Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of Lehman Brothers, if the Anglophone academy could be said to have arrived at any consensus about the value of Marxist theory, it would be that Marxism was a quaint historical curio at best and a world-historically hubristic folly at worst. Today, however, well on our way through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we live in a moment of greatly renewed interest in Marxist ideas. This curiosity is (...) stoked by, among other factors, the worldwide economic shocks of 2008 and, in more recent times, by impending climate catastrophe, incipient fascisticization, and the still-ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. Any of these on its own would stand out as a rebuke to the neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s, famously crystallized in Francis Fukayama's assertion that humanity had arrived at "the end of history," there to find permanently expanding capitalist prosperity. Taken together, they present at least strong prima facie evidence for what Karl Marx identified as the inherently and ineluctably crisis-ridden nature of capital and, therefore, good reason to encounter his writings anew. (shrink)

This paper discloses and furthers the rebirth of comedy in Continental philosophy in three stages. The first treats Greek comedy, bringing forth the comic contours in Plato and exploring the philosophical content of Aristophanic comedy. The second examines certain German encounters with comedy, from the staid Wieland translations of Aristophanes through the thoughtful discussions of Schiller, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The third investigates twentieth-century American comedy and its connection to American Continental philosophy, and includes a close analysis of the Marx (...) Brothers' Horsefeathers . The latter serves as a bridge to some surprising developments regarding comedy, poetry, and philosophy. (shrink)

Abe and his friend Sol are out for a walk together in a part of town they haven't been in before. Passing a Christian church, they notice a curious sign in front that says "$1,000 to anyone who will convert." "I wonder what that's about," says Abe. "I think I'll go in and have a look. I'll be back in a minute; just wait for me." Sol sits on the sidewalk bench and waits patiently for nearly half an hour. Finally, (...) Abe reappears. "Well," asks Sol, "what are they up to? Who are they trying to convert? Why do they care? Did you get the $1,000?" Indignantly Abe replies, "Money. That's all you people care about." Ted Cohen thinks that's not a bad joke. But he also doesn't think it's an easy joke. For a listener or reader to laugh at Abe's conversion, a complicated set of conditions must be met. First, a listener has to recognize that Abe and Sol are Jewish names. Second, that listener has to be familiar with the widespread idea that Jews are more interested in money than anything else. And finally, the listener needs to know this information in advance of the joke, and without anyone telling him or her. Jokes, in short, are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes. _Jokes_ is a book of jokes and a book about them. Cohen loves a good laugh, but as a philosopher, he is also interested in how jokes work, why they work, and when they don't. The delight at the end of a joke is the result of a complex set of conditions and processes, and Cohen takes us through these conditions in a philosophical exploration of humor. He considers questions of audience, selection of joke topics, the ethnic character of jokes, and their morality, all with plenty of examples that will make you either chuckle or wince. _Jokes:_ more humorous than other philosophy books, more philosophical than other humor books. "Befitting its subject, this study of jokes is... light, funny, and thought-provoking.... [T]he method fits the material, allowing the author to pepper the book with a diversity of jokes without flattening their humor as a steamroller theory might. Such a book is only as good as its jokes, and most of his are good.... [E]ntertainment and ideas in one gossamer package."—_Kirkus Reviews_ "One of the many triumphs of Ted Cohen's Jokes-apart from the not incidental fact that the jokes are so good that he doesn't bother to compete with them-is that it never tries to sound more profound than the jokes it tells.... [H]e makes you feel he is doing an unusual kind of philosophy. As though he has managed to turn J. L. Austin into one of the Marx Brothers.... Reading Jokes makes you feel that being genial is the most profound thing we ever do-which is something jokes also make us feel-and that doing philosophy is as natural as being amused."—Adam Phillips, _London Review of Books_ "[A] lucid and jargon-free study of the remarkable fact that we divert each other with stories meant to make us laugh.... An illuminating study, replete with killer jokes."—Kevin McCardle, _The Herald_ "Cohen is an ardent joke-maker, keen to offer us a glimpse of how jokes are crafted and to have us dwell rather longer on their effects."—Barry C. Smith, _Times Literary Supplement_ "Because Ted Cohen loves jokes, we come to appreciate them more, and perhaps think further about the quality of good humor and the appropriateness of laughter in our lives."—Steve Carlson, _Christian Science Monitor_. (shrink)

