Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality.

Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in _Before the Law_, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics. Wolfe argues that the human­­­-animal distinction must be supplemented with the central distinction of biopolitics: the difference between (...) those animals that are members of a community and those that are deemed killable but not murderable. From this understanding, we can begin to make sense of the fact that this distinction prevails within both the human and animal domains and address such difficult issues as why we afford some animals unprecedented levels of care and recognition while subjecting others to unparalleled forms of brutality and exploitation. Engaging with many major figures in biopolitical thought—from Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault to Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida—Wolfe explores how biopolitics can help us understand both the ethical and political dimensions of the current questions surrounding the rights of animals. (shrink)

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic LiteraturesCary Howie (bio)Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008, xii + 254 pp.Sahar Amer’s Crossing Borders adds to the expanding bibliography on medieval sexualities by showing the resonances between certain female same-sex relationships in medieval French literature and analogous, though generally more explicit, relationships between women (...) in the medieval Arabic tradition. In the process, sexuality becomes a way of talking about the porous boundaries that constitute the field of Old French, and perhaps even Western, literature as such.Amer’s book couldn’t have arrived at a better time, as Sarkozy’s French government once again, in the name of French values, intervenes in the debates around religion and clothing in the public sphere, debates in which the old divides between France and its constitutive others—in this case, certain kinds of Islam and certain kinds of women— have once again come to the fore. By proposing that “medieval French writing is essentially a hybrid, cross-cultural project” (163), Amer contributes not just to the emerging sense of the Middle Ages’ postcoloniality (as articulated by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Sharon Kinoshita, among others) but also to the work being done by intellectual historians and cultural theorists such as Joan Scott and Diane Rubenstein on the fantastic investments that take place within and around French universalism (which could be said to inform the idea of the literary no less than the idea of the citizen).Crossing Borders begins with the notion of borders as “fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration” (ix), and it is the emphasis on a more general sense of cultural exchange, more than the fact of borders per se, that will permeate the chapters that follow. (In fact, the border, like “the lesbian,” Amer’s polemical term of choice for the women she describes, may be important for her argument precisely insofar as it resists visibility, as it remains to some extent difficult to locate.) Amer’s reading of Old French texts, in dialogue with a handful of medieval Arabic narratives and erotic compilations, proceeds from an understanding of medieval culture in which there is “a continuity rather than a rupture between medieval and modern conceptions of alternative [End Page 156] sexualities” (9), and in which it is possible to argue for influences that are tough, if not impossible, to trace empirically. According to this logic, ideas and stories may have circulated “next to” more tangible material goods taken to and from the Arab Islamicate world (13), and French authors may have “culled some elements from Arabic material and wove[n] them into a literary fabric to suit their audience’s sensibilities” (163). This attentiveness to what “may have” happened (e.g., 44, 110) is one of the signature gestures of Amer’s critical poetics, which I am tempted to describe as an imaginative historicism, committed at once to the explanatory power of historical context and to what Amer will repeatedly call the “imagination of the audience” (e.g., 79).After an initial chapter outlining this “cross-cultural” poetics of contextualization and imaginative investment, chapter 2, “Crossing Linguistic Borders,” is dedicated to seven stanzas of a late twelfth-century poem, Étienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, in which a long description is given of women who go “against Nature” by “join[ing] shield to shield without a lance” (32). Amer reads these military metaphors for female homoeroticism in light of Arabic sources including, for example, al-Jurjani’s eleventh-century Anthology of Metonymic Devices, in which one of the cited commonplaces observes, “They [lesbians] manifest a war in which there is no spear-thrusting” (36). Most provocatively, Amer argues for the Arabic provenance of two otherwise untranslatable words in Étienne’s text, “trutennes,” which she traces to an Arabic root meaning “the mons of the beloved” (40), and “eu,” which she interprets as an orgasmic onomatopoeia. From mons to moans, the “medieval French literary lesbian” is a condensation of forms and fantasies—and noises—that come from before and beyond medieval France. In fact, the... (shrink)

The principle of liberal neutrality requires governments to avoid acting to promote particular conceptions of the good life. Yet by determining who uses natural resources and how, environmental policy makers can affect the availability of resources needed by individuals to carry on meaningful lives and in doing so can effectively privilege some versions of the good life at the expense of others. A commitment to liberal neutrality by implication promotes environmental policy that accommodates competing activities in order to provide a (...) wide range of resources that can support diversity in individual lives. It also encourages caution with regard to legislation based on deep ecology, the intrinsic value of species, and the fear of impending environmental catastrophe. (shrink)

