Marta Petreu, Ionescu în Tara tatãlui Biblioteca Apostrof, Cluj-Napoca, 2001. + Marie-France Ionesco, Portretul scriitorului în secol. Eugène Ionesco 1909-1994 Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2003, trad. rom. Mona Þepeneag.

This article addresses the unique role performed by social foundations programs in colleges of education and in addressing broader issues facing education today, which fundamentally include the development of interpretive, normative, and critical perspectives in academia. All three perspectives serve to create a scholarly framework within which students and academicians interpret and normatively reflect upon existing educational, political, historical, religious, economic, and social institutions critically. In other words, although many departments in colleges of education tend to fulfill the functional, professional, (...) and institutional requirements essential in preparing future teachers to enter public and private schools, social foundations programs utilize interdisciplinary expertise, primarily from the social sciences and humanities, to explicate extrainstitutional critiques, interpretations, and normative analyses of existing social structures, including schools. Although social foundations programs perform a variety of academic functions, it is this unique reflexive and normatively critical capacity?what critical theorists refer to as ideology critique?that augments social foundations programs and informs present and future scholars in the field. (shrink)

In theories of interpretation, the artwork's “surface” is frequently cast as something to be looked past in our quest for meaning. As such, the “surface” has also understandably been the focus of several polemics against the excesses of interpretive criticism – in film scholarship and beyond. This article explores what role concepts of the “surface” and “surface meaning” might fruitfully play in the interpretation of fiction films by thinking about a particular kind of expression-by-implication available to the medium: irony. (...) An under-theorised phenomenon, filmic irony could seem to require interpretation in order to grasp meanings that reside precisely elsewhere than the “surface”. Yet, can we even distinguish between a “surface meaning” and an “implied” meaning in a non-linguistic medium like film? This article addresses such questions by exploring the possibility of separating the explicit and implicit, as well as interpretation and comprehension, in a medium whose very capacity for ironic expression h... (shrink)

Recent policy debates are commonly framed as questions of “sci-ence” versus “ideology”. This is seen in polemics around issues that can be informed by bio–medical or geo–physical sciences: the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. The paper explores the basis for claims of difference between science and ideology: truth versus delusion; representations of reality and the means for interpreting it; and their relation to conflicting interests. Each of these three characteristics of ideology is explored by relating them to the methods (...) of the sciences. Three questions are derived from that analysis: Does science hide premises or assumptions; or, conversely, does it proceed by unmasking hidden premises in rival scientific positions? Are the facts of science immediately interpretable, or are they embedded in a web of methodological and metaphorical operations? Are the operations of science insulated from human interests, conflicts, and ethical considerations for how one should live? These are then approached through a compressed case study of three phases of medical science: neo– Platonic herbal studies deriving from Paracelsus; the Enlightenment development of clinical medicine; and the development of immunology from the nineteenth to the twenty–first century. The concluding section draws on the case studies to answer the three questions. Each of the key elements of ideology is shown to also be involved in scientific reasoning. The development of medical science demonstrates that semiotic operations characteristic of ideology are also found in good scientific practice. In conclusion, it is proposed that science is better off for having learned from ideology. Critique is an epistemic virtue; images and metaphors enrich scientific thinking; and science will better serve humanity as its connections to the interests of all species, and to the Earth itself, are exposed. (shrink)

Since the modern era, the discourse of punishment has cycled through three sets of questions. The first, born of the Enlightenment itself, asked: On what ground does the sovereign have the right to punish? Nietzsche most forcefully, but others as well, argued that the question itself begged its own answer. The right to punish, they suggested, is what defines sovereignty, and as such, can never serve to limit sovereign power. With the birth of the social sciences, this skepticism gave rise (...) to a second set of questions: What then is the true function of punishment? What is it that we do when we punish? From Durkheim to the Frankfurt School to Michel Foucault, twentieth century moderns explored social organization, economic production, political legitimacy, and the construction of the self_turning punishment practices upside down, dissecting not only their repressive functions but more importantly their role in constructing society and the contemporary subject. A series of further critiques_of meta_narratives, of functionalism, of scientific objectivity_softened this second line of inquiry and helped shape a third set of questions: What does punishment tell us about ourselves and our culture? What is the cultural meaning of our punishment practices? These three sets of questions set the contours of our modern discourse on crime and punishment.What happens now_ now that we have seen what lies around the cultural bend and realize that the same critiques apply with equal force to any interpretation of social meaning that we could possibly read into our contemporary punishment practices? Should we continue to labor on this third and final set of questions, return to an earlier set, or, as all our predecessors did, craft a new line of inquiry? What question shall we_children of the twenty_first century_pose of our punishment practices and institutions?This essay suggests that the form of the question never really mattered. In all the modern texts, there always came this moment when the empirical facts ran out or the deductions of principle reached their limit_or both_and yet the reasoning continued. There was always this moment, ironically, when the moderns took a leap of faith. And it was always there, at that precise moment, that we learned the most: that we could read from the text and decipher a vision of just punishment that was never entirely rational, never purely empirical, and never fully determined by the theoretical premises of the author. In each and every case, the modern text let slip a leap of faith_an ethical choice about how to resolve a gap, an ambiguity, an indeterminacy in an argument of principle or fact.It is time to abandon the misguided project of modernity. Rather than continue to take these leaps of faith, it is time once and for all to recognize the critical limits of reason, and whenever we reach them, to rely instead on randomization. Where our facts run out, where our principles no longer guide us, we should leave the decision_making to the coin toss, the roll of the dice, the lottery draw_in sum, to chance. This essay begins to explore what that would mean in the field of crime and punishment. (shrink)