Abe and his friend Sol are out for a walk together in a part of town they haven't been in before. Passing a Christian church, they notice a curious sign in front that says "$1,000 to anyone who will convert." "I wonder what that's about," says Abe. "I think I'll go in and have a look. I'll be back in a minute; just wait for me." Sol sits on the sidewalk bench and waits patiently for nearly half an hour. Finally, (...) Abe reappears. "Well," asks Sol, "what are they up to? Who are they trying to convert? Why do they care? Did you get the $1,000?" Indignantly Abe replies, "Money. That's all you people care about." Ted Cohen thinks that's not a bad joke. But he also doesn't think it's an easy joke. For a listener or reader to laugh at Abe's conversion, a complicated set of conditions must be met. First, a listener has to recognize that Abe and Sol are Jewish names. Second, that listener has to be familiar with the widespread idea that Jews are more interested in money than anything else. And finally, the listener needs to know this information in advance of the joke, and without anyone telling him or her. Jokes, in short, are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes. _Jokes_ is a book of jokes and a book about them. Cohen loves a good laugh, but as a philosopher, he is also interested in how jokes work, why they work, and when they don't. The delight at the end of a joke is the result of a complex set of conditions and processes, and Cohen takes us through these conditions in a philosophical exploration of humor. He considers questions of audience, selection of joke topics, the ethnic character of jokes, and their morality, all with plenty of examples that will make you either chuckle or wince. _Jokes:_ more humorous than other philosophy books, more philosophical than other humor books. "Befitting its subject, this study of jokes is... light, funny, and thought-provoking.... [T]he method fits the material, allowing the author to pepper the book with a diversity of jokes without flattening their humor as a steamroller theory might. Such a book is only as good as its jokes, and most of his are good.... [E]ntertainment and ideas in one gossamer package."—_Kirkus Reviews_ "One of the many triumphs of Ted Cohen's Jokes-apart from the not incidental fact that the jokes are so good that he doesn't bother to compete with them-is that it never tries to sound more profound than the jokes it tells.... [H]e makes you feel he is doing an unusual kind of philosophy. As though he has managed to turn J. L. Austin into one of the Marx Brothers.... Reading Jokes makes you feel that being genial is the most profound thing we ever do-which is something jokes also make us feel-and that doing philosophy is as natural as being amused."—Adam Phillips, _London Review of Books_ "[A] lucid and jargon-free study of the remarkable fact that we divert each other with stories meant to make us laugh.... An illuminating study, replete with killer jokes."—Kevin McCardle, _The Herald_ "Cohen is an ardent joke-maker, keen to offer us a glimpse of how jokes are crafted and to have us dwell rather longer on their effects."—Barry C. Smith, _Times Literary Supplement_ "Because Ted Cohen loves jokes, we come to appreciate them more, and perhaps think further about the quality of good humor and the appropriateness of laughter in our lives."—Steve Carlson, _Christian Science Monitor_. (shrink)

Preface: The dog's bollocks-- at the media dinner party -- Introduction: "The Marx brothers", "The Elvis of cultural theory", and other media clichés -- The mediated imp of the perverse -- Žižek's tickling shtick -- Big (Br)other : psychoanalysing the media -- Understanding the media : the sublime objectification of ideology -- The media's violence -- The joker's little shop of ideological horrors -- Conclusion: Don't just do it : negative dialectics in the age of Nike.

Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful attention to the treatment of humor in philosophy, Todd McGowan locates the universal source of comedy in the interplay of the opposing concepts lack and excess. After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working (...) in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay. Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy."--Publisher's summary. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Terry Comito NOTES ON PANOFSKY, CASSIRER, AND THE "MEDIUM OF THE MOVIES" The modesty of my title is not feigned. Panofsky's essay on "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures"1 is more often quoted than understood, and much of it proves upon examination to be curiously elusive. The notes and hypotheses offered here are tentative ones, meant only to point us in the direction of answers to two questions. (...) How might Panofsky's well-known formulation ("the medium of the movies is physical reality as such") most usefully be construed?—useful for us as viewers and then perhaps as critics of movies. And what might he plausibly be supposed to have intended? It is to be hoped that these two points are not impossibly remote from one another. In a recent discussion of "Fact and Fiction in Literature," Roger Shattuck takes Panofsky's essay as an extreme instance of a "belief in the basically documentary nature of film." According to Shattuck, Panofsky supposes that a "film grows naturally out of material things," that it is generated spontaneously, without the intervention of authorial consciousness, from the "undifferentiated reality" before which a camera needs only to be set in motion. Now this is a familiar enough parody of "realist" theories of cinema. But it would be a curious position for anyone really to assert, and particularly curious for a writer so committed as Panofsky to idealist aesthetics. There is, to be sure, a puzzle about the way such an aesthetic might take account of an art that is said somehow to "do justice" to a materialistic interpretation of the world (p. 31). (We would presumably want to know if the justice in question is distributive or commutative: rendering unto Caesar or robbing Peter to pay Paul?) But does a disciple of Cassirer really need to be lectured at about the priority of the whole to the parts, or to be informed that what we call "reality" is constituted in the act of perception? There 229 230Philosophy and Literature are confusions enough in Shattuck's essay to suggest that he is not our best guide over an admittedly strenuous terrain. He informs his readers that Panofsky (and apparently Bazin and Kracauer too) "anticipate " the views of "many structuralists and semioticians," as if there were not a fundamental difference between the autonomy of écriture and the "animistic" view of physical reality Shattuck attributes to Panofsky and his followers. He then introduces a distinction between documentary and fiction films that makes Panofsky the prophet of Warhol, Wiseman, and South American snuff-films, when in fact he talks about Disney, the Marx Brothers, and the derivation of movies from comic strips and dime novels. All this is worth bringing up because Shattuck does raise some crucial issues, if only by so noticeably fudging them. Like most of us who have responded to Panofsky's essay, he has chiefly in mind the assertion that "the medium of the movies is physical reality as such" (p. 31). He wants to construe this as saying that movies "document" or certify the world of external objects and thereby encourage certain sorts of naivete: the belief that we are secure in our knowledge of the world "out there," and that the world really is "out there," independent of our hypotheses and untainted by our uncomfortable consciousness. That movies have often fueled some such nostalgia for the world seems undeniable, but the question elided in Shattuck's discussion is the critical one. To what extent and in what ways does a statement about the "medium" of the movies commit us to a position as to their proper content, or to a specific social program, or to a particular metaphysical understanding of the world? Shattuck cuts through these knotty matters rather than unraveling them. He talks as if Panofsky claims that physical reality as such is the subject matter of movies—which is where Warhol and cinéma vérité come in, as the inheritors of the tradition of Balzac. But this is not what Panofsky says, and it does not accurately describe the parameters of his taste. He objects to "artistic prestylization" in the manner of Caligari, and he thinks... (shrink)

