A consensus is building that our planet has entered the so-called age of the Anthropocene—a post-Holocene epoch defined by the significant impact of humans on geological, biotic and climatic planetary processes. On the one hand, there is good reason to exercise caution in relation to this concept of the “Age of Man.” At a time when immoderate anthropogenic impact poses a serious threat to ecological integrity and balance, calling an epoch after ourselves does not necessarily demonstrate the humility we may (...) need to espouse. Moreover, discourses of the Anthropocene risk overwriting important differences among human.. (shrink)

In the dominant “climate change” imaginary, this phenomenon is distant and abstracted from our experiences of weather and the environment in the privileged West. Moreover, climate change discourse is saturated mostly in either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both largely obfuscate our implication therein. This paper proposes a different climate change imaginary. We draw on feminist new materialist theories—in particular those of Stacy Alaimo, Claire Colebrook, and Karen Barad—to describe our relationship (...) to climate change as one of “weathering.” We propose the temporal frame of “thick time”—a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible. In doing so, we can rethink the temporal narratives of climate change discourse and develop a feminist ethos of responsivity toward climatic phenomena. This project reminds us that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially “in” it. As weather-bodies, we are thick with climatic intra-actions; we are makers of climate-time. Together we are weathering the world. (shrink)

Werner Herzog’s documentary film Grizzly Man about the life and death of Timothy Treadwell invites us to consider the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal and phenomenological accounts of lived embodiment. In this paper I begin with a general account of becoming-animal and suggest that this concept is helpfully elucidated by considering the ways in which some aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s practice can be understood as a rhizomatic phenomenology of our lived experience that in part extends the (...) work of Merleau-Ponty. What emerges between the two philosophies is the possibility of bodily "molecularity" as a mode of lived embodiment. I argue that this molecularity is what enables the potential interpermeation of bodies across their differences, such as occurs in the event of becoming-animal. Alphonso Lingis’s descriptions of our becoming-animal as lived experience serve here as an evocative source for clarifying this proposition further. I conclude by returning to Herzog’s film to consider the risks and consequences of becoming-animal--not only for the human who becomes, but also for the animal who, as Deleuze and Guattari note, is no less transformed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Speculative ReproductionBiotechnologies and Ecologies in Thick TimeAstrida NeimanisEveryone loves me, Frida and the Abortion that fetus So Much Larger Than Life. Everyone loves that one. irrigation channelsthese waters as thick as blood (There is another painting I did, I called it “Roots.”) You the golden beets the potato bugs We are eating our young. Signed,—Frida Kahlo, Posthuman Gardener1 [End Page 108]IntroductionBirth has never been a “natural” matter. In the (...) context of proliferating new reproductive biotechnologies, we might be tempted to reconstitute a past when ushering new lives into this world only ever happened “naturally.” Yet reproduction has always been more than a simple question of fertilization, gestation, and delivery, whereby bodies might enact some natural biological destiny.2 Every reproduction is what we might call, after Donna Haraway, a “naturalcultural” one: that is, an inextricable entanglement of “natural” forces, matters, and processes, with “cultural” systems, values, and institutions (Haraway 2004, 2, 212–18) that together constitute a birthing ecology. Every human reproduction is thus not only a birthing of a human body, but also an event within certain conditions of possibility—a reaffirmation of, challenge to, and/or intervening otherwise in the structures, institutions, cultures, and ecologies of human and more-than-human bodies and technologies. On this view, a failure to birth, a decision not to birth, or a direction of one’s reproductive body or matter toward other kinds of births (not necessarily of one’s “own” child) are also “reproductions” within birthing ecologies. This is not at all to say that the reproductions we facilitate are always deliberate political choices or purposeful acts of compliance/subversion, even if in some cases they might be. Rather, it is to underline that all births are a co-configuration of naturalcultural bodies in context. What is birthed is also the affirmation of certain kinds of births, certain kinds of life, and certain value systems according to which life and reproduction are understood. Within this frame, we might also understand birth as the creation or reproduction of certain social and cultural imaginaries within which our values are oriented. Concomitant with such naturalcultural reproductions, then, might also be a speculation about what other sorts of births and birthing ecologies are possible—ones that might engender values and relations in which the technologies and naturecultures of reproduction can be imagined anew.In this paper, I contrast two very different versions of a reproductive imaginary—both birthed through the matter of our reproductive tissues, and both worth our consideration in the present moment. The first is the birthing of a neoliberal, individualistic reproductive imaginary of commodification and amnesiac bioscientific progress. Using terminology unpacked in more detail below, we might call this an autologous imaginary, where reproduction is disentangled from any obligation to other bodies in a polity of mutual care and concern. This imaginary promotes an erasure of the thick past of bodies and labors that produce reproductive tissues, and is focused primarily on preservation of the self and direct kin. This is what we find in dominant contemporary biobanking trends that divert human reproductive matter (here, [End Page 109] embryos, amniotic fluid, and umbilical cord blood) in the service of speculative “biological venture capital[ism]” (Waldby and Mitchell 2006, 123).In contrast, I consider a different kind of contemporary birthing imaginary, wherein one invests one’s reproductive matter in the service of both human and more-than-human reproductive ecologies. Drawing on two different artworks, I suggest that these creative interventions offer alternative “speculative reproductions.” Like contemporary biobanking regimes, these artworks speculate on what new kinds of bodies the reinvestment of reproductive matter (in this case, amniotic fluid and menstrual blood) might engender. Unlike the neoliberal regimes, however, these artworks confirm rather than repudiate a feminist ethics of corporeal generosity, and in fact, extend this ethics even further, through an imaginary of what I call posthuman gardening. Here, the literal resowing and reseeding of one’s reproductive matter establishes an extended, more-than-human birthing ecology that includes not only human bodies, but ecological bodies of various kinds. In this productive troubling of our commonplace Western and humanist understandings of the spacetimes of birth, we... (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch out the way our bodies are engaged while commuting in order to elucidate several key aspects of the bodily experience of “in-between-ness.” I discover that within the rhythm and movement of the in-between, our bodies can open to a specific kind of conceptual creativity—an insight that I unfold in reference to the unanticipated innovation and transformation that accompanies other bodily experiences of in-between-ness more generally. This sketch, however, also demands that I reflect on phenomenological methodology, (...) and our ontological presuppositions about the “things” that we intend to “go back to.” I conclude by suggesting that while Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic ontology helps us explain the findings of my phenomenological sketch of commuting, Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology can help to flesh out (quite literally) Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that all the work happens in “the logic of the AND” ( A Thousand Plateaus 25). While the method I call on in this paper is decidedly phenomenological, the conclusions I reach invite me to explore further the promise of a more “rhizomatic phenomenological” practice. (shrink)

Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them - from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, this book develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it.

Responding to Rosi Braidotti's call for more ‘conceptual creativity’ in thinking through contemporary feminist subjectivity, this paper proposes the figuration of the body of water. It begins with a critical materialist enhancement of Adrienne Rich's concept of a politics of location, followed by a schematised description of the various ‘hydro-logics’ in which our bodies partake. The ways in which these logics already inform diverse modes of feminist scholarship are then explored. The objective of this paper is to locate, at the (...) confluence of these discourses and descriptions, an invigorated figuration of the feminist subject as body of water. This subject is posthumanist and material, both real and aspirational. Most importantly, she is responsively attuned to other watery bodies—both human and more-than-human—within global flows of political, social, cultural, economic and colonial planetary power. (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch out the way our bodies are engaged while commuting in order to elucidate several key aspects of the bodily experience of “in-between-ness.” I discover that within the rhythm and movement of the in-between, our bodies can open to a specific kind of conceptual creativity—an insight that I unfold in reference to the unanticipated innovation and transformation that accompanies other bodily experiences of in-between-ness more generally. This sketch, however, also demands that I reflect on phenomenological methodology, (...) and our ontological presuppositions about the “things” that we intend to “go back to.” I conclude by suggesting that while Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic ontology helps us explain the findings of my phenomenological sketch of commuting, Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology can help to flesh out Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that all the work happens in “the logic of the AND”. While the method I call on in this paper is decidedly phenomenological, the conclusions I reach invite me to explore further the promise of a more “rhizomatic phenomenological” practice. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider climate change as a systemic respiratory crisis, and explore how breath can function as a mode of witnessing climate catastrophe. We build on feminist environmental humanities methodologies of embodied attunement to advance a more-than-human witnessing of climate change. We suggest that a feminist “conspiratorial” witnessing of breath(lessness) can afford an embodied, situated, empathetic and systemic mode of witnessing. In this approach, the witness (e.g., “the human”) is part of what is witnessed (the climate crisis). As (...) such, breathing climate catastrophe can reveal the intimate, visceral and personal violences of global climate change, and develop empathetic approaches to climate injustice. Nevertheless, as breath’s social and multispecies differentiation reveals, no-one can witness the entirety of climate catastrophe with their own bodies. We thus advocate for collective, more-than-individual modes of knowing, such as science, art and critical analysis, to augment our own sensorial experiences of witness. (shrink)

