Patrick ffrench 'Potential Not To Be: Bersani and Dutoit's _Forms of Being_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 9 no. 3, January 2005 Peter Caws 'Theory as Criticism: Bersani and Dutoitπs _Forms of Being_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 9 no. 4, January 2005.

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit _Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity_ London: British Film Institute, 2004 ISBN 1844570150 185 pp.

Résumé Le rapprochement de Whitehead avec le courant émergentiste, notamment Samuel Alexander, Conwy Lloyd Morgan et Charlie Dunbar Broad, met en lumière l’articulation entre la dimension processuelle de sa philosophie et son effort pour rendre compte du caractère signifiant de l’univers. Pour tous, la philosophie se doit de montrer que ce qui relève de l’esprit appartient pleinement à la nature, et n’a pas à être rejeté dans un non-lieu métaphysique. Mais, chez Whitehead, cet effort prend une tournure différente, impartiale, en (...) décentrant la notion d’« esprit » de la référence exclusive à la mentalité humaine. (shrink)

Derrida's new book bears a special significance because it focuses on an issue that has informed the whole of his work up to the present. One of the aporetic experiences touched upon is that "my death" can never be subject to an experience that would be properly _mine,_ that I can _have_ and _account_ for, yet that there is, at the same time, nothing closer to me and more properly _mine_ than "my death.".

O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar a semântica da palavra Eros dentro da tradição cristã. Limita-se a algumas dessas significações. A reflexão mostra a limitação dessa expressão na língua portuguesa. Seu significado é muito mais rico na língua grega. Se a tradição cristã carregou esta palavra de forma negativa, outros Padres leram-na em sintonia com Ágape e com outros significados. A relação mística a interpreta como uma relação “erótica” entre homem e Deus. Esta intimidade procura explicar o aspecto do desejo (...) de Deus e da relação mútua entre aquele que ama e o amado, que tem sua raiz na busca mais íntima da humanidade. Negar por preconceitos palavras carregadas de desejos não divinos e nem dignos da humanidade, como na Antigüidade, é reduzir demais seu campo semântico na história. Esta palavra reflete o amor da alma para com Deus numa perspectiva mística, assume variações significativas, dentre tantas, como o amor de Jesus Cristo, como sinônimas de Ágape, do amor de Deus para com os homens, como amor individual ligado a Deus, o Eros como virtude e como castidade. A compreensão das dimensões do amor se realiza na capacidade de ver que todas elas são positivas e importantes para obtermos o equilíbrio da vida humana, numa harmonia destas dimensões constitutivas e importantes para a vida. Palavras-chave: Eros; Patrística; Amor; Alma; Mística; Virtude; Castidade e Ágape. ABSTRACT This article aims at demonstrating the semantics of the term Eros in Christian tradition, pointing out the limitations of the term in Portuguese. The scope of its meaning is much wider in Greek. If Christian tradition has charged the word with a negative feature, other priests have read it in tune with Agape and other meanings. The mystical perspective interprets it as an ‘erotic’ relationship between man and God. Such intimacy attempts to explain God’s desire and the mutual relation between the one who loves and the beloved, rooted in mankind’s most intimate longing. To deny, on account of prejudice, words charged with non-divine desires unworthy of humanity, as happened in antiquity, is to reduce their semantic field in history. That word reflects the soul’s love for God in a mystical perspective and assumes meaningful variations, among which Christ’s love, ‘Agape’ or God’s love for men, and individual love connected with God: ‘Eros’ as virtue and chastity. The comprehension of the dimensions of love takes place in the capacity to realize that they are all positive and relevant to human life’s balance, in the harmony of those dimensions that constitute life. Key words: Eros; Patristics; Love; Soul; The mystical; Virtue; Chastity; Agape. (shrink)

Efforts have been dedicated to the understanding of social-ecological systems, an important focus in ethnobiological studies. In particular, ethnobiological investigations have found evidence and tested hypotheses over the last 30 years on the interactions between human groups and their environments, generating the need to formulate a theory for such systems. In this article, we propose the social-ecological theory of maximization to explain the construction and functioning of these systems over time, encompassing hypotheses and evidence from previous ethnobiological studies. In proposing (...) the theory, we present definitions and two conceptual models, an environmental maximization model and a redundancy generation model. The first model seeks to address biota selection and its use by human populations. The second emphasizes how the system organizes itself from the elements that were incorporated into it. Furthermore, we provide the theoretical scenario of plant selection and use from an evolutionary perspective, which explicitly integrates the phylogenetic relationships of plants and human beings. (shrink)

