Language mixing is a ubiquitous phenomenon characterizing bilingual speakers. A frequent context where two languages are mixed is the word-internal level, demonstrating how tightly integrated the two grammars are in the mind of a speaker and how they adapt to each other. This raises the question of what the minimal unit of language mixing is, and whether or not this unit differs depending on what the languages are. Some scholars have argued that an uncategorized root serves as a unit, others (...) argue that the unit needs to have been categorized prior to mixing. We will discuss the question of what the relevant unit for language mixing is by studying word-internal mixing in Cypriot Greek-English, English-Norwegian, Greek-English, Greek-German, and Spanish-German varieties that have been reported in the literature based on data from judgment experiments and spoken corpora. By understanding and modeling the units of language mixing across languages, we will gain insight into how languages adapt to each other word-internally, and what some possible outcomes of language contact are in the minds of speakers. (shrink)

Generative grammar is an approach to the study of language which is explicit, mentalistic, and based on the claim that the ability to acquire language is innately specified. This chapter outlines some of the recent history leading up to contemporary generative grammar. It provides some context for the emergence of Principles and Parameters and the basic gist of the Principles and Parameters approach. Chomsky is a fundamental contribution to the study of human language in its effort to develop a new (...) theory of what is universal across languages and what is variable. In the beginning of the 1990s, Chomsky developed a new model, called the Minimalist Program. The main idea behind the model of grammar labeled Government and Binding was developed by Chomsky in several publications. The chapter also outlines some of the current research trends within the Minimalist Program. (shrink)

There is a growing body of literature using the tools of syntactic models of word formation (e.g. Distributed Morphology) to provide analyses of language mixing phenomena, in particular word internal mixing. In fact, the very phenomenon of word internal mixing directly supports a syntactic approach to word formation, according to which words are structurally complex. On the basis of this view, the basic units of word formation involve roots that combine with functional elements in the syntax. The combination of roots (...) with functional elements creates words. This paper is in line with this work and investigates further the question of how word formation operates in cases of language mixing and what exactly is being mixed in mixing, i.e. words vs. roots. After reviewing literature on word internal mixing, I will discuss compound formation in language contact situations, the question being of how compounding in mixing can inform both theories of mixing and theories of word-hood. Compounding is important to answer the question of what exactly is being mixed in mixing, as language differ with respect to the units they employ for compound formation, i.e. words vs. roots and to the availability of linking elements to form compounds. Moreover, compounding is important to understand the role the two languages play in mixing, as languages differ with respect to head-ness (left or right) of their compounds. The data to be discussed will be a mixture of materials that have already been published in the literature and newly collected data and involve several mixing varieties, namely Greek-English, Greek-German, Greek-Turkish, Turkish-Norwegian, Turkish-Dutch and French-Dutch. (shrink)

Este artigo problematiza o antropocentrismo na “esferologia” de Peter Sloterdijk, com sua narrativa da antropogênese como construção imunológica da “casa do ser”, na qual o humano, rompendo a “jaula” animal, constrói esferas, ilhas imunológicas de coexistência humana. O mito de Orfeu simboliza para Sloterdijk a imunologia: ao perder a amada, Orfeu reconstrói imunologicamente o complemento, neutralizando o espectro ausente como linguagem. Propomos um experimento filosófico, o “Anti-Orfeu”, no qual o perspectivismo cosmológico de Viveiros de Castro e Tânia Stolze Lima, pensado (...) de um ponto de vista topológico, serviria de contraponto para pôr em perspectiva a imunologia, apontando para a variação da diferença entre dentro e fora e para a “antropofagia”, como outra distribuição topológica que permite outra relação com a alteridade que não a imunologia. Com isso, apontamos para uma “esferologia do ponto de vista do inimigo”, da alteridade, permitindo modular a esferologia, evidenciando-a como diagnóstico da “autoimunidade” de esferas imunológicas. (shrink)

