This chapter contains sections titled: I. Knowing Oneself: The Cartesian Project Ii. Where Am I? Being in the World Iii. Who Am I? Existence Precedes Essence Iv. What Am I? Notes.

In this paper, we extend Michel Foucault’s final works on the ‘care of the self’ to an empirical examination of research practice in community-based research (CBR). We use Foucault’s ‘morality of behaviors’ to analyze interview data from a national sample of Canadian CBR practitioners working with communities affected by HIV. Despite claims in the literature that ethics review is overly burdensome for non-traditional forms of research, our findings suggest that many researchers using CBR have an ambivalent but ultimately productive (...) relationship with institutional research ethics review requirements. They understand and use prescribed codes, but adapt them in practice to account for the needs of participating community members, members of their research teams and the larger communities with whom they work. Complying with ethics protocols was seen as only the beginning, a minimum standard; our research suggests that the real ethical work happens in the field, where CBR practitioners encounter community members in diverse public roles and must forge ethical consensus across communities. CBR represents an ethical terrain in which practitioners challenge themselves to work differently, and as a result they care for themselves—and others—in ways that often resist the propensity for domination through public health research.‘…there are different ways to “conduct oneself” morally, different ways for the acting individual to operate, not just as an agent, but as an ethical subject of action.’ (Foucault, 1985: 26). (shrink)

In this paper, we extend Michel Foucault’s final works on the ‘care of the self’ to an empirical examination of research practice in community-based research (CBR). We use Foucault’s ‘morality of behaviors’ to analyze interview data from a national sample of Canadian CBR practitioners working with communities affected by HIV. Despite claims in the literature that ethics review is overly burdensome for non-traditional forms of research, our findings suggest that many researchers using CBR have an ambivalent but ultimately productive (...) relationship with institutional research ethics review requirements. They understand and use prescribed codes, but adapt them in practice to account for the needs of participating community members, members of their research teams and the larger communities with whom they work. Complying with ethics protocols was seen as only the beginning, a minimum standard; our research suggests that the real ethical work happens in the field, where CBR practitioners encounter community members in diverse public roles and must forge ethical consensus across communities. CBR represents an ethical terrain in which practitioners challenge themselves to work differently, and as a result they care for themselves—and others—in ways that often resist the propensity for domination through public health research.‘…there are different ways to “conduct oneself” morally, different ways for the acting individual to operate, not just as an agent, but as an ethical subject of action.’ (Foucault, 1985: 26). (shrink)

In the beginning, Savransky's book offers a copious list of many worlds that we may or may not inhabit or even know about: a world where the dead are persons with whom the living confer, a world where part of the year the sun never sets, a world where sorcery-lions stalk their victims, a world where fictional characters give advice to novel readers, a world where immortal fungi live in disturbed forests, and and and (without end). This is (...) a “world of many worlds,” say Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser; a “pluralistic universe,” says William James. But neither phrase tells us what the world is like. They only stand for a practical and burning question at a time when the erasure of differences goes on at a breathtaking pace and the worlds face globalizing forces that fracture the multiple practices through which beings exist.These attempts at world erasures were and are by no means inevitable, and Savransky offers us, more precious than any explanation, a story about the past that helps us feel important aspects of what continues to occur. The story concerns the fraction of Magellan's circumnavigating crew arriving back in Spain in 1522, and by retelling it Savransky gives us a striking sense of the crew not so much having crossed the globe as having invented it. As in Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), the journey legitimized the conception of a unified reality, a globe, everywhere of the same quality, whose local particularities are but obstacles to overcome, resources to exploit, or exotic mysteries to visit. The main effort of Savransky's book, then, is to gather means that might empower ways of thinking, feeling, and living in a brazen reversal of Verne's title—around the day in eighty (or a thousand) worlds.Savransky is by no means alone in this task, and many anthropological and philosophical proposals have contributed. He comments on some of these with a view to learning from their inventiveness rather than to pointing out their shortcomings. Still, we have learned from the fate of such proposals and experiments the startling ease with which the vision of a unified reality can creep back into the best attempts at thinking about a world of many worlds. Take, for instance, the language of ontology that has enabled us to hear from other worlds things of which we could not imagine reality was capable. But then, as Savransky shows, those gains are nearly lost when ontology turns into a turn—the “ontological turn”—and the anthropologists sail off around the world, posing the question “What is your ontology?” to people who could not care less about ontology.From James especially, Savransky borrows many proposals, two of which I will mention here. First is the need to reclaim philosophical Realism from those who made it a weapon of disqualification. James himself was the keen proponent of a Realism that we might call generic: “reality feels like itself,” any experience is real, and no experience should be required to justify its existence. Second, if “reality feels like itself,” then we may expect to experience “worldquakes” whenever we happen to brush up against other worlds. Perhaps the most compelling meaning that we may assign, following James, to pluriverse, is the notion and experience of “the” world being not only more than one, but also more than many—a sense of the real as inseverable from a more. Thus Savransky writes, along these lines, that “the pluriverse is not a world we dream might come about—it is what makes us dream.”. (shrink)

One of the most striking features observed throughout tropical agricultural frontiers is the extreme variability in land-use strategies from one farmer to the next. This article analyzes the forest conversion process and predominant land uses associated with smallholder settlement expansion in the Amazon frontier. The discussion seeks to increase understanding of the micro and macro-level forces that propel land-use decisions in the Amazon and offer insights about how farmers' land-use decisions may be altered to bring about forms of (...) resource use that are consistent with the constraints and opportunities of the frontier environment. Recognizing that no frontier area can be truly representative of the Amazon as a whole, this article also introduces some detailed evidence from another Amazon country (Ecuador) within a topic that has been previously dominated by research mainly in Brazil. The analysis suggests that to be effective, any policy or technology-based effort on the part of governments or researchers to alter colonist land-use systems must begin to look systematically at the production systems of agricultural colonist populations already present in frontier environments. This knowledge is essential to understand the social and economic factors affecting present land use and choice of technology. It is also important for understanding factors influencing farmers' demand for more optimal systems of land use that are consistent with varying agroecological potentials, demographic situations, and the management capacity of the farmer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Ethics of Revenge and the Meanings of the Odyssey by Alexander C. LoneyEmily P. AustinAlexander C. Loney. The Ethics of Revenge and the Meanings of the Odyssey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xii +265. Hardcover, $78.00. ISBN 978-0-190-90967-3.The Ethics of Revenge and the Meanings of the Odyssey places Odysseus' climactic act of revenge where it belongs: at the center of our interpretation of the Odyssey. (...) With admirably clear prose, Loney traces out the recurring pattern of tisis narratives woven through the poem. The accumulation of these revenge stories demonstrates that, in Loney's words, "tisis breeds endless further plots, making an epic of revenge fatally open-ended" (225, emphasis mine). Although the focus is simple, Loney's comprehensive account of the workings of revenge narratives commands the reader's interest. I, for one, was unprepared to recognize how systematically the poet sets up its readers to be disturbed by the ending—although I have long found the final books of the Odyssey troubling. On Loney's reading, the Odyssey sets up the terms of revenge's justice such that, on those very terms, the execution of vengeance is always ambivalent. For anyone with interests in Homer or revenge narratives, Loney's book has much to offer.The Ethics of Revenge begins with archaic conceptions of vengeance (tisis) (chap. 1). Loney distinguishes between "positive" reciprocity, which aims at balance through the ostensibly free exchange of benefits; and "negative" reciprocity, which is blatantly transactional: tisis is a form of negative reciprocity, where harm is met with immediate and (supposedly) equivalent harm. But as Loney shows, the returning harm is equivalent to the initial harm only insofar as someone judges it to be so. This insight is essential to understanding the inconclusive quality of vengeance: one person's retributive act is, potentially, another person's harm received. The justice achieved by such retributions is limited to the perspective of the one judging.Loney turns to such overlapping stories of tisis in the Odyssey in chapter 2. These overlaps prime the audience to notice ethical complexities among different characters' claims about wrongdoings and merited punishments. For Loney, Zeus' story of Orestes in Book 1 is the paradigmatic tisis narrative of the Odyssey. From this story, Loney distills the elements of all tisis narratives in the poem: absence (Agamemnon away) → unheeded warning / recklessness (Aigisthos ignores Hermes' warning) → preparation for offense (Aigisthos woos Klytaimnestra) → offense (Aigisthos commits adultery with Klytaimnestra and murders Agamemnon) → preparation for retribution (Orestes returns to Mycenae) → retributive act (Orestes kills Aigisthos and Klytaimnestra) → just order restored (Aigisthos has repaid in full). [End Page 535] Loney emphasizes how the unheeded warnings contribute to the ideal of immediate equivalence in tisis: when an offender chooses to perpetrate harm despite a warning (often marked by the term ἀτασθαλίαι), he or she effectively chooses to suffer retribution. The narrator of the tisis story moreover stresses equivalence—in the Orestes paradigm, killing for killing.In the next four chapters, Loney masterfully applies this theoretical and philological work to his interpretation of the poem. Chapter 3 follows three narratives of divine vengeance: Zeus avenging the companions' offense against Helios; Poseidon avenging Odysseus' blinding of Polyphemos; and Poseidon taking vengeance on the Phaiakians, who helped Odysseus. With clear analysis of story patterns and intratextual resonance, Loney shows how these stories evoke latent meanings through their parallels, echoes, or mutual implications. So, for example, Odysseus complicates the narrative of Poseidon avenging Polyphemos with his own story of Polyphemos' wrongs against him and his companions; and the vengeance of Poseidon on the Phaiakians is left literally open-ended, with the poet never telling us if Zeus destroys the island or not. As a result, by the time we get to the central tisis narrative of the poem (chap. 4), Odysseus' vengeance against the suitors comes to us against a varied backdrop of inconclusive and intertwined stories of retribution.In chapter 4, Loney explicates the key aspects of tisis in Odysseus' "terrifying revenge" (cf. Plato's Ion 535c7). For example, the suitors receive five of the poem's nine attributions of ἀτασθαλίαι, marking their wrongdoings as "precipitating harm" that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & The Environment 25th Anniversary Issue:Introduction from the EditorPiers H.G. StephensAt the time that Vicky Davion conceived of and launched Ethics and the Environment twenty-five years ago, environmental philosophy was still struggling for acceptance and respectability as a philosophical subdiscipline. For most of the period since 1979 just one journal, Environmental Ethics, had been the primary beacon of the field, and a second, the United (...) Kingdom-based Environmental Values, had only started up in 1992. Much of the surrounding professional atmosphere at the time was less than congenial, especially in relation to any attempt to engage in philosophical radicalism via environmental thought, with much institutional pressure pushing towards seeing all the concerns of our nascent field as questions to be shuffled off into a subsection of applied ethics. As someone who was beginning my doctoral studies in Britain around that time, I well recall the pressures and the struggle for respectability that was involved, and such conditions made the bar for success in launching a new journal that much higher. Vicky's actions in beginning the journal thus required not only imagination and creativity, but a significant amount of intellectual courage.This courage manifested itself most obviously in the new ground that Ethics and the Environment set out to break. Environmental Ethics had tended to take much of its inspiration from the American conservation and preservation movements as well as debates over intrinsic value, while Environmental Values took a perspective that bridged these concerns to predominantly British political and economic theory, Ethics and the Environment responded to the institutional challenges facing the new field by broadening the range of voices and critique that environmental [End Page 1] philosophy articulated. From the earliest stages, radical perspectives that were unrepresented or underrepresented in the other journals—especially ecofeminism, deep ecology, indigenous and non-Western thought—were central to the identity and mission of Ethics and the Environment, and gave it a distinctive place and appeal. It was a risky strategy to take in the mid 1990s, yet it proved to be not only the right thing to do, broadening the debate and adding new protagonists, but also a path to produce a highly successful journal over time.Ethics and the Environment is today one of the top journals in environmental philosophy, still growing in its subscriptions and influence, and a living tribute to the quality of Vicky Davion's vision. As editor, I am often astounded at the range, diversity, and quality of the manuscript submissions we receive from a global audience, and though I remain saddened at the circumstances under which I took over the editorship, I am proud and grateful to be in charge of such a publication, and holding fast as best I can to its founding vision as the journal nears its 25th anniversary. Within the field of environmental philosophy Ethics and the Environment is deeply associated with our department and with the University of Georgia, and I hope that it may continue to be so for many a long year yet. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2020 The Trustees of Indiana University... (shrink)