Christiane Bailey and Chloë Taylor (Editorial Introduction) Sue Donaldson (Stirring the Pot - A short play in six scenes) Ralph Acampora (La diversification de la recherche en éthique animale et en études animales) Eva Giraud (Veganism as Affirmative Biopolitics: Moving Towards a Posthumanist Ethics?) Leonard Lawlor (The Flipside of Violence, or Beyond the Thought of Good Enough) Kelly Struthers Montford (The “Present Referent”: Nonhuman Animal Sacrifice and the Constitution of Dominant Albertan Identity) James Stanescu (Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, (...) Factory Farms, and the Advent of Deading Life) Ian Werkheiser (Domination and Consumption: An Examination of Veganism, Anarchism, and Ecofeminism) Cynthia Willett (Water and Wing Give Wonder: Trans-Species Cosmopolitanism) Corey Lee Wrenn (Nonhuman Animal Rights, Alternative Food Systems, and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex) Emily R. Douglas (Eat or Be Eaten: A Feminist Phenomenology of Women as Food) Gary Steiner’s Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) Chloë Taylor (“Postmodern” Critical Animal Theory: A Defense) Patrick Llored (La déconstruction derridienne peut-elle fonder une communauté politique et morale entre vivants humains et non humains?) Jan Dutkiewicz (“Postmodernism,” Politics, and Pigs) Gary Steiner (Response to Commentators). (shrink)

Christiane Bailey | : Distinguant deux sens de « communauté morale », cet article soutient que certains animaux appartiennent à la communauté morale dans les deux sens : ils sont des patients moraux dignes de considération morale directe et équivalente, mais également des agents moraux au sens où ils sont capables de reconnaître, d’assumer et d’adresser aux autres des exigences minimales de bonne conduite et de savoir-vivre. Au moyen de la notion d’« attitudes réactives » développée par Peter (...) F. Strawson, je soutiens que les animaux sociaux qui sont à la fois objets et sujets d’attitudes réactives forment des communautés morales au second sens, dans la mesure où ils se traitent mutuellement comme des individus ayant des obligations et tenus à des exigences de bonne volonté minimale dans leurs interactions interpersonnelles. Distinguant l’agentivité morale du raisonnement moral, je soutiens que la capacité de raisonner abstraitement sur les principes et les conséquences de nos actions nous imposent plus de responsabilités que n’en ont d’autres animaux, mais que cela ne fait pas nécessairement de nous des agents moraux plus compétents que d’autres animaux sociaux. Je termine en donnant un aperçu de quelques implications de ce changement de perspective en éthique animale. | : This article draws the distinction between two meanings of “moral community” and maintains that certain animals belong to moral communities in both senses of the term: these animals are moral patients worthy of direct and equivalent moral consideration, but also moral agents in the sense that they are capable of recognizing and respecting minimal requirements of good conduct and manners as well as expecting and demanding the same from other members of their community. By way of the notion of “reactive attitudes” developed by Peter F. Strawson, I maintain that social animals who are at once objects and subjects of reactive attitudes constitute moral communities in the second sense of the term, in that they treat each other as individuals who have obligations and who are bound by the demand for a minimum of good-will in their interpersonal interactions. Distinguishing between moral agency and moral reasoning, I maintain that the capacity to reason abstractly about the principles and consequences of our actions gives us more responsibilities than other animals have, but that this does not necessarily make us more competent moral agents than other social animals. I conclude with an overview of some of the implications that this change in perspective has for animal ethics. (shrink)