Diderot?s universe is somewhat weird, often dreamlike and hallucinatory, and his ontology fluid and elusive. It comprises the existing, the non-existent and even contradictory entities, the boundaries between which cannot always be clearly delimited. This universe in which nothing is of the essence of a particular being and everything is more or less something or other, resembles the amorphous and oneiric world of Zhuangzi in which nothing is clearly defined, while essenceless things, floating in uncertainty and indeterminacy, literally blend into (...) one another. The author examines what the early Hollywood comedies of Preston Sturges and the Marx brothers can teach us about the metaphysics and the principles at work in this complex and intricate world. Didroov univerzum je unekoliko neobican, cesto nalik na san, halucinatoran, a njegova ontologija fluidna i neuhvatljiva. Ona, naime, obuhvata kako postojeca tako i nepostojeca, pa cak i protivrecna bica, izmedju kojih nije uvek moguce postaviti jasne granice. Taj univerzum, u kojem nista nema sustinu posebnog bica i svaka stvar je vise ili manje bilo koja stvar, mozda jos najvise podseca na Cuang Ceov amorfni i oniricni svet, u kojem nema nicega razgovetnog, a stvari koje bez ikakve esencije plutaju u neizvesnosti i neodredjenosti se doslovno prelivaju jedna u drugu. Autor razmatra sta nam o metafizici i principima koji vaze u tom kompleksnom i slozenom svetu mogu reci rane holivudske komedije Prestona Stardzesa i brace Marks. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Strangeness of AlterityJolanta Saldukaitytė (bio)The problem of strangeness can be approached from different angles: aesthetic, sociological, psychological, cultural, etc. Strangeness can be found as well in the strangeness of experience: I as stranger to myself, or the strange place I find myself, or the strange people who surround me. These would enable us to uncover the uncanny (Freud, Heidegger), or discuss sociological notions of alienation (Marx) or (...) the aesthetic method of ostranienie (Shklovsky, Brecht), just to mention a few additional accounts of strangeness. The goal of the present essay, however, is not to show various forms and aspects of strangeness, horizontally, as it were, but to address the very meaning of strangeness, intensively or vertically. Even more specifically, the present essay discusses the strange as at once that which comes from the outside and as that which addresses me.In the first part, I present a general notion of strangeness, mainly concentrating on strangeness as what is peculiar or weird. Some studies by Bernhard Waldenfels will be considered here. In the second part, the problem of strangeness is examined in the context of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, primarily in terms of his notion of personal otherness and the question of the link between strangeness and such [End Page 95] alterity. For the latter point of view, juxtaposing the difference and relatedness of strangeness and Levinasian alterity, we ask the question of if and of how alterity is strange.Relative StrangenessFirst let us clarify what we usually or generally call strange. No doubt different languages uncover slightly different aspects, but in most cases in searching for the strange we bring up similar images: distant, unseen places — something like the lands of Gulliver’s Travels — with their unusual inhabitants and weird customs or distant times, past and future, with their unfamiliar communities and peculiar customs. We may even conjure aliens from undiscovered galaxies or fantastical creatures and monsters — unicorns, nymphs, vampires, dragons — or unusual and peculiar animals — a platypus, albino cave-dwelling fish, elephants. Perhaps unexplained earth phenomena, like Stonehenge, or seemingly paranormal events that are the inspiration for cults and imagination. We may encounter David Lynch’s Elephant Man or Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, or conjure the holy fool, madmen, the third little brother fool Ivan from the European fairytale, or even Prince Myshkin of Dostoyevsky. No doubt all these images do not coincide or cohere. They unveil various different aspects of strangeness: on one hand, we see that strangeness belongs to the realm of the imaginary while, on the other hand, it is part of the world; or, one may say, the latter has existence, or a more stable existence, while the former does not. What gives them a commonality, however, is that in each instance there is some disruption of order, of discourse, a shaking of the established conception of the world and knowledge, going beyond what is familiar, ordinary, and normal. In each case, there is something unusual, weird, peculiar. In each case, there is a putting into question of our aesthetical sensibilities, moral norms or practices, and epistemological knowledge. In other words, using Levinas’s vocabulary, this kind of the strange is a rupture in [End Page 96] the discourse of totality. By “totality” here we understand universalizing order, system, a way of thinking that does not allow otherness, exteriority, anomaly, differences, or, in some sense, strangeness. The univocal discourse of totality, of coherence and consistency without exception, is a discourse of violence because it must suppress even the possibility of ruptures in continuity: the other must be reduced to the same. Totality allows nothing discontinuous: everything must have a place, within, a part, not an exception.The strange as the weird and peculiar, however, opens such a closed universe to discontinuity, variety, and heteronomy. According to Waldenfels, who has developed a phenomenology of the alien/strange with careful precision, strange as weird and peculiar applies to the order of things, to various forms of life and to forms of experience.1 Strangeness understood as difference in kind, as the peculiar, according to Waldenfels, might appear in various forms: (1) everyday strangeness that belongs to or occurs within... (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 27-32. “My”—what does this word designate? Not what belongs to me, but what I belong to,what contains my whole being, which is mine insofar as I belong to it. Søren Kierkegaard. The Seducer’s Diary . I can’t sleep till I devour you / And I’ll love you, if you let me… Marilyn Manson “Devour” The role of poetry in the relationalities between people has a long history—from epic poetry recounting tales of yore; to emotive lyric poetry; to (...) rude, irreverent limericks; to Hallmark cards which have ditties that allow one to cringe, and somehow fall in love at the same moment. Without going into a notion of aesthetics, or attempting to choose which form of poetry is superior, we might want to consider why the form of poetry itself has long been a part of relationality. And whilst doing so, we might always keep in mind that poetry—especially poetry that moves, transports us—is the form that Plato has been warning us about, particularly if we want to become good citizens.As Avital Ronell teaches us in Stupidity : the poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy—a being who at least since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes (287). And considering that the philosopher is the lover of wisdom, we might begin to ask ourselves why one lover is warning against another—if the philosopher is in love with wisdom, then is the poet perhaps his rival, his challenger, for that very love? For, one must also remember that Plato—through Socrates—mentions constantly that Homer is his favourite. Moreover, by adopting both his own voice, whilst mixing it with Socrates’, Plato is adopting the form of poetry that he warns most about—the warning almost serves more as a homage to poetry than anything else. Here, we might open the register that one of the main reasons that he ejects a particular kind of poet is on the grounds of effecting effeminacy on the populace—good poetry moves you, affects you, transports you, shifts you beyond reason, puts you “out of your mind.” However, Plato also teaches us that rhetoric in its highest form requires divine inspiration by way of the daemon, or the muse. This moment of divine intervention is one that seizes—perhaps even ceases—you; putting you “beyond yourself.” In other words, a good rhetorician must always already be open to the possibility of otherness—the same otherness that possibly resides in the feminine. One could also trace this back to the poet that he both loved, and feared, most—Homer. Perhaps the effect