Apart from the names of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), Mikołaj Kruszewski (1851-1887), and, later, Jerzy Kuryłowicz (1895-1978), Polish linguists and Polish linguistics generally have been little known in the West. The first two were mentioned with approval by Saussure in an unpublished paper, and this reference was picked up by Roman Jakobson and others many years later. Kuryłowicz, for his part, made himself well known in the West through his important work as Indo-Europeanist, even Semiticist, and as a (...) general linguist. The present volume is a first attempt to broaden the perspectives on the Polish contribution to linguistics both inside and outside of Poland during the past centuries. Specialists in their respective fields contributed chapters on the origins and development of general linguistics (Z. Wąsik), applied linguistics (F. Grucza), lexicology (T. Piotrowski), dialectology (St. Gogolewski), and onomastics (S. Gala), followed by five chapters presenting the theories of the arguably most remarkable Polish linguistic thinkers, from Baudouin de Courtenay (A. Adamska-Sałaciak), Kruszewski (F. M. Berezin), and Kuryłowicz (W. Smoczyński) to Mikołaj Rudnicki (1881-1978) and Ludwik Zabrocki (1907-1977) (both written by J. Bańczerowski). Detailed individual bibliographies, a full index of names (with life dates of Polish linguists from the Renaissance to the present day), and a thorough index of subjects and terms make this volume an important reference tool for anyone wishing to acquaint himself with the rich heritage of Polish linguistic thought. (shrink)

Philologus, founded in 1846, is one of the oldest and most respected periodicals in the field of Classics. It publishes articles on Greek and Latin literature, historiography, philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, reception, and the history of scholarship. The journal aims to contribute to our understanding of Greco-Roman culture and its lasting influence on European civilization. The journal Philologus, conceived as a forum for discussion among different methodological approaches to the study of ancient texts and their reception, publishes original scholarly (...) contributions with a strong international focus. Publications languages are: German, English, Italian, French. As of 2014 the publication of supplementary volumes will be resumed. The series Philologus. Supplemente / Philologus. Supplementary Volumes will publish monographs and edited volumes pertaining to all aspects of the study of ancient literature and its reception, with a special focus on topics concerning literary theory, philosophy and the history of scholarship from an interdisciplinary perspective. (shrink)

Postmodernists reject what they call the universalist-rationalist framework of liberalism. When they do defend liberal democracy, they do so in a contextualist manner (within a ‘form of life’) and on the basis of contestation (‘agonism’). Liberals are right to charge postmodernism with self-contradiction, relativism, and immoralism. It is also argued in this article that liberalism and postmodernism are incompatible, and therefore, they cannot be joined together in response to the hegemonic construction of democratic debate. However, liberals are caught in a (...) bind as they insist on impartiality but also believe the exercise of virtue (reasonableness, mutual respect) is a requirement of rational dialogue. This article argues that perfectionism (objectivism) in value judgements is required both to insist that virtuousity is a requirement of rationality and to reject postmodernism. However, it must be possible to separate perfectionism from two features of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism: he is hostile to liberal rights and his contextualism results in relativism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History ed. by Mark D. Hersey and Ted SteinbergJeff HirschyA Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History EDITED BY MARK D. HERSEY AND TED STEINBERG Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2019In the beginning, there was something. Usually filled in with more details, the phrase “in the beginning” is a universal phrase that can cross academic fields, (...) religions, governments, works of literature, and many other things. In A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History, the “in the beginning” is used to refer to the works of famed environmental historian Donald Worster. Using Worster’s writings as a guide, editors Mark D. Hersey and Ted Steinberg use their contributors to lead readers through an examination of the past, present, and future of the field of environmental history.The concepts from Worster that Hersey and Steinberg organize their work around include the problems of natural limits, the transnational nature of environmental issues, and questions regarding method. This framework allows the editors and contributors to examine the relationship between democracy, capitalism, technology, and the environment; the ways that environmental history can and should cross borders; and the tools and the methods of the field. The framework built around Worster’s writings allows for a rich examination of environmental history and shows that many of the ideas that Worster pioneered almost forty years ago are still valid and important.A Field on Fire is divided into three sections containing six, six, and five chapters, respectively. The first section focuses on the relationship between capitalism, the environment, and technology. The second focuses on the international nature of environmental history. The third focuses on the ways that environmental history, including its methods and tools, can be useful in other fields. Together, all three sections [End Page 133] show the richness of environmental history and the influence Worster has had, and still has, on the field.The first section of the book focuses on ideas like resource use, capitalism, and the radical roots of the field. It is driven by Worster’s desire to “get out of parliamentary chambers, out of the birthing rooms and factories, get out of doors altogether, and ramble into the fields, woods, and the open air” (2). The contributors use Worster has a guide to “get out” and examine environmental history and concepts across the United States. They show that environmental history does, in fact, have radical roots dating back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, that capitalism was the lens through which the United States usually engaged with nature, and that humans will continue to have an influence on nature in the United States and around the world. For example, in chapter 3 Frank Zelko writes, “Changing historical interpretations of humans’ impact on landscapes and ecosystems, as well as a willingness among scholars to write histories on a large spatial and temporal scale, have also contributed significantly to the managerial worldview of the Anthropocene” (49). All the authors of this section show that the field of environmental history is an important one for the changing environmental, cultural, economic, and political conditions in the United States in the early 21st century.Section two of A Field on Fire travels outside the United States and shows that Worster’s wish to create a field that could more easily cut across national borders to both enrich the field and its readers is alive and well. This section shows how examinations of things and ideas in many places, like Abaca fiber (chapter 7) or human migration (chapter 10), can tell a complex and often transnational story that can shed historical light on often overlooked ideas, peoples, and concepts. The contributors in this section show that environmental history should consider things such as migrant history, nationalism, race, and economic history. These contributors show that Worster’s ideas have merit and are taking flight in the early 21st century. Take, for example, the idea that immigrants and colonists traveling around the world take their own ideas about nature with them. This simple individual and collective act shows the transnational nature of this and many other aspects of environmental history. [End... (shrink)