This paper will discuss Edna Millay's influence on Anne Sexton, with particular reference to issues such as gender politics, femininity, performativity, and the female body. Through close comparative readings of some of the two women's most representative poems, I analyze, firstly, how Millay's outspokenness and daring self-presentation as a woman writer facilitated Sexton's handling of material that was previously considered unacceptable for poetry and, secondly, how Sexton expanded the scope of women's writing in a manner that paid tribute to the (...) earlier poet's innovation. My paper maintains that Millay's repeated attempts to explore gender and interrogate the concept of ‘authentic’ femininity anticipated Sexton's overtly feminist works. Ultimately, I am arguing that, despite the literary climate of the 1960s (which urged the rejection of poets like Mi May) and despite her own ambiguous feelings for the earlier poet, Sexton eventually recovered Mil lay as an important literary predecessor for her generation, consistently imitated her artistic posturing, performance strategies, and self-presentation, and finally acknowledged her unique contribution to women's writing. (shrink)

This article examines Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems in relation to Edna St Vincent Millay’s Fatal Interview. Discussing notions such as lyric voice and innovation within traditional genres, the author analyses how Millay’s attempts to challenge commonplace definitions of female sexuality impacted on Rich’s articulation of sexual desire. The intertextual dialogue between the above works reveals that Millay and Rich produced two remarkably similar erotic narratives, which resist masculinist conceptions of literary history and comment on the self-referentiality of poetic composition. (...) Finally, the author approaches Fatal Interview as a work that foregrounds the significance of women’s bonding, and argues that it was precisely this aspect that caught Rich’s attention and helped the younger poet develop her feminist consciousness. (shrink)

Starting with the characterization of Baruch Spinoza’s work as a “theory of expression” and with the influence that Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy has on multinaturalist perspectivism, this article speculates on the possibility of a theory of expression for multinaturalism. First, one proceeds to raise some Deleuzian considerations on Spinozist ontology to articulate the influence Deleuze has on the manner in which multinaturalist anthropology dialogues with indigenous mythologies and cosmologies. At last, with the help of some descriptions of Yanomami cosmology, as articulated (...) by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert in The Falling Sky and of provocations raised by authors such as Jean-Christophe Goddard and Fabián Ludueña, this article will investigate the problems of dreams, images and specters a possible way to elaborate a multinaturalist theory of expression. (shrink)

Whereas the Mediterranean has not submitted easily to strong theories, still it has inspired a certain kind of theorizing from the ground. The setting of the Mediterranean viewed from the land's edge gave the world theoria, which Greek etymology and usage associates with looking onto a scene with amazement, viewing drama, being sent as an emissary to consult the oracle, or traveling for the purposes of sightseeing. The present essay explores some connections between the Mediterranean and theoria. Following a brief (...) survey of how theoria functioned in antiquity, it studies the case of 20th-century Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and American director and choreographer Eva Palmer - husband and wife - who sought to revive ancient ideas of theoria. They organized revivals of the Delphic Festivals in 1927 and 1930 as a prelude to re-establishing Delphi as a world center for people with a vision for the world. Their work rivaled that of the Olympic Revivals, except that the Delphic Revival was linked to a particular Mediterranean site and pursued the course of art, music, social thought, and especially tragedy together with athletics. A spectacular, imaginative, ambitious, but stillborn effort, it gives evidence of both the potential and limits of Mediterranean theoria. (shrink)

Whereas the Mediterranean has not submitted easily to strong theories, still it has inspired a certain kind of theorizing from the ground. The setting of the Mediterranean viewed from the land's edge gave the world theoria, which Greek etymology and usage associates with looking onto a scene with amazement, viewing drama, being sent as an emissary to consult the oracle, or traveling for the purposes of sightseeing. The present essay explores some connections between the Mediterranean and theoria. Following a brief (...) survey of how theoria functioned in antiquity, it studies the case of 20th-century Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and American director and choreographer Eva Palmer - husband and wife - who sought to revive ancient ideas of theoria. They organized revivals of the Delphic Festivals in 1927 and 1930 as a prelude to re-establishing Delphi as a world center for people with a vision for the world. Their work rivaled that of the Olympic Revivals, except that the Delphic Revival was linked to a particular Mediterranean site and pursued the course of art, music, social thought, and especially tragedy together with athletics. A spectacular, imaginative, ambitious, but stillborn effort, it gives evidence of both the potential and limits of Mediterranean theoria. (shrink)

