Le regain progressif d'intérêt dont a bénéficié depuis 1990 la pensée de Gilbert Simondon s'est encore renforcé, depuis 2006, par la publication de textes inédits du philosophe français, ainsi que par celle, enfin unifiée, du grand œuvre de Simondon, jusque-là publié en deux parties : sa thèse principale pour le doctorat d'État, intitulée L'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information. La présente étude se propose de revenir sur ce texte fondateur, origine de L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (...) comme ensuite de L'individuation psychique et collective, pour en dégager à la fois l'originalité et l'actualité, mais aussi pour mieux comprendre finalement le classique de l'auteur, sa thèse complémentaire : Du mode d'existence des objets techniques. On découvrira la portée du " nouvel encyclopédisme " dont Simondon se voulait l'initiateur. Il apparaîtra alors que dans le sillage de son directeur de thèse, Georges Canguilhem, avec d'autres modalités et insistances que lui, Simondon ne rejette le " facile humanisme " que par exigence d'un humanisme difficile qui sache d'une part faire dériver l'homme du vivant, d'autre part intégrer la technique à la culture. [Source : d'après la 4e de couverture]. (shrink)

La 4e de couv. porte : "Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) a été considéré de son vivant comme un philosophe de la technique original mais difficile. Il s'impose aujourd’hui comme l’artisan d’un « nouvel encyclopédisme » qui veut unifier les sciences au sein d’une philosophie de la nature et renouveler l’humanisme. Pour l’« ontologie génétique » de Simondon, toute chose tient sa réalité de la genèse où elle«s’individue ». Celle-ci est un processus ininterrompu auquel l’inerte, le vivant, le technique, le social, mais (...) aussi le savoir et la pensée eux-mêmes appartiennent. On expose ici la question de « l’individuation » dans ses trois dimensions essentielles – la différence entre le physique et le biologique, le « transindividuel », l’objet technique – pour montrer ensuite comment le génétisme de Simondon dépasse les oppositions classiques entre matière et forme ou sujet et objet, mais aussi les antagonismes (par exemple entre technicisme et humanisme) qui se disputent la conception de la nature et de l’homme. On développe enfin l’enjeu politique et social d’une philosophie pour laquelle une véritable « culture technique » pourrait supprimer une des principales causes de l’aliénation humaine et donner aux hommes les moyens de comprendre leur monde.". (shrink)

Avec le début de l'ère industrielle, notre écosystème n'a cessé d'être dégradé par l'activité humaine. Et puisque la vie humaine est liée à la terre, et donc à sa qualité minimale, comment habiter ce monde devenu désormais fragile? En travaillant sur le système philosophique d'Hans Jonas, au regard de Gunther Anders et Heidegger, l'auteur pose la question de la cohabitation de l'homme avec la technique. Avec, in fine, quelques hypothèses pour conserver notre "maison commune".

Pourquoi le mal est-il toujours perçu comme singulier et scandaleux? Pourquoi éveille-t-il autant d'émotion? Doit-on pardonner à ceux qui ne reconnaissent pas leur tort? Et comment pardonner si personne ne demande pardon? Autant de questions qui, par une approche à la fois philosophique et théologique, s'appuient sur Paul Ricoeur. Dans sa philosophie de l'homme capable, le philosophe montre que le pardon est pensé en lien avec les conditions de son effectuation. Il faut donc un homme capable de répondre de ses (...) actes, d'assumer la sanction. (shrink)

I will defend two claims. First, Schaffer's priority monism is in tension with many research programs in quantum gravity. Second, priority monism can be modified into a view more amenable to this physics. The first claim is grounded in the fact that promising approaches to quantum gravity such as loop quantum gravity or string theory deny the fundamental reality of spacetime. Since fundamental spacetime plays an important role in Schaffer's priority monism by being identified with the fundamental structure, namely the (...) cosmos, the disappearance of spacetime in these views might undermine classical priority monism. My second claim is that priority monism can avoid this issue with two moves: first, in dropping one of its core assumptions, namely that the fundamental structure is spatio-temporal, second, by identifying the connection between the non-spatio-temporal structure and the derivative spatio-temporal structure with mereological composition. (shrink)