The persistently high rates of sexual assault on college campuses have led to an increasing demand for a solution to the problem. In response, research in the field is growing rapidly. With any expanding field, proper focus needs to be given to ethical dilemmas that may arise when studying a sensitive topic. College students who have experienced a sexual assault are a highly vulnerable population. As the current literature is limited, this article considers the ethical implications of conducting research with (...) college sexual assault victims. Drawing upon the 2010 American Psychological Association Ethics Code, specific ethical concerns including respect for persons, competence, confidentiality and privacy, and beneficence and nonmaleficence are discussed. Recommendations for researchers studying sexual assault in college students are provided. (shrink)

Patients with apraxia perform poorly when demonstrating how an object is used, particularly when pantomiming the action. However, these patients are able to accurately identify, and to pick up and move objects, demonstrating intact ventral and dorsal stream visuomotor processing. Appropriate object manipulation for skilled use is thought to rely on integration of known and visible object properties associated with ‘ventro-dorsal’ stream neural processes. In apraxia, it has been suggested that stored object knowledge from the ventral stream may be less (...) readily available to incorporate into the action plan, leading to an over-reliance on the objects’ visual affordances in object-directed motor behaviour. The current study examined grasping performance in left hemisphere stroke patients with (N = 3) and without (N = 9) apraxia, and in age-matched healthy control participants (N = 14), where participants repeatedly grasped novel cylindrical objects of varying weight distribution. Across two conditions, object weight distribution was indicated by either a memory-associated cue (object colour) or visual-spatial cue (visible dot over the weighted end). Participants were required to incorporate object-weight associations to effectively grasp and balance each object. Control groups appropriately adjusted their grasp according to each object’s weight distribution across each condition, whereas throughout the task two of the three apraxic patients performed poorly on both the memory-associated and visual-spatial cue conditions. A third apraxic patient seemed to compensate for these difficulties but still performed differently to control groups. Patients with apraxia performed normally on the neutral control condition when grasping the evenly weighted version. The pattern of behaviour in apraxic patients suggests impaired integration of visible and known object properties attributed to the ventro-dorsal stream: in learning to grasp the weighted object accurately, apraxic patients applied neither pure knowledge-based information (the memory-associated condition) nor higher-level information given in the visual-spatial cue condition. Disruption to ventro-dorsal stream predicts that apraxic patients will have difficulty learning to manipulate new objects on the basis of information other than low-level visual cues such as shape and size. (shrink)

The sports media landscape has shifted to favor outlets with inside access to sports organizations, teams, and athletes. This study interviews 21 NFL in-house reporters working at 19 official team websites to determine how they view their roles as sports journalists, including ethical standards and shifts in media boundaries. Qualitative interviews uncovered that cultivating a positive team image and protecting the interests of stakeholders supersede the production of objective news stories, even from those who started their careers as external sports (...) reporters. Internal reporters are often conflicted with their roles in the sports media ecosystem. Additionally, interviews reveal their efforts to maintain a balancing act between the established ideals of journalism with the positive spin that accompanies public relations. The present study illuminates how such positions both mirror and diverge from the expectations typically placed within sports journalism, while offering fruitful avenues for subsequent scholarly investigation. (shrink)

The West's foremost translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm thought deeply about how contemporary readers could benefit from this ancient work and its perennially valid insights into change and chance. For him and for his son, Hellmut Wilhelm, the Book of Changes represented not just a mysterious book of oracles or a notable source of the Taoist and Confucian philosophies. In their hands, it emerges, as it did for C. G. Jung, as a vital key to humanity's age-old collective (...) unconscious. Here the observations of the Wilhelms are combined in a volume that will reward specialists and aficionados with its treatment of historical context--and that will serve also as an introduction to the I Ching and the meaning of its famous hexagrams. (shrink)

The idea of the Guantánamo detainee as a Muselmann , the lowest order of concentration camp inmates, contains within it important implications for the new understanding of sovereignty in the era of Guantánamo, in an age of exception. The purpose of this article is to explain the status of those who are detained at Guantánamo Bay. Stated broadly, in assessing that status, we will emphasize the connection between the altered meaning of sovereignty that has accompanied the placing of prisoners in (...) an American penal colony in Cuba and the biopolitical status of the prisoners who reside there. More particularly, we will locate the points of convergence among the factors (the war on terror, sovereignty, and the media) that have produced and reconstituted the legal and ethical status of Guantánamo detainees. (shrink)