This article builds on a developing interdisciplinary discussion of home. It studies two 20th-century texts in counterpoint: political philosopher Agnes Heller's essay, `Where Are We at Home,' and novelist Melpo Axioti's My Home, a nostalgic recollection of life on Mykonos. Heller contrasts the elusive, self-appointed geography of postmodern living with a traditional view of primordial dwelling, a non-transient way of dwelling that gave to Earth a commitment stretching from ancestral past to a distant future. That experience is all but lost (...) today, Heller muses as she surveys the horizon for space-bound alternatives to today's geographic promiscuity. The closing paragraph of her essay, which settles inconclusively on a Mediterranean landscape, opens a portal to My Home, the work of another political exile deprived of nationality and citizenship during the Cold War. Axioti's postmodern novel juxtaposes native stories of a transient life on Mykonos with the modern developer's efforts to discover firm foundations for building and an exile's wish to recover solid memories of home. Between those perspectives, Mykonos comes alive as a different type of home, in which obligation forms a bridge between presence and absence. The article closes by inquiring whether a thoughtful look at fragile Mediterranean worlds might reintroduce the idea of obligation to postmodern conceptions of home. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche dizia que a transcendência e a negação da vida, próprias do niilismo reativo que caracteriza a autofagia do Ocidente, eram subprodutos do excesso de memória, plasmado em ressentimento e “espírito de vingança”. Por outro lado, o xamã yanomami Davi Kopenawa, liderança indígena e autor, junto ao antropólogo Bruce Albert, do livro _A queda do céu_, responsabiliza o esquecimento dos brancos por sua própria derrocada — derrocada que leva todos os povos não-brancos consigo, em um vertiginoso cataclisma ambiental e (...) pandêmico de dimensões planetárias que Kopenawa e os Yanomami chamam de “queda do céu”. Neste artigo, pretendemos lidar com essa equivocidade perspectiva do olvido, vislumbrando nela uma questão filosófica crucial: como compreender esse duplo cruzamento entre olvido e memória, quando saímos do discurso filosófico ocidental e partimos para o discurso de um pensador yanomami? Haveria em jogo, aqui, uma equivocidade do olvido, no sentido em que o esquecimento é outro, a depender de sua direção? (shrink)

Este artigo tem o objetivo de articular a crítica feita por Peter Sloterdijk em Esferas I, de 1998, à insuficiência da tematização do problema da espacialidade em Ser e tempo, obra de Martin Heidegger publicada em 1927, explicitando a solução que Sloterdijk oferece ao recuperar aquilo que, para ele, estava prenhe na obra heideggeriana, isto é, o desenvolvimento apropriado da questão da espacialidade. Nos reportamos primeiramente aos parágrafos em que Heidegger disserta sobre a espacialidade em Ser e tempo para servir (...) de base à crítica que Sloterdijk constrói em Esferas I. Em seguida, recuperamos certa influência teórica que Heidegger sofreu do biólogo estoniano Jakob von Uexküll e do teórico da história Wilhelm Dilthey sobre as noções de vida e mundo ambiente, junto à exposição do conceito de vida fática em Ontologia: Hermenêutica da facticidade. Por fim, a partir da relação entre vida e existência, nos voltamos à obra de Sloterdijk para compreender o que está implicado no conceito de “esfera”, via aberta, segundo Sloterdijk, a partir da rearticulação dos problemas da vida e da espacialidade nos escritos de juventude de Heidegger. (shrink)

