Drawing on a range of philosophical, anthropological and political theories, Athena Athanasiou offers a new way of thinking about agonistic performativity with its critical connections to national and gender politics and alongside the political intricacies of affectivity, courage and justice. Through an ethnographic account of the urban feminist and antinationalist movement Women in Black of Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars, she shows that we might understand their dissident politics of mourning as a means to refigure political life beyond sovereign (...) accounts of subjectivity and agency. (shrink)

In this paper we distinguish two competing conceptions of dignity, one recognizably Hobbesian and one recognizably Kantian. We provide a formal model of how decision-makers committed to these conceptions of dignity might reason when engaged in an economic transaction that is not inherently insulting, but in which it is possible for the dignity of the agent to be called into question. This is a modified version of the ultimatum game. We then use this model to illustrate ways in which the (...) Kantian evaluative standpoint enjoys a kind of internal stability that the Hobbesian framework lacks. Our interpersonal argument shows that, under certain conditions, Hobbesians prefer to cultivate Kantian commitments in others and promote the presence of Kantians in the population. Our intrapersonal argument shows that agents who are conflicted between Kantian and Hobbesian commitments have powerful reasons not to resolve this commitment in favour of Hobbesian values. Our emulation argument illustrates that in repeated versions of the ultimatum game, the Hobbesian chooses to behave like a Kantian, including publicly repudiating her Hobbesian commitments. Here again, however, the Hobbesian is able to achieve a desired benefit only on the condition that there are genuine Kantians in the population. Finally, our social planning argument explores the reasons why a community of Hobbesians would opt to enshrine a Kantian conception of dignity into law. The paper concludes with some remarks about the policy implications of this work. The value or worth of a man is, as for all other things, his price, that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power; and therefore is not absolute, but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another... The public worth of a man, which is the value set on him by the Common-wealth, is that which men commonly call DIGNITY. Hobbes, _Leviathan X_, 16. (shrink)

Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging to the world. This thought-provoking book seeks to elaborate our understanding of dispossession outside of the conventional logic of possession, a hallmark of capitalism, liberalism, and humanism. Can dispossession simultaneously characterize political responses and opposition to the disenfranchisement associated with unjust dispossession of land, economic and political power, and basic conditions for living? In the context of neoliberal expropriation of labor and livelihood, dispossession opens (...) up a performative condition of being both affected by injustice and prompted to act. From the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa to the anti-neoliberal gatherings at Puerta del Sol, Syntagma and Zucchotti Park, an alternative political and affective economy of bodies in public is being formed. Bodies on the street are precarious - exposed to police force, they are also standing for, and opposing, their dispossession. These bodies insist upon their collective standing, organize themselves without and against hierarchy, and refuse to become disposable: they demand regard. This book interrogates the agonistic and open-ended corporeality and conviviality of the crowd as it assembles in cities to protest political and economic dispossession through a performative dispossession of the sovereign subject and its propriety. (shrink)

One of the core debates concerning equity in the response to the threat of anthropogenic climate change is how the responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should be allocated, or, correspondingly, how the right to emit greenhouse gases should be allocated. Two alternative approaches that have been widely promoted are, first, to assign obligations to the industrialized countries on the basis of both their ability to pay and their responsibility for the majority of prior emissions, or, second, to assign emissions (...) rights on a equal per capita basis. Both these proposals ignore intra-national distributional equity. Instead, we develop a policy framework we call 'Greenhouse Development Rights' which allocates obligations to pay for climate policies on the basis of an individually quantified metric of capacity and responsibility . Crucially, the GDRs framework looks at the distribution of income within countries and treats people of equal wealth similarly, whatever country they live in. Thus even poor countries have obligations proportional to the size and wealth of their middle and upper classes, defined relative to a 'development threshold'. While this method nominally identifies the 'right to development' as applying to people, not countries, as a proposal for a treaty among sovereign nations, there is no obvious way to give legal meaning to that right. In this paper, then, we raise some of the philosophical and political questions that arise in trying to quantify capacity and responsibility and to use the 'right to development' as a principle for allocating costs.*. (shrink)

