This essay offers a new reading of Marx's chapter on ‘the working day’ in Capital Volume One by exploring the textual theme of night-time work. Even as Marx emphasises how the lengthening workday enables the super-exploitation of producers’ wage labour, his depictions of nocturnal experiences highlight more forcefully the destruction of workers’ reproductive resources, capacities and relationships. Night comes to represent the contracted time, condensed space, petrified relational bonds and thwarted desires for human reproduction in a free, (...) fulsome sense that includes reinvigorating oneself, caring for others and enjoying experiences apart from work or care. Night's role as a privileged signifier and catalyst of these changes comes through in key passages about women, children and vampires, and in theoretically meaningful variances between Marx's German paraphrasing of English sources and those original texts, which replace Marx's phrases in English translations of Capital. Contemplating Marx's ambivalent reflections on legal-political action to limit workday hours, I argue for making struggles over social reproduction in a capacious sense central to working-class politics today. I demonstrate the power of this Marxian analytic by considering the compression of social-reproductive time among today's microworkers, who fuel the digital economy by performing platform-based ‘tasks’ at all hours for very low wages. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which (...) extraordinary events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

Working the night shift can be fraught and experienced as demanding and, yet, is often dismissed as babysitting. Few researchers have explored the social and cultural meanings of night nursing, including storytelling rituals. In 2019, a narrative study was undertaken. The aim was to explore the stories recalled by nurses about working night shifts. Thirteen Australian nurses participated. Data were gathered using the Biographical Narrative Interview Method, and narrative analysis produced forty stories and three themes: strange and (...) challenging experiences; colleagues can be mentors (or not); and textbook knowledge is only part of what is needed on night shift. Nursing students who engage with these stories may come to understand the challenges of the night shift, and the valuable work that nurses engage in throughout a 24‐hr period, work that involves adept psychosocial and interpersonal skills alongside technical and physical competence. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which (...) extraordinary events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

Combining philosophical reflections with deep self-exploration to delve into the ancient mystery of death and rebirth, this book emphasizes collective rather than individual transformation. Drawing upon twenty years of experience working with nonordinary states, the author argues that when the deep psyche is hyper-simulated using Stanislaw Grof's powerful therapeutic methods, the healing that results sometimes extends beyond the individual to the collective unconscious of humanity itself.

Supernatural fans often associate Season 3's popular “Jus in Bello” episode with the world's quintessential zombie movie, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Romero's zombie films, beginning with Night, fill the survival space with multiple, diverse survivalists who are forced to work through personal differences stemming from jealousy and petty annoyance to racism and bigotry, issues of morality, theology, and other social and cultural differences. Indeed, the setting is the first link to Romero's Night, whose (...) cramped Pennsylvanian farmhouse is little different than the poorly fortified police station holding Sam and Dean. The demons congregate listlessly around the jail. This is an obvious visual homage to the isolated Pennsylvanian farmhouse in Night. The work of the demons in “Jus in Bello” like the zombies in Night and Dawn, is ceaseless and instinctual. (shrink)

None of us will escape the experience of personal loss, illness, aging, or mortality. Yet, psychoanalysis seems to shy away from a discussion of these core human experiences. Existential vulnerability is painful and we all avoid this awareness in different ways. However, when analysts fail to explore the topic of mortality, their own and their patients, they may foreclose an important exploration and short-change patient and therapist. _Entering Night Country_ focuses on the existential condition, and explores how it penetrates (...) professional lives, analytic work, and theoretical formulations. Each chapter explores this topic, shifting the lens from analytic process, to include theoretical assumptions, and professional communities. _Stephanie Brody_ shows how the analytic process is a journey, no less profound than the epic journeys depicted in the classic literature of Homer and repeated in the patient’s own heroic and painful stories. Weaving literary references into the clinical experience of psychoanalysis, Brody reveals the transformative power of the analytic process for the patient and for the analyst. By relating the ancient past to our current struggles, psychoanalyst and patient together are guided to a destination, a life of meaning in the universe of possibilities. Clinical vignettes and personal reflections intersect with motifs from the epic poems and fantasy fiction, where the despair of loss and trauma do not extinguish the wish for change and the search for intimacy. __Entering Night Country__ highlights the common themes that arise for patient and analyst as any person entering an unknown territory. It is intended for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists, and mental health clinicians. It will also be accessible to those outside the clinical profession, even to individuals who have little understanding of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to elucidate municipal night registered nurses’ (RNs) experiences of the meaning of caring in nursing. The research context involved all night duty RNs working in municipal care of older people in a medium-sized municipality located in central Sweden. The meaning of caring in nursing was experienced as: caring for by advocacy, superior responsibility in caring, and consultative nursing service. The municipal night RNs’ experience of caring is interpreted as meanings in paradoxes: (...) ‘being close at distance’, the condition of ‘being responsible with insignificant control’, and ‘being interdependently independent’. The RNs’ experience of the meaning of caring involves focusing on the care recipient by advocating their perspectives. The meaning of caring in this context is an endeavour to grasp an overall caring responsibility by responding to vocational and personal demands regarding the issue of being a RN, in guaranteeing ethical, qualitative and competent care for older people. (shrink)