Drawing upon Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological constitution of the Other through Einfülhung, I argue that the hierarchical distinction between higher and lower animals – which has been dismissed by Heidegger for being anthropocentric – must not be conceived as an objective distinction between “primitive” animals and “more evolved” ones, but rather corresponds to a phenomenological distinction between familiar and unfamiliar animals.

Paper presented at the Heidegger Circle 2011. Although Aristotle’s influence on young Heidegger’s thought has been studied at length, such studies have almost exclusively focused on his interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics, physics and metaphysics. I will rather address Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s ontology of life. Focusing on recently published or recently translated courses of the mid 20’s (mainly SS 1924, WS 1925-26 and SS 1926), I hope to uncover an important aspect of young Heidegger’s thought left unconsidered: namely, that Dasein’s (...) existential structures – Befindlichkeit, Understanding and being-with-one-another through language – arose from his close reading of Aristotle’s ontology of life, of animal life. (shrink)

While phenomenologists claim to have overcome solipsism, most have not pushed beyond the boundaries of individual human intersubjectivity to that of individuals of other species. Yet Husserl recognizes the existence of an interspecific intersubjectivity, an intersubjectivity beyond the limits of the species. He even goes so far as to say that we sometimes understand a companion animal better than a foreign human. However, even if he admits that many animals are capable of a life of subjective consciousness and live in (...) a world of shared meaning, he does not consider them to be “persons” according to his strict conception that associates personhood with rationality, maturity, normality and historicity. Being a “person” in its most primordial sense – and its most decisive as the basis for political, legal and ethical conceptions – simply means being the subject of a surrounding world, of a common world and a biographical existence. Distinguishing two meanings of the concept of person allows us to recognize that animals share transcendentality; they are not simply alive but have a life that is both biographical and communal, even if they are not able to reflect on their own conscious life in order to consider their place in the chain of generations and to adopt what Husserl calls a “vocation”. The Husserlian phenomenology of anomalies allows us to recognize that animals truly come under the figure of the other, that they are alter ego subjects of a conscious life, and as such they participate fully, just as do children, the insane, and foreigners, in the co-constitution of the spiritual world. (shrink)

Book Panel on Zoopolis including articles by Clare Palmer, Dinesh Wadiwel and Laura Janara and a reply by Donaldson and Kymlicka.

The destruction of animality that takes place in Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics goes as far as to destroy the very idea of an animal life as distinct from plant life. “Life”, as Heidegger says in Being and Time, is “a specific mode of being”, that is to say, as the 1929-30 lecture course will show, that it is “the mode of being of animals and plants”. Conceived as a mere organism that does “nothing more than to live”, the animal (...) find itself deprived of world, living in a vegetative state, in a kind of stupor (Benommenheit). The method of the ontology of life – announced in Being and Time as a “privative interpretation” – will reveal itself as a biological reduction: the strategy is to find functional equivalences for all that, in animals, resemble in any way what we find in humans. The life of animals is not a life, but biological processes. The traditional faculties associated with animal life – movement, perception and irrational desire (i.e. impulsion) – will be held as properly human, letting the animals a form of life deprived of signification, of possibility, of world. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

