various forms it acquired during Modernity. Sometimes oscillating between religious, moral and political forms, some other times combining them all, the censorship system found different means (either pre- or post- publication) of controlling and restricting the freedom of speech and thought. The attitude towards censorship has always been conflicting since it was regarded most of the time as an impediment for the free development of literature and of art in general, ignoring its role in keeping defamatory and slanderous publications under control. Censorship also helped in the creation of different strategies of indirection meant to disguise the severity and harshness of criticism in those texts susceptible to be censored. Postmodern theory, in spite of many tragic incidents that occurred during the twentieth century, does not focus only upon the negative aspects of censorship, also referring to inherent censorship (since no text can totally escape censorship and the author’s self-imposed censorship consisting in the selection and revision before publication) and to incomplete censorship (since no matter how strict it might be a text always finds its means to elude censorship). Going beyond the oppressive system of censorship in Communist Europe or the excessively punitive one still at work in the Islamic world we are faced with new forms of silent censorship and with the awareness that no matter how much we may try to evade this we will always live under one form of censorship or another.

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