This piece written for Valentine’s Day 2014 links the love songs of Smokey Robinson with writing on romantic love from classical theorists to feminist writers like Mary Evans and bell hooks. Through a discussion of Smokey Robinson’s biography it argues that the political and affective key of his songs is similar to the arguments provided by feminist theory. It makes a case for holding to a ‘love ethic’ that is a doing, not confined to one person alone but rather circulated (...) and routed within wider communities. (shrink)

Wittgenstein refers to psychophysical parallelism in this apparently prejudiced way in paragraph 611 of Zettel , in the course of a rather remarkable passage. It begins at 605 with the claim that ‘One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads’. Subsequent sections develop this remark in a way that demonstrates Wittgenstein's rejection of the view that thinking is any sort of process in the head, whether a (...) physiological process or a matter of the operations of ‘a nebulous mental entity’. Indeed he appears to consider that these ontologically opposed alternatives have a common source, in that they both derive from the mistaken view that there must be a mediating process between psychological phenomena such as my present remembering and my experience of the remembered event . If we find no suitable mediating physiological process, we are easily led to assume that there must be a process of a rather different sort, and hence we are led to believe in a ‘nebulous mental entity’. But this whole line of thought in fact depends on a ‘primitive interpretation of our concepts’, an interpretation which we uncritically made at the stage at which we assumed that there must be a process of some sort mediating between the phenomena. We are reminded of Wittgenstein's earlier remarks in Philosophical Investigations , I, 308. (shrink)

Wittgenstein refers to psychophysical parallelism in this apparently prejudiced way in paragraph 611 of Zettel, in the course of a rather remarkable passage. It begins at 605 with the claim that ‘One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads’. Subsequent sections develop this remark in a way that demonstrates Wittgenstein's rejection of the view that thinking is any sort of process in the head, whether a physiological (...) process or a matter of the operations of ‘a nebulous mental entity’. Indeed he appears to consider that these ontologically opposed alternatives have a common source, in that they both derive from the mistaken view that there must be a mediating process between psychological phenomena such as my present remembering and my experience of the remembered event. If we find no suitable mediating physiological process, we are easily led to assume that there must be a process of a rather different sort, and hence we are led to believe in a ‘nebulous mental entity’. But this whole line of thought in fact depends on a ‘primitive interpretation of our concepts’, an interpretation which we uncritically made at the stage at which we assumed that there must be a process of some sort mediating between the phenomena. We are reminded of Wittgenstein's earlier remarks in Philosophical Investigations, I, 308. (shrink)

r esumo: Minha proposta é perguntar-me em que sentido a Enciclopédia é um dicionário racional das ciências, artes e ofícios. Se foram estudados, sobretudo, os dezessete volumes do texto da Enciclopédia para conhecer o estado do conhecimento no século XVIII, as ilustrações constituem um terreno de estudos muito mais abandonado e suscitam principalmente um interesse estético. Ainda, essas ilustrações tiveram um papel de primordial importância na realização da Enciclopédia. Elas tiveram um papel essencial, como tentarei mostrá-lo através do exemplo do (...) ofício de tecelagem de meias, na transmissão das técnicas. Para começar, gostaria de lembrar a história tumultuosa da edição da Enciclopédia e a maneira que Diderot se serviu das ilustrações para bem conduzir a empreitada enciclopédica. Depois procurarei pensar a Enciclopédia inteira colocando em relação o discurso e as ilustrações, através do exemplo do tratamento em imagem e em texto de um ofício: a tecelagem de meias. a bstract: My purpose is to question in what sense the Encyclopédie is a reasoned dictionary of sciences, arts and trades. The seventeen texts’ tomes of the Encyclopédie have been the object of several researches for understanding the state of knowledge in the seventeenth century, but the eleven plates’ tomes have not been so studied and have been seen more as an object of esthetical fascination than as an object of researches. Nevertheless, the plates played a great role in the making of the Encyclopédie. The plates were an essential medium to hand down technical knowledge. To begin with, I am going to tell the story of the tumultuous edition of the Encyclopédie and the way Diderot used the plates in order to manage well the encyclopaedic enterprise. Then I shall give an example to show how the text and the plates can be connected: the stockings weaving. (shrink)