Efforts have been dedicated to the understanding of social-ecological systems, an important focus in ethnobiological studies. In particular, ethnobiological investigations have found evidence and tested hypotheses over the last 30 years on the interactions between human groups and their environments, generating the need to formulate a theory for such systems. In this article, we propose the social-ecological theory of maximization to explain the construction and functioning of these systems over time, encompassing hypotheses and evidence from previous ethnobiological studies. In proposing (...) the theory, we present definitions and two conceptual models, an environmental maximization model and a redundancy generation model. The first model seeks to address biota selection and its use by human populations. The second emphasizes how the system organizes itself from the elements that were incorporated into it. Furthermore, we provide the theoretical scenario of plant selection and use from an evolutionary perspective, which explicitly integrates the phylogenetic relationships of plants and human beings. (shrink)

Part of the task of doing moral philosophy is to strengthen our confidence in morality or to bring back the gravitas of morality. I argue that this cannot be done by a representational view of moral reality and by downplaying the importance of human sentiments that make our moral assertions more natural and authentic.

According to contemporary moral realism a moral property, like goodness or badness, is either a natural property or a non-natural property of actions or situations. Contemporary moral naturalists like Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink are a group of philosophers who are often referred to as Cornell realists because of their connection with Cornell University. Frank Jackson is another contemporary moral naturalist who is one of the leaders of The Canberra Planners at the Australian National University with which he (...) is connected. Jackson defends “the most extreme form of naturalism.” Jackson’s view is considered extremeby those who disagree with him because he believes that moral properties are reducible or identical to natural properties. This view of Jackson is opposed by contemporary non-naturalists like Jonathan Dancy, Derek Parfit, and Russ Shafer-Landau for reasons which in my view are not successful. Despite Jackson’s reductionism about the ethical, the Cornell realists, nevertheless, agree with him that moral properties are natural properties. (shrink)

This article analyzes the role played by Immanuel Kant's defense of the death penalty, in the first and the second years of Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars, delivered from 1999 to 2001. Regarding the first year, the initial part of this article charts how Derrida introduces Kant's writings that purport to elaborate the categorical imperative of the death penalty, not by Kant's primary arguments but rather precisely through Kant's concession of an exception to this categorical imperative, concerning the impunity of (...) a mother's infanticide. Derrida's lectures juxtapose Kant's philosophy of the death penalty with Victor Hugo's claim for the inviolability of life, and in doing so, the sessions introduce other examples of the applicability of the death penalty to mothers who have killed their children. What is at stake is the status of philosophy relative to the death penalty. Concerning the second year, the latter part of this article isolates the logic of Kant's categorical imperative, as deconstructed by Derrida, through recourse to the additions that Kant was obliged to append to his initial argument—those involving precisely sex crimes. The article follows how Derrida thoroughly takes apart both the simplicity of Kant's categorical imperative of the death penalty by means of the complications that are its abyssal foundation and the phallogocentrism of Freud's sexual oppositions through the extraction of insights into another thinking of sexual difference that Freud's categories foreclosed. (shrink)

& co-graphy names here writing experienced as differance of ‘now’ and ‘then’, of memory and erasure called here ‘saw’ and ‘was’ and the rupture that const...

The epigraph from Adieu. À Emmanuel Levinas for this issue is here throughout the linchpin, the Triebfeder or the spring, the feather of impulse, of drive or of desire, out of which this paper attempts to formulate the relation, “in Derrida,” of desire and obligation, sexual pleasure and moral law, Emmanuel Levinas and Immanuel Kant, the letters b + l (and thus the words and things called éblouissement [dazzlement], obligation, oblivion, obliquity, bells and cloches, Mallarmean alarms), mourning and melancholy, but (...) and butt, rams (béliers) and rebellion, rebellion and oblivion, good conscience and good unconsciousness, and, ultimately, non-reading and reading. (shrink)

TRECHO DO DISCURSO DE PROMULGAÇÃO DA CONSTITUIÇÃO FEDERAL DE 1988, EM 5 DE OUTUBRO.

Today, an extensive body of research has been produced on the history of mobilisation by residents of working-class neighbourhoods in France and by those who identify with them. These analyses have changed our understanding of contemporary mobilisations, but the existing discourse should not prevent us from reflecting on the alternative modes of engagement that are emerging in these neighbourhoods. These commitments contribute to the “making” of a distinct political culture, rooted in practices and discourses hybridised within working-class lifestyles. Is there (...) an elective affinity between Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and the mobilisations of working-class neighbourhoods? If so, how can this framework provide a productive interpretation of the ordinary actions interwoven into the daily fabric of these social spaces? One way of answering these questions is to consider these actions as a form of political knowledge that reveals alternative ways of considering politics. (shrink)