Within the field of education management studies, recent reforms promoting devolution and choice are often seen to provide exciting new opportunities. It is claimed that the 'new' education management, with its emphasis on site-based decision-making and consumer accountability, will enable headteachers and principals to 'take control' of their schools and make them more productive environments in which to work and study. However, our review of research findings from five different countries that are putting in place devolution and choice policies (...) suggests that these new opportunities are more illusory than real. Positioned between the competing demands of the state and the market, school managers are becoming increasingly isolated from colleagues and classrooms - leading to a growing divergence between the managers and the managed. The paper considers the implication of recent developments for managers in general and for women managers in particular and concludes by discussing the relationship between the personalisation of responsibility and the legitimation of crises within the state and public education. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 230—233. A word about the quotation marks. People ask about them, in the beginning; in the process of giving themselves up to reading the poem, they become comfortable with them, without necessarily thinking precisely about why they’re there. But they’re there, mostly to measure the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet. If I had simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would be read too fast for my musical intention. The quotation marks (...) make the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend. They also distance the narrative form myself. I am not Alette. Finally they may remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice: this is not a thought, or a record of thought process, this is a story, told.(1) We read (reread) the poems that keep the discourse with ourselves going. —Wallace Stevens We have to break open words or sentences, too, and find what’s uttered in them. —Gilles Deleuze “The Descent of Alette” “is an allegorical poem” “in four books” “first published” “in 1992” “by Alice Notley.” “In the Descent of Alette,” “the double quotation mark” “is wrapped around” “words, phrases, sometimes whole sentences, and utilized as bones for structure and tonality.” “The winged” “dbl quotation” “like angels or devils” “descending from elsewhere” “function as” “poetic feet.” “Distance” “in the text through the use of dbl quotes,” “according to Notley,” “was a way to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” I know someone who tattooed double quotes on her shoulder blades. In other words, the body is quotable. To be able to say that one is quotable. A body filled with other’s sayings. I never asked her what for, what is the double quote tattoo for and why on the shoulder blades? I prefer my own interpretation that keeps shifting every time I see her. First words of every poem in every book: Book One One ... On ... A ... There ... I ... We ... An ... A ... A ... I ... At ... A ... When ... When ... There ... I ... In ... At ... I ... Once ... A ... A ... In ... A ... A ... Two ... I ... I ... Eyeball ... In ... I... A ... I ... I ... On ... I ... There ... What ... As ... As Book Two I ... When ... I ... I ... As ... I ... I ... There ... I ... There ... I ... A ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I Book Three The ... Presently ... I ... I’m ... I ... We ... What ... My ... I ... Who ... But ... Lay ... My ... I ... The ... Your ... The ... I ... It’s ... As ... The ... Talon’s ... When ... We ... I ... Slowly ... I ... I ... The ... How ... The Book Four I ... I ... You ... The ... Now ... She ... The ... There ... As ... Then ... The ... All ... Let’s I ... You ... The ... Thus ... The ... I ... The ... I ... There ... Have ... The ... As ... The Defamiliar Object “Poetry is a defamiliarized language, whose formations, so far from being simply formations of meaning, are aesthetic structures...”(2) “The same can be” “irresponsibly associated” “with the use of punctuation.” “The dbl quotation as a measure” “of poetic feet” “is treated as such” “because the author” “injects artfulness into it.” “The dbl quote is an object—” “a joystick” “to control breadth” “(of breath.)” “To de-familiarize” “said sign” “is also to” “impart the sensation of [it] as [it is] perceived and not as they are known.”(3) “The dbl quote” “nests previous words, phrasings and sayings.” “How many have come and gone” “through the doorway of this punctuation sign.” “There are also air quotes and virtual quotes.” “There is emphasis and there’s irony.” “It would be aggravating” “or interesting” “to watch a reading of” “The Descent of Alette” “with someone” “raising and curling” “fingers” “bent out of shape” “in what could be used as” “peace signs.” “I am trying to avoid” “scare quotes.” “I looked up” “what they are” “and supposedly they arose” “in the early 20th century.” “The scare quote” “is a mark around a word or phrase to indicate that it doesn’t signify conventional or literal meaning.” “This isn’t how Notley” “intended to use them” “in The Descent of Alette.” “The characters, places, and things” “signify nothing” “beyond” “their literal meaning” “ within the allegory .” “I’d like to stress” “within the allegory;” “that’s why its” “italicized.” “It is told through” “the main character/voice of” “Alette.” “The author reminds us she is not Alette.” “The author marvelously found a way” “to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” “This was attempted” “by tonal and intimate” “affect of the dbl quote” “used as poetic feet.” “Its as though” “punctuation in this regard” “becomes a magical toy.” “Arguably, punctuation” “(as perceived)” “undergoes a kind of” “ defamiliar ” “make-over.” “The text” gently forces the reader” “to slow down,” “read slowly.” “At some point” “one begins to sense” “lines of text” “moving on its own.” “Broken words, phrases, and sentences” “shuttling left to right” “like a subway” “that stops” “from station to station;” “open quote to end quote.” Double Quote Occupied “There are two worlds; one above ground” “and one underground.” “The world above ground is where,” “the tyrant” “with a capital t” “lives.” “(The “T” gets tangled in the claws of the dbl quote.)” “Alette becomes an owl and kills him.” “In the last book the tyrant dies.” “ “...the tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact” “that we were” “below the ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains, never surfacing” “A man who” “would make you pay” “so much” “to leave the subway” “that you don’t” “ever ask” “how much it is” “It is, in effect,” “all of you & more” “Most of which you already” “pay to live below” “But he would literally” “take your soul” “Which is what you are” “below the ground” “Your soul” “your soul rides” “this subway” “I saw” “on the subway a” “world of souls” ”(4) “New York;” “the city of cities” “and its subways—” “worlds underground,” “above ground,” “& above the above ground.” “Skyscrapers,” “Wall Street,” “old money,” “new money,” “and falling further down a cleavage;” “the middle class” “slipping away.” “Contemporary artist ” “Ligorano Reece” “recently made” “a sculpture of ice ” “a block of ice” “carved to read” “middle class” “(in all upper case letters)” “and let it melt” “naturally” “for however long—” “hours,” “days.” “It didn’t take very long to melt.” A global uprise of mass demonstrations; a cacophony of bodies on the street, in parks and universities, on City Hall lawns, coastal ports, neighborhoods, etc., and for what? The reasons are endless and finite. Not a single body is unaffected by the movement even when not “occupying.” “Occupiers” “stormed into a Sotheby’s auction” “protesting” “via human microphone” “that the CEO takes home” “about” “six thousand dollars” “a day.” “(The a/Art market” “is not a reflection” “of a desire” “for a/Art” “but a reflection” “of a desire” “for money” “confused with a/Art.)” What could it mean to occupy that which has been written or said? Someone with double quotes tattooed on both shoulders attempts to reclaim the sign; re-invent it privately-publicly since the body is always split between both spheres. A genre of hide-and-seek; the speaking and silent body which can never mean what it says even while it so desires to mean something. To nest (and hold hostage) someone in double quotes is an act of violence; a gesture of displacement where one is arrested, dislocated, and scrutinized under a distant gaze. “The air quote” “also known as” “finger quote or ersatz quote” “supposedly” “harks back to” “1927.” “The brevity of this gesture” “ as something invisible” “like virtual money or credit” “doesn’t really exist” “though it take up space;” “its the ghostliest of all punctuation signs” “and one that requires the presence and appearance of a body.” “ “she made a form” “in her mind” “an imaginary” “form” “to settle” “in her arms where” “the baby” “had been” “We saw her fiery arms” “cradle air” “She cradled air...” ”(5) “The air” “gets occupied” “by one or two hands” “with thumb, forefinger, and middle finger” “which alternately could be used” “to shoot rubber bullets,” “pepper spray,” “tear gas.” “How three fingers” “could be responsible for so much:” “satire, sarcasm, irony” “and ultimately” “bruises, blood, death.” (“The violence of the dbl quote is to eagerly to place oneself inside a tornado.)” “The violence of this” “embodied punctuation mark” “stems from a discordance with others.” “Is the name, word, or phrase” “placed in dbl quotes” “heroic” “ or brave?” “An act of displacement;” “must there always be” “bright or negative lights—” “a leaderless act” “to inhabit, to occupy” “space removed” “from normative use.” “Of course” “I’m also wondering” “what it means to re-occupy” “public/private space—the street, neighborhood or page” “policed” “by laws, limits, and” “to some extent” “punctuation.” Echo, Mirror “There are first, second, and third voices interwoven.” “ “Braid of voices,”(6) ” “Some lines read as internal thoughts,” “dialogues,” “and scene descriptions,” “all of which make up the allegory.” “It seems appropriate” “for the word” “allegory” “to nest in dbl quotes” “for perhaps it might be” “a gesture to echo on and on” “eternally referencing” “whatever came before.” I notice the first tooth of the double quote, when paying too close attention, gets caught in the hook of the “f”. I space bar to untangle them; the f does not resist the closed bite of “deaf” and I resist to know what it could mean, because it could doubly mean nothing. “ “He looked” “so familiar” “to me...”(7) ” “The second-person” “echoes in one of two directions:” “further into” “or farther from” “me.” “Its as though” “the second-person amplifies” “or else the opposite” “in which he,” “who looks so familiar,” “retreats further” “like stars in a telescope.” “The dbl quote” “has this kind of affect” “concerning distance and dimension” “as also illusory” “as something twice removed” “and unreal” “in a similar way” “movie stars are unreal and far away.” “ “I entered” “a car” “in which I seemed” “to see double” “Each person I” “looked at seemed” “spread out” “as if doubled” “Gradually” “I perceived that” “each person” “was surrounded by a ghostly” “second image” “was encased in it” “& each” / “of those images,” “those encasings,” “was exactly the same” “each was in fact” “the tyrant...” ”(8) A daydream of a mirror-less world while staring through window blinds; a palm tree behind. It was dark with nothing there. A world with no mirrors “in my mind,” though my mind could only reflect what it knew: a palm tree. Naturally then, palm trees multiplied; a world of palm trees reflected the daydream with no mirror in sight. “The mirror” “(prior to obsidian manufacturing ca. 6000 B.C)” “was wherever water” “could be found.” “Its interesting” “mirrors have been around” “before humans—its funny” “animals and humans” “get born into” “a world of mirrors,” “therefore, simulation” “is always already” “a given—” “a sparkly consequence to be born with a dbl.” NOTES 1. Notley, Alice. “Author’s Note” in The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996) 2. Bruns, Gerald L. “ From Intransitive Speech to the Universe of Discourse” in Modern Poetry And The Idea of Language (New Haven & London, 1974), p.75 3. Ibid. p.77 4. Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996). p.3 5. Ibid. p.10 6. Ibid i. p.9 7. Ibid ii. p.16 8. Ibid iii. p.12. (shrink)

Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear, a political and philosophical standpoint that emerges in her mature work, has ostensibly two defining characteristics. It is a sceptical approach that puts cruelty first among the vices. For that reason, it is considered to be both set apart from mainstream liberalism, in particular the liberalism of J. S. Mill and John Rawls, but also an important source of influence for political realists and nonideal theorists. However, I argue here that, in putting cruelty first (...) among the vices, Shklar also offers a value monist approach to political thought, one that she shares with Mill and Rawls as well. Each claims to have identified the general rule for the resolution of moral conflicts, although they disagree about what that rule is. Therefore, Shklar’s mature work combines scepticism with value monism. As such, it represents a radical departure from the value pluralist approach to moral conflict evident in her early work. Her commentators have not noticed either her mature monism or the move away from her earlier value pluralism, and this is explained by a tendency to see her mature work as offering simply a sceptical alternative to mainstream liberalism. (shrink)

In this essay, the reminiscences of Margaret Fuller, feminist activist and member of the American Transcendentalist movement, from her journey to the Great Lakes region, entitled Summer on the Lakes, are considered in the light of EcoGothic considerations. The essay shows how Fuller’s journey disillusioned her about progress and led to abandoning the serene vision of nature and landscapes reflected in the works of Transcendentalists. The destruction of nature and landscape verging on an ecological catastrophe is presented by Fuller (...) in the perspective of the Gothic, as a price for the technological development driven by the capitalist economy. The Gothic character of Summer on the Lakes derives from the mental condition of the writer and a pessimistic vision arising from the debunking of the myth of America as a virgin land. Fuller’s work constitutes an EcoGothic tribute to the indigenous inhabitants of America—but also a Gothic live burial of the Native Americans who do still live in the regions she visits—as well as to Mariana and Frederica, unusual and gothicized women excluded from society. By bringing together Fuller’s observations about nature, indigenous peoples and marginalized women, the essay shows how Fuller’s text prophetically announces the beginning of the end of the American environment. (shrink)