of effeminacy that Homer's poetry opened is precisely the source of its power: through listening to Homer, one's body, one’s habitus is opened to the possibility of the feminine. And here, one must remember that the source of all learning—and all teaching—also lies in mimesis, in repetition, in habit. Once the habitus is opened to the possibility of invasion, of intervention, of otherness, there is quite possibly no possibility of distinguishing whether the mimesis is that of reproduction, or if there is always already a productive aspect to it. And by extension, if learning cannot be controlled, the very notion of teaching itself is shifted from a master-student relationality to one where the master is potentially changed as well—the relationality between the master and the student is not only inter-changing, but one cannot even know who is teaching, or learning, at any point. All that can be said is that they are in a relationality; which means that one is ultimately unable to locate the locus of knowledge, of wisdom—the site of which Plato is attempting to convince us is the sole domain of the philosopher. And it is this that philosophy is cringing from. To compound matters, philosophy is striving for wisdom; which can only come from the Gods. In other words, this is a gift that has to be bestowed on them—and more than that, wisdom is always already exterior to one’s control and knowledge. At best, it is the role of one to recognise the gift, to answer the call as it were. Here, if we listen carefully, we can hear the echo of Alexander Graham Bell, and the telephone. And as we are attempting to respond to the call of wisdom—the call that both poetry and philosophy are listening out for—it might be helpful to recall the agreement between Alexander Graham Bell and his brother Melville. In the biography, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude , Robert V. Bruce notes that Aleck and Melly made a “solemn compact that whichever of us should die first would endeavour to communication with the other if it were possible to do so” (63). Since Melville was the one who passed on first, this pact put the onus on Aleck to receive the call of his brother. If you take into consideration the fact that until Melville’s death, both brothers had been working on an early prototype of the telephone, the instrument of distant sound can be read as an attempt by Aleck to maintain the possibility of keeping in touch with Melly, of hearing the voice from beyond. However, this was a connection that was not premised on any knowing, reason, or rationality; it was rather, one that was based on hope, and born out of love. And here, if we eves-drop on a cross-line with The Telephone Book , we can pick up the voice of Avital Ronell once again and hear, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading” (380). In other words, the telephone can be read as the openness to the possibility of responding to the other; one that might always remain unknown. Even in this day of caller-identification, we can never know for sure who the other person on the line is until we pick up: hence, the only decision we can make—the effects of which we remain blind to until it affects us—is to either pick up or not, to either respond or not. And it is not as if the decision to pick up comes without risks: each time we answer a call, we run the risk of it ruining our day. Even when we don’t know who the caller is, perhaps especially when we don’t know who the person on the other end of the line is—and here one only has to think of prank calls—we are leaving ourselves completely open to being affected by another. Thus, philosophy finds itself in the position of Vladimir and Estragon. Since they have no idea who Godot is, they can never know if or when he shows up—thus, if he (and we are taking his gender on the word of the boy, some boy—we don’t even know if it is the same boy—who comes round in the evening) has already come, they would not be in the position to know it. And even if someone comes to them and announces that “I am Godot,” the wait would not be over—without referentiality to the name, they would have to take on faith that that person is indeed Godot. Hence, all they can know is that they are waiting for Godot; and Godot is the name of that waiting itself. All philosophy can know is that it is waiting; and wisdom is the name of that waiting itself. Which brings us to Tina Turner’s eternal question, “what’s love got to do, got to do with it?” In order to begin to consider that, we have to first attempt to examine the notion of love itself. Perhaps we might begin to consider what the difficulty of the statement “I love you.” For, if love is a relationality between two persons—both of whom remain singular, and are attempting to respond to each other—this suggests that neither of them subsume the other under themselves. In other words, the other remains wholly other. If this is so, then the “you” in the statement always remains shrouded in mystery. And even if the “you” was replaced with the name of the person, the veiling remains: for, names refer both to the singularity that is the person, and also every other person bearing that name, at exactly the same time. To compound matters, the only time one has to utter a persons name is in their absence—thus, the correspondence of a name to that particular person is at best an affect of memory. And if we consider the notion of memory, we have to also open the register of forgetting—bringing along with it the problem that there is no object to forgetting. For instance, when one utters “I forgot,” all one is uttering is the fact that one has forgotten, and nothing more—the moment there is an object to the statement, one has strictly speaking remembered what one has forgotten. Moreover, we have no control over when forgetting happens to us. And since it is always already exterior to us, affects us, and has no necessary object, there is no reason to believe that every moment of memory might not bring with it a moment of forgetting. Hence, whenever we utter a name—even if we accept the correspondence between the utterance and the person in front of us—all we are doing is uttering the fact that we are naming. Thus, it is not so much that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ but more appropriately, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’—the relationality between its name and the phenomenon of its sweet smell can only be established after that moment of naming, that instance of catachresis. So, whenever one utters “I love you,” not only is it a performative statement, it is the very naming of that love—all you are doing is establishing a relationality between you and the other. And since there is no necessary referent—one is naming that referentiality as one utters it—this suggests that it is always already a symbolic statement; without which the mystery of the other cannot me maintained. In other words, one cannot love the other without maintaining this symbolic distance—through a ritual; in this case the utterance “I love you.” This might be why Valentine’s Day seems to provoke such a massive reaction: the most common one from people (besides florists) being, Valentine’s Day is mere commercialism. Those among the nay-sayers who maintain a soft spot for Karl Marx would proceed to call it the commodification of relationships; those who prefer the Gods would claim that the sanctity of relationships has been profaned; the gender theorists would note how the fact that males buy the gifts only serves to highlight the unequal power-relation between the genders. Whichever side and variation of the arguments they choose boils down to this: the discomfort lies in the fact that they are confronted with the notion of relationships moving into a mediated sphere. The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only; it should not only remain between them, but more pertinently, be an unmediated experience between two persons. Which of course completely misses the point. For, if we reopen the register that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, there must then be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is, one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding; effectively effacing the other. If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationality; all negotiation is gone and the other person is a mere extension of the self—one is in a masturbatory relationality with one’s imaginary. Hence, any relationship must always already carry with it the unknown, and possibly always unknowable. The other person is an enigma, remains—must remain—enigmatic to you. This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person—and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is. For, if the mystery of the other is unveiled, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love: one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; a check-list. And if they are knowable, this suggests that they can also be negated, and hence, the love can also go away. Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event—and if it is an event, then strictly speaking, it cannot be known before it happens; at best, it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realised retrospectively. At the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere: this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, I was struck by love;” or even more so by, “I was blinded by love.” This is a blinding to not only the subject of the encounter—the self—but also of the very object of that encounter, the “you”—all that can be said is that there is an encounter. And it is for this reason Cupid is blind: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time), but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. Since there is an unknowable relationality with the other person, the only way you can approach it is through a ritual. This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the God(s), one has no choice but to approach them symbolically. These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless—the actual content is interchangeable—as it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets; and secrets are never about their content(s). Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret. This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work: since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret. Occasionally the actual content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance. For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings. In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognise the significance of the knowledge of my birthday. This means that you have to know that you know something. Since the God(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the God(s). The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritualised role. It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them. The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange. Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received. This means that the worst thing that one can do is not give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person. This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the reciprocal gift would be nothing more than a calculated return. The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind. In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and also a reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). Naturally, this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. But it is precisely the stupidity involved that saves the relationship from being banal—more importantly, stupidity prevents it from entering the mere profane. This is not to say that an enigmatic love cannot end—of course it can. However, the difference lies in the fact that if the relationality is wholly transparent, it is subsumed under reason—completely predictable, within the self, and thus never open to the possibility of otherness, exteriority, musing. A love that is an event is one that is also open to the possibility of the divine, the sacred—always already closer to the possibility of wisdom. If we establish that both love and wisdom are exterior, to our knowledge, and the finitude to our selves, this suggests that both are names for the possibility of openness to otherness. In other words, and what choice do we have here but to use the words of the other, the philosopher—the lover of wisdom—is a name for one who is waiting, and nothing more. But that still leaves us with the question of this uncomfortable relationality between philosophy and poetry. But before we address that question, we have to take a momentary detour, and consider the whether it is possible to call one a poet. For, if we take the notion of a poet to be one who reaches the highest levels of rhetoric (beyond the lawyer, and the orator, who only aim to either please the crowds, or convince by way of sophistry), then we must also acknowledge that one can only become a poet at the moment of seizing, the point of inspiration, by the muses. Without this divine moment, all (s)he can do is practice her craft. As no one can control when the muses make their appearance, one could always be practising in vain—in some way, one is always already practising to be least in the way when the muse whispers into one’s ear; one is practising so as not to be vain. And since one cannot know when the muse will appear, there is no time frame to the practising—unlike the lawyer who speaks against a clock, poetry knows no time; the only time that matters is the time appropriate to poetry itself. Thus, all the poet (if one can use this term) is practising for the possibility of effacing her/him self—and waiting. Thus, in order for poetry to occur, in order to be seized, the poet—along with all her concerns—must cease. In other words, there is no poet; there is only the possibility of poetry. However, even as there is no time frame to this waiting, even as all we can say is that poetry is a name for waiting, the one who is practising is always already also in time. And since (s)he is in a symbolic relationality with the possibility of poetry, this suggests that the practising is her sacrifice, and time is precisely what she is sacrificing. Here, it might be helpful to turn to a strange source when it comes to poetry—Georges Bataille—and consider his teachings in the first volume of The Accursed Share where he reminds us that, the “essence [of sacrifice] is to consume profitlessly .” This is where each exchange is beyond rationality, beyond calculability, beyond reason itself, “unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.” He continues: Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates. It does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order.” (58) Since there is no need for a physical change in the object of sacrifice—“it does not have to destroy as fire does”—this suggests that the tie is severed symbolically. Hence, there is an aspect of trans-substantiation in this sacrifice: the form remains the same; in fact there is no perceivable change—this is the point at which all phenomenology fails—but there is always already a difference, an absolute separation from the “real order,” from logic, calculability, reason. The object of sacrifice, the victim [,] is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth…Once chosen, he is the accursed share , destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things…” (59). And it is this tearing away from the order of things—the order of rationality—that “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane” (55). For, only when it is no longer useful, when it is no longer abstracted—subjected, subsumed under—merely a use-value, can the object be an object as such, can a subject be a subject as such; be a singularity. Thus, it is never so much who or what is sacrificed, but the fact that there is a sacrifice. So even as (s)he is sacrificing her time to poetry, it is always already beyond her knowledge whether what (s)he is doing is actually preparing her for poetry or not—all (s)he can know is that she is sacrificing and nothing more. Hence, all (s)he can do is to open her self to the possibility of this relationality—all (s)he can do is be in love with poetry. At the moment the muse whispers into her ear, (s)he ceases to be, and becomes a medium for poetry—and since this possession is always already beyond our cognitive knowledge, this is also a moment of divine wisdom. In other words, there is no difference between poetry and wisdom—the moment of poetry is the moment of wisdom. And this might be the very reason for the philosopher’s aversion to poets. Not so much because they may corrupt the youth (this is after all the aim of all thinking, all philosophy), but precisely because in order to do so, the philosopher must wait for a moment of possession, for divine musing, for poetry. Hence, all thought, all thinking, all philosophy, is nothing but the waiting for the possibility of poetry itself. (shrink)