Comment éviter les contradictions et les impasses de la double conscience inhérentes à la prise de parole depuis la subalternité? En s’appuyant sur les travaux de l’historien algérien Daho Djerbal, cet article d’Ulysse Rabaté instruit une lecture décoloniale des mobilisations dans les « quartiers populaires », depuis la marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme de 1983 jusqu’à aujourd’hui. L’auteur, militant et chercheur en sciences politiques, propose de comprendre comment ces activismes des banlieues ou des cités, comme on les (...) a nommés, ont été marginalisés voire exclus du domaine de la politique légitime. (shrink)

Les mobilisations qui émergent depuis plusieurs décennies dans les quartiers populaires français se font à distance des structures établies d’énonciation de la politique. Ce que nous pourrions considérer avec le vocabulaire de Guattari comme un mouvement de déterritorialisation s’est réalisé dans le cadre de rapports de pouvoirs spécifiques, invisibilisés par la grammaire des conflits politiques. Identifier les lignes de fuite élaborées dans la pratique par des mobilisations souvent considérées hors-radars (« ce n’est pas de la politique »), impose de « (...) sortir de la langue » et contourner les modes de signification qui sont aussi modes de confiscation. Les outils légués par Félix Guattari nous aident à affronter une question qui demeure : réside-t-il dans cette brèche creusée en conflit avec les « données » de la domination, un mouvement irrépressible vers la transformation des rapports sociaux du capitalisme, et donc une cohérence des subjectivations et des pratiques en direction de cet objectif? (shrink)

Si Marx aujourd'hui doit retrouver la radicalité qui a porté en ses premiers commencements sa pensée révolutionnaire, il faut rompre définitivement avec les évidences les mieux établies de son interprétation. La pensée de Marx, loin de pouvoir être rattachée au sol du matérialisme, s'enracine au plus profond de l'idéalisme allemand dans ce mouvement de pensée qui vient contester en ses fondements ultimes la métaphysique et son ordre, l'ordre d'un entendement captif de l'horizon borné de la positivité. Pensée de subversion de (...) l'ordre de la positivité, la pensée de Marx se laisse alors définir comme un mouvement de déstabilisation du monde, mise en abyme de son fondement. Cette disqualification an-archique de l'arche est au principe de la pensée de la révolution radicale et de la mise en question fondamentale du pouvoir. Dans l'espace ouvert par cette double Bestimmung, idéaliste, an-archique, la pensée de Marx, en opposition à toute interprétation qui y voit une pensée du social, définit un individualisme radical qui se veut la critique absolue de toute volonté d'édification d'un nouvel ordre, individualisme qui ne laisse plus rien prévaloir qui fasse violence à la valeur de sens de l'autonomie.The road to Marx's thought supposes as its condition a movement of radical depositioning in relation to the classically established guidelines for journeying through his work. Marx's thought, in opposition to any interpretation which sees therein a reflection on the social sphere, defines a radical form of individualism which is intended as the absolute criticism of any desire to construct a new order, an individualism which allows absolutely nothing which might obstruct the value of the meaning of autonomy to prevail. (shrink)

Se saisir de la réalité, du monde sensible, de façon subjective énonce la 1re thèse sur Feuerbach. Qu'engage pour la pensée matérialiste de Marx un tel appel ? Que faut-il comprendre sous le terme du matérialisme quand il s'agit de la philosophie de Marx ? À quel matérialisme nous renvoie la révolution théorique qui s'effectue dans les thèses sur Feuerbach ?Notre texte vise à apporter une réponse à ces questions en montrant que si le matérialisme de Marx doit définir quelque (...) chose d'inédit, il ne peut en aucun cas s'identifier à ce qu'en a fait la tradition marxiste, tout au contraire il définit une pensée nouvelle de la subjectivité, celle de la « gegenstandliche Tatigkeit», pensée que requiert l'impératif pratique de la onzième thèse sur Feuerbach : la transformation du monde.The first thesis on Feuerbach calls for a subjective apprehension of reality and of the world perceived by the senses. What does such a program entail for Marx's materialist thought ? What should be included under the term "materialism" when we consider Marx's philosophy ? To what materialism are we directed by the theoretical revolution effected in the theses on Feuerbach ?Our text attempts to answer these questions by showing that if Marx's materialism must define something theoretically unprecedented, it certainly can not be identified with this interpretation within the Marxist tradition. On the contrary, it defines a new way of thinking about subjectivity, the « gegenstandliche Tatigkeit », a way of thinking which requires the imperative of praxis enjoined in Feuerbach's eleventh thesis : the transformation of the world. (shrink)

I evaluate the metaphysical plausibility of the non-naturalist view of moral properties. I will mainly concentrate my evaluation on the views of Shafer-Landau (henceforth just S-L) whose defence of moral non-naturalism is the most lucid and vigorous so far. I shall try to show its metaphysical problems and defend Jackson’s Occamist naturalism about moral properties which I consider to be more consistent with the supervenience platitude.