The Communicational Theory of Law (CTL) usually differentiates between Legal Sociology and Legal Theory, in the sense that Legal Sociology is concerned with the social validity of the rules and Legal Theory with the formal or legal validity of the rules. It can be argued that both disciplines are two different perspectives of the same empirical reality (legal rules). Also, legal System and social milieu are two closely linked realities; they cannot be separated because they need each other. The Law (...) is the form or order that the social milieu takes, and, at the same time, the social environment provides the ideas, collective representations and other matters that need a legal regulation. For this reason, the epistemological separation between Sociology and Legal Theory must be overcome when the theoretical perspective comes to legal decisions. Thus, the decisional moment becomes the meeting point between the legal System and the social milieu. This is where the concept of the legal System fulfils its main function, as it allows for the dynamism and adaptability of the legal order. The hermeneutic re-elaboration of the normative texts will be the channel through which the social facts and other material elements can inform the meaning or possible interpretations of the rules and institutions of the legal order. This happens primarily by influencing theoretical and doctrinal works of an expository and didactic nature; and secondarily by influencing the decisions of legal operators and courts. This study seeks to explain how the social context influences legal decisions and the formation of the legal System, from a communicational perspective of Law. In order to do so, it will be necessary to set out two epistemological premises of CTL: the semiotic tripartition of the Theory of Law and the legal Order-legal System distinction. (shrink)

As space travel and intentions to colonise other planets are becoming the norm in public debate and scholarship, we must also confront the technical and survival challenges that emerge from these hostile environments. This paper aims to evaluate the various arguments proposed to meet the challenges of human space travel and extraterrestrial planetary colonisation. In particular, two primary solutions have been present in the literature as the most straightforward solutions to the rigours of extraterrestrial survival and flourishing: (1) geoengineering, (...) where the environment is modified to become hospitable to its inhabitants, and (2) human (bio)enhancement where the genetic heritage of humans is modified to make them more resilient to the difficulties they may encounter as well as to permit them to thrive in non-terrestrial environments. Both positions have strong arguments supporting them but also severe philosophical and practical drawbacks when exposed to different circumstances. This paper aims to show that a principled stance where one position is accepted wholesale necessarily comes at the opportunity cost of the other where the other might be better suited, practically and morally. This paper concludes that case-by-case evaluations of the solutions to space travel and extraterrestrial colonisation are necessary to ensure moral congruency and the survival and flourishing of astronauts now and into the future. (shrink)

Objectives: To analyse and compare the surveys on German doctors and judges on end of life decision making regarding their attitudes on the advance directive and on the dying process.Design: The respondents were to indicate their agreement or disagreement to eight statements on the advance directive and to specify their personal view on the beginning of the dying process.Participants: 727 doctors in three federal states and 469 judges dealing with guardianship matters all over Germany.Main measurements: Comparisons of means, analyses (...) of variance, pivot tables and factor analyses .Results: Three attitude groups on advance directive were disclosed by the analysis: the decision model, which emphasises the binding character of a situational advance directive; the deliberation model, which puts more emphasis on the communicative aspect; and the delegation model, which regards the advance directive as a legal instrument. The answers regarding the beginning of the dying process were broadly distributed, but no marked difference was observed between the responding professions. The dying process was assumed by most participants to begin with a life expectancy of only a few days.Conclusions: A high degree of valuation for advance directive was seen in both German doctors and judges; most agreed to the binding character of the situational directive. Regarding the different individual concepts of the dying process, a cross-professional discourse on the contents of this term seems to be overdue. (shrink)

This article examines the place of reproduction in the UK migration policy popularly known as ‘the hostile environment’, introduced in 2012 by the Conservative–Lib Dem Coalition government, and the ‘Windrush scandal’ that followed. In order to think through how the reproductive sphere comes in to play in this policy and its consequences, I draw on theoretical insights from the work of Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, both of whom invite us to reflect on the ways in which the (...) afterlife of enslavement and empire continues to impinge on the status of Black subjects, and the ways in which our notions of the maternal, reproduction, kinship and belonging are entangled in this process. I begin by examining the place of the reproductive sphere in the hostile environment policy itself, before moving on to discuss the Windrush scandal and the ways in which it can be seen as an attack on the reproductive needs of its victims. I then consider these findings further through an engagement with the work of Sharpe and Hartman, arguing that the scandal reveals ways in which we continue to live ‘in the wake’ of racialised understandings of the reproductive that mean that some people are refused the possibilities of attachment and affiliation, so that, in Hartman's words, theirs is ‘the perilous condition of existing in a world in which you have no investment’. In the final section, I respond to Sharpe's call for white people to ‘rend the fabric of the kinship narrative’ that produces these exclusionary terms of belonging and permits the repetition of such brutalities as the hostile environment. (shrink)

Feminist theories are concerned to analyse how women can transform society so that they are no longer subordinated, by understanding how patriarchal relations control and constrict them. (Abbott and Wallace, 1997: 284) Feminisms start from the position that women are oppressed within a society, which is patriarchal and socially constructed within knowledge which is malestream. This traditionally defines men such that they are rendered subordinate, within a social world constructed by men. Feminisms are engaged with making transparent patriarchal constructs, (...) and illuminating the ‘spaces’ within which women-realities can become more visible. This paper presents research undertaken by two key services working with male sex workers in central London. The insights gained from this research are discussed, as they allow comparison between the traditionally subordinate position of women and the contextual experiences of the ‘hidden’ population of male sex industry workers. It demonstrates, that like women, for male sex workers, hegenomic and heterosexist constructs ensure that they also occupy a subordinated position within society. (shrink)

At several places in this paper we have made use of a well-known rhetorical device: an argument was made; a character —dubbed “fictional reader” — was then evoked who voiced some objections against that particular argument; and finally, we answered those objections, thus bringing to a close, at least temporarily, our argument. The use of this device raises a question: “How is the presence of the ‘fictional reader” to be understood?” Is it a “mere” rhetorical tool, or does this character (...) designate some particular target? For instance, depending on the context, it could be seen as aimed at different straw men: traditionally minded sociologists, Whiggish historians, well-intentioned philosophers of science. Actually, none of these characters is behind the “fictional reader”. Rather, it refers, potentially, to any of the scientific actors (Milstein, Schwaber, Koprowski, Cohn, and so on) who inhabit our set of narratives. In other words, the “fictional reader” is an icon for the “native” reader/writer who simultaneously produces and questions the products of that particular literary activity known as scientific texts, by explicitly and implicitly raising the issue of the distinction between fact and technique.By following actors in their disputes about the novelty of K & M's contribution, it became apparent that it is not exactly clear which of the different elements of “hybridoma technology” should be regarded as “novel.” Was it the use of the P3 myeloma line? Was it the theoretical framework related to the notion of allelic exclusion? Was it ...? In each and every case, arguments can be made for or against the existence of a certain continuity or discontinuity with previous work. And in each case, the determination of novelty, as translated through the continuity/discontinuity issue, appeared to be hanging on the previous attribution of an epistemological status to the object that had allegedly been discovered: was it a fact or a technique?If one focuses on the relatively narrow network of immunogenetics, it could be argued that within that particular evidential context a series of “facts” had been established which, when transferred to other fields, such as the virological research being pursued in Koprowski's institute, were translated into a technique. However, as we have seen, even from an immunogenetic point of view the production of monoclonal antibodies can be viewed as being simultaneously a fact and a technique to establish that fact. Not only, as he himself noted,139 was Milstein not seeking to develop a technique for the production of monoclonal antibodies when the original experiments were carried out, but the significance later imputed to those experiments was not immediately attributed to them. The paper was seen as one among other papers that used cell fusion techniques to dissect the genetic control of antibody diversity. Distinctions that now appear crucial (e.g.: were the fusion partners two myelomas or a myeloma and a spleen cell?) were easily overlooked. At some point, around 1977, the production of monoclonal antibodies became a goal in itself, no longer linked to the initial immunogenetic network. The transformation of [MILSTEIN 75] into the foundational event of “hybridoma technology” was thus achieved. This transformation did not flow naturally from the original experiments. Rather, it involved specific investments which mobilized the activity of a large number of other scientific and industrial actors.140A tentative generalization can be deduced from our case study. The dichotomy between fact and technique that underlines much of contemporary science studies seem to be fundamentally misconceived, insofar as the determination of what counts as a fact and what counts as a technique is not possible on a priori grounds. Historians and sociologists of science are confronted with a field of heterogeneous interventions where particular pieces of work are constituted as discrete entities and simultaneously attributed a technical or a factual identity. “Novelty” and “innovation” are precisely the result of such polymorphic attributional processes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:At the Beginning, There was the MaskFrançoise Vergès (bio)There is a long history to be told about the links between the economy of extractivism and exhaustion, between colonialism, race, capitalism, imperialism, and breathing, which could be summarized as the "struggle against suffocation and for life." Colonialism (slavery and post-slavery), race, and capitalism are all about un-breathing, about the toxicity of social, cultural, sexual and "natural" environments, about silencing, (...) erasing voices, cutting tongues, forbidding speech, fabricating a deadly form of quietude, requiring mute consent to injustices and inequalities. They play on restricting human lungs and on colonizing the lungs of the planet. In their world, one no longer breathes freely, one can no longer finds her voice, one learns to whisper. It is not the whisper of underground resistance, of words circulating from mouth to mouth to signal where is the next refuge, the next sanctuary, the cache for arms, the false papers, the hidden routes of escape and marooning. It is the murmur of someone beaten and tortured until mad with pain, when breathing has become an ordeal.When we say, "We are suffocating" or "The air has become unbreathable!" we are not just talking of polluted air but of the feeling of living in a deleterious and asphyxiating political regime, which involves social censorship and self-censorship. Fear sets in, we only speak in hushed tones. Under such a regime, political order demands civilized speech, disciplined expression; the authorized music is "national," "military," patriarchal, or of a reinvented tradition. The joy must be measured and the words of the songs and public speech be neutral or to the glory of the regime. The authoritarian regime may even appropriate a song of freedom as its hymn, a bitter paradox where the words of freedom are confiscated to justify oppression. The body is corseted, the voice muzzled, the lungs function faintly, they transcribe our feelings in their rhythm, accelerating or slowing down. When songs and cries of freedom nonetheless arise, defying the regime of silencing and un-breathing, they sharply shatter the feeling of physical and psychic suffocation, the feeling that words remain in our throat, that our voice cannot come out. Suddenly, we catch our breath. We respire, inhale, exhale, fill our lungs. And we reconnect [End Page 54] ourselves with the etymological meaning of respire: from Latin re (again) and spirare itself from Latin spiritus "a breathing (respiration, and of the wind), breath; breath of a god," hence "inspiration; breath of life," hence "life," also "disposition, character; high spirit, vigor, courage" (Harper). Life, vigor, and courage, the breathing of the oppressed break down the politics of suffocation."I can't breathe" were the last words of George Floyd, not long before exhaling his last breath. When across the world, during 2020, people were shouting in many languages, "I can't breathe" using all their breath, they were, by the thousands, making their voices heard, rupturing the silencing of racism. "I can't breathe" became a breathing cry. Breathing became resistance. Singing collectively was breathing together. The song soars from thousands of breasts. The human voice, alone or collective carries an emotional force within it, vibrates sensually. But one may say, this has been, and can still be, the expression of fascism, of toxic masculinity and lynching mobs. When is breathing a revolutionary practice then? When we retrace the racial history of suffocation and breathing, of the colonial/ imperialist military noise vs. songs of freedom, of breathing as a politics toward humanizing the world. In other words, when we show how polluted air and noise are central elements in racial and gendered exploitation and how the antiracist struggle against pollution and suffocation is a struggle against racial capitalism. When we learn that recent medical research links air pollution to delayed cognitive development, stunted growth, and reduced lung capacity in children, we understand that the pretense of the universal right to childhood is a lie. Racism condemns Black, Indigenous and Brown children to premature death. According to the World Health Organization, more people are dying every year of polluted air than of any other cause. The role of air pollution in neurodegenerative diseases such as... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with (...) professional boundary issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change. (shrink)