This article clarifies what a neuroscience challenge to criminal justice must look like by sketching the basic structure of the argument, gradually filling out the details and illustrating the conditions that must be met for the challenge to work. In the process of doing so it explores influential work by Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, and Stephen Morse respectively, arguing that the former should not be understood to present a version of the challenge, and that the latter's argument (...) against the challenge is unpersuasive. This analysis allows the article to flesh out the challenge, and demonstrate why it is currently non-completeable. However, the paper argues that contrary to what is often assumed the burden of proof falls on the defenders of criminal justice, and that they will find meeting it a monumental task. (shrink)

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

This essay attempts a critical analysis of the boom in 'uncanny' theory. As the 'uncanny' has carved its image in cultural, political, sociological and aesthetic theory, there has been little attempt to challenge the notion that all critical work is or should be uncanny. Introductions to the concept, such as those by Nicholas Royle and more recently Anna Masschelein, have tended to promote its ubiquity and irreducibility, even while acknowledging a dramatic shift in its fortunes since the 1990s. Opening (...) with a brief genealogy of uncanny theory in the late twentieth century the article pays particular attention to the watershed of the late 1980s when the uncanny is increasingly assimilated to the 'spectral' and begins to take shape as an autonomous theory. It probes the influence of Heidegger, who inflected Derrida's own turn to spectres, and the way the uncanny is mobilised on cultural and sociological terrain as a specifically ethical tool: a site of historical mourning or sociological resistance. The article proposes that the anti-conceptualism of the uncanny is a transcendant gesture which needs to be read in the context of a crisis in the theorisation of Marxism at the end of the 1980s. In all the clamour over the disturbing and in-coercible logic of the uncanny, there has been little analysis of its potentially reactionary function on the contemporary scene. (shrink)

Rotating shifts are common among nurses to ensure continuity of care. This scheduling system encompasses several adverse health and performance consequences. One of the most injurious effects of night-time shift work is the deterioration of sleep patterns due to both circadian rhythm disruption and increased sleep homeostatic pressure. Sleep problems lead to secondary effects on other aspects of wellbeing and cognitive functioning, increasing the risk of errors and workplace accidents. A wide range of interventions has been proposed to (...) improve the sleep quality of nurses and promote an increase in attention levels. In recent years, particular attention has been paid to individual and environmental factors mediating the subjective ability to cope with sleep deprivation during the night shift. Given the predictive role of these factors on the negative impact of a night shift, an individualized intervention could represent an effective countermeasure by ensuring suitable management of shift schedules. Therefore, the aims of this mini-review are to: provide an updated overview of the literature on sleep problems in night shift nurses and their adverse consequences; and critically analyze the psychosocial factors that mediate the negative impact of shift work with the ultimate goal of defining an effective countermeasure based on an individualized approach. (shrink)

BackgroundSleep is a strong predictor of quality of life and has been related to cognitive and behavioral functioning. However, research has shown that most autistic people experience sleep problems throughout their life. The most common sleep problems include sleep onset delay, frequent night-time wakings and shorter total sleep time. Despite the importance of sleep on many domains, it is still unclear from first-hand accounts what helps autistic people to sleep. The purpose of this study is to explore together with (...) autistic adolescents their sleep-related practices before bedtime and during the day which contribute to a good night’s sleep.MethodsFifty-four autistic adolescents collaborated with an academic researcher in a novel adapted photo-elicitation methodology, rooted in a Lifeworld framework. The adolescents were invited to collect and analyze their data. The data were also presented in a community knowledge exchange event.ResultsSeveral self-reported practices that facilitate better nocturnal sleep were identified. Those were organized into two thematics: Evening/bedtime factors and Day time factors. These included practices such as personalized sensory and relaxation tools before bed and during night-time, engaging in a range of physical activities during daytime and accommodating personal time to engage with highly preferred and intense focus activities and hobbies. It also included spending time in predictable and fun ways with family members before bedtime.ConclusionThis is the first time that a study uses a novel methodological approach based on personal accounts elicited by photos rooted in a Lifeworld framework to describe personal sleep-related practices before bedtime and during the day to identify a “good night of sleep” in autistic adolescents. The outcomes from the current study showed that sleep facilitating factors are in a direct contrast to the sleep hygiene recommendations. Therefore, it is thus important for the sleep practitioners and healthcare providers to move beyond providing standardized sleep hygiene interventions. A Lifeworld led care model that pays attention to personal experiences, promotes sense of agency, evaluates both autism-specific strengths and struggles could and should complement biomedical approaches.Lay SummaryThis is the first study to examine autistic adolescents’ self-reported sleep habits and factors which facilitate autistic adolescents’ sleep by employing adapted photo-elicitation interviews. This study is innovative in at least three ways. First, it examines the factors that may facilitate a good night’s sleep through personal accounts of autistic adolescents. Second, this is the first sleep study to adopt a collaborative, flexible approach to understanding positive sleep factors in the lives of autistic adolescents. This study employed a personalized approach into collecting, categorizing, coding, and analyzing qualitative data allowing autistic adolescents and the researcher to work together across key stages of data collection and data analysis. Third, we adopted a theoretical framework that allows us to consider autistic adolescents in both agency and vulnerability positions when it comes to their sleep difficulties. Our results highlight that sleep should be treated individually and in relation to the environmental and personal factors that affect each autistic person. Hence, researchers and professionals may benefit from working collaboratively with autistic adolescents with the aim to identify individual strengths and adopt a positive narrative around sleep. Furthermore, it is important to further examine both the daytime and evening factors that may affect bedtime and the quality and quantity of sleep as well as the role of intense focused interests and physical activities that cultivate positive feelings and help autistic people to relax before bedtime. (shrink)