We propose that middle childhood female ambivalent attachment, given the adaptive problem of uncertainty of future investment, is designed to evoke immediate investment from current caregivers, rather than new investment sources. We suggest greater specificity of strategic attachment solutions to adaptive problems that differ by sex, time, and relationship type.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Waiting for CriticismCary Howie (bio)1Critical AttentionIf it is often the case that so much of what we do, as writers in a certain idiom and profession, is to wait for criticism—in the form of peer reviews, book reviews, tenure reviews, and so many other kinds of review that one would not be wrong to characterize the profession as constitutively myopic, incapable of seeing anything without looking at it again—there (...) may nonetheless be another sense in which to understand this work of waiting, this waiting for work, that comes to be called, more often than not, critical. In other words, what would it mean to think criticism as a mode of taking (and making) time? What if one of the most crucial things we do when we read and write—but also, and still more importantly, when we look at or participate in the world—is to wait? This essay aims to give space, and time, to the question of critical attention, even as it will become clear that aiming is really the last thing anyone can be expected to do while they wait.What, then, could it mean to be critically attentive? That is to say, how might it be possible to give an account of those processes and states of suspension and expectation that lie within the moment or the sequence of critical attention? This question may seem less obvious—although there’s nothing wrong with the obvious—if we recall the resonance that attention has, in French or Italian for example, with certain words for waiting, with attente or attesa; if we take seriously how attending to something or someone may also be to wait for them. Critical attention, in this way, would put on hold—for a while if not necessarily forever—the evaluative and policing functions that so frequently attend what comes to be called critical; and it would do so precisely because it would take seriously what it means, and what it feels like, to attend.For Martin Seel, this is a specifically aesthetic question: “It is,” he says, near the beginning of his Aesthetics of Appearing, “a basic characteristic of all aesthetic relations that in them we take time for the moment” [20]. To take time for the moment, as Seel puts it, is also, I’d argue, to give time; to inscribe a kind of waiting at the heart of that moment, to respond, capaciously, to the objects or persons who are convoked there. This encounter—or what I’m tempted to call this convocation—is bound up, for Seel, with the complex presence of the encountered object: “Aesthetic perception,” he writes, “wants to take something in this light, in this movement, in this tone, in this roughness and coldness, in this weather and taste” [34]. This sequence—and notice how Seel returns to that deictic pronominal adjective “this” again and again—shows at least two things: the extent to which aesthetic perception’s mode of “taking” is no mere appropriation, given the drawn out, the literally distracted, effect of the object on the perceiver; and how this deictic disarray, caught up in “this” and “this” and “this” and “this,” is fed and fueled by a kind of wanting. Aesthetic perception, in other words, wants to take; but it ends up being taken. And when it is a matter of wanting—indeed, when it is a matter of being literally for the taking—the question and the encounter become more than just aesthetic. “Attention,” Simone Weil says, “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, [End Page 43] and ready to be penetrated by the object.”1 To wait for the world, for Weil, is to prepare to be entered by that (or perhaps another) world. The attentive position or disposition is also an erotic one. This preparation—about which more will be said in the second part of this essay—takes place not as prophylaxis but as seduction.I’d like, accordingly, to ask how we, singularly and in common, may be taken or, in Weil’s words, penetrated by the objects and persons we attend to; and how they, more often than not... (shrink)

Phenomenology’s reversal of naturalism hinges on the central claim that the worldly objects that we experience acquire their ontological solidity throughout series of intentional acts that are accomplished over the course of our subjective and intersubjective lives. This posture has historically given rise to realist critiques stating that such a “correlational” ontology undermines our capacity to formulate a coherent discourse on generative natural events that predate humans, such as the Big Bang, the Earth’s accretion, the formation of the oceans, etc. (...) In this paper, I articulate a Merleau-Pontian response to this problem. I establish a continuity between the temporality that is at play in the genesis of empirical bodies and the pre-objective tension that precedes perceptual givenness. I therefore suggest treating the past of nature as a transcendental past, always at work within our present experience, instead of an objective moment that would have determined in advance a causal chain of events. (shrink)

Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, which enjoyed both critical and popular success, features a bright colour palette and an eerily playful tone alongside a dark narrative exploring complexities of grief, depression, and bad relationships. The remote Swedish community to which protagonist Dani, her boyfriend, and his friends travel for a mid-summer festival is designed around beautiful objects, collective experiences, and rituals that foreground communal emotions, all of which contrast the technologically mediated communications foregrounded at the film’s outset. In (...) fact, this community offers meticulously constructed antidotes to the loneliness of the modern world, and to Western ideals of masculine emotional distance…but at a cost. This paper examines the intersection of emotion, community, and gender in Midsommar, using the concept of affective design – usually associated with technology design – as well as work on group-based emotions, to interrogate the film’s vision of a community that challenges gender norms and the boundaries of emotional experience. Through the depiction of ingroup boundary-policing, stark contrasts between visions of masculinity, and lush visions of aesthetic experience and emotional release, Midsommar offers a series of convincing compensatory mechanisms that invite viewers, along with the main character, to temporarily compromise morality for the sake of belonging. (shrink)