Oscar Kenshur’s “Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism” should go a long way toward convincing most readers that the cure for “ideological” criticism is worse than the disease. His attempt to uncouple ideology and epistemology in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction belongs to an increasingly popular subgenre of metacriticism, the “more-historical-than-thou” offensive against Marxists and new historicists for their alleged essentialist procedures.1 There is no question that Kenshur raises significant issues about the nature of (...) ideological analysis that should be debated. However, he has neither interrogated the basis of his own assumptions about seventeenth-century views of language theory and epistemology nor convincingly demonstrated, to my mind, that Ryan is somehow wrong in his reading of Hobbes. The weakness of Kenshur’s argument is that he seems intent on erecting the windmills at which he wants to tile—most damagingly for his argument a simplistic notion of ideology that he assumes both Hobbes and Ryan share. By accepting a deterministic notion of ideology, Kenshur offers a “corrective” to overzealous claims for the significance of ideological criticism that has the effect not of “sav[ing history] from its friends” but of returning it to the status of “background” or “context” that it had been for a previous generation of New Critics. The terms in which he casts his argument—epistemology and/or ideology—redefine “ideological criticism” in a polemical manner designed, it seems, to discourage anyone from wanting to practice it. His ultimate purpose is not simply to save “history” from the Ryans of the world but to inoculate his versions of literature and philosophy against the ideological virus. To respond fully to the various issues that Kenshur raises would require detailed analyses of seventeenth-century literary and political culture and of the institutionalization of twentieth-century criticism; simply to discuss the differences between Hobbes and Ryan on epistemology or ideology would require a full-length study of the various discourses in which and against which their works are situated. Given the limitations of a critical response, I shall confine my remarks to two suspect areas of Kenshur’s argument: his characterization of seventeenth-century notions of the relationships among language, epistemology, and ideology and his assumptions about the nature of claims currently made for ideological analysis. 1. See, for example, Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” PMLA 102 : 292-303. Robert Markley teaches in the English department of the University of Washington and is editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He is the author of Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve and coauthor, with Kenneth J. Koespel, of Newton and the Failure of Messianic Science: A Postmodern Inquiry into the Discourses of Natural Philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of Interpreting ReligionJohn M. Najemy*No aspect of Machiavelli’s thought elicits a wider range of interpretations than religion, and one may wonder why his utterances on this subject appear to move in so many different directions and cause his readers to see such different things. One reason is of course his famous challenge to conventional piety in the advice to princes (...) (in chapter 18 of The Prince) that, while it is important to appear to be “all compassion, faith, integrity, humanity, and religione, and there is nothing more necessary for a prince than to appear to have the last of these,” these “qualities” can actually be “damaging” if a prince insists on observing them at all times. For it is sometimes necessary to act “against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religione.” 1 Machiavelli probably never wrote more famous or infamous words than these, even though they express an obvious, and hardly original, truth about all politics. But the world of the later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reformations and religious absolutisms could not tolerate such honesty, and Machiavelli’s reputation was quickly tarred with accusations of devilish immorality by the very societies that thought it was godly to burn heretics. On the issue of religion Machiavelli became, and to some extent remains, a convenient scapegoat often blamed for the decline of religion in the modern world, all of which has no doubt intensified the polemical and ideological nature of the debates surrounding his views of religion in general and Christianity in particular. [End Page 659]The polar positions in the interpretation of Machiavelli’s ideas about religion are represented by Leo Strauss and Sebastian de Grazia. For Strauss, Machiavelli was a “teacher of evil,” a “blasphemer,” and a purveyor of lessons of a “diabolical” and “soulless character” whose purpose was to sabotage the heritage of thought and morality inherited from both Christianity and Greek philosophy. 2 De Grazia, by contrast, has recently given us a Machiavelli who “discourses about God always in the conventional reverent attitude,” who “never questions that there is good and evil,” and who, “by associating virtuous political action with grace and glory... argues that through this kind of active and political virtue men conform to God’s desire.” “Behind Niccolò’s insistence on political action,” says de Grazia, “stands God. He grants His grace when it is earned—in political coin.” 3 Part of the fascination of Machiavelli scholarship is the mystery of how this most outspoken and direct of political thinkers—a writer who pulled no punches and minced no words—could be the common referent of such wildly different readings. But it is equally curious to observe how uncannily these extreme positions mirror each other. Both give us true believers, one in the Word, the other in the subversion of the Word; and in both cases a believer who is always of a piece, true to himself, and possessed of an unshakeable commitment—whether positive or negative—toward the transcendent truth of Christianity. In short, for all the obvious differences, the similarities between Strauss’s “diabolical” Machiavelli and de Grazia’s reverent “friend of God” remind one of the old myth that devils are after all only fallen angels.The papers in this forum should certainly remove any doubt about the importance of religion in Machiavelli’s thought. They remind us of the prominence of religious language and examples in Machiavelli’s texts: his call for the “redemption” of Italy in the last chapter of The Prince; the esteem in which he holds the heads and founders of religions, whom he declares, in Discourses 1.10, to be the most praised of all famous men; the crucial appeal to the figure of Moses as the prototype of both founders of states and liberators of enslaved peoples; the central role that Machiavelli attributes to religion among the factors responsible for Rome’s power, unity, and political success; and his provocative critique of Christianity, which leads him, in a number of places, to blame the Christian faith for the relative weakness of both modern states and the modern ethic of citizenship. 4 The authors... (shrink)