Adolescence and young adulthood are peak periods for risky sexual behaviors and borderline personality disorder features. RSB is a major public health concern and adolescents with BPD may be particularly vulnerable to RSB, but this is understudied. The aim of this study was to identify distinct RSB profiles in youth and determine whether a specific profile was associated with BPD features. Participants were 220 adolescents and young adults recruited from the community. To identify groups of adolescents and young adults (...) who engage in similar RSB, a latent profile analysis was conducted on sexually active youth. Next ANOVA was used to identify how profiles differed in terms RSB dimensions and BPD features. We identified three distinct RSB profiles: a Low RSB profile that was manifested by the majority of youth; an Unprotected Sex in Relationships profile and; an Impulsive Sex Outside Relationships profile which was manifested by youth with significantly higher BPD features. The findings shed light on the difficulties youth with BPD manifest around integrating sexuality, intimacy, fidelity, and love. This contrasts with the majority of youth who are sexually active in the context of relationships and engage in little or no RSB. The findings have important clinical implications. Adolescent sexuality is frequently in the blind spot of clinicians. To address the elevated risk of RSB in adolescents with BPD, interventions are needed to help adolescents navigate this period and improve their understanding of the reasons for RSB while addressing difficulties in establishing sexual and attachment relationships. (shrink)

The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life: Translated From The French By Joseph Ward Swain, M.A. This book is a result of an effort made by us towards making a contribution to the preservation and repair of original classic literature. In an attempt to preserve, improve and recreate the original content, we have worked towards: 1. Type-setting & Reformatting: The complete work has been re-designed via professional layout, formatting and type-setting tools to re-create the same edition with rich typography, (...) graphics, high quality images, and table elements, giving our readers the feel of holding a 'fresh and newly' reprinted and/or revised edition, as opposed to other scanned & printed (Optical Character Recognition - OCR) reproductions. 2. Correction of imperfections: As the work was re-created from the scratch, therefore, it was vetted to rectify certain conventional norms with regard to typographical mistakes, hyphenations, punctuations, blurred images, missing content/pages, and/or other related subject matters, upon our consideration. Every attempt was made to rectify the imperfections related to omitted constructs in the original edition via other references. However, a few of such imperfections which could not be rectified due to intentional\unintentional omission of content in the original edition, were inherited and preserved from the original work to maintain the authenticity and construct, relevant to the work. We believe that this work holds historical, cultural and/or intellectual importance in the literary works community, therefore despite the oddities, we accounted the work for print as a part of our continuing effort towards preservation of literary work and our contribution towards the development of the society as a whole, driven by our beliefs. We are grateful to our readers for putting their faith in us and accepting our imperfections with regard to preservation of the historical content. HAPPY READING! (shrink)

Do philosophers have a responsibility to their society that is distinct from their responsibility to it as citizens? This edited volume explores both what type of contribution philosophy can make and what type of reasoning is appropriate when addressing public matters now. These questions are posed by leading international scholars working in the fields of moral and political philosophy. Each contribution also investigates the central issue of how to combine critical, rational analysis with a commitment to politically relevant public (...) engagement. The contributions to this volume analyse issues raised in practical ethics, including abortion, embryology, and assisted suicide. They consider the role of ethical commitment in the philosophical analysis of contemporary political issues, and engage with matters of public policy such as poverty, the arts, meaningful work, as well as the evidence base for policy. They also examine the normative legitimacy of power, including the use of violence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of BeliefRobert MetcalfFor the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief. Eugene Garver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. pp. 264. $55.00, hardcover; $22.50, paperback.Professor Garver's book, For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief, is a provocative and illuminating study of practical reasoning, and one that develops (...) many of the ideas found in his magisterial study, Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The previous book concluded by arguing that Aristotle's Rhetoric is philosophically more interesting today than it was in Aristotle's time, in part because for us there is no polis to which the argumentative facility of rhetoric would be subordinate (1994, 233ff.). This idea is echoed in the present book when Garver writes: "The more we take disagreement to be a permanent part of the situation of practical reasoning, and not something soon to be overcome by appropriate theory or universal enlightenment, the more rhetorical facility becomes a central part [End Page 95] of practical reason" (2004, 175). It is, indeed, a fascinating feature of For the Sake of Argument that it defends the autonomy and integrity of practical reason through Aristotle's insights on the various connections between argument, persuasion, and ethos (153), and illustrates these through examples such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, and subsequent Supreme Court decisions.The book is divided into eight chapters, and, as Garver explains, these represent four pairs of essays in which a more concrete or "applied" chapter is followed by a chapter that draws generalizations from the examples of the prior chapter. Among the themes most prominent in the book are the connection between reason and character, on which Garver writes, "Practical reason has its own integrity when who we are and how we think are intimately connected" (2); the compatibility, within practical reason, of truth and one's own interest; the "ampliative" nature of practical reason, such that the implications of one's beliefs can lead to discoveries unanticipated at the beginning; the connection between the ethos of a leader and the ethos of a community; and the underappreciated power of epideictic rhetoric "to affirm values and articulate new vocabularies" (178). In addressing such broad themes, Garver's attention to concrete examples, like Brown v. Board of Education, is thoroughly instructive. The Brown decision, he argues, is "an epideictic declaration that equality and antidiscrimination are fundamental American Constitutional values" (73). Brown clearly demonstrates the ampliative nature of practical reason in that the conclusion it reaches is stronger than the premises from which it begins (i.e., the Fourteenth Amendment); moreover, it generates what Garver calls an "ethical surplus" that allows for unanticipated implications that are stronger still, such as the later Court decision striking down antimiscegenation laws (71–73). This "increase" in strength in proceeding from premises to conclusion is "impossible under a purely deductive conception of rationality," Garver writes (73), yet it is well explained by his Aristotle-inspired account of practical reasoning.Surely some readers will recoil from Garver's more provocative claims, such as that "we decide... to be convinced and choose to find a line of reasoning compelling" (119), offered within a discussion of the responsibility we bear in ethical argumentation. However, the issue that is more problematic, to my mind, concerns Garver's treatment of Plato. This may seem odd, given that Plato only appears as a foil in the book—but the problem is that it is merely a caricature of Plato that Garver allows to act as [End Page 96] a foil. Garver argues against "the Platonic program which will save reason by removing it from human contamination" (3) and "the Platonic hope of replacing ethical reasoning by the certainties of science" (5). He sides with Aristotle's idea that we can aim at effectiveness and at rightness together (48, 200) over against the allegedly Platonic idea that we must choose between truth and our own interest, reason and emotion, and so forth, or else... (shrink)

In this essay, I undertake a critical phenomenological exposition of the conditions of ethical community as they present themselves in the light of the Anthropocene. I begin by approaching the present human condition by following Arendt in her considerations of what more recently has been termed the Anthropocene. I will take her notion of the process character of action as a lodestar in a so-called anarcheological reading of Aristotle that opens for a thinking of unbounded possibility and unbounded affinity and (...) that shows how Aristotle’s ethics, like so many other ethical and moral theories, is really a project of metaphysical closure in the face of the poignantly sensed, but theoretically marginalized, anarchic apertures of communitary life. To prepare for an ethics capable of perpetually affirming, rather than closing off, these anarchic apertures of the human condition, I bring the insights won in the anarcheological reading of Aristotle into conversation with accounts of the ethical responses presented by the Native American nation of the Crow towards the end of the 19th century, when they – in a sense not-dissimilar to what we now experience in the Anthropocene – faced the end of the world. I conclude by extracting from this some elements for a thinking of ethics at the end of worlds that affirms the unbounded apertures of human community. (shrink)

The third quarter of the twentieth century with full employment in most Western countries is a historically unique period, forming The Great Trough in unemployment. This article analyses the beginning, continuation, and demise of The Great Trough, contrasting a supply-and-demand framework derived from economic theory with a power-sensitive approach focusing on long-term positive-sum conflicts involving major interest and reflected in unemployment, inflation, industrial disputes, and the functional distribution of national income. Comparative empirical data from eighteen countries are (...) used in analyses of hypotheses implied by the different theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Affective Spaces: Architecture and the Living Body by Federico de MatteisJasna SersicAffective Spaces: Architecture and the Living Body BY FEDERICO DE MATTEIS New York, NY: Routledge, 2021What is architectural space? For architects, urban planners, and all involved in the design and transformation of the environment, space is a central subject. However, despite this fact, nobody accurately states what space is all about. As a result, the concept (...) of space remains ambiguous, challenging to transmit, and a point of fundamental misunderstandings, with consequences on how we move, inhabit, and transform the world around us (1).In the attempt to provide order in today’s theory of space in architecture, De Matteis’ Affective Spaces invites the reader to explore the question of space from the subject’s point of view by asking what the encounter with architecture is like, and how do I feel, here, now?, borrowed from Eugene Minkowski (7). De Matteis offers an interconnected yet clear and instructive way to explore further what first-hand, direct experience with architecture can tell us about the effects it produces on us. Through this exciting intellectual journey, De Matteis thus shows how architecture, generally understood as an art of building space, does not regard the built environment alone. As people are also emotionally affected by the (built) world they live in, this book can ultimately be read as a quest to understand the relation between the feelings and moods arising from the bodily, corporeal experience of the built environment and the way they invite us to respond and act within environments we inhabit and modify (130).To accept De Matteis’ invitation to join him on his quest entails two things. The first is to take the position that the root of the emergence of sense and feelings is the subject’s corporeity. We must thus acknowledge the primacy of feeling (130). The second, by extension, is to put aside preconceived notions and conceptual tools for representing space inherited from modernity, as they are grounded in dualistic contraposition between physical reality, which is seen as objective (9). In contrast, experience and feeling are seen as subjective (9). Consequently, [End Page 142] they cannot adequately grasp the non- measurable dimensions of the lived space and thus the experience that the subject makes of it.Instead, De Matteis argues that one cannot describe space as a thing separate from us and that we are always a part of the space we inhabit. For this purpose, the book derives its theoretical model of space from phenomenology, which considers the felt body as a sounding board for the built environment and human experience of the world.The book is arranged into fourteen chapters that show the thematic progression of the argument, and is structured in three parts that explore space, the living body and corporeal dynamics, and the experiential character of some specific families of space. Titles of the chapters provide clear signposts to the reader about where the story is going and are much appreciated in this unique exploration. They also show that the author carefully weaves the conceptual intersections between phenomenology and its model of space with investigations in several fields of knowledge. Drawing across a multitude of disciplines, ranging from geography, anthropology, psychology, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics to neurosciences, and offering many examples from art, literature, film, and everyday life, the book helps the reader visualize the content discussed. This panoramic character and accessible language and format make it an engaging read for experts in the field and to a broader audience interested in topics addressed in the book.Perhaps one of the most compelling arguments the book brings forward is that the corporeal dynamics of space enable understanding of space as a thing that is not separate from us. It is from the coming together of persons and things that atmospheres arise. They are not objective, yet they exist as the natural qualities of things; neither are they subjective, yet they belong to sensing beings. This understanding implies a possible workable definition with no boundary between the subject and object. However, it also clearly points out that the book emerged in response to our modern understanding and critique... (shrink)