Diante da pandemia do Novo Coronavírus, muitos foram os problemas levantados pela filosofia a partir do modo “imunitário” com o qual a civilização industrial lidou com a crise, e muito tem sido aventado sobre a necessidade de se repensar o sentido da noção de comunidades de apoio e de resistência. Exemplos disso não faltam; dentre os filósofos que abordaram a crise, encontram-se desde Giorgio Agamben a Paul B. Preciado, entre outros. Neste artigo, pretendemos partir da discussão sobre imunologia e paradigma (...) imunitário em Roberto Espósito para nos perguntar de que modo podemos pensar essa demanda por “comunidade” em meio a uma crise imunitária, no sentido biológico e político do termo. Temos por hipótese que, mais do que postular a oposição exclusiva dos termos, levantar a questão pela articulação deles nos abre dois modos possíveis de relação com a alteridade abissal que encontramos no vírus. (shrink)

Neste ensaio, busca-se pensar de que forma a questão do niilismo é enfrentada pelo pensamento de povos indígenas das terras baixas da América do Sul: se interpretarmos o niilismo como perda de parâmetros diante da “morte de Deus”, que sentido o problema do niilismo faz para povos que não estipularam um Deus unitário como fundamento axiológico? Para desdobrar essa questão, fez-se uso da obra Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo, de Ailton Krenak, bem como de referenciais antropológicos e filosóficos (...) a respeito de temas como niilismo, sacralidade, alegria, natureza, ciência e técnica. O artigo se desenvolve em quatro partes: em I, faz-se uma breve descrição do que Pelbart denominou “travessia do niilismo”; em II, levanta-se o questionamento central deste ensaio, trazendo à tona o conceito de “sobrenatureza” como principal operador ontológico do pensamento ameríndio; em III, examina-se as diferentes relações com a alteridade “natural” entre o pensamento indígena e o pensamento ocidental; e em IV, por fim, compara-se as metáforas das “conchas coloridas”, de Nietzsche, e dos “paraquedas coloridos”, de Ailton Krenak, em um debate sobre niilismo e Antropoceno, momento em que a noção de “riso”, levantada por P. Clastres a partir de mitos chulupi, orienta a reflexão sobre o papel da “gaia ciência” no pensamento indígena. (shrink)

This article examines the diversity of tactical interventions that transpired at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, culminating in the resignation of the vice-chairman of its Board of Trustees. Instead of accepting the myth of museum neutrality, the activist campaign, spearheaded by the action-oriented movement Decolonize This Place, treated the Whitney as a site of ideological struggle, permeated by inner divisions and conflicting interests. Through their organizing efforts, activists prefigured a movement-based form of cultural production, mapped connections between (...) seemingly disparate struggles, and built decolonial solidarities. While the activists’ actions were essential to stage the antagonisms that had been dormant in the institution, a multiplicity of actors needed to step in during the process, creating multiple pressure points and taking sides in the division. To amplify the Whitney staffers’ attempt to hold the museum leadership accountable, they sought to bring political protest into the institution, challenging the very principle of counting who belongs to the community and who is excluded. (shrink)

Addressing Education: Purposes, Plans, and Politics is the first in the 10-volume series, Lynchburg College Symposium Readings, 3rd edition. Each volume presents primary texts organized around an interdisciplinary, liberal arts theme such as education, politics, social issues, science and technology, morals and ethics. The series has been developed by Lynchburg College faculty for use in the Senior Symposium and the Lynchburg College Symposium Readings Program (SS/LCSR). While these programs are distinctive to Lynchburg College, the texts are used on many college (...) campuses across the nation, as well as by readers interested in significant original texts on important topics. Addressing Education: Purposes, Plans, and Politics offers primary source readings on a wide range of topics in education. Here are the original writings that readers often only read about. In this volume, the educators speak for themselves in selections and excerpts from Plato (360 B.C. E.) to Paolo Freire (1968). Familiar luminaries Mann, Rousseau, DuBois, Keller, Jefferson, 21 in all gather together all in one volume to deliver these pivotal ideas with incomparable impact. Whether consumed cover-to-cover or piece-by-piece, the volume invites useful, critical debate on this important topic. (shrink)