La place qu’occupe la matière dans la définition de la substance sensible évolue au cours des livres Z et H de la Métaphysique : là où les chapitres 10 et 11 du livre Z affirment que la matière doit être exclue du definiens de la substance sensible, le chapitre 2 du livre H affirme, au contraire, qu’il se doit de l’inclure. Le présent article montrera que cette différence de doctrine est issue d’un approfondissement de la manière dont la priorité causale (...) de la forme est exprimée dans la définition. Elle l’est d’abord, dans le livre Z, au moyen d’une réduction des termes du definiens aux seules « parties de la forme », réduction qui est d’emblée jugée superflue et insatisfaisante. Elle le sera ensuite, dans le livre H, par la position de prédicat de la matière qu’elle occupe et qui a précisément vocation à exprimer sa priorité. En ce sens, les deux ensembles de textes ne constituent pas une volte-face théorique de la part d’Aristote, mais l’approfondissement d’un seul et unique modèle de définition visant à exprimer la priorité de la forme. (shrink)

Resumo: O artigo trata da especificidade de um dos produtos tecnológicos de vigilância e de ataque aéreos mais importantes em uso atualmente, os drones, mostrando em que sentido essa nova tecnologia traça um marco decisivo na evolução do domínio dos ares e, portanto, como sugere Carl Schmitt, na transformação do campo teológico-político das sociedades contemporâneas. A imanência radical do campo político proposta pelo liberalismo, diagnosticada por Schmitt, terá nos drones um de seus instrumentos mais exemplares. Para caracterizar a especificidade dos (...) drones frente a outros aparelhos visuais e aéreos de guerra, será proposta uma aproximação com o conceito de imagem-tempo de Gilles Deleuze, de tal modo a determinar essa sua singularidade a partir das propriedades intrínsecas da imagem gerada. A principal característica da imagem-tempo deleuziana a ser integrada à análise dos drones será seu aspecto tátil. Nesse momento, a aproximação dos livros de Deleuze sobre o cinema com sua obra escrita com Félix Guattari será essencial para determinar a dimensão política da imagem-drone.: This paper deals with the specificity that characterizes one of the most important technological aerial products dedicated to surveillance and attack being in use nowadays, the drones, showing in which sense this new technology is a decisive turning point in the evolution of the domination of the skies and therefore, as suggested by Carl Schmitt, in the transformation of the political-theological field in contemporary societies. The radical immanence of the political field proposed by liberalism, such as Schmitt described it, finds in drones one of its most typical instruments. To characterize the specificity of drones regarding other visual and aerial war machines, it will be proposed an approximation with the Deleuzian concept of image-time, in order to determine its singularity through the intrinsic properties of the images so produced. The main characteristic of the Deleuzian time-image to be integrated in the analysis of drones will be its haptic aspect. At this point, the relation between Deleuze’s cinema books and his work in collaboration with Félix Guattari will be essential to characterize the political dimension of the drone-image. (shrink)

Tradução do texto "Da verdadeira Theologia Mystica", de G. W. Leibniz.

Este artigo analisa as anotações que Leibniz escreveu, em 1678, sobre a então recém-publicada Ética de Espinosa, mostrando como elas prefiguram alguns desenvolvimentos posteriores de sua teoria metafísica. Partindo de uma análise das críticas de Leibniz à Proposição 2 da Parte I da Ética, o artigo mostrará como as discussões sobre a compatibilização entre liberdade e determinismo, que ocuparam o centro de suas preocupações metafísicas nas décadas seguintes, retomam, ainda que com modificações, temas e problemas tratados nessas notas. Particularmente, será (...) mostrado que a relação entre autonomia e poder de escolha pode ser melhor compreendida como um desenvolvimento de teses exploradas nessa leitura inicial da obra de Espinosa. (shrink)

O presente artigo examina o modo como Leibniz figurou as relações entre o pensa- mento filosófico e o pensamento místico, recorrendo para isso ao contraste entre suas teses e as de Spinoza. Trata-se de mostrar que a transcendência do fundamento da racionalidade levará Leibniz, de forma à primeira vista surpreendente, a uma valorização da totalidade do campo imanente da experiência humana como fonte de conhecimento. O erro do spinozis- mo, segundo Leibniz, consiste justamente em, ao tornar imanente o fundamento, perder (...) de vista a especificidade cognitiva e ética da experiência. (shrink)