In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the editor explains the rationale of the new project, citing increases in aggressive xenophobia internationally. He comments on the intergroup-relations theorist Todd Pittinsky's argument that, since tolerance is not logically the antithesis of negative feelings toward out-groups, even long-established traditions of toleration are inadequate to prevent intergroup aggression. Pittinsky proposes that tolerance be replaced, as a principle of peacekeeping, by the encouragement of positive feelings toward out-groups, (...) and the author of this essay responds by showing how the Freudian theory of ambivalence and the history of literature on which Freud drew in constructing it support Pittinsky's viewpoint. Enemies regularly fall in love, above all in Shakespearean drama, which Freud explains by arguing that all human relations are love-hate relations. Thus, this essay suggests, it takes as much psychic energy to repress the love in what appear to be relationships of hatred as to repress the hatred in what appear to be relationships of love. There is a metaphysical component as well to this argument: the xenophobe and xenophile equally presuppose that the identity principle is applicable to society as well as to mathematics; both assume that each discrete social group is self-identical and differs from all other groups more or less radically. The main difference between –phile and –phobe is the latter's relative incapacity to live with ambivalence. Given these arguments, one must expect to find negative as well as positive motives in the etiology and conduct of xenophilia—and the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium is said to focus on cases of xenophilia in which varieties of enmity accompany that singular and underrated variety of love. (shrink)

Fernández-Savater, Amador (2020)Habitar y gobernar: Inspiraciones para una nueva concepción políticaBarcelona: Ned Ediciones, 381 p. ISBN 978-84-18273-03-2.

El presente artículo plantea un análisis del sujeto revolucionario en Los condenados de la tierra de Frantz Fanon bajo la lente de las posteriores contribuciones teóricas de Antonio Negri y Ernesto Laclau a los modos y determinaciones de construcción de los sujetos políticos en general y a través de sus valoraciones de las tesis fanonianas en particular. En concreto, se argumentará que en Fanon se encuentran matizada y entrecruzadamente algunas de las consideraciones que permiten interpretar el sujeto político que se (...) alza en la lucha de liberación nacional, primero como un sujeto múltiple y espontáneo de características tangentes a la multitud negriana, y segundo como un sujeto articulado unificadamente en relación con el pueblo laclausiano que, eventualmente, acabará recalando en nuevas correspondencias exegéticas con Negri. Este cuerpo analítico será complementado con referencias a la postura divergente de Vladímir Lenin y de Rosa Luxemburgo en torno a la cuestión del espontaneísmo y la organización del sujeto revolucionario. (shrink)

A contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, this article examines the travelogue of Mirza Abu Taleb ibn Muhammed Isfahani, the Muslim Indo-Persian scholar, poet, and Lucknow nobleman who sympathized with the Irish during his travels to England and Ireland in 1799–1802. Translated from Persian to English by an Irish scholar working for the British East India Company, Charles Stewart, and published in London in two editions, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan records the author's love for the (...) Irish and theirs for him. This mutual xenophilia, the article argues, is politically motivated by Abu Taleb's strong, but mostly tacit, reservations about the English, his imperial patrons. He realigns the relationship between metropole and colony by casting Ireland as the bridgehead of a glorious Islamic-Persianate culture that spread westward, a transcultural fantasy that takes two forms. First, the unconditional hospitality Abu Taleb experiences among his Irish and Anglo-Irish hosts leads him to imagine a linguistic-ethnic kinship between ancient Celts and Persians, recalled in the similarities he sees between a subimperial capital, Dublin, and an Indian Mughal city, Lucknow. Second, in his detailed account of a patriotic performance that he attended in Dublin of the British siege of Seringapatam in 1799, he identifies with the skeptical audience who, he assumes, are self-conscious about this propagandistic medium. (shrink)

This article is a preliminary exploration of a large and relatively unknown sample of reactionary uchronias—works of fiction that imagine future revolutionary societies in dystopian terms1—published in Spain between the 1870s and the 1950s. Gregory Claeys has found the origins of this distinctively modern literary subgenre—which, as we will see, overlaps with many others—in what he calls the “second dystopian turn” of the late nineteenth century, born as a reaction against the promises of science and socialism.2 However, other historians have (...) described the emergence in France in the mid-nineteenth century of an anti-utopian genre that anticipates the classic novels written by Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell in the.. (shrink)

El presente escrito trata de abordar la relación entre el ser humano y su mundo de productos técnicos mediante la exploración del concepto de desnivel prometeico, acuñado por Günther Anders. De este modo, se llevará a cabo un análisis de correspondencia entre las nociones de Anders y la enajenación marxiana y feuerbachiana, alumbrando así un estudio comparativo de vocación extemporánea y crítica.

The aim of this paper is to propose a scheme of conscious life that allows us to recognize three constitutive moments of the Levinasian subjectivation process: il y a, jouissance and éthique. Presenting such moments will provide an understanding of subjectivity as a development which is done based on its relationship with transcendence. It will be seen that this term means, firstly, a relationship with sensitive outward experience and, subsequently, a relationship with the Other or an ethics. When describing the (...) different stages indicated, not only the elements of nonobjective processes will be presented—a general reading of Levinasian phenomenology will also be provided by describing different moments that occur within the conscious life and constitute it. (shrink)

The history of communication is a new subject in mass communication and journalism curricula, one for which there has been only scattered published research and no adequate text. Communication History attempts to remedy both of these problems by providing a challenging new approach to the study of communication over time. Moving away from a tradition that focuses merely on major communication personalities or institutions, the authors instead encourage the reader to see the interrelated processes by which information in diffused. The (...) authors utilize social science concepts and techniques to enlarge and enrich our understanding of communication in historical perspective. (shrink)