This study seeks to understand the ways in which men who pledge sexual abstinence until marriage negotiate and assert masculine identities before and after marriage. Using longitudinal qualitative data, this work traces the ways in which men who pledge abstinence until marriage manage a tension between both “sacred” and “beastly” discourses surrounding sexuality. The situational and interactional gendered practices of these men highlight their attempts to resolve the incongruity between practices of sexual purity and hegemonic definitions of masculinity. I (...) argue that a decision to pledge sexual abstinence until marriage is an example of hybrid masculinities in that the postmarriage transition to a more hegemonically masculine status suggests that such practices are not challenging current gendered systems of power and inequality. These findings underscore the potential fallacy in using cross-sectional data to illustrate changes in gender relations, and demonstrate the importance of incorporating life course perspectives when theorizing masculinities. (shrink)

Möbian Nights: Literary Reading in a Time of Crisis develops a new understanding of literary reading: that in the wake of disasters like the Holocaust, death remains a premise of our experience rather than a future. Challenging customary "aesthetic" assumptions that we write in order not to die, Sandor Goodhart suggests (with Kafka) we write to die. Drawing upon analyses developed by Girard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas (along with examples from Homer to Beckett), Möbian Nights proposes that all literature works (...) "autobiographically", which is to say, in the wake of disaster; with the credo "I died; therefore, I am"; and for which the language of topology (for example, the "Möbius strip") offers a vocabulary for naming the "deep structure" of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Maternal Condition: Freedom in Situation Beyond the “Ideal Mother”: Creating Our Own Identities Mommy and Me Notes.

When Blanchot sketches the obscure space of the other night, he describes it primarily in terms of sound. The vocation of the other night, the domain of inspiration, which is approached because it promises to enable artistic works but ultimately puts them at the utmost risk, turns out to be one’s own “eternally reverberating echo.” In my article, I want to trace how such nocturnal sounds are articulated in works of art across different media, especially by staging breath. (...) Echoing Blanchot, these works indicate how hearing the night and hearing breath, the sound of physical inspiration, coincides with hearing what constitutes the respective work’s medial and material bases. In Virginia Woolf’s novels Jacob’s Room and The Waves, an impersonal, neutral narrative voice resounds in a “murmur of air,” “tremulous with breathing,” spreading darkness across space and time. The visitors’ exploration of Kimsooja’s installation To Breathe: Bottari ends in a completely dark anechoic chamber where visitors start hearing their own breath. By creating this uncanny moment of hearing one’s own respiration as an external and disembodied sound, the spatial installation points to what essentially determines it: the bodily movements of the participants. “Nightmarket,” a track by Burial, is a labyrinthine soundscape consisting mainly of muffled whispering, rustling, crackling and audible breath. Through the acoustic proximity of the recorded breath and the vinyl crackles, the track evokes its own medial constitution and history: it displays traces of the organic basis of voice as well as the analogue medium in the digital. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

Written over the course of two months in early 2008, Art as "Night" is a series of essays in part inspired by a January 2007 visit to the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, London, with subsequent forays into related themes and art-historical judgments for and against theories of meta-painting. Art as "Night" proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form (...) of formalism, this "night" is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency. Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as "Night" restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velázquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as "Night" argues for a nondiscursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art – and, foremost, painting. A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as "Night" suggests by way of this critique of an elective "night" crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma , a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as "Night" is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to explore the experiences of night nurses. An interpretative phenomenological study was undertaken, and 35 nurses working in Italian medical, surgical and intensive care units were purposely recruited. Data were gathered in 2010 by semi‐structured interviews, collecting nurses' narratives, memorable cases and metaphors, aimed at summarising the essence of work as a nurse during the night. The experience of night nursing is based on four interconnected themes: (i) working in a (...) state of alert, (ii) growing by expanding autonomy and responsibility, (iii) assuring sensitive surveillance and (iv) experiencing deep intimacy. Memorable episodes were polarised along (i) expected/unexpected events; (ii) positive/negative epilogues; and (iii) life/death issues. Many of the emergent metaphors described working during the night as being in the middle of a space where an apparent calm scene takes place, but unpredictable factors may suddenly change the order of events and the outcomes, creating chaos. Working during the night alerts nurses, who increase autonomy, expanding their role and assuming more responsibility with respect to that assumed during daily shifts. The nurses' clinical reasoning is based on data they carefully listen to, and on the meaning that nurses give time by time to different noises and silence. While in the past a sense of companionships was reported, a loneliness or a ‘neutral’ experience concerning the relationships with colleagues seems to prevail during night nursing. Working night shifts is a complex task, and specific training must be assured to students/novices. (shrink)