Resumo: Martin Heidegger desenvolveu uma análise da metafísica e da tecnologia que questionava radicalmente seus pressupostos ontológicos. Contudo, para Peter Sloterdijk, autor de uma revisão do motivo da clareira heideggeriana intitulada Domesticação do ser: clarificando a clareira, Heidegger padece daquilo mesmo que ele critica: uma pendência para a ontologia clássica que, desde pelo menos Platão e Aristóteles, separa o ser e o nada, basila o princípio de bivalência na lógica, excluindo qualquer terceira possibilidade, e permite os dualismos constitutivos da metafísica. (...) Seguindo o antropólogo Bruno Latour, o qual evidenciara que “modernidade” não é senão uma crença na cisão entre os polos de forma e matéria, sujeito e objeto, natureza e cultura, também Sloterdijk vai atribuir a Heidegger a pendência à ontologia clássica, elevada ao nível da cisão entre o ôntico e o ontológico. Diante disso, o que sugere Sloterdijk? Uma alternativa à ontologia clássica na cibernética de Wiener e Günther, reatando os laços, desfeitos por Heidegger, entre ontologia e antropologia. Este trabalho tem por intenção articular a crítica de Sloterdijk, a investigação de Latour e a revisão ontológicológica de Günther, a fim de assentar bases para compreensão do projeto sloterdijkiano de se pensar a antropologia a partir de pressupostos cibernéticos.: Martin Heidegger developed an analysis of metaphysics and technology that questioned its ontological presupositions. However, Peter Sloterdijk, author of a revision of the Heideggerian clearing, under the title of Domestication of being: clarifying the clearing, argues that Heidegger suffers from the same illness he criticizes: an abeyance relative to classical ontology, which, after Plato and Aristotle, separated Being and Nothingness, grounded the logical bivalence, excluding any third possibility, and allowing for the metaphysical dualisms. Following the anthropologist Bruno Latour, who has showed that “Modernity” is a belief in the split between the poles of form and matter, of subject and object, of nature and culture, Sloterdijk also assigns to Heidegger the dependence on classical ontology on the level of the split between ontological and ontic. In this respect, what does Sloterdijk suggest? An alternative to classical ontology in the cybernetics of Wiener and Günther, in order to reattach the links broken by Heidegger between ontology and anthropology. This work aims to articulate Sloterdijk’s critique, Latour’s enquiry and Günther’s ontological-logical revision, in order to open field for an understanding on the Sloterdijkian project of thinking anthropology from cybernetical hypotheses. (shrink)

Com passar do século XX, o conceito de humanismo perdeu forças em virtude das diversas calamidades que evidenciaram seus paradoxos. Diante disso, um ano após o fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial, Martin Heidegger respondeu uma carta do teórico Jean Beaufret a respeito da necessidade de se manter ou não o termo “humanismo”. Em 1999, Peter Sloterdijk pronunciou uma conferência que consistia em uma resposta à carta de Heidegger sobre o humanismo. Ambos se amparam nos paradoxos que subjazem o conceito, mas (...) suas teses tem implicações diversas. Considerando tal divergência, este artigo tem por objetivo articular as duas respostas, inserindo-as em seus contextos e evidenciando em que pontos elas se confrontam e quais posturas elas implicam. Para isso, nos é necessário primeiro a colocação do texto de Heidegger em seu contexto e, posteriormente, a abordagem da conferência de Sloterdijk, parte em que se evidenciará o aporte crítico desse último frente a algumas das principais teses heideggerianas, como a recusa à noção de pastoreio e a necessidade de se abordar o problema ontológico do humano a partir da perspectiva antropológica da domesticação do homem pelo homem. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo busca levantar algumas questões a respeito da proposta do filósofo alemão Peter Sloterdijk ao Antropoceno, termo em debate que define a época na qual o ser humano se configurou como um agente de transformação geológica e climática. O debate faz-se pertinente por conta da proximidade de Sloterdijk com nomes como Bruno Latour e Yuk Hui, autores que, de forma central ou tangencial, se debruçam sobre este problema. Neste artigo, começaremos trazendo alguns dos principais conceitos sloterdijkianos de sua (...) obra recente para, em seguida, analisar suas propostas de ‘paradigma homeotécnico’ e de ‘coimunismo’, levantando, ao fim, questões pertinentes às propostas mencionadas. ABSTRACT This paper aims to raise some questions concerning the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s propositions regarding Anthropocene, a debatable term that serves to define the epoch in which human being made itself an agent of geological and climatic transformation. This debate is important because of Sloterdijk’s closeness with names such as Bruno Latour and Yuk Hui, authors that, in a more or less central manner, engage with such a problem. Here, firstly we will gather some of the main concepts of Sloterdijk’s recent work in order to analyze the ‘homeotechnological paradigm’ and the ‘co-immunism’ propositions, raising, at last, some relevant questions to the aforementioned propositions. (shrink)