One of the core debates concerning equity in the response to the threat of anthropogenic climate change is how the responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should be allocated, or, correspondingly, how the right to emit greenhouse gases should be allocated. Two alternative approaches that have been widely promoted are, first, to assign obligations to the industrialized countries on the basis of both their ability to pay (wealth) and their responsibility for the majority of prior emissions, or, second, to assign (...) emissions rights on a (possibly modified) equal per capita basis. Both these proposals ignore intra-national distributional equity. Instead, we develop a policy framework we call ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs) which allocates obligations to pay for climate policies (both mitigation and adaptation) on the basis of an individually quantified metric of capacity (ability to pay) and responsibility (prior emissions). Crucially, the GDRs framework looks at the distribution of income within countries and treats people of equal wealth similarly, whatever country they live in. Thus even poor countries have obligations proportional to the size and wealth of their middle and upper classes, defined relative to a ‘development threshold’. While this method nominally identifies the ‘right to development’ as applying to people, not countries, as a proposal for a treaty among sovereign nations, there is no obvious way to give legal meaning to that right. In this paper, then, we raise some of the philosophical and political questions that arise in trying to quantify capacity and responsibility and to use the ‘right to development’ as a principle for allocating costs.Footnote**The ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs) framework is a collective project. The core team includes the author, Tom Athanasiou, Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict; this is the ‘we’ that appears where the text refers to the project, as in ‘we intended this’, and so on. This paper, however, is primarily the author's own product and, beyond the description of GDRs, my collaborators have not read or approved it; thus much of the writing and philosophical speculation uses the first person singular. And, while credit for useful work goes to all team members, the blame for philosophical sloppiness remains with the author. (shrink)

With a foreword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a chapter by Irigaray responding to her commentators, this book is an essential text for those in social ...

_A transdisciplinary reader on Luce Irigaray's reading and re-writing of Ancient Greek texts._.

Human intuition and perception are basic and essential phenomena of consciousness. As such, they will never be replicated by computers. This is the challenging notion of Hubert Dreyfus, Ph. D., archcritic of the artificial intelligence establishment. It's important to emphasize that he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible, only that the current research program is fatally flawed. Instead, he argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being in the (...) world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. This helps to explain the practical problems in implementing artificial intelligence algorithms. (shrink)

This article examines the historically contentious relationship between the financial market and the public as discussed in academic literature, financial journalism and prescriptive how-to invest handbooks during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although financial markets thrive off active public participation, speculating at stock and commodity exchanges has been a sanctioned ritual reserved for a privileged minority. We argue that the financial establishment’s intent to control market access through financial entry-barriers (such as exchange membership fees and margin requirements) has (...) been part of a bigger story we need to understand: a history of delegitimating uninitiated ‘lay speculators’ through the construction of exclusionary narratives about unfit amateur investors and morally corrupt publics. We conceptualize this process as an ongoing and delicate boundary-making exercise contributing to a market participation discourse that has been characterized by a set of reductive binaries, such as those of insider–outsider, professional–amateur and speculator–gambler. We show, however, that attempts to delineate popular participation in financial markets through these binaries have been complicated by the idea that besides being a force of market instability and collective irrationality, the public was a largely untapped source of liquidity. We argue that today’s discourse on public participation in financial markets resuscitates these simplified narratives and propose a more nuanced view of non-professional market participants being both destabilizers and liquidity-providers. (shrink)

In this interview with Wu Ming 1, a member of the mysterious but well-known and widely-translated novel-writing Wu Ming Collective, we discuss his new book, La Q di Qomplotto ( The Q in Qonspiracy: How Conspiracy Fantasies Defend the System). In the interview, Wu Ming 1 unravels the power of narrative and games in driving conspiracy fantasies and fuelling new forms of activism that have risen to confront a system that gives rise to them.

Der Didaskalikos des mittelplatonischen Philosophen Alkinoos aus dem 2. Jahrhundert n. Chr. ist eine der wenigen vollständig erhaltenen platonischen Schriften vor der Zeit Plotins und des Neuplatonismus. Der vorliegenden Edition und Erstübersetzung ins Deutsche werden eine Einleitung sowie eine Bibliographie vorangestellt. Die Anmerkungen zum Text erläutern philosophische Zusammenhänge, erklären philologische Einzelheiten und weisen markante Stellen nach. Der Band ist von Interesse besonders für Philosophen, Philologen und Theologen.

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides'Bacchaeand again inThe Greeks and the Irrational, we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own debt to (...) him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection.The working out of the anger of Achilles in theIliadbegins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of theOdysseyhinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simplySuppliants, and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. (shrink)

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, (...) resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. -/- Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Basak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis. (shrink)

Der Band untersucht die fünf Stellen des Hebräerbriefes, die herkömmlicherweise als Hinweise auf die Parusie Christi gedeutet werden (Hebr 1,6; 9,28; 10,25.36-39; 12,25-29). Ausgangspunkt ist die Feststellung, dass eine apokalyptische Rede von der Parusie zur übrigen Denkweise des Schreibens nicht recht passen will, die eher von einer mittelplatonischen Ontologie geprägt ist. Zur Auflösung dieser Spannung werden in Teil I die problematischen Stellen des Hebräerbriefes textimmanent analysiert und in Teil II mit relevanten Texten von Philon, Plutarch, Seneca und Alkinoos in (...) Verbindung gebracht, die ebenfalls eingehend analysiert werden. Teil III führt schließlich die Ergebnisse der ersten beiden Teile zusammen und macht eine mittelplatonische Umformung des Parusiegedankens durch den Autor des Hebräerbriefes plausibel. (shrink)

The Greenhouse Development Rights developed by Paul Baer, Sivan Kartha, Tom Athanasiou, and Eric Kemp-Benedict are grounded in two fundamental ethical considerations: caus...