Sacrifice, solidarity, and social decadence were essential themes not only for Patočka's philosophical work, but also for his personal life. In the "Varna Lectures" sacrifice is characterized uniquely as the privation of a clear telos, as counter-escapist, and as sutured to a comportment of finite life that is non-causal and non-purposive. In his Heretical Essays a similar hope is expressed to extract meaningfulness from use-value, and to deploy a Socratic and Christian "Care for the Soul" that can counteract the (...) decadences of our age. These interests and developments of the practice and notion of sacrifice point to Patočka's double-hereticism, both of the post-industrial age of technological advancement, and of what had become the unthought-through of the Christian tradition. In both senses, his theory of sacrifice is not unlike that of St. Paul, who saw the necessity of counter-acting the decadence and pompousness of the Corinthians by calling them to become "scum of the earth." This helps reveal how sacrifice presumes, in general, an operative notion of waste, and this paper seeks to lend further understanding to the relation between solidarity and sacrifice by developing, from out of Patočka's own work, precisely how waste figures prominently in such a relation. Waste may be refused by merit of being deemed to have no value; waste can mark a layer of expenditure of using "something up" in a way that overlooks its societal surplus; and waste could depict whatever is, like a wasteland, uncultivable and barren. Waste then is employed in the essay as a heuristic tool for understanding how the normalization of the relation between solidarity and sacrifice is in need of being inverted, and how this inversion has consequences also for how solidarity can be considered in relation to atonement. (shrink)

This essay examines Meera Margaret Singh’s exhibition Nightingale in the time and place of the liminal space we call “hotel.” In intertexual dialogue with Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory, the author not only reviews Singh’s intimate photographs of her mother, she reads the images with and against the architecture in which they are exhibited. The Gladstone as exhibition space redoubles Singh’s emphasis on the tense connectivity of apparent binaries: youth and age, public and private, artist and model, object and spectator, living (...) and dying. The quotidian activities of hotel living—guests’ arrivals, departures, and returns—become inextricable pieces of Singh’s site-specific installation. The author theorizes what Freud calls the “foretaste of mourning” in this work, grappling with what will be but is not yet the death of the mother. Singh’s Nightingale proposes that we do not “work through” mourning: mourning is a perpetual way of being in the present. (shrink)

In the preface to his Nodes Atticae, Gellius explains his choice of title: quoniam longinquis per hiemem noctibus in agro, sicuti dixi, terrae Atticae commentationes hasce ludere ac facere exorsi sumus, idcirco eas inscripsimus Noctium esse Atticarum He then proceeds to enumerate other titles used for miscellaneous works similar to his own, both Greek and Latin, which, he claims, are far more refined and witty than his title . Attractive as Gellius' explanation may be, it raises some serious difficulties2 and (...) should not be taken at face value, especially since it seems to establish a novel type of relation between title and work. None of the titles in Gellius' list seems to have been based on the circumstances of the inception of the work, nor indeed does any other extant title prior to the publication of the Nodes Atticae. There is no reason to deny Gellius the credit for inventing a novel principle of titling, yet titles based on the circumstances of composition rather than on the content of the work fail to perform a primary function of titles, namely an initial direction of the expectations of prospective readers. (shrink)

As one of the bare handful of scholars working on Schelling, I should heartily like to accept Professor Harris's argument, for all these black cows hang around one's neck more heavily than did the albatross on the ancient mariner's. I find myself obliged, however, to closely test his argument. I regret that, viewed in the context of the whole of the Phenomenology's Preface, Harris's argument is not fully convincing. I shall argue that, since the Preface's plain intent is to contrast (...) the vitalism of a method of thought that is spirit's coming into its own with all styles of fixated propositional thinking, the “formalism” Hegel attacks is a loose aggregate of the philosophical styles of Fichte, Schelling, Reinhold and Bardili. Hegel is content to leave the label loose and unspecified and not to name names. It is not strictly fair to let the scope of the term resonate upon Schelling's “first scientific grasp of the idea”, at least not for an author who knew Schelling's work so well. But as Harris points out, it is not fair to Hegel for his public to read him with the sole, simplistic question of what positions he supports and what positions he rejects. (shrink)

In this paper I show that, from a philosophical perspective, in Elie Wiesel’s work in general and in Night in particular, the relation between ethics and religion is based on complementarity. In order to achieve this, I have analysed the way in which memory is shown as an invitation to participation in a common set of meanings, values and actions. What I deem most significant is the way in which the memory of the Holocaust is constituted as a (...) medium of action and of communion among humans in an act of mutual responsibility. Through this, the memory of the Holocaust obliges us to assume an ethics of responsibility and of action that rules out the possibility of a contemporary repetition of the events that took place in the death camps. I use Night to show how this narrative reveals several points that are important for understanding certain aspects of the relation between ethics, religion and the memory of the Holocaust. One of these is the understanding of memory as a way to bring man and God together in a relation of mutual communication, beginning with the experience of suffering of dehumanization and of God’s absence from the death camp. Another is that the religious and cultural memory represented by Israel is the main target of extermination as a manifestation of radical evil. A third is that Israel’s suffering has a paradigmatic value, and therefore the memory of the Holocaust becomes a special power that may be used as a tool to diminish the power of evil through the elimination of indifference and the assumption of responsibility. (shrink)

This essay begins with some observations on the main features and availability of the aesthetic experience of the night sky to us. In the second part, the aesthetics of the starry sky is interpreted in terms of time experience, complementing the usual approach in terms of immense space. These remarks on this broad and abundant subject can partly be linked to the intellectual historical interpretation of the birth of modern aesthetics, and partly to the vital discourse of environmental aesthetics, (...) which proves that these two approaches can work together and bring to the fore the aesthetic relevance and fruitfulness of this subject. (shrink)

The experiments described in this publication had their start during the Second World War under the direction of Professor Sir Frederick Bartlett at Cambridge. The immediate aim was to compare the various tests that had been devised at one time or another to help in selecting people for such night tasks as required keen night vision. The work gradually turned into a laboratory investigation for studying the outstanding traits of the key tests. When the war came to (...) an end, the research was continued because it was seen to have importance for the theory of human vision in general. In the post-war investigations, special attention was paid to the way in which quantum properties of light might be related to excitation of the retina. (shrink)

Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences (HHEs) accompanying sleep paralysis (SP) are often cited as sources of accounts of supernatural nocturnal assaults and paranormal experiences. Descriptions of such experiences are remarkably consistent across time and cultures and consistent also with known mechanisms of REM states. A three-factor structural model of HHEs based on their relations both to cultural narratives and REM neurophysiology is developed and tested with several large samples. One factor, labeled Intruder, consisting of sensed presence, fear, and auditory and visual (...) hallucinations, is conjectured to originate in a hypervigilant state initiated in the midbrain. Another factor, Incubus, comprising pressure on the chest, breathing difficulties, and pain, is attributed to effects of hyperpolarization of motoneurons on perceptions of respiration. These two factors have in common an implied alien ''other'' consistent with occult narratives identified in numerous contemporary and historical cultures. A third factor, labeled Unusual Bodily Experiences, consisting of floating/flying sensations, out-of-body experiences, and feelings of bliss, is related to physically impossible experiences generated by conflicts of endogenous and exogenous activation related to body position, orientation, and movement. Implications of this last factor for understanding of orientational primacy in self-consciousness are considered. Central features of the model developed here are consistent with recent work on hallucinations associated with hypnosis and schizophrenia. (shrink)

In the Qurʾān, the night which encompass half of human life, is expressed by various concepts. From sunset to sunrise (night), various moments of the time frame are also named with different words and concepts. On the other hand, besides sleep and rest, some worship and actions that are asked to be done at night are also mentioned in the Qur’ānic verses. Also sleep at night and the night itself is mentioned as a proof of (...) Allah and an important blessing for us. When we say “night”, people first think of sleep and rest. However, as it is understood from the Qur’ānic verses, the night should not be seen only as a sleep time and rest time. Such that one of the first commandments to the Prophet Muḥammad was to wake up at night and perform various worship and deeds. Also, it is emphasized in the Qurʾān that night worship and actions influence and leave permanent impacts on human being. In this context, in this study, we tried to identify the concepts and expressions stated in the Qurʾān expressing the night-time or the time slices in it by taking into account the references in the Qur’ānic verses. Moreover, we have also examined worship and actions performed or recommended to do at night. Again, we have researched how the worship and actions performed in the calm and darkness of the night will contribute to human being. Thus, we tried to determine how the Qurʾān addresses the "night" which is the preparation time for the next day and the assessment time of the previous day.Summary: One lives half of his life during the day and the other half at night. However, he plans his daily tasks mostly according to daytime, and spends his nights mostly for sleep and rest. On the other hand, sparing the night completely for sleep and rest means that a long period of life passes passively by. That is why we have decided to do a night-time study that expresses an important time frame for human being. Although there are some ḥadīth about the importance of night worship in the sources, we tried to conduct our research within the framework of the Qur’ānic verses about the night. To determine the meaning and the importance attributed to the night by the Qurʾān, we have examined the Qur’ānic verses referring to night-time, night events and worship and actions that are desired to be done during these times. We concluded our research by making use of the main sources of tafsīr and relevant copyrighted works, articles, papers and encyclopedia articles.During the research we saw that the Qurʾān refers to the night and some time periods in it with different names. In this context, we see that concepts such as leyl (ليل), beyāt (بيات), fajr (فجر), seḥar (سحر), ğāsik (غاسق), ʿashiyy (عشيّ) and asīl (أصيل) are used in the āya. In many Qur’ānic verses, phrases reffering an entire day with specific composition such as day-night and morning-evening are used. In the composition of day and night, night is always mentioned first. In the compositions in the form of morning-evening, we see that sometimes the morning is mentioned first, and sometimes the evening. In addition to these, there are expressions such as before the sunrise, sunset, stay until evening that evokes night-time in the Qurʾān.Another point that draws attention in the research is that there are vows on the night or on certain times in the night in the Qurʾān. We can say that the vows in question are an indication of the importance that Allah gives to the night and some time in it. In fact, Allah points to the night, the functions of the night and its relationship with the day as a āyah (proof) of his existence, might and uniqueness.On the other hand, there are many good and bad historical events that happened during the night in the Qurʾān. First of all, it should be noted that the beginning of the waḥy (devine revalation), which is one of the biggest historical events, took place at night. The Qurʾān describes this night, which is mentioned as Laylat al-Qadr, as better than a thousand months. Again, it is mentioned in the Qurʾānic verses that Prophet Moses and Lūṭ left their countries by taking advantage of the darkness of the night with the believers to get rid of the evil of the oppressors. Also, deniers sometimes chose especially the night-time to carry out cheats and traps for the prophets and believers, and even attempts to assassinate. The fact that the night is dark, quiet and calm obsufucates such negative actions. For this reason, the Qurʾān recommended to take refuge in the Lord of the daybreak from the evil of the darkness.The research demonstrates that the Qurʾān asks people to perform various worships and actions in certain time periods of the night. In fact, even in the early days of waḥy, the Prophet was commanded to wake up at night and perform some worship and actions. In this context, he was asked to pray at night, read the Qurʾān by contemplating and understanding, and chant the name of his Lord. Actually, the Prophet is prepared for the heavy responsibility he took spiritually with such actions that he performed at night. Because a strong spirit and mind are necessary for facing up to what will happen during the next day. It is already stated in the Qurʾān that getting up at night has effective and permanent effects on people. Again, during the prophethood, The Prophet has advised to perform some actions such as sajdah (prostration), qiyām, tasbīḥ and tahajjud ṣalāt (night prayer) -as a special night prayer- during the night.In the Qurʾānic verses examined, some prayers and actions are asked to do at night and day regardless of time. Especially three of the farḍ of prayer (ṣalāt), namely evening, ʿišāʾ and fajr prayer (ṣalāt), are performed during the time defined as night. In addition, some aspects such as duʿāʾ (prayer), istighfār (ask for forgiveness), ṣadaqa and daʿwah (call) are mentioned in the Qurʾānic verses. It is an order or recommendation that all this be done at night as well as during the day. Especially for istighfār which means to ask for forgiveness, it is mentioned the time of dawning.As a result, we can say that there are some special features that make the night different from daytime. For instance, it prepares a suitable environment to sleep and rest for one who is tired mentally, spiritually and physically after the daytime; as the night has features such as darkness, silence and tranquility that man needs to rest and be calm. On the other hand, Allah does not want the night, which means half of human life, to be spent entirely with sleep and rest. As, one rests not only his body but also his mind and soul in the quiet and calm atmosphere of the night, Hereby, human-being starts the next day with a more vigorous mind, spirit and body. At night-time, while making an evaluation of the previous day's deeds and actions, people are also prepared spiritually and mentally for the next day's works.We can say that worship and deeds performed at night are more sincere than those performed during daytime, because man stays alone with his nafs and his Lord at night, away from the eyes. This can keep people away from riyā (pretension) and vanity that invalidates their deeds. Man's waking up and worshiping his Lord at a time when everyone is asleep shows his ikhlāṣ and sincerity. All these indicate that the time of responsibility for man is not limited to daytime. For this reason, people should think day and night together within the framework of his responsibilities and do their work accordingly. (shrink)