The article addresses the notion of communism with a special angle of factuality and negativity, and not in the usual sense of a futurist utopia. After considering the main contemporary theories of communism in left-leaning political thought, the author turns to the Soviet experience of an “actually existing communism.” Apart from and against the bureaucratic state, a social reality existed organized around res nullius, that is, an unappropriated world that was not a collective property, as in the case of res (...) publica. The alienation from things and from the state resulted not only in the sense of oppression, but in a new culture of a paradoxical “communality”, where the “Other,” be it a thing or a person, appears rather as ground, not figure. This culture of a non-thematic gaze led to a formation of a communality as a given, and not as a utopian desideratum. I claim that this is a major difference between the current Western society and a post-Communist society. The former is more solidary and collectivist, but only consciously and deliberately so, operating from an individualist ontology, while the latter is individualist, but with an assumption of the “Other” as a pre-given fact. In this chiasmus, both “communisms” are problematic, so that an alternative model of individuation, rather than the atomization of an assumed collectivity, would be preferable. (shrink)

This article discusses the 2022 war from the point of view of its well-documented savagery. It addresses philosophical discussions of barbarism and gives a dialectical explanation of this phenomenon through the gradual polarization between the forces of Enlightenment and the obstinacy of the subject. This clash has a double shape: formality versus materiality and morality versus happiness.

The article is dedicated to the politico-theological critique of Judaism from the position of Christianity. It shows the affinity of Marx’s early critique of liberal state and of Hannah Arendt’s criticism of formal legalistic thinking in the contemporary judicial treatment of Nazism (and of similar international political crimes). Marx’s critique of nation-state finds its unlikely continuation in Arendt’s critique of international law. The politico-theological argument is explicit in Marx and implicit in Arendt, but both develop the Hegelian criticism of liberal (...) state which shows its reliance on the abstract law, on the one hand, and on the egotistic abstract individual, on the other. The theological undercurrent of the argument is both sign of its limitations, and of the subsisting relevance of the politico-theological framework, even in the similarly novel circumstances of the twentieth century. It is only within and through the theological critique and critique of theology that these issues would stand a chance of resolution. (shrink)

This roundtable intervention explores the question of collective guilt in the case of Russia’s war with Ukraine. Psychoanalytic analysis of guilt is added here to the traditional discussions of concrete and generalized responsibility of the individual for the actions of her government. An affirmative, good-oriented ethic is promoted, in contrast to the evil-centered ethic. A group guilt of intelligentsia is found in its cultural and economic domination within the Russian society, which has led to an unfortunate separation between the nationalist (...) and internationalist classes. (shrink)

Lenin’s State and Revolution is not only a project for imminent revolutionary policy and not only a legitimization argument for a revolutionary dictatorship, but also a theory of state and theory of democracy. Lenin points at the reduplication of state organs that is inherent in a democratic state. While the Russian revolutionary thinks of this reduplication as something transitory, we today increasingly see it as a durable condition coterminous with the late-modern democratic state. I use Lenin’s treatise as a point (...) of inspiration to briefly characterize my dialectical theory of state. (shrink)

