Oblicisme: Surgery on the Contemporary Archive
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This preprint establishes Oblicisme as both a formal semiotic system and a critical decolonial methodology designed to perform "surgery on the contemporary archive." Building on a systematic analysis of Italy's recent Decree-Law n. 23/2026 (converted into Law 24 April 2026, n. 54, widely known as the Security Decree), this paper maps the structural and institutional continuity of state-sponsored subordination from the historical colonial era (Code Noir 1685, Álvará Real 1512, Code de l'Indigénat 1881) to contemporary technocratic legislation. While historical colonial archives recorded immediate physical violence (hanging, branding, dismemberment), the violence of Decree 54/2026 operates through biological, spatial, and bureaucratic containment. To address this paradigm shift, the author introduces five new Oblicist diacritical signs into the grammatical system to scarify five contemporary institutional violences:1. The red subscript for biometric extraction and bodily tracking.2. The blue tilde (ã) for maritime refoulement and border drownings in the Mediterranean.3. The gray degree sign (°) for spatial exclusion, urban banishment, and CPR confinement.4. The amber schwa (ə) for the structural suppression of the right to legal defense.5. The purple ordinal indicators (º/ª) for nominal reification and bureaucratic depersonalization. By transmuting cold legislative prose into "scarified archives" (Œuvre VIII), this research challenges the neutral facade of modern bureaucracy, exposing the violent mechanics of contemporary biopolitics and necropolitics.
Author: SIEWE MINGUEU, FRANCIS BRICE
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7162000914
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