In this publication, we will use the principal concepts of John of the Cross, the famous mystic of the XVI th century, as a framework to go over, in a non-reductionist way, three challenges in contemporary neuroscience of decision-making. Firstly, the dark night and the purgative paths will be related to discontinuity in decision-making. Secondly, the passive and active paths will be associated to brain plasticity, architecture, and levels of decision. Thirdly, the illumination, which can be felt when a (...) solution is reached, has to do with positive emotions and can be inspired by the science of love of John of the Cross. We shall lastly conclude by emphasizing the usefulness of his work to illuminate the neuroscience of decision-making. (shrink)

This study adds to a small but growing literature that situates sleep within gendered work— family responsibilities. We conducted interviews with 25 heterosexual dual-earner working-class couples with children, most of whom had one partner who worked at night. A few men suffered disrupted sleep because of their commitment to being a coparent to their children, but for most their provider status gave them rights to longer and more continuous sleep. By contrast, as they were the primary caregiver during (...) sentient hours, women’s sleep was curtailed and interrupted by responding to the needs of family members at night and at the beginning of each day, and this was true for women who worked nights as well as days. Furthermore, in struggling to meet their daily employment and familial obligations while tired and sleepy, women further stressed their bodies in ways that can cause cumulative sleep debt. This article demonstrates that sleep deficits are another manifestation of gender inequality, with important implications for long-term health and well-being. (shrink)

This study investigates the portrayal of five female journalists on the Aaron Sorkin television series Sports Night. The women were depicted as acting unprofessionally, displaying motherly qualities, choosing their personal lives over work, being deferential to men for ethical decisions, and showing a lack of sports knowledge compared to the male characters. The researchers use social responsibility theory to suggest why these portrayals were ethically problematic.

This article argues that the modern world is not only produced by, and is promoting, processes of rationalization and disenchantment, but is also the site of `enchanting' influences that are genuinely `charming' or `magical'. Such modes of influencing rely increasingly on the power of images, and on theatre-like performances of words or discourses. The impact takes place under conditions that, following Victor Turner's work, could be called `liminal', and which can be turned through `imagemagic' into a state of `permanent (...) liminality'. A path-breaking analysis of such influences can be found in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, written at a highly liminal moment in European history, the end of the Renaissance and the unfolding of the Reformation. It is argued that the central problem of the play is the source of the power that motivates, from the inside, human beings. Shakespeare attributes this power to images through which human beings can be incited to act, in particular to fall in love, and assigns a decisive role in the manipulation of such images to the Trickster figure of folk-tales and myths. Such image-magic makes its victims believe that they gained enlightenment, maturing to reason, exactly when succumbing to its influence; while its lasting impact is the confusion of the senses, or the power to distinguish and discriminate. (shrink)

St. John of the Cross’ work, The Dark Night of the Soul, and Joseph Symonds’ work, The Case and Cure of a Deserted Soul, offer two compelling treatments on the subject of spiritual dryness. Moreover, these works represent two spiritual traditions which offer distinct but viable perspectives on the Christian life. This paper seeks to answer the following question: What is the degree of similarity between St. John of the Cross’ understanding of the dark night of (...) the soul and Joseph Symonds’ understanding of spiritual desertion? A secondary question is also addressed: What is the value of these resources for pastoral care today? Although notable differences exist between the two, their degree of similarity is significant considering the disconnection between the spiritual traditions that each represent. Moreover, these works are invaluable resources for contemporary pastoral care. (shrink)