If forced to state Feuerbach’s philosophical genealogy, one would have to say that he was son of Hegel, father of Marx, and half-brother of Comte. In his own day he had many a celebratory and many a vilifier. His philosophy has received very little direct treatment in the English language. Feuerbach’s contribution was in his writings on religion and philosophy, each of them a manifesto to humanity, telling us that the desires of men can be satisfied here below. The (...) object of this book, first published in 1941, is twofold. It is its intention to pay humble tribute to a little understood philosopher whose stature grows with the years, and in so doing perhaps to provide a key to the question of religion and personal immortality for those who reject philosophical idealism and a personal God. (shrink)

If forced to state Feuerbach’s philosophical genealogy, one would have to say that he was son of Hegel, father of Marx, and half-brother of Comte. In his own day he had many a celebratory and many a vilifier. His philosophy has received very little direct treatment in the English language. Feuerbach’s contribution was in his writings on religion and philosophy, each of them a manifesto to humanity, telling us that the desires of men can be satisfied here below. The (...) object of this book, first published in 1941, is twofold. It is its intention to pay humble tribute to a little understood philosopher whose stature grows with the years, and in so doing perhaps to provide a key to the question of religion and personal immortality for those who reject philosophical idealism and a personal God. (shrink)

This chapter traces Taubes’s covenantal apocalypticism from Occidental Eschatology to The Political Theology of Paul—the two books which beginning readers of Taubes should focus upon. Taubes’s writings present and enact the memory of apocalypticism as the memory of the covenant. The historic figures he deals with in his works—St. Paul, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Barth, and Schmitt—are the enemy brothers in the struggle with whom Taubes finds a way to live in the presence of God.

The period between 1830 and 1848 is not only a period of political upheavals, not only the beginning of the so called Industrial Revolution in Germany, but also an extraordinary philosophical era characterized by Hegel’s scholars. The so called Vormärzphilosophie was dominated by two different schools of Hegelianism. There was one faction which saw in the continuation of Hegel’s speculative system philosophy the intellectual fundament of a modern constitutional state. On the other side stood those “philosophers of the future” like (...) the brothers Ludwig and Friedrich Feuerbach or Karl Marx who worked on a complete break with Hegel’s system of science because of its theological roots. Going back to the idea of an absolute spirit meant from this perspective going back to a non-enlightened school of thinking. The philosophy of future was a philosophy with a strong practical accent as Marx had put into words in his 11th thesis on Feuerbach. First step of this practical program was the secularization, which was first of all an educational program, since the church educated the teachers, wrote the school books and prevented any enlightenment of the people. In the consequence people were not only treated as bad sinners, but also as eternal subject with no right of political participation. So the break with Hegel and the Hegelian theory of a Christian state opened the door to a united and democratic Germany. The way to democracy and unity was long. It took – seen from 1848 – 100 years to give Germany a lasting constitution and 140 years to unite. (shrink)

Proceeding from the premise that Lucilius’ hexameter Aetheris et terrae genitabile quaerere tempus (fr. 1 Marx - I 1 Charpin) was inspired by Euripides fr. 182a Kannicht (Αἰθέρα καὶ Γαῖαν πάντων γενέτειραν ἀείδω), sung by Amphion the musician in Antiope, the author advances two further propositions about the fragment: first, that Lucilius, influenced by the famous debate in that play between Amphion and his brother, associated satire with the active life and the genres of didactic poetry and tragedy with (...) the contemplative life ; and secondly, that Lucilius’ direct model may have been not Euripides’ tragedy, but Pacuvius’ Latin rendering of it. (shrink)

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was born in Landshut, Bavaria, the son of Paul Johann Anselm, a renowned legal theorist who had been called from Jena by the king of Bavaria to modernize the kingdom’s penal code. Feuerbach’s brothers all became distinguished scholars in their fields and his nephew Anselm a renowned classicist painter. After enrolling in theological studies in Heidelberg, Feuerbach became enthralled in Hegel’s philosophy and moved to Berlin to study with him. He presented his dissertation in 1828 at (...) the university of Erlangen and began his career there as a young Privat Dozent. Posterity has associated Feuerbach’s name to his anthropological critique of religion, presented in the 1841 The Essence of Christianity. Yet his writings touched on many other areas of philosophy. His life-long interest in religion arose from his attempt to solve the classical, fundamental questions of philosophy, of the human being’s place in the world, the relationships between thinking and being, reason and nature, mind and body, and the epistemological implications entailed in answering these questions. (shrink)