An ingenious argument – we may call it the Argument from Excuse – purports to show that the Standard View of Ignorance is false and the New View of Ignorance is true. On the former, ignorance is lack of knowledge; on the latter, ignorance is lack of true belief. I defend the Standard View by arguing that the Argument from Excuse is unsound. I also argue that an implication of my case is that Factual Ignorance Thesis (FIT) is false. According (...) to FIT, whenever an agent A acts from factual ignorance, A is morally blameworthy (culpable) for the act only if A is morally blameworthy (culpable) for the ignorance from which A acts. (shrink)

Le projet dont cet ouvrage est l'aboutissement n'a pas été d'établir une théorie du droit, mais d'en rechercher la signification au plus près de la pratique quotidienne des juristes. Chaque fois que l'un d'eux emploie le mot droit, il le fait sans s'expliquer comme s'il s'agissait là d'une chose commune qu'il suffirait de désigner pour être compris. Pourtant, dans sa brièveté même, il renvoie à des contenus divers qui ne font sens qu'à un haut degré d'élaboration. C'est à la recherche (...) de ces significations que l'on a voulu partir, en examinant le réseau complexe de représentations que les juristes mobilisent quand ils parlent de droit. On doute qu'il y ait une essence du droit, intemporelle et transcendante, qui en figerait la définition par-delà les époques et les climats. Mais il y a des constantes que l'on a voulu explorer. Un lieu, qui rend possible le développement d'un système de droit : l'ordre juridique, qui en réunit les conditions institutionnelles. Une matière commune à tous ses énoncés : la norme, règle ou décision, qui est au droit ce que l'atome est à la matière, la cellule au vivant. Enfin, par-delà l'unicité de l'énoncé des normes, il y a la diversité des pratiques d'application, qui en bouleversent la signification sociale et la compréhension. Tout cela permet, par des approches successives, de découvrir la texture du droit et d'examiner le singulier discours que tient l'ordre juridique. En première approximation, on appelle droit tout ce qui circule dans un ordre juridique. Plus profondément, le discours tenu par cet ordre permet à une société de décliner ses valeurs : l'exposé de son fonctionnement de principe doit permettre aux individus de s'y insérer sans la troubler. S'agit-il d'un discours qui dirait la vérité de la collectivité? Pas forcément : par son droit, toute société propose un miroir qui la reflète, mais seulement telle qu'elle se voit. On le constate, certains miroirs se révèlent déformants. Il en va ainsi pour la France, dont le droit présente à la fois un modèle de construction rationnelle et un véritable trompe-l'oeil ménagé par l'Etat, pour égarer sur la régulation véritable de la société. (shrink)

The erosion of the three interlocking dimensions of nature, society and self is the consequence of what Felix Guattari referred to as integrated world capitalism (IWC). In South Africa the erosion of nature, society and self is also the consequence of centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid. In this paper I wish to explore how the African philosophy of ubuntu (humanness), which appears to be anthropocentric, might be invoked to contribute to the healing of the three ecologies—how healing of (...) the social might transversally effect healing of nature and the self. My theoretical exploration has relevance to education in South Africa, given that a mandate of national curriculum policy is that indigenous knowledge systems form part of the discursive terrains of all school learning areas/subjects. (shrink)