In this paper, I give an account of how our hominin ancestors evolved a conscious ability I call scenario visualization that enabled them to manufacture novel tools so as to survive and flourish in the ever-changing and complex environments in which they lived. I first present the ideas and arguments put forward by evolutionary psychologists that the mind evolved certain mental capacities as adaptive responses to environmental pressures. Specifically, Steven Mithen thinks that the mind has evolved cognitive fluidity, viz., an (...) ability to exchange information flexibly between and among mental modules. Showing the deficiency in Mithen’s view, I then argue that the flexible exchange of information between and among modules together with scenario visualization is what explains the ability to construct the novel tools needed to survive and flourish in the environments in which our hominin ancestors resided. Finally, I trace the development of the multi-purposed javelin, from its meager beginnings as a stick, in order to illustrate scenario visualization in novel tool manufacturing. (shrink)

. The use of narrative to communicate and convey particular points of view in society has increasingly become the focus of academic attention in recent years. In particular, MacIntyre. (1985, 1988, 1990, 1999) has paid attention to the role of narrative in the conflict between different traditions when developing his virtue approach to ethics. Whilst there has been continued debate about the application of virtue approaches, some arguing that it is incompatible with business, I disagree and have already argued for (...) a form of virtue that will focus business on society’s needs rather than better business itself. Here I continue to develop the argument in two ways. First, I will explore the predominant business narrative and offer some comment on the ‘virtues’ that it promotes. However, rather than accepting this narrative, I want to challenge it with a narrative from the environmental tradition. I consider how adopting the virtues promoted by an environmental narrative it would shape business practices and challenge current business conventions. As a second step, I will focus on how we can change managers’ perceptions of business to reflect these environmentally based virtues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonaventure's Aesthetics: The Delight of the Soul in Its Ascent into God by Thomas J. McKennaDennis P. BrayThomas J. McKenna, Bonaventure's Aesthetics: The Delight of the Soul in Its Ascent into God. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020. 186 pp. $100. ISBN: 978-1-4985-9765-4.It has been just over three decades since the last book-length engagement with aesthetics in Bonaventure's work (S. McAdams, "The Aesthetics of Light: A Critical Examination of (...) Bonaventure's Doctrine of Light in View of His Aesthetics," [PhD diss., Pontifica Universitas Gregoriana, 1991]). Heartily welcome, then, is Thomas McKenna's Bonaventure's Aesthetics. The purpose of the book, in McKenna's words, is "to provide a comprehensive analysis of Bonaventure's aesthetics, that is, his philosophy, theology, and mystical theology" (2). In so doing, he intends also to argue for a resolution to a list of disputed questions raised by contemporary voices – most famously that of Balthasar – in the debate on Bonaventure's aesthetics. Put another way, McKenna's project has two aims: first, to understand Bonaventure's aesthetics on its own (historical, theological, philosophical) terms; second, to determine whether that aesthetic connects significantly to contemporary questions in the field of aesthetics. In this review I will detail and engage critically with some of the foundational methodological moves McKenna makes in the book's introduction. I will then summarize the big themes of the book's four chapters, and conclude with a few evaluative remarks.However extensive their merits, earlier studies on Bonaventure's aesthetics are not as thorough as McKenna's and, more problematically, are limited by their investment in predominantly Enlightenment-era concerns. What I mean is that thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Baumgarten, and Kant were absorbed with matters such as the immediacy of the aesthetic experience, disinterest, the role of the affect, freedom of the imagination, and the categorization of les beaux arts. It is this trajectory (call it "the standard paradigm," using McKenna's terminology) that the field of aesthetics, as we know it, has largely followed. Early historians of aesthetics viewed, and often evaluated, medievals through the standard paradigm. Even later, more revisionist historical work sought to understand medieval thought in distinction from the paradigm. In most instances, [End Page 243] though, it is the Enlightenment-era list of concerns that serves as the fulcrum on which historical work has tended to swing. Our understanding of Bonaventure, then, is limited to the extent that we take the standard paradigm as guide.Bonaventure's Aesthetics is so compelling, in part, because it does not begin with the standard paradigm, but rather a more historically sound (and frankly, more interesting) list of research questions. This is not to say that McKenna rejects the standard paradigm. It is simply too deeply embedded in how we conceive of such matters to naively ignore. Instead, McKenna works to situate these later concerns as secondary, or parallel, to Bonaventure's concerns and interests. McKenna realizes that he faces a difficulty at this juncture, one that must be addressed by anyone aiming for historical sensitivity regarding their object of study. The difficulty is what McKenna calls "the hermeneutical crisis," and he formulates the key issues by quoting Jean Grondin: "The basic doctrine…is that every particular phenomenon must be conceptualized within the context of its age" to avoid anachronism. But if so, this "raises a striking epistemological problem…Our view of earlier ages must itself be produced by reference to our present, and is thereby relativized." Thus Grondin asks, "how if at all, is it possible to escape from the hermeneutic circle of our historicity?" (9, quoting J. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophicaal Hermeneutics [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997], 76).Restricted to Bonaventure studies, McKenna poses the worry this way: "is it possible to accurately recover the conceptualization of beauty and, perhaps, the arts of any age – ancient, medieval, or modern – with a reasonable degree of accuracy? If so, does it remain relevant to current aesthetic theory and practice?" (9).In sum, the apparent dilemma is between, on the one hand, "a historically accurate conceptualization of the aesthetic sympathies of the past," and on the other hand, "a... (shrink)

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language is concerned with the years 1865 through Winter/Spring 1870-71. Four texts of Nietzsche's, "Vom Ursprung der Sprache", "Zur Teleologie", "Zu Schopenhauer", and "Anschauung Notes", are translated into English and interpreted from the perspective of Nietzsche's developing theory of language. An examination of the major influences of Schopenhauer, Kant, Eduard von Hartmann, and Frederick A. Lange are pursued. ;Theory, in this work, does not assume that it is possible to take a position of (...) authority or truth in the interpretation of texts, rather that interpretation of texts constitutes an attempt to uncover a discursive practice, to describe a discourse-object. The method used is Nietzsche's method of genealogy, which follows the formation of discourse, at once scattered, discontinuous, and regular and analyzes the process of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in that discourse. Genealogy is exegesis in Nietzsche's sense of it as rumination, as the slow, repetitive, gray activity of deciphering what is documented. Major genealogical nodes or elements of Nietzsche's beginning theory of language are used and reused in different contexts throughout the work, resulting in a cumulative effect which explores specific elements in Nietzsche's thinking about language. ;This work offers five major contributions to Nietzsche studies: a detailed introduction of the significant influence of Eduard von Hartmann upon Nietzsche's thinking; a comprehensive look at the influence of Lange's History of Materialism upon Nietzsche's beginning theory of language; a thorough analysis of "Zur Teleologie" and "Zu Schopenhauer" in the overall contexts of Nietzsche's thinking with regard to metaphysics and teleology; the gathering together and interpretation into a world view of the "Anschauung Notes"; and a close examination of Nietzsche's breaking away from Schopenhauer as it takes place before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. ;Nietzsche's primary contributions to a theory of language in these beginning years are three: the adoption of the role of the unconscious instincts in the origins and ongoing production of language; the assertion that unconscious thought processes are a precondition for conscious thought; an examination of the relationships of language to epistemology, which results in the recognition of the limits of language as an instrument of truth, but a realization of the inestimable value and force of its symbolic and figurative aspects, aspects necessitated by the very nature of language itself. (shrink)