The Principles of Fair Information Practice are almost three decades old and need to be broadened to take account of new technologies for collecting personal information such as drug testing, video cameras, electronic location monitoring and the internet. I argue that the ethics of surveillance activity must be judged according to the means, the context and conditions of data collection and the uses/goals and suggest 29 questions related to this. The more one can answer these questions in a way that (...) affirms the underlying principle the more ethical the use of a tactic is likely to be. Four conditions are identified which, when breached, are likely to violate an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy. Respect for the dignity of the person is a central factor and emphasis is put on the avoidance of harm, validity, trust, notice and permission when crossing personal borders. (shrink)

Durante los años 1853 y 1854 surgió una ola de huelgas en varios distritos industriales de Inglaterra, especialmente en los sectores textiles de Lancashire y Manchester. Este ciclo de luchas, que pugnaba principalmente por un aumento de los salarios, fue visto por Ernest Jones y el movimiento Cartista como una oportunidad para organizar una asociación obrera a escala nacional. Karl Marx, que compartía la visión de los cartistas, analizó el movimiento desde el New York Tribune, brindando apoyo a la (...) iniciativa a la que dio lugar: el Parlamento Obrero. A continuación, se ofrece la traducción de cuatro textos periodísticos que Marx publicó en apoyo a la institución obrera –la mayoría inéditos en español–, seguidos de «Las luchas por la organización obrera en la época victoriana (1853-1854)», un estudio crítico sobre el ciclo de huelgas y las expectativas de organización obrera durante aquellos años, donde se defiende que este fallido intento de organización constituye un precedente de la sección británica de la Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores. La traducción y edición de los textos de Marx, y el estudio crítico que los acompaña, han sido realizados por Mario Espinoza Pino (Universidad de Granada). (shrink)

On 4 and 5 April 1983 the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry celebrated its 50th anniversary with an invited conference titled, “Where Are We Going?;—Critical Issues in Science and Technology.” This article is a slightly revised version of Professor Marx's talk given there.—Ed.

This lecture by Professor Werner Marx, of Freiburg University, was presented at the Moscow Hegel Convention on November 2, 1974. It is here translated for the first time by Professor James C. Risser, of Seattle University.

We consider the problem of the product finite model property for binary products of modal logics. First we give a new proof for the product finite model property of the logic of products of Kripke frames, a result due to Shehtman. Then we modify the proof to obtain the same result for logics of products of Kripke frames satisfying any combination of seriality, reflexivity and symmetry. We do not consider the transitivity condition in isolation because it leads to infinity axioms (...) when taking products. (shrink)

Der Band gibt wichtige Impulse für die methodologische Reflexion der historischen Kulturwissenschaften. Er geht auf eine Tagung zurück, deren Thema "Dichtung und Wahrheit. Zum Verhältnis von Narration und Erklärung in den Kultur-, Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften" war. Die Autoren greifen zum ersten Mal im kulturwissenschaftlichen Kontext Anregungen vor allem aus der Analytischen Philosophie auf und diskutieren ihren Wert für historisches und kulturwissenschaftliches Arbeiten. Im Fokus der Untersuchungen steht eine Begriffstrias, die für die Sozial-, Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften gleichermaßen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (...) eine große Herausforderung darstellt: Erklären, Verstehen und Erzählen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hamlet’s PerfectionJohn D. CoxHamlet’s Perfection, by William Kerrigan; xviii & 179pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $29.95.While acknowledging that his reading of Hamlet is “idiosyncratic and unfashionable” (p. x), Kerrigan offers no apologies for it, asserting, instead, that tradition is worth vindicating, because “those who have been trained in a tradition may discard it, but those who come after, students of the discarders, will be simply oblivious” (...) (pp. 2–3). Putting all his cards on the table, Kerrigan acknowledges four influences in the tradition he defends: literary formalism, historical scholarship, intellectual history, and psychoanalysis (pp. xii–xiii).Hamlet criticism thus “begins with the Romantic Germans” (p. 1), and they eventually give rise to Freud, who “influences most of the criticism of our century” (p. 14), even when critics (like Eliot) disagree with him. Kerrigan’s reading of the tradition is illuminating, subtle, informed, and informative, and he uses it to establish his reading of the play, working within the tradition but extending it in hitherto unseen and insightful ways. Of course Hamlet delays for Kerrigan, but no one has ever explained his delay so carefully or with so many other factors taken into account. “This seems to me much the best reading yet of the delay,” Kerrigan asserts (p. 76), and one is inclined to assent, given the assumptions.But why make these assumptions? Kerrigan dismisses postmodern criticism: it is a symptom of “our current decadence” (p. 31) and has contributed “little to the elucidation of Hamlet” (p. xi). Since the elucidation of texts and characters is not the aim of postmodern critics, they unsurprisingly fail at what they do not attempt. Yet they follow a tradition established, for the most part, by Marx and Nietzsche, and Kerrigan does not explain why he venerates one of Paul Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion,” namely Freud, and not the other two.In fact, many readers may feel that Kerrigan fails to avoid decadence himself. He relates his Oedipal explanation of Hamlet’s delay to the observation that Shakespeare never has anything good to say about cosmetics, even though he was a man of the theater. Kerrigan relates this “split,” in turn, to early traumas in Shakespeare’s life. The fact that Mary Shakespeare had lost two daughters before William’s birth means that she must have been overattentive to him as an infant, yet she must have weaned him nine months before birth of younger brother Gilbert, thus splitting William’s attitude toward her between resentment of her overattention and resentment of being displaced at the breast. Kerrigan finds evidence of the latter in Timon 4.3.114–20, where Timon inveighs against “milk-paps” as “horrible traitors” (p. 78). Never mind that these are virgin’s paps and that Timon’s emphasis is sexual, not maternal: breasts are traitors to Timon as sex objects, not as sources of nutrition. The critic’s confusion between virgin and maternal breasts perhaps explains why Kerrigan places Thaisa in a brothel in Pericles, rather than Marina (p. 80), but I am not sure what psychological explanation to offer for this particular split. [End Page 381]Kerrigan would do well to heed the postmodern insight that we all speak out of a specific tradition, with the attendant lesson that tolerance and mutual respect across traditions is imperative, since “ridiculous” and “mockable” are relative to context, as Corin points out to Touchstone.In privileging Freud, Kerrigan not only dismisses the heritage of Marx and Nietzsche but underestimates the importance of what lies behind all three. For the Romantic/Freudian tradition cannot claim to have originated either character analysis or individuality, which Kerrigan purports to value. “A man’s character is his fate,” Heraclitus says, perhaps generalizing from Homer, but the insight would eventually inform Aristotle’s notion of an ethics based on virtuous character, which in turn was Christianized by Thomas (where it complements the moral sense of individual worth that Hamlet acknowledges in the providential oversight of sparrows), and came to influence the Reformers in various ways. Kerrigan has good things to say about Stoicism in Hamlet, but to assert that “It all begins with the Romantic Germans... (shrink)