I have only two comments to make, both of which will appear incidental at first. Their full relevance to the paper you have just read will become clear at the end, as I hope.The first refers to Harris's remark that Jacobi, Schleiermacher and Herder “make strange bedfellows”. Actually, they do not. This is one more example, I believe, of Hegel's usual idiosyncratic yet conceptually sound classification of philosophers and philosophies. I am thinking especially of the Jacobi-Herder pair, but I suspect (...) that what I have to say would apply to the third member of the trio as well. We must remember that, at the time of the writing of the Preface to the Phenomenology, the 1815 edition of Jacobi's dialogue David Hume on Faith, which Jacobi himself had overseen, did not exist. It is the edition that we are most likely to have read, because the wonders of photomechanical reproduction have made it easily available. Hegel, however, could only have read the dialogue in its 1787 edition, without the long new Introduction which Jacobi added in 1815 as an introduction to his collected works as well. (shrink)

Aesop's fables are used to gather HR fables and these fables are told mainly in the words of the protagonists of these moral stories, HR practitioners. Leaving the moral meaning of the fables for the reader to interpret so the reader can ethically connect with the morality of HR work, the personal narratives of practitioners and their humanity, the fables conclude with a critical commentary by the author, the promotion of a human virtue and HR moral maxim. The article, (...) itself, then ends with an explanation of the research methodology adopted to compile the HR fables. (shrink)

Reber and Collins are each major researchers in psychology and sociology respectively. Both focus on the analysis and investigation of tacit knowledge. Yet neither had read or cited the other’s work. Here we explore how this similarity of interest can coexist in the midst of ignorance. Over many months we explored the differences in our world views, our approaches to the topic and the difficulties of interdisciplinarity. This paper is a summary of that exchange presented as a kind of (...) case-study in doing science. We conclude with a list of the general properties of the dialogue associated with this kind of “incommensurability” and state our distaste for tribalism in academic life. (shrink)

Reber and Collins are each major researchers in psychology and sociology respectively. Both focus on the analysis and investigation of tacit knowledge. Yet neither had read or cited the other’s work. Here we explore how this similarity of interest can coexist in the midst of ignorance. Over many months we explored the differences in our world views, our approaches to the topic and the difficulties of interdisciplinarity. This paper is a summary of that exchange presented as a kind of (...) case-study in doing science. We conclude with a list of the general properties of the dialogue associated with this kind of “incommensurability” and state our distaste for tribalism in academic life. (shrink)

This paper engages in a critical examination of Michel Henry’s (1922-2002) phenomenological study of the erotic relation. I argue that while Henry’s analysis sheds light on the nature of eros and how it might be renewed from the obscene objectivism to which it has largely been reduced in Western society today, his analysis of eros undermines his account of the phenomenological life of the subject as a radically immanent mode of appearing and calls for revision. I contend that it is (...) by acknowledging life as a movement of transcendence toward the world that we can resolve this issue and further refine Henry’s insights into the nature of eros and how it might once again be renewed in contemporary Western civilization. I begin by laying out Henry’s account of how the forgetting of life results in a reduction of the erotic (i.e., inter-subjective) relation to a merely sexual (i.e., inter-objective) one, and how this lays the groundwork for what he regards as the destructive sadomasochistic practices of voyeurism and pornography. Following this, I outline Henry’s account of the nature and limits of the erotic relation, and I demonstrate how Henry’s work harbours the latent suggestion that the failure of eros can serve as a step toward a higher union with others in a love of God. In the closing section, I show how Henry’s analysis of the erotic relation calls for a re-conception of life as a movement of transcendence. I outline how this re-conception better accounts for the complex exchanges between the non-objectifying drives of life and the objectifying acts of consciousness, and I show how this allows us to retain some of Henry’s insights into eros and its renewal while forcing us to modify others. (shrink)

If you can, take the chance to see this exhibition of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paintings. This survey of her works opened briefly at Tate Britain in 2020 and has n.

Japanese nurses, like their counterparts in many other countries, are suffering from staff shortages and severe working conditions. The Japan Federation of Medical Workers’ Unions launched a campaign in 1989 for nurses called the ‘Nurse Wave’. Their demands were many: to increase the numbers of nursing staff, the regulation of night shifts, the implementation of a five-day working week everywhere, a fair appraisal of nurses’ work, better vocational training, etc. Nurses in white uniforms assembled at meetings, marched and (...) took part in nationwide strikes. They collected over 5.4 million petition signatures, which they submitted to Parliament. After three years of campaigning, they won the enactment of a law for securing sufficient numbers of nursing personnel. This struggle, which highlighted the most pressing demands of nurses and was supported by the general public, was a new experience for Japanese nurses. It was a militant movement which demanded that the Government should change its health policy. Against the sluggish image of the Japanese labour movement, strikes and demonstrations organized by nurses dressed in white have made a strong impression on the Japanese people. As health care is a public service on which the life and death of people depend, a strike at a health institution naturally has constraints and must follow specific procedures. In this article, the measures taken by Nihon Iroren to minimize the consequences of strikes on patients and the local community, the impact of the nurses’ movement on the society, as well as the lessons drawn from the campaign, are presented. (shrink)