Is the conviction that there is a God the default position of the human mind? This is the suggestion of Vatican II’s _Gaudium et spes_, as well as Cardinal Newman and even St. Thomas Aquinas. But however natural it is for human beings to acknowledge their maker, it seems almost as natural to throw up obstacles between man and God. _Characters in Search of Their Author, _the Gifford Lectures delivered by Ralph McInerny in Glasgow in 1999–2000, is devoted to clearing (...) away some of these impediments, mainly those fashioned by philosophers. The first series of lectures traces the progressive dismissal of natural theology by modern and contemporary philosophers. Are all intellectual difficulties intellectual in origin? McInerny invites his reader to consider the ordinary acknowledgment or denial of God as analogous to falling into or out of love. The upshot may be a simple judgment, but the way to it is through the emotions and types of discourse that seldom appear in logic books. The recovery of natural theology is the theme of the second series of lectures. Making critical use of philosophers from Kierkegaard and Newman to Thomas Aquinas, McInerny brings us to the point where the age-old task can once more begin. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life by Fabrizio AmeriniJohn LanganReview: Fabrizio Amerini, Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life, trans. Mark Henninger, Harvard University Press, 2013The ongoing and apparently interminable debate over the moral and legal status of abortion has come over the years to resemble the Western front in World War I, with two contending armies facing each other with (...) limited maneuvering room, familiar and overused weapons, periodic artillery barrages, increasing casualties, not much new to report, and a deadly ‘no man’s land’ between them in which virtually nothing survives. Against the gloomy monotony of the abortion wars, in which reductivist accounts of the opponents’ views and repetitious restatements of familiar and cherished views predominate, this book by Fabrizio Amerini, a professor of philosophy at the University of Parma, appears as a refreshing surprise. It is surprising for a number of reasons, which I shall present later. But its refreshing character comes primarily from its moderate tone and the care with which its arguments are presented. Amerini is clearly familiar with the Catholic tradition on abortion and euthanasia; he is respectful of this tradition, which he does not directly challenge, but his sense of scholarly integrity prevents him from simply presenting Aquinas as a defender and synthesizer of all the positions championed in that tradition or by its papal custodians. He has an impressive command of the relevant texts in Aquinas and the Fathers of the Church, which he joins with a scrupulous style of [End Page E-103] philosophical argument which has an affinity with the clarifying labors of G. E. Moore in the early days of analytic moral philosophy. The result is not easy reading, but the reader can be confident that the desire to score rhetorical points and political victories will not distort the philosophical and historical analysis. The book is intended primarily for those who can benefit from careful scholarship, but it should be instructive for all who regard the questions of abortion and euthanasia as genuinely difficult and as deserving our best intellectual efforts.The most important surprise is Amerini’s focus on the issue of delayed versus immediate hominization in the development from embryo to complete human being. Since Pius IX in 1867, the Vatican has insisted that from the moment of conception the embryo becomes a human person whose life is sacred and deserves full protection. This view is ordinarily discussed as ‘immediate hominization’. In Amerini’s view, the embryo lacks the development and differentiation of organs which would enable it to have a sustainable potentiality to perform the acts which are proper to a human person, particularly reasoning and choosing. In the Vatican’s view, the soul is immediately infused by God, though it obviously requires many years of development before it is able to function as a complete and distinct human person. Amerini regards this position as untenable within Aquinas’s metaphysical system and finds in Aquinas’s own texts evidence that he teaches a discontinuous process in fetal life. Amerini regards the insistence on immediate hominization as an arbitrary effort to maintain an absolute uniformity of moral status in all the stages of embryonic and fetal life. He sees the Vatican’s position as leading to an equation of abortion and homicide which he regards as unjustified. He does, however, affirm that there is an identity of subject running from the embryo to the developed person and also that this grounds an ethic of respect for life in all of its stages. The practical conclusions in bioethics he would draw from this position “could allow space for a judicious and discriminating ethical evaluation of individual cases,” as he puts the matter in the concluding sentence of the book.Other surprises are the author’s discovering from a careful reading of Aquinas’s texts that he taught a progressive plurality of substantial forms in the development of the embryo. For Aquinas, it is the substantial form which answers the question about what sort of being the object of our inquiry is. In the case of human persons, the substantial form is the soul, which includes the intellectual properties of... (shrink)

The conduct of hostilities is very bad for the environment, yet relatively little attention has been focused on environmental military ethics by just war theorists and revisionist philosophers of war. Contemporary ecological concerns pose significant challenges to jus in bello. I begin by briefly surveying existing literature on environmental justice during wartime. While these jus in bello environmental issues have been addressed only sparsely by just war theorists, environmental jus ad bellum has rarely been tackled within JWT or the (...) morality of war. In line with the theme of this special issue, I focus my discussion of war and the natural environment primarily on the jus ad bellum level. I set out with the presumption against the use of force, and its possible exceptions. The principal question raised is whether environmental harm can trigger a new justification for war. Beyond just cause, I consider what might be a proportionate response to “environmental aggression,” or negligent harm to nature. The use of force is clearly justified in response to military attacks, against the natural environment or otherwise. Where harm to nature or its inhabitants are not caused by military aggression, just war theory criteria point in favor of responding via measures short of war. Finally, I suggest that responding by means that are not themselves harmful to nature serves to fulfill the further jus ad bellum criterion of “right intention.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:God’s Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham by Carl A. VaterBenjamin R. DeSpainVATER, Carl A. God’s Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022. xi + 294 pp. Cloth, $75.00Carl Vater skillfully blends historical and constructive concerns in his study of medieval theories of the (...) divine ideas. The book, first, makes a significant contribution to the body of scholarly resources on medieval philosophy by systematically mapping out the complex intellectual history of the divine ideas between the years 1250 and 1325. Throughout the work Vater displays a staggering command of the relevant literature, figures, and ideas from this period of philosophical development. Second, he provides a robust defense and promotion of John Duns Scotus’s theory of the divine ideas, which he regularly insists is the best theory. Through careful analysis of the often subtle differences in medieval articulations of the divine ideas to answer the questions of how God knows and produces creatures, Vater makes the case that Scotus avoided certain pitfalls in earlier theories that rely on a flawed understanding of relations influenced, principally, by Avicenna’s notion of essence.The book itself is divided into five parts with each systematically detailing a particular theory, beginning with the “imitability theory” represented by Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Bonaventure—the one figure, in Vater’s narrative, capable of escaping Scotus’s subsequent critiques. According to Vater, the imitability theory is defined by several notable characteristics, including that the divine ideas are “secondary objects of the divine intellect when it knows the divine essence,” that they perform both cognitive and causal roles, that they are relations, and that there are many of them. The “infinite intellect theory” critiques the imitability theory for depending on a notion of relations that is mistaken for supposing that relations can be known before the terms of the relation are themselves known. In this section, Vater examines the works of Peter John Olivi and his student Petrus de Trabibus. The third part considers what Vater calls the “objectum cognitum theory” developed by James of Viterbo. Here, according to Vater, we encounter the first signs, following Olivi and de Trabibus’s critique of the imitability theory, of the shift away from identifying the divine ideas with relations to defining them as creatures themselves. This shift culminates in the “creatura intellecta theory” introduced by Richard of Mediavilla, but it is not properly developed until Scotus, who concludes that “God knows relations because he knows possible creatures.” The section ends with an analysis of Scotus’s influence on the theories of early Thomists and Scotists, including John of Paris, Thomas of Sutton, and Henry of Harclary. In the fifth part, Vater turns to the “nominalist theory” of Peter Auriol and [End Page 373] William of Ockham. Although both Auriol and Ockham offer accounts of the divine ideas, these are, as Vater says, little more than nods to the Augustinian tradition that ultimately amount to a rejection of the divine ideas.Vater’s approach to these medieval theories has many strengths. By not only classifying the prominent theories during this period but also systematically organizing his interpretation of each respective author, he is able to create a comparative framework for assessing the central issues at play in the divine ideas, such as their status, definition, cognitive and causal roles, plurality and unity, exemplarity, and the question of nonexistent possibles, and he traces variations in each area to identify where change, development, and critique are actually occurring within this seventy-five years of intellectual history. He also is attentive to figures often overlooked in larger narrations of medieval philosophy, and he locates their contributions to the varied development of the divine ideas. More importantly, however, Vater is able to maintain coherence in his evaluation of these complex, intertwining layers of medieval philosophical reflection by constantly returning to the overarching theme of relations in the movement from identifying the divine ideas with relations to approaching them as creatures themselves. Vater is correct when he notes that the divine ideas form a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Stanley Cavell WHAT BECOMES OF THINGS ON FILM? And does this title express a genuine question? That is, does one accept the suggestion that there is a particular relation (or a particular system of relations, awaiting systematic study) that holds between things and their filmed projections, which is to say between the originals now absent from us (by screening) and the new originals now present to us (in (...) photogenesis)—a relation to be thought of as something's becoming something (say as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, or as a prisoner becomes a count, or as an emotion becomes conscious, or as after a long night it becomes light)? The title is, at any rate, the working formulation I have given myself for the guiding question of this discussion. Of the many issues and many levels of issue raised by the papers I have been invited to comment upon, I have picked two moments at which work of my own about film has been referred to, wishing to contribute to a conversation in the territory of film study. The first moment is one in which I am quoted (or Heidegger and I jointly quoted) as saying that "The cinematic image accentuates the conspicuousness, obtrusiveness and obstinacy of things." I am sorry to have given such an impression. The background of what I said —in the course of giving some examples of how thinking about films and thinking about philosophy have drawn upon one another in my work— was this: early in Being and Time, Heidegger characterizes the specific way in which the phenomenon occurs, in his terms, of the "worldhood of the world announcing itself"; it is a phenomenon in which a particular mode of sight or awareness is brought into play. What brings this mode of sight into play is a disruption of what Heidegger calls the "work-world," a disruption of the matters of course running among our tools, and the occupations they extend, and the environment which supports these occupations. It is upon the disruption of such matters of course (of a tool, say by its breaking; or of someone's occupation, say because of an injury; or of some absence of material) that the mode of sight then brought forth discovers objects in what Heidegger 249 250Philosophy and Literature notes as their conspicuousness, their obtrusiveness, and their obstinacy. Now the foreground of what I said was this: it struck me that this perception or apprehension of the things of our world is part of the grain of silent film comedy; and, more particularly, that Buster Keaton is the silent comic figure whose extraordinary works and whose extraordinary gaze, perhaps the fundamental feature of his character, illuminate and are illuminated by the consequent concept of the worldhood of the world announcing itself. While I take even this bare broaching of this idea to formulate one possibility of cinematic images of the things of our world, it is no more to be expected that all cinematic images carry this force, than it is to be expected that all are in the service of Keaton's species of comedy; any more than the idea of such images exhausts what there is to say about Keaton, orabout Heidegger, or about any further relations between them. What the idea ought to do is to help us to see and say at once what it is Keaton permits us to laugh about and what concretely the nature is of the mode of sight from which Heidegger begins his analysis of Being-in-the-world. This laughter is not defined, for example, by a Bergsonian suggestion that the human being has become machine-like, or vice versa. Keaton is as flexible, as resourceful, as Ulysses, and his giant machines do exactly what they might be expected to do under their circumstances. We have here to do with something about the human capacity for sight, or for sensuous awareness generally, something wë might express as our condemnation to project, to inhabit, a world that goes essentially beyond the delivery of our senses. This seems to be the single point of agreement throughout the history of epistemology, at least throughout the modern history of the... (shrink)

This article considers the meaning of the ancient Chinese magic square Luoshu. It is known that this square is the most ancient of this type of squares. The importance of the magic square in the philosophical tradition and in the whole culture of China is large. The ancient understanding of number differs from the modern one by its dual character, combining the features of philosophical symbolism and mathematical constructions. Unfortunately, modern interpretations of the Luoshu as well as other numerical (...) constructions preserved by the Chinese tradition are too often limited to a superficial statement of their symbolic, “numerological” nature, ignoring the effects of the mathematical structure represented by them. At the same time, some scholars strongly emphasize the intuitive aspects of numerology, which do not presuppose accuracy. On the contrary, Leibniz saw in the Chinese binary system of thinking the beginning of an exact universal language. The author, appealing to the concept of A.A. Krushinskiy, analyzes the arithmetic laws of the structure of the square. The article shows that the magic square Luoshu is not a numbers game. Without any doubt, its main meaning lies in the application of arithmetic. Chinese magic square is an illustrative implementation of one of the main features of Chinese language and traditional thinking – its rational and mathematical basis. The Luoshu square is a vivid example of visual constructivism in the Chinese style of thinking. By means of the magic square’s scheme, the procedure of generalization that is a basis of concepts formation is carried out. This procedure uses a mathematical magic square algorithm based on the numerical codes of the five elements. The quinary spontaneous symbolism is rooted in the Chinese traditional culture of thinking and life order. (shrink)