It was a dark and stormy night, in the otherwise unnoteworthy year 711 E.C. , and the great-aunt sat crouched at her typewriter, holding his hands out to it from time to time as if for warmth and swinging on a swing. He was a handsome boy of about eighteen, one of those men who suddenly excite your desire when you meet them in the street, and who leave you with a vague feeling of uneasiness and excited senses. On the (...) plate beside the typewriter lay a slice of tomato. It was a flawless slice. It was a perfect slice of a perfect tomato. It is perfectly boring. I hold out my hands to the typewriter again, while swinging and showing my delicate limbs, and observe that the rows of keys are marked with all the letters of the English alphabet, and all the letters of the French alphabet minus accent marks, and all the letters of the Polish alphabet except the dark L. By striking these keys with the ends of my fingers or, conceivably, a small blunt object, the aging woman can create a flaw in the tomato. She did so at once. It was then a seriously, indeed a disgustingly flawed tomato, but it continued to be perfectly boring until eaten. She expired instantly in awful agony, of snakebite, flinging the window wide to get air. It is a dark and stormy night and the rain falling in in the typewriter keys writes a story in German about a great-aunt who went to a symposium on narrative and got eaten in the forest by a metabear. She writes the story while reading it with close attention, not sure what to expect, but collaborating hard, as if that was anything new; and this is the story I wrote . . . Ursula K. Le Guin, distinguished novelist, poet, and essayist, is the author of The Left Hand of Darkness, Malafrena, and The Dispossessed, for which she won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. Her novel The Lathe of Heaven was made into a film by the Public Broadcasting System. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Close Enemies: The Relationship of Psychiatry and Psychology in the Assessment of Mental DisordersPhilippe Le Moigne, PhDAs Peter Zachar rightly points out in his comment, the assessment of mental disorders underwent new developments with the release of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V in 2013 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Whereas in 1980, the manual had been thought of in a rigorously categorical way, on the basis of (...) distinct and closed syndromic entities, this new version advocated the development of a radically dimensionalist approach, with the diagnosis aiming this time to restore the whole symptomatological picture of the patient on a spectrum of ratings are supposed to cover the entirety of psychiatric semiology (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).For its part, my article aimed to show how standardized assessment, guided by the return of psychiatry’s authority and the assertion of its legitimacy in the diagnostic field, gave the ascendancy in the 1980s to the classificatory tradition and thus to the categorical model, to the detriment of personality approach and test psychology which offered a competing solution here. This perspective, historically dated, may have led the reader to think that there is an antagonism that cannot be overcome here. Rather, it should be seen as a form of structuring opposition, or even a “complementarity inscribed in rivalry,” between psychiatry and psychology, which is naturally susceptible to change over time.Indeed, the reversal operated by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V is not total because it cannot be total. The defense of the dimensionalist approach, dear to the psychological testing tradition, was intended here to allow the identification of co-morbidities, present in most patients but poorly apprehended by the categorical approach, and to open up diagnosis to prevention by screening for minor manifestations of psychopathology when they suggest the [End Page 259] development of a manifest episode of the disease in the more or less long term. The risk here is that we end up with overdiagnosis and thus an over-representation of false positives (Wakefield, 2015). In other words, this type of approach does not escape the obligation to determine threshold scores, likely to indicate the lower limit of the disorder, and thus to resort to a categorical approach. There is a first affinity between the two perspectives which obeys, beyond the divergences in principle, a technical requirement.But the two approaches have even more in common when we look at their epistemological background: they share the idea that the representation and the intervention on mental disorder, to use Ian Hacking’s expression (1983), must be based on the model proposed by the physical and natural sciences. And as Greta Kaluzeviciute aptly points out in her comment, this orientation leads to the idea of measuring mental disorder in particular to conduct elaborate quantification operations to determine, for example, whether two entities are statistically distinct or whether a drug has a significant effect on the evolution of a pathology.This is in fact an old question that can be formulated as follows, to use the expression of the psychometrician Joel Michell (1999): are psychological dimensions metric? In other words, if we want to apply the language of numbers to mental disorders, they must share its properties, two of which seem essential: it must be possible to establish that each mental disorder, in the same way as qualities attributable to length for example, has a zero and can be divided by means of gradients (or degrees of intensity) whose interval is constant (Le Moigne, 2018; Michell, 1999). For lack of space, let us only address the second condition. This one has already been denied by many, starting with Bergson at the end of the nineteenth century (1889). He does not believe in the quantification of psychological expressions, starting with sensations. What is the common point, he wrote, between the feeling of a mild pain, as one feels a stiffness, and the sensation of a needle being hammered into your flesh? For him, one and the other of these intensities are incomparable, so that they do not belong to a similar register of sensations that one could stage from a 0 toward a... (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I offer an account of propositional learning: namely, learning that p. I argue for what I call the “Three Transitions Thesis” or “TTT” according to which four states and three transitions between them characterize such learning. I later supplement the TTT to account for learning why p. In making my case, I discuss mathematical propositions such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the ABC Conjecture, and then generalize to other mathematical propositions and to non-mathematical propositions. I also discuss (...) some interesting applications of the TTT, and reply to some noteworthy objections. (shrink)