This essay is about the United States Supreme Court's discursive creation of two kinds of persons, one corporate the other criminal, during its 1886 term. The aim is to contrast the Supreme Court's construction of corporate personhood in County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad with its view of the criminal's body in Ex parte Royall, a habeas corpus case. The Court's purpose in deciding these two cases was to design a way to disperse newly emergent and conflicting interests (...) in particular directions within the judicial apparatus. The result is that both criminal and corporate bodies come to be understood through discourse, not outside of it. So the body which is being introduced can be described as a discursive body, not as an anatomical given. (shrink)

Metaphysics is the thoroughly empirical science. Every item of experience must be evidence for or against any hypothesis of speculative cosmology, and every experienced object must be an exemplar and test case for the categories of analytic ontology. Technically, therefore, one example ought for our present theme to be as good as another. The more dignified examples, however, are darkened with a patina of tradition and partisanship, while some frivolous ones are peculiarly perspicuous. Let us therefore imagine three lollipops, made (...) by a candy man who buys sticks from a big supplier and molds candy knobs on them. Lollipop No. 1 has a red round peppermint head, No. 2 a brown round chocolate head, No. 3 a red square peppermint head. The circumstance here which mainly provokes theories of subsistence and inherence is similarity with difference: each lollipop is partially similar to each other and partially different from it. If we can give a good account of this circumstance in this affair we shall have the instrument to expose the anatomy of everything, from an electron or an apple to archangels and the World All. (shrink)

This book shares the recent debates by systemic functional linguistics and other linguistic forums. Its principal focus is on how we use language to make meaning of the world, on how the systems and structures of the ideational function of language represent the realisation of our experiences of the world around us. The volume captures the endeavours of scholars working in different contexts, disciplines and languages around the world. Their contributions explore what underlies experiential and logical meaning-making through specific analyses (...) of recently-created, contextually diverse, single texts or collections of texts, from mono- to multimodal texts. The issues addressed are: layers of meaning through the transitivity system; agency and subjectivity; what kinds of participants and circumstances are associated with various processes and how these vary across languages; new ways of researching and capturing the interaction of the experiential function with the other functions of language - interpersonal, textual and logical - in communicative contexts; how multimodality and new ways of modelling experience semiotically influence the work of linguists, linguistic description and application. The book displays the dynamic dialogue on theoretical and applied interests of scholars interested in functional linguistics and working in a wide range of academic contexts. At post-graduate level advanced students will benefit from new perspectives, the innovative thinking and research accounts that make up the collection. The papers highlight the flexibility of systemic functional linguistic approach and exemplify how it can offer deeper and further insights into potential ways of exploring meaning-making by drawing on recent seminal developments in ideation. (shrink)

From the very beginning German dentists and their scientific and professional organizations were involved in the disastrous developments following the Nazi assumption of power of 1933. After purging and both organisational and ideological streamlining which had been comparatively rapidly accomplished in 1933/34 a development started which was characterized by extreme professional confrontation and lust for power in close entanglement with Nazi health policy objectives and deformation of scientific dentistry. A decisive role was assigned to the Reichszahnärzteführer Ernst Stuck (1893-1974) who (...) was the highest representative of the dental profession throughout the Nazi Regime. However, up to the present his life and position has not been thoroughly researched. What is more, history of dentistry has been looking at his activities in a merely cursory and appeasing way.In fact, his function as Reichszahnärzteführer needs to be critically scrutinized and evaluated. (shrink)

Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best.The book calls on ...

Unique in its collation of major theorists rarely considered together, Critical Environments incorporates detailed discussions of the work of Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Cavell, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Niklas ...

This Article aims to draw the connection between how we conceptualize legal rights over information resources and our capacity to develop technologically neutral legal norms in the information age. More specifically, it identifies and critically examines three competing approaches to the idea of technological neutrality apparent in copyright jurisprudence. Ultimately, it is argued that true technological neutrality requires not simply the seamless expansion of legal rights into new technological contexts, but the careful, contextual recalibration of rights and interests in light (...) of shifting values and changing circumstances. As a normative principle, technological neutrality in copyright law thus demands a nuanced and relational understanding of the rights at play, and the social values that they seek to foster as technologies evolve. (shrink)

Assassins are often regarded as ahistorical figures of evil. In this article, I contest this view by analysing the assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz in 1901. There are two purposes to this article. The first is to situate McKinley’s assassination within the history and development of the social sciences, principally sociology, rather than assume that the assassin is a trans-historical representation of willful irresponsibility. The second is to describe and critique the discourse that made Czolgosz into a (...) rational agent once he entered history as an assassin. (shrink)