This volume in the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series examines one of the most important topics in contemporary political theory: how to conceptualize the relationship between the one and the many. The essays discuss how to reconcile multiple ontologies without subsuming them to a totalitarian unity. While one school of thought seeks to create a new ontology based on the many instead of the one,, another proposes to understand the "one" as the "ultra-one" of the event. In this groundbreaking (...) work, leading thinkers explore these debates and offer alternative concepts. Building on Jean-Luc Nancy's essay who proposes an ontology of "singular plurality," contributors aim to synthesize the one and the many and suggest different ways of forming collectives, beyond the dominant representative political forms. An original and challenging work, Politics of the One addresses new possible ways of bringing people together, integrating philosophy with theoretical and practical problems of politics. (shrink)

This is the Q&A portion of the roundtable that focuses on the crucial issues of individual and collective guilt of the intellectual class in the face of war. The participants address the stratification of Russian society, possibilities and obstacles of dissent, and the eschatological tendencies of history by engaging with each other’s claims and ideas and seeking answers to direct questions.

The historical meaning of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and of the subsequent post-communist transformation remains profoundly unclear. Most observers hesitate to designate these events as a revolution, building on a common-sense notion of revolution as a violent, radical change. My dissertation argues that the post-communist transformation was indeed a revolution and proves this claim by comparing it with the French Revolution, in its political, social, and anthropological aspects. In both historical cases, the quick and easy victory of society (...) over the "old regime" was followed by a long period of internal struggle, threat of stagnation, and widespread melancholia. ;Based on this historical parallel, I turn to the theoretical analysis of the concept of revolution. Our recent historical experience allows for a new perspective on the history of this concept, as it has been developed in the Modern philosophy and political theory. The present study focuses primarily on two points in this history. The first is Immanuel Kant's treatment of the French Revolution in his late political texts, The Conflict of the Faculties and The Metaphysics of Morals. The second is Hannah Arendt's work On Revolution. The close reading of these texts allows me to outline the structure of the concept of revolution as centered around the logic of negativity. ;Kant interprets the French Revolution as an irreversible event. The revolution repeatedly returns to the imaginary, impossible point of self-foundation only to recoil again from the abyss it opens. Arendt also emphasizes the two sides of revolution, the infinite self-destruction and the new beginning. Although Arendt attempts to separate the "positive" American Revolution from the "negative" French Revolution, the dissertation shows that her conceptual reading of the two is identical and that it heavily depends on the narrative structure of tragedy. ;Revolution is the central concept of the Modern philosophy of history. It is far from being outdated but must be updated and renewed to provide meaning to our present historical situation. This dissertation makes a step towards this renewal. (shrink)

This article offers a close reading of Hannah Arendt's book On Revolution. It exposes the ambivalence of Arendt with regard to tragedy and mimesis. This ambivalence is not just her own; it is inherent in the treatment of tragedy and mimesis throughout the history of political thought. In spite of Arendt's argument that privileges the limited American Revolution against the boundless French one, in her rhetoric and in her storytelling Arendt presents a unitary but dialectical picture of revolution, where suffering (...) and foundation are inseparably intertwined. The founding public action of revolutionaries implies a crisis of mimetic passions (of fear and pity) which threatens to undo, but also set the stage for, revolution. This negative, passionate and passive side of revolution helps us to come to terms with the non-productive but emancipatory revolutions in the Eastern Europe of 1989-91. (shrink)

The state has been a dominant political form for at least the last two hundred years. This is a multi-authored volume exploring the transformation of state as it experiences historical and conceptual crisis and envisioning how it could be re-constituted.

This essay attempts to formulate an ethical program for today's left by showing that such a program should necessarily involve both the insistence on a subjectivity, in the sense of a revolutionary self-determination that would go beyond the liberal pre-established autonomy and an openness to the new and unrecognized that would go beyond all liberal tolerance. I further argue that the only way to understand the co-articulation of subjectivity and openness is to accentuate the event as the origin of open (...) subjectivity. Moreover, borrowing a motif from Kant,1 I will speak of the “orientation” in history that an event provides…. (shrink)

We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, (...) -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike. (shrink)