Shift work is a fixture of our 24-hour economy, with approximately 18 per cent of workers in the USA engaging in shift work, many overnight. Since shift work has been linked to an increased risk for an array of serious maladies, including cardiometabolic disorders and cancer, and is done disproportionately by the poor and by minorities, shift work is a highly prevalent economic and occupational health disparity. Here we draw primarily on the state of science around (...) shift work and breast cancer to argue that shift work represents a public health threat serious enough to warrant a precautionary stance. We use the precautionary principle to advance our case and view it as a moral compass for shift work research, empowering public health to cast shift work within the domain of health disparities deserving action despite scientific uncertainty. With the precautionary principle, we call for a deliberative decision-making process and formation of a broad shift work research collaboration to protect the health of many millions who work at night. (shrink)

"Prefaces to Unwritten Works is a collection of five essays, prefaces to books that Nietzsche never went on to write. Nietzsche himself put these prefaces together in the form of a small leather-bound, handwritten book, and gave that book to Cosima Wagner as a Christmas present in 1872. The dedicatory letter indicates that Nietzsche sent this little book to Cosima "in heartfelt reverence and as an answer to verbal and epistolary questions." As such, this work is a window into (...) Nietzsche's relations with the Wagners at the height of their association, but it is also a continuation of Nietzsche's radical confrontation with Greek antiquity that had begun with the then-recently published Birth of Tragedy. The Wagners read Nietzsche's book of prefaces on the evening of New Year's Day 1873, and Cosima records in her diary five days later that at night, "again" she reflected about the essence of art as a consequence of Nietzsche's work. A month later, Cosima sent Nietzsche a letter encouraging him to write at least two of the books promised by his prefaces." "Nietzsche did not go to write the books heralded by these prefaces, but the prefaces themselves provide substantial challenges of their own and intriguing clues as to the form and content of the books Nietzsche may have intended. Some of these prefaces are better known to students of Nietzsche than others and have attracted significant attention from scholars. The first essay is entitled On the Pathos of Truth, and it consider the relative value of truth and art for human life. The second essay, Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational Institutions, is the only preface in this collection regarding which Nietzsche did actually go on to write a book, albeit a book he did not publish (entitled On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, available from St. Augustine's Press). This essay is a revised version of the preface Nietzsche wrote for that book, and the changes Nietzsche made are indicative of the plans he had for an improved version. The topic of the essay is almost entirely the art of careful reading. The third essay is entitled The Greek State, and it treats of the relation of slavery to culture and of the genius to the state. This essay is also an interpretation of Plato's Republic, in which Nietzsche claims to reveal everything he has "divined of this secret writing." The fourth essay, The Relation of Schopenhauerian Philosophy to a German Culture, neither assumes that there is in fact, at present, a German Culture, nor hardly mentions Schopen-hauer at all, except to suggest that he is one about whom a culture could be built. The final essay is entitled Homer's Contest and is an exploration of the place of jealousy, strife, and agonistic competition in Greek culture."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

The scholiasts supposed that it was Zeus, not Strife, who dwells γαíνσ Έν ŕίζησι, and Paley has punctuated the line accordingly. I do not in any case doubt that he is wrong, but if the Theogony is evidence, he can almost be proved so. In the Theogony the γης ŕίσα;ι are a kind of suburb of Tartarus, from which the author does not very clearly distinguish them. In his useful though somewhat desultory gazetteer of those districts he says that Styx (...) dwells there apart from the gods, and that Iris only comes down when there are oaths to be administered in Olympus. Clearly Zeus is not at home in such a place. Strife herself is not enumerated in the Theogony among the residents, but her family is. Whatever she may be elsewhere, both in the Works and Days and in the Theogony she is the daughter of Night; and in the Theogony not only Night but also her two sons Sleep and Death reside in the district. Strife may appropriately keep them company. (shrink)

The remarks that critics make about works of art are various in character. Some of them are strictly interpretative—for instance, The Lord of the Rings may be claimed to be an allegorical representation of the Gospel Story; the slow movement of a symphony may be said to express a period of calm after a revolution; a painting may be said to depict the horrors of war. Some may be biographical—that the play was written in 1654, that the poem was written (...) while the poet was in love, that the sculpture was commissioned by the Canada Council. Some may be autobiographical—that the 7th has always been one's favourite Beethoven symphony, that one identifies with Joe in Room at the Top, that Medea was the first tragedy one saw performed in the original Greek. Some are ‘descriptive’ in the philosopher's sense, ‘matters of fact’—that the narrator is a senior civil servant, that the painting is all in pastel colours, that the conductor has not played all the repetitions. Some invoke formal structural principles—that the doors are in classical proportions, that the work's catastrophe is deferred to the finale, that the poem is in iambic pentameters. Some are concerned with the exposition of technique—that the spaciousness is suggested by the use of open fifths, that speed is portrayed by making the moving object sharper than anything else in the picture, that the effect of a sculpture is achieved by the use of metallurgically distinct materials. I wish to concentrate on a type of remark found frequently in art criticism, which defies reduction to any of the kinds mentioned above. The following are typical instances:That picture will not, at the first glance, deceive as a piece of actual sunlight; but this is because there is more in it than the sunlight, because under the glazing veil of vaulted fire which lights the vessel on her last path, there is a blue deep, desolate hollow of darkness, out of which you can hear the voice of the night wind, and the dull boom of the disturbed sea; because the cold deadly shadows of twilight are gathering through every sunbeam, and moment by moment as you look, you will fancy some new film and faintness of the night has risen over the vastness of the departing form. (shrink)