This paper discusses the ways in which a person’s character ( ethos ) and a hearer’s emotional response ( pathos ) are part of the complex judgments made about experts’ claims, along with an actual assessment of those claims ( logos ). The analysis is rooted in the work of Aristotle, but expands to consider work on emotion and cognition conducted by Thagard and Gigerenzer. It also draws on some conclusions of the general epistemology of testimony (of which expert testimony (...) is a special subset), where it is argued that we learn not just from the transmission of another’s beliefs, but from the words they speak. This shifts the onus in testimony away from the intentions of a speaker onto the judgments of an audience, capturing better its social character and reflecting our experience of receiving testimony. I conclude, however, that accepting the arguments of experts involves much more than simply believing what they say. (shrink)

The contribution of Jesuits to the different fields of knowledge, including philosophy, is historically well known. In fact, since the foundation of the Society of Jesus, in the 16th century, Jesuits from different generations and cultures have taken part in the philosophical debates of their time and their different contexts. Since the foundation of the Society of Jesus, in 1540, the Jesuits, individually and as a body, have engaged in a fruitful dialogue between the Christian tradition and different dimensions (...) of human culture. During almost five centuries, numerous Jesuits taught philosophy in academic institutions all over the world. Some of them have their names recorded in the history of philosophy. Of course, the majority of them is not anymore remembered, despite their valuable contribution to the development of the Jesuit intellectual tradition up to our times. In fact, as an heir of the Roman College, the first academic institution founded by the Society of Jesus, in 1551, the Pontifical Gregorian University, in Rome, is a witness to this tradition, which has been kept alive thanks to the discrete work of both Jesuits and lay intellectuals. Known as the University of the Nations, this institution corroborates not only the capacity of the Jesuit tradition to put faith in dialogue with reason, but also the option to take the concrete reality of each human culture and its historical context as its point of departure. The Jesuits’ willingness to engage in dialogue with different intellectual perspectives is underpinned by one of the most defining traits of the Jesuit charism, namely, the conviction that God can be found and served in all things. Accordingly, Jesuits have adopted, from the beginning, an amenable stance towards the world with its different cultures and intellectual trends. As such, Jesuits have, since the beginning, inhabited the frontiers of human thought. According to the contemporary philosopher Paul Gilbert, SJ, within the institutions under the leadership of the Society of Jesus, it was always possible to maintain an equilibrium between two principles: “intellectual unity” and “openness to the world.” Without detriment to the Jesuit identity, the companions of Ignatius have been willing to dwell in the various dimensions of human reality, in their multiplicity and plurality. Either in the renewal of Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ metaphysics, or in the dialogue with modern philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, or Hegel, and even in the inculturation in non-European contexts, the Jesuits have been able to preserve the Christian tradition through an original development of human culture in all its richness and diversity. With respect to the last century, it has to be acknowledged that a significant number of Jesuits made significant contributions, with recognized competence, to philosophy. Certainly, the 20th century was particularly complex in many respects. It would be enough to recall that this period, which brought with it unprecedented social, scientific, and technological developments, was also the stage for the two World Wars. With the emergence or consolidation of philosophical currents such as Marxism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Structuralism, and Post-Modernism, the past century was, without any doubt, fascinating from the intellectual point of view. Jesuits such as Karl Rahner, Frederick Copleston, Bernard Lonergan, William Norris Clarke, John F. Kavanaugh, Teilhard de Chardin, Gaston Fessard, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, Michel de Certeau, Xavier Tilliette, Paul Valadier, Paweł Siwek, Ignacio Ellacuría, Francisco Taborda, Henrique de Lima Vaz and, in the Portuguese context, Diamantino Martins or Júlio Fragata, among many others, were able to engage different philosophical currents, problems and controversies of their times. Faithful to their long tradition of being present in the frontiers of thought, those Jesuits have engaged in a fruitful dialogue with these intellectual trends, offering relevant contributions to different ongoing debates. Within this context, the present volume recalls and discusses the philosophical contribution of some of the most prominent Jesuit protagonists of the intellectual interchange that took place in the 20th century. This volume also intends to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, which happens just before the inauguration of the Ignatian Year. Decreed by Father Arturo Sosa, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, this celebratory Year will start on May 20, 2021, precisely 500 years after Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, was wounded at the battle of Pamplona. We are happy that this volume could bring together outstanding specialists in the thought of some of the most prominent Jesuits philosophers of the last century, namely Paul Valadier, Paul Gilbert, Józef Bremer, Jacek Poznański, Alexander Maar, Patrick H. Byrne, M. Ross Romero, Carlos Alvarez, Hélio Pereira Lima, José Gama, Domingos Terra, Gabriel Flynn, Marie-Gabrielle Lemaire, José Sols Lucia, Lorena Zuchel Lovera, Pedro Pablo Achondo Moya, Enzo Solari, Massimo Borghesi, Mendo Castro Henriques, João Barbosa, and Dominique Lambert. In addition, in the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Júlio Fragata’s birth, Maria Teresa Fragata presents a memory of his life and thought. We hope that this volume may be useful to all those interested in the Jesuit philosophical tradition. Hopefully, it will stimulate scholars to pursue a fruitful and creative dialogue with contemporary philosophy, in the footsteps of the Jesuit philosophers featured here. We would like to thank all the authors and all those who, in different ways, made this volume possible. (shrink)

The cosmological relevance of emptiness—that is, space without bodies—is not yet sufficiently appreciated in natural philosophy. This paper addresses two aspects of cosmic emptiness from the perspective of natural philosophy: the distances to the stars in the closer cosmic environment and the expansion of space as a result of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Both aspects will be discussed from both a historical and a systematic perspective. Emptiness can be interpreted as “coming” in a two-fold sense: (...) whereas in the past, knowledge of emptiness, as it were, came to human beings, in the future, it is coming, insofar as its relevance in the cosmos will increase. The longer and more closely emptiness was studied since the beginning of modernity, the larger became the spaces over which it was found to extend. From a systematic perspective, I will show with regard to the closer cosmic environment that the Earth may be separated from the perhaps habitable planets of other stars by an emptiness that is inimical to life and cannot be traversed by humans. This assumption is a result of the discussion of the constraints and possibilities of interstellar space travel as defined by the known natural laws and technical means. With the accelerated expansion of the universe, the distances to other galaxies (outside of the so-called Local Group) are increasing. According to the current standard model of cosmology and assuming that the acceleration will remain constant, in the distant future, this expansion will lead first to a substantial change in the epistemic conditions of cosmological knowledge and finally to the completion of the cosmic emptiness and of its relevance, respectively. Imagining the postulated completely empty last state leads human thought to the very limits of what is conceivable. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Interpreting from the IntersticesThe Role of Justice in a Liberal Democracy—Lessons from Michael Walzer and Emmanuel LevinasNicholas R. Brown (bio)1As anyone who is familiar with more recent theological debate can attest, the appraisal of the liberal democratic tradition has undergone a radical reevaluation in the wake of Stanley Hauerwas’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s scathing critiques. As a result of their blistering assault, religious ethicists and philosophers now find (...) themselves operating within a discursive milieu that is almost the photo negative of the one they previously inhabited. For what has followed After Virtue and After Christendom is a situation in which compliance with liberal democratic norms is now perceived as actively inveighing against justice rather than as an integral prerequisite to its pursuit.There are cracks, however, beginning to emerge in the MacIntyre/Hauerwas edifice. For what is becoming disputed and increasingly so among a growing chorus of religious ethicists and philosophers is whether their critical reading of liberal democracy offers the most [End Page 155] helpful or even the most biblical way to think through its own moral dimensions as well as those undergirding its relationship with justice.It is the emergence of these criticisms that forms the basis for this essay. For the thesis that I wish to advance below is that liberal democracy offers religious ethicists and philosophers alike a moral framework and vocabulary from which it is possible to comprehend and enact the normative precepts encapsulated within a biblical understanding of justice. Accordingly, some aspects of my argument will build upon the rhetorical trajectories that have been already charted by the ethicists and philosophers I mention above.What distinguishes my approach, however, is that I will proceed from a more focused examination of some of the ethical and political undercurrents found within contemporary Jewish thought. More specifically, I want to probe the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the political philosophy of Michael Walzer, for I believe the juxtapositional methodology of interpretation which informs each of their perspectives is illustrative of an interstitial hermeneutic that helps further illuminate the moral compatibility between biblical and democratic accounts of justice.2By now, MacIntyre’s and Hauerwas’s critiques of the liberal democratic tradition have been so thoroughly documented, discussed, and dissected that a review of their perspectives cannot help but have a certain pleonastic quality.Probably the most significant and disturbing problem that MacIntyre and Hauerwas see belying the liberal democratic tradition stems from its conception of time and space, or more precisely, its lack thereof. For what they discover upon a more careful probing of its moral and epistemological underpinnings is a pursuit of transcendence not dissimilar to Gnostic metaphysics. In the case of liberalism, however, the existential encumbrances to be excised are not corporeal and carnal in nature, but historical and social. [End Page 156]Such conditionalities, surmise liberal theorists, are so shot through with conceptual prejudices that they comprise an interpretative straight-jacket that vitiates against the kind of objectivity necessary to engage in a nonparochial process of moral and political discernment. For it is precisely this ability “to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity” which MacIntyre sees as constituting “the essence of moral agency” of modern liberalism (AV 31–32). Therefore, “liberalism is successful,” maintains Hauerwas, “exactly because... [it] provide[s] that philosophical account of society designed to deal with” the moral and political implications such a social and historical denuding portends, namely “a system of rules that will constitute procedures for resolving disputes as they pursue their various interests.”1However, what liberalism defines as success MacIntyre and Hauerwas see as anything but. Instead, both judge its “system of rules” to be an insidious prescription for a particularly virulent form of moral nihilism and political bankruptcy. For by stripping moral and political discourse of their historical and social referents, liberalism, ironically and tragically, eviscerates itself of the very heuristic and discursive practices necessary to make those... (shrink)