Ce texte répond aux critiques formulées par J.G. Hülsmann à propos de mon article “Ludwig von Mises, Théoricien de la Banque Libre”. J.G. Hülsmann me reproche une méthode scientifique douteuse sans voir que ses reproches ne s’adressent qu’à luimême. Pour lui répondre, il me suffit de le paraphraser. Le commentaire de Hülsmann a néanmoins un léger mérite, celui de mettre en exergue deux courts passages de l’oeuvre de Mises que j’omets involontairement dans mon article. Aussi il me revient de combler (...) cette lacune, d’interpréter ces deux passages, d’affiner et finalement d’appuyer le propos et la conclusion de mon article.This article is a reply to J.G. Hülsmann’s critics concerning my article “Ludwig von Mises, Théoricien de la Banque Libre”. J.G. Hülsmann blames me for an uncertain scientific method when these reproaches are aimed at himself. To respond, we just have to paraphrase. Nevertheless, for the credit of Hülsmann’s commentary, we have to say that it makes appear two short citations of Mises’ work that we unintentionally ignore in our article. So, to fill the gap, I have to interpret these citations, improve and finally rest the purpose and the conclusion of my article. (shrink)

Ce texte répond aux critiques formulées par J.G. Hülsmann à propos de mon article “Ludwig von Mises, Théoricien de la Banque Libre”. J.G. Hülsmann me reproche une méthode scientifique douteuse sans voir que ses reproches ne s’adressent qu’à luimême. Pour lui répondre, il me suffit de le paraphraser. Le commentaire de Hülsmann a néanmoins un léger mérite, celui de mettre en exergue deux courts passages de l’oeuvre de Mises que j’omets involontairement dans mon article. Aussi il me revient de combler (...) cette lacune, d’interpréter ces deux passages, d’affiner et finalement d’appuyer le propos et la conclusion de mon article.This article is a reply to J.G. Hülsmann’s critics concerning my article “Ludwig von Mises, Théoricien de la Banque Libre”. J.G. Hülsmann blames me for an uncertain scientific method when these reproaches are aimed at himself. To respond, we just have to paraphrase. Nevertheless, for the credit of Hülsmann’s commentary, we have to say that it makes appear two short citations of Mises’ work that we unintentionally ignore in our article. So, to fill the gap, I have to interpret these citations, improve and finally rest the purpose and the conclusion of my article. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of the disciplinary status of Educational Studies, which both in the theoretical discourse and in the practice of this area is far from unambiguous. The issue is relevant not only for theoretical reasons but also for practical and social ones. This is because the status of Educational Studies, by having a decisive impact on the very understanding and nature of studies in education, at least in part may impact changes in educational practice. Two main models (...) of Educational Studies can be differentiated, with additional variation within these models. Among the terms most commonly used in discussion of the disciplinary status of Educational Studies, frequent mention is made of the autonomy that exists in various versions and of interdisciplinarity. This article proposes a new way of understanding this status, which I call the autonomy of Educational Studies as a second-level discipline, which includes aspects of both of the previously mentioned models, yet also adds certain modifications. In the course of my argumentation, I will conduct a comparative analysis of both traditions, and subsequently justify the proposed thesis, and finally briefly indicate potential problems which may be generated by this model. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Natalja, Jacob and Sebastian for their kind attention to my paper, and for their many insights on this topic, which have materially helped me get clearer about some of the issues. All the points of disagreement are constructive and it has been both a pleasure and an education to engage with them. I’m also happy to note some points of agreement, too! Here I attempt to reply to some of the objections.

L'individualité est un thème largement exploité par les sciences sociales et la psychologie, mais, sans doute, trop peu par la philosophie. Que peut nous révéler la phénoménologie au sujet de cette notion centrale pour les sociétés occidentales développées? C'est ce que ce livre propose d'explorer.

Come into my office. Usually it is an office of teaching and writing and research. Today the function shifts, as it does periodically throughout the semester. It becomes a space where my students t...