Bridging feminist new materialism and feminist phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis’s volume, Bodies of Water, discusses water in terms of nurturing maternality based on a figural reservoir of what she terms “amniotics” and “planetary breastmilk” in order to posit this maternality as the material condition of the embodiment of life. In this article I show that this imagery is a construction consistently haunted by figures of anxiety and loss. I do this by first revisiting earlier interventions in deconstruction concerning materiality (...) and feminist theory as follows. First, pointing out a resonance between this figuration of wateriness and Kant’s notion of the dynamic sublime, I turn to Paul de Man’s reading of materiality in the Kantian sublime in order to suggest that Neimanis’s figuration of maternal water is an effect of an aesthetic ideology. Subsequently, I will revisit Diana Fuss’s reading of Irigaray – Neimanis’s main feminist resource – to show that the ontological status of water as maternal is constructed via an Irigarayan distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Finally, in order to show ways in which the maternal materiality of water is haunted by figures of anxiety and loss, I will consult Elissa Marder’s more recent work on the maternal function. (shrink)

Recent debates over the role of recognition by the community for one’s development and flourishing generally discuss community in a univocal sense: the way that recognition functions in particular communities is not fundamentally different from the way it functions in the larger community. They also tend to logically prioritize a fundamental human identity over particular religious, ethnic, or societal identities, which are understood to be secondary to, and derivative of, this basic identity. In his depiction of how communal recognition contributes (...) to individual selfhood, Søren Kierkegaard challenges these accounts by (1) differentiating between how communal recognition occurs in society in general and in one particular community, the Christian church and (2) questioning the idea that the self created in the former is more fundamental than that created in the latter. For Kierkegaard, one’s identities as both a Christian and a fully-developed self depend essentially on recognition by the Other: initially and fundamentally on recognition by God alone, and secondarily and derivatively on recognition by the human Other. (shrink)

If, following Masuzawa, Fitzgerald and others we assume that “the religious” is a category produced by Western colonial regimes in tandem with that of “the secular,” then consequently the post-secular would need to be post-religious, as well. Here I demonstrate how in one metropolitan case, Germany, the religious and secular divide is evoked to produce a particular exclusivist narrative of national identity. A substantial part of German civil society, media, and legal establishment mobilize an imagined culturally Christian vision of Germany (...) in order to exclude from public visibility and political participation German born Muslims of Turkish descent. The colonial twin categories of secular-religious still operate in the shaping of the German polity. Decolonizing it would thus require not only to enter a post-secular dialogue with religious presentations in the public sphere, as Habermas contends; rather a post-secular polity would require the post-religious. (shrink)

This accessibly written book offers an approach to cultural engagement that is attentive to the hunger for meaning, beauty, and justice and governed by the gospel virtues of faith, love, and hope.

In this volume, authors Alan Bailey and Dan O'Brien examine the full import of David Hume's arguments and the context of the society in which his work came to fruition. They analyze the nuanced nature of Hume's philosophical discourse and provide an informed look into his position on the possible content and rational justification of religious belief. The authors first detail the pressures and forms of repression that confronted any 18th century thinker wishing to challenge publicly the truth of (...) Christian theism. From there, they offer an overview of Hume's writings on religion, paying particular attention to the inter-relationships between the various works. They show that Hume's writings on religion are best seen as an artfully constructed web of irreligious argument that seeks to push forward a radical outlook, one that only emerges when the attention shifts from the individual sections of the web to its overall structure and context. Even though there is no explicit denial in any of Hume's published writings or private correspondence of the existence of God, the implications of his arguments often seem to point strongly towards atheism. David Hume was one of the leading British critics of Christianity and all forms of religion at a time when public utterances or published writings denying the truth of Christianity were liable to legal prosecution. His philosophical and historical writings offer a sustained and remarkably open critique of religion that is unmatched by any previous author writing in English. Yet, despite Hume's widespread reputation amongst his contemporaries for extreme irreligion, the subtle and measured manner in which he presents his position means that it remains far from clear how radical his views actually were. (shrink)