The complexity of the satisfiability problems of various arrow logics and cylindric modal logics is determined. As is well known, relativising these logics makes them decidable. There are several parameters that can be set in such a relativisation. We focus on the following three: the number of variables involved, the similarity type and the kind of relativised models considered. The complexity analysis shows the importance and relevance of these parameters.

IntroductionLifestyle modifications are part of comprehensive treatment plans to help manage the symptoms of pre-existing chronic conditions. However, behavior change is notoriously difficult as patients often lack the necessary support. The present manuscript outlines the development of a Green Health Prescription pathway that was designed to link patients with appropriate lifestyle interventions and to support attendance. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats analysis was undertaken in three focus groups to highlight areas of strength and weakness within the proposed pathway prior to (...) delivery. The SWOT analyses revealed that the pathway was supported by all three focus groups. Weaknesses and threats were identified including sustainability of nature-based interventions in terms of funding, the need to connect patients with appropriate interventions based on their physical and mental health needs, and the requirement to have a “one-stop shop” for information to ensure that the pathway was accessible for all service-users and healthcare professionals. Results were addressed and considered throughout the development of the pathway.DiscussionThe Green Health Prescription pathway was launched in 2019 and gave patients the ability to receive a prescription from a healthcare professional, community service, or to self-refer. The pathway allows patients to contact a consultant, via a telephone service, who is trained to match them with a programme that the patient believes will be enjoyable and that fits their treatment needs. Data collection to assess the efficacy of the pathway is ongoing. (shrink)

Summary In this paper I inquire by way of a phenomenological description whether the experience of an encounter with one's own mortality could not so transform a person's ethos that the virtues of justice, compassion and neighborly love could ensue. I will concentrate on such an encounter in and through the mood of dread. This paper, in opposition to Heidegger, is only concerned with it's effect regarding our ethical comportment. I claim that the mood of dread not only destroys the (...) mood of indifference, but also sends him on a pathway of self‐transforming moods. As to the “understanding” accompanying moods in the field of ethical comportment I try to show that it has the character of a direct non‐ratiocinative insight.RésuméJe voudrais dans cet article examiner, à l'aide d'une description phénoménologique, si l'expérience que constitue la rencontre avec la perspective de sa propre mort ne peut pas transformer l'éthique d'un homme de telle manière que les vertus de justice, de pitié et de reconnaissance de la dignité humaine puissent s'y développer. Je me limite ici à une telle rencontre avec un sentiment d'horreur. Cet article n'aborde — contrairement à la manière dont Heidegger conçoit l'angoisse — que l'effet sur le comportement éthique. Je suis d'avis que le sentiment d'horreur non seulement détruit celui d'indifférence, mais dispose l'homme à vouloir se changer lui‐me̊me. Quant à la »compréhension« des sentiments accompagnant le comportement éthique, je montre qu'elle a le caractère d'une intuition immédiate et non rationnelle.ZusammenfassungIn diesem Aufsatz möchte ich auf dem Wege einer phänomenologischen Beschreibung untersuchen, ob die Erfahrung einer Begegnung mit der eigenen Sterblichkeit das Ethos eines Menschen nicht so verwandeln kann, dass sich die Tugenden von Gerechtigkeit, Mitleid und mitmenschlicher Anerkennung entwickeln können. Ich beschränke mich dabei auf eine solche Begegnung in der und durch die Gestimmtheit des Entsetzens. Dieser Aufsatz erörtert — im Gegensatz zu Heideggers Auffassung der Angst — nur die Wirkung auf unser ethisches Verhalten. Ich bin der Auffassung, dass die Gestimmtheit des Entsetzens nicht nur die Stimmung der Gleichgültigkeit zerstört, sondern den Menschen auch auf einen Weg der selbstverändernden Gestimmtheiten sendet. Was das »Verstehen« begleitender Stimmungen im Bereich des ethischen Verhaltens betrifft, so versuche ich zu zeigen, dass dies den Charakter eines unmittelbaren, nicht‐rationalen Einsehens hat. (shrink)