It so happens that classical physical theories can be interpreted as a representation of local interactions between systems with determinate properties. Orthodox quantum mechanics, which is one of our most experimentally well-confirmed theories, is notoriously resistant to being interpreted in terms of the above framework. Bell-type theorems and Bell-type experiments have made such an interpretation impossible. In the early sixties, John Bell demonstrated that any theory that represents its domain in terms of the above framework satisfies a set of inequalities, (...) the so-called Bell inequalities. Experiments on quantum phenomena violate Bell-type inequalities. By a simple modus tollens, the upshot is that no theory that includes all the elements of the above framework can recover all statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. Philosophers have been trying to interpret this result, that is, to understand what the world might be like if it is true that physical interactions between systems are non-local, or that physical systems do not possess determinate properties. This line of thought found its climax in program of Òexperimental metaphysicsÓ that developed after the violation of Bell-type inequalities was observed. Experimental metaphysics consists in deriving metaphysical conclusions from the Bell-type experimental results. The mainstream interpretation within experimental metaphysics is that Bell-type experiments force us to accept the existence of a form of non-locality at the ontological level, but a form that we can consider benign because it is of a non-causal type. In my dissertation, I assess to what extent philosophical investigation can help us decide what the world is like on the basis of our best physical theories, from the point of view of the quantum domain and with an emphasis on Bell-type phenomena. My conclusions point to a more modest view on the possible achievements of philosophy of physics than the experimental metaphysics program would have us believe. In the first part of my dissertation, I investigate what role philosophy of physics can legitimately hope to play in the development and evaluation of various accounts of quantum phenomena. I claim that it is not the role of philosophy of physics to impose criteria of acceptability on physical theories, in addition to coherence and empirical adequacy. By contrast, I take in my dissertation that the legitimate role of philosophy of physics is to clearly determine what is imposed by the phenomena and our best theories from what is a matter of preference on the basis of the structural analysis of the phenomena and theories. In the second part of my dissertation, I turn to the more specific case of the interpretation of Bell-type theorems and Bell-type phenomena. I undertake a systematic examination of the mainstream interpretation. I show that the mainstream interpretation includes three claims, one about locality, another one about causation and a last one about holism. I utilize theories of locality and causation in order to assess these three claims. On the one hand, the upshot of my analysis is that the claim about locality can be supported by a rigorous theory of locality. On the other hand, no theory of probabilistic causation can support the claims of the mainstream interpretation about causation when it is construed as a strong program of experimental metaphysics yielding conclusions about the ontology of the world. That said, weakened versions of the mainstream interpretation, those that do without conclusions about the ontology of the world, can be made compatible with some theories of probabilistic causation. In particular, the mainstream interpretation can be rigorously supported if its claims are restricted to the empirical level. (shrink)

Mathias Risse has provided a thoughtful critique of my book, raising serious points about a major part of the argument. I am glad to have the opportunity to reflect further on it.