This essay examines asset development for the poor as an approach to reducing poverty. Because there has been very little discussion of this approach by Christian ethicists, my primary purpose is to introduce and defend the rationale for developing assets for the poor. I begin with a discussion of conservative and liberal approaches to poverty reduction, arguing that the favored policies of both are founded upon the belief that poverty is best understood as a state of consumption deprivation brought on (...) by deficient levels of income. I suggest that the focus on consumption and income, while obviously important in light of the material deprivations of the poor, is not in itself a sufficient response to the needs of the poor. This leads to a discussion of past and present public policies that have stimulated asset development. A characteristic feature of many of these policies is that they have provided both material and institutional support for asset development, but only for the nonpoor. If public policies have helped the nonpoor to save, why should we not develop policies that help the poor do the same? Some suggested approaches to developing assets for the poor are then reviewed. Finally, I briefly discuss points of convergence between Catholic social thought and asset-development approaches to poverty reduction. (shrink)

COVID-19 confronted many people with an abrupt shift from their usual working environment to telework. This study explores which job characteristics are perceived as most crucial in this exceptional situation and how they differ from people’s previous working conditions. Additionally, we focus on job crafting as a response to this situation and how it is related to employees’ well-being. We conducted an online survey with N = 599 participants, of which 321 reported that they were telework newcomers. First, we asked (...) participants to indicate the three most important advantages and disadvantages they see in telework. The subsequent questionnaire contained a comprehensive measure of working conditions before and during the pandemic, job crafting behaviors, and indicators of well-being. Based on the qualitative answers, we identified three major advantages and disadvantages. Quantitative results indicate perceived changes in all job characteristics for telework newcomers. Concerning working conditions and well-being, job crafting activities that aim to increase structural and social resources are important mediators. The findings underline the need to design appropriate telework conditions and encourage job crafting activities to foster occupational well-being. (shrink)

A review of Elspeth Probyn. 2016, 'Eating the Ocean'. Durham: Duke University Press and Astrida Neimanis. 2017, 'Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology'. London: Bloomsbury.

In the light of the modern idea of a sovereign and self-transparent subject, the paper evaluates the philosophical and ethical relevance of Bildung. As a first step, (the early) Nietzsche's and Adorno's criticism of Bildung is explicated, a criticism based upon the thinkers' critical stance towards the modern epistemological relation of subject and object. However, neither thinker abandons the concept of Bildung. The second part of the paper accordingly reconstructs Nietzsche's and Adorno's adherence to Bildung understood as a different relationship (...) of subject and object within Bildung. In the paper's concluding reflections there is an attempt to assess the systematic educational consequences, and to shed light on the ethical relevance, of a non-transparent subject of Bildung. (shrink)

While the distinction between civilians and combatants is fundamental to international law, it is contested and complicated in practice. How do North Atlantic Treaty Organization officers see civilians in Afghanistan? Focusing on 2009 air strike in Kunduz, this article argues that the professional vision of NATO officers relies not only on recent military technologies that allow for aerial surveillance, thermal imaging, and precise targeting but also on the assumptions, vocabularies, modes of attention, and hierarchies of knowledges that the officers bring (...) to the interpretation of aerial surveillance images. Professional vision is socially situated and frequently contested with communities of practice. In the case of the Kunduz air strike, the aerial vantage point and the military visual technologies cannot fully determine what would be seen. Instead, the officers’ assumptions about Afghanistan, threats, and the gender of the civilian inform the vocabulary they use for coding people and places as civilian or noncivilian. Civilians are not simply “found,” they are produced through specific forms of professional vision. (shrink)

The political significance of masses is more obvious than ever. The aim of this article is to develop a conceptualization capable of capturing the dangerous as well as promising aspects of masses. It argues that, intricately, the dangers and fruitful potentials of masses are born out of the same fundamental structural features. We may differentiate analytically between different kinds of masses, but all masses contain elements of ambiguity. The mass conceptualization developed builds on a critical, deconstructing interpretation of selected Bataille (...) texts centering on ontological features of individuality and collectivity. Especially, Bataille’s concepts of ‘myth’ and ‘sacrifice’ are accentuated and critically transformed. Contemporary examples of masses – right-wing anti-establishment movements, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter – are presented and reflected through the prism of sacrifice, with the aim of highlighting the multifaceted and complex nature of the dynamics of masses. (shrink)