Im Zentrum des Buches steht ein kurzer Traktat des Albinos, der sogenannte Prologos. Albinos ist geistesgeschichtlich dem Mittelplatonismus zuzuordnen, der Phase des antiken Platonismus, die dem um 250 n.Chr. einsetzenden Neuplatonismus Plotins vorausging. Der antike Autor fuhrt den Leser seines Prologos mit folgenden Fragen an die Dialoge Platons heran: Was ist ein Dialog? In welche Typen lassen sich die Platonischen Dialoge einteilen? Mit welchem Dialog soll das Studium der Platonischen Dialoge beginnen? Welche Anordnung der Dialoge ist Platons Philosophie angemessen? Der (...) Prologos wurde in der alteren Forschung aus verschiedenen Grunden vernachlassigt: Zum einen glaubte man, die philosophische Position des Albinos besser aus dem umfangreicheren Didaskalikos, der ihm zunachst zugewiesen wurde, rekonstruieren zu konnen; zum anderen sahen die meisten Forscher in dem Prologos nur eine schlecht gearbeitete Zusammenfassung (Epitome). Diese Vorurteile grundeten auf der Monographie "Der Platoniker Albinos und der falsche Alkinoos", die J. Freudenthal 1879 publizierte. Seit einigen Jahren wird der Didaskalikos jedoch wieder Alkinoos, einem nur in den Handschriften auftauchenden und ansonsten unbekannten Autor, zugewiesen. Somit wurde der Weg fur eine unvoreingenommene Neubewertung des Prologos frei.Das Buch beginnt mit einem Uberblick uber die Forschungsgeschichte zum Prologos. Ein Durchgang durch Leben, Werk und Lehren des Albinos mundet in eine Einordnung des Traktats unter die Testimonien zu Albinos und dessen Lehrer Gaios. In einem dritten Abschnitt wird in dem Buch die zentrale Frage diskutiert, worum es sich bei dem Prologos handelt, um ein Exzerpt oder eine Epitome. Aus einer philologischen und philosophiehistorischen Untersuchung der Textstellen, die von Freudenthal in seiner oben erwahnten Monographie als verderbt beanstandet wurden, geht hervor, dass es sich bei dem Prologos um ein Exzerpt und nicht um eine Epitome handelt. In einem vierten Kapitel wird mittels eines formalen und funktionalen Vergleichs des Prologos mit spateren Einfuhrungsschriften dessen spezifischer Charakter herausgearbeitet: Der Prologos gibt sich als unkorrigierte Mitschrift einer Vorlesung zu erkennen und gewahrt als solche Einblick in den Horsaal eines Platonikers der Kaiserzeit. In einem langeren funften Abschnitt wird die handschriftliche Uberlieferung dargelegt und kritisch betrachtet. Reis beschreibt hier ausfuhrlich 21 griechische Handschriften und eine lateinische Ubersetzung unter kodikologischen, historischen und palaographischen Gesichtspunkten. Die Verflechtung der Textgeschichte mit derjenigen Platons und spaterer Platoniker macht diese Untersuchung wunschenswert. Die Abhangigkeit der Handschriften voneinander wird ermittelt, worauf eine kritische Edition des Prologos folgt. Die beigegebene Ubersetzung macht den Text auch interessierten Nicht-Grazisten zuganglich. (shrink)

Twentieth-century ideologies, from liberalism to fascism, are rooted in humanism—the faith in the sovereignty of human reason and potential that grew out of Renaissance thought and discovery. This special issue asks if it is true that all vestiges of humanism have been dismantled, or whether humanism has taken on new forms. Have new versions of historical analysis and cultural studies reanimated humanist themes? What is posthumanism? These essays examine relationships among structuralism, poststructuralism, and the subject; explore the challenge of anticolonialist (...) critique to the coherence of antihumanism; reconsider the canon of antihumanists such as Heidegger and Foucault, and broach the intractable problems posed by efforts to comprehend the Holocaust, the camps, and ethnic cleansing. _Contributors_. Athena Athanasiou, Etienne Balibar, Mara de Gennaro, Carolyn J. Dean, Brady Thomas Heiner, Lynne Joyrich, Jacques Lezra. (shrink)