In this article, I defend the thesis that selfishness and altruism can be intrapersonal . In doing so, I argue that the notions of intrapersonal altruism and selfishness usefully pick out behavioural patterns and have predictive value. I also argue that my thesis helps enrich our understanding of the prudential, and can subsume some interesting work in economic and psychological theory.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Carmen MirandaJessica LesCarmen Miranda, she called herself today. She suffered from decades of schizoaffective disorder and now more recently, end–stage renal disease from uncontrolled diabetes. I first met Carmen two weeks prior when she had been brought to the hospital on a 72 hour psychiatric hold for self–harm. She failed to go to dialysis for a week, an act that would kill her if allowed to continue. Now she (...) was here again, for the same reason.Everyone of competent mind has the right to refuse medical treatment. Unfortunately, Carmen’s mind was not currently grounded in reality. So against her will, our family medicine team admitted her to the hospital and arranged for dialysis early the next morning. None of us liked doing this. Fortunately, when the time came for the dialysis tech to insert the dialysis catheter into her shunt, Carmen agreed peacefully. After her dialysis, we had no right to keep her in the hospital because her life was no longer in danger, at least until the next week. We discharged her to home. However the question remained, what about next time?To navigate this ethical gray zone, we called an ethics committee meeting. An ethicist, nurses, hospital social workers, the inpatient family medicine resident team, and most importantly, two people who knew her very well—her caseworker and long–term psychiatrist—discussed her case for an [End Page 103] hour. Our medicine team learned that in her last period of clarity two months prior, Carmen made contradictory statements regarding her wishes. Carmen told her caseworker she was tired of dialysis and being sick and stated it was time to let herself go. During the same lucid week she told her psychiatrist that she was grateful she had been forced to complete dialysis against her wishes after a run of non–adherence while suffering psychosis a couple of months prior. Now months later she was in a downward spiral, exacerbated by the deterioration of her mentally ill husband. If she missed a dialysis treatment here and there, it was okay, but when she went on a run missing several treatments, it was slow suicide.The ethics meeting concluded that Carmen needed to complete an advanced directive and select a power of attorney other than her gravely incompetent husband as soon as she was deemed competent. If she did not become lucid again, her psychiatric team should apply for conservatorship, a legally appointed person who serves as guardian for a gravely disabled mentally ill person. However, conservatorship would take months. In the interim, the ethics committee ruled that our medicine team would continue to provide lifesaving treatment for her, against her wishes if necessary.The ethics meeting adjourned but our medicine team remained in a gray area. To what length should we go to treat her? If she continued to refuse dialysis would we hold her in the hospital until she became sufficiently docile by inevitable uremia that we could peacefully dialyze her? Possibly. Would we go so far as to put her under anesthesia to complete her dialysis? Personally, I hoped not.Just three days after the ethics committee meeting, her caseworker found Carmen yelling nonsensical phrases through the front door of her home while her husband held the door shut with his beer belly and good shoulder. After gaining entry later in the day, Carmen’s caseworker found their mutual medication collection strewn in the bathtub and no food in the house. He placed Carmen on a psychiatric hold and transported her to the hospital. The emergency department paged me when Carmen arrived. I braced myself for the possibilities that lay ahead. When I reached Carmen, she was sitting in a room reserved for psychiatric patients and under watch by a friendly police officer accustomed to these situations.“Hi, Carmen,” I said, one step into her room. She sat on the edge of the gurney, wrapped in three blankets.“Cold,” she said.The police officer spoke from behind my shoulder, “She has been requesting cup after cup of ice water, she won’t take anything else.”“Let’s get you more comfortable.” I returned with a warm blanket and draped it over her... (shrink)

I pursue here a wish of Ricœur: to analyze ideology and utopia from a genetic phenomenology, in the sense of Husserl in the _Cartesian Meditations_, which “strives to dig under the surface of apparent meaning to the most fundamental meanings.” A single innovative interest guides my proposal between two contrasting phenomenologies of the imagination in Michel Henry and Paul Ricœur: to root, on the one hand, the dialectical mediation of ideology and utopia in the living immanence of the affective imagination (...) and, on the other hand, to inscribe the power of its expression as well as its power to act in the social and cultural field require to hold together the affective immanence of life, the figuration of the social reality and the socio-cultural and historical praxis. The psychoanalytical interpretation of the cultural imaginary to the bending of the affect and the language and the micro-history of the social practices of the representations serve here as “forks caudines,” under which the immanent phenomenology of the affective imagination is led to a hermeneutics of the imaginative practices of the discourse and the action. (shrink)

Although the tension which Christianity, in continuance with the Sache Jesu, first displayed with its surrounding culture, gradually conformed to the predominate culture of the ancient Mediterranean world, probably to avoid further conflict, it seems that the author of 1 Peter, despite my preference for a later dating, was set on maintaining this tension. 1 Peter employs a 'revolutionary subordination'. When the author of 1 Peter urges wives to be submissive or slaves to obey their masters, he is not perpetuating (...) normative conservatism. Rather, wives and slaves as followers of Christ were to subvert injustice the same way Jesus did. Wives therefore do not submit to their non-believing husbands because they buy in to society's evaluation of them as inferior to their male counterparts. Rather, wives can submit to their non-believing husbands because they are triumphant in Christ and therefore emancipated moral agents, who may win over their non-believing husbands by their moral and godly conduct. (shrink)

During the 20th century, the format of domestic life became an explicit object of functional reworking and rewriting. Thanks to the industrialisation processes that affected it, the home entered the era of its technical reproducibility, becoming a container aimed at optimising the functions it is called upon to perform. The meanings that were associated with it in the bourgeois tradition of the previous century, first and foremost that of being the place of intimacy and family affection, underwent a significant transformation. (...) The signs of this transformation are particularly evident in the experimental and futuristic projects on human domesticity by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Thanks to them, domesticity enters a new horizon of expression, even beyond the architectural imagination, anticipating elements and characteristics that define its contemporary condition. (shrink)