Understanding the intersections of science and publics has led to research on how diverse publics interpret scientific information and form positions on science-related issues. Research demonstrates that attitudes toward science, political and religious orientation, and other social factors affect adult interactions with science, which has implications for how adults influence K-12 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. Based on a statewide survey of adults in Idaho (n = 407), a politically and religiously conservative western state, we demonstrate how attitudes (...) toward science, measured through a composite measure “orientation toward science,” and other social factors are correlated with support for STEM education. Results show that “orientation toward science,” along with political orientation and respondents’ perceptions of feeling informed about science, predicts behavior intentions to support STEM education. Our findings suggest that a nuanced and localized approach to fostering support for K-12 STEM education would resonate with populations regardless of political orientation, and they illuminate new ways of thinking about how political orientation more generally impacts thinking about science in the context of complicated “socio-scientific relations.” In exploring how people think about science in a politically and religiously conservative state, we provide insights on potential outcomes in other states, should conservative ideology spread. We argue that the publics’ relationship with science and, by extension, support for science education, is more fluid, as many of us suspect, than ideological polemics suggest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 1-13 [Access article in PDF] From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context Ihab Hassan I What Was Postmodernism? What was postmodernism, and what is it still? I believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. Like a ghost, it eludes definition. Certainly, I know less about postmodernism today than I did (...) thirty years ago, when I began to write about it. This may be because postmodernism has changed, I have changed, the world has changed.But this is only to confirm Nietzsche's insight, that if an idea has a history, it is already an interpretation, subject to future revision. What escapes interpretation and reinterpretation is a Platonic Idea or an abstract analytical concept, like a circle or a triangle. Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, however, like humanism or realism, will shift and slide continually with time, particularly in an age of ideological conflict and media hype.All this has not prevented postmodernism from haunting the discourse of architecture, the arts, the humanities, the social and sometimes even the physical sciences; haunting not only academic but also public speech in business, politics, the media, and entertainment industries; haunting the language of private life styles like postmodern cuisine--just add a dash of raspberry vinegar. Yet no consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means.The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call an essentially contested category. That is, in plainer language, if you put in a room the main discussants of the concept--say Leslie Fiedler, Charles Jencks, Jean-François Lyotard, Bernard Smith, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon and, just to [End Page 1] add to the confusion, myself--locked the room and threw away the key, no consensus would emerge between the discussants after a week. But a thin trickle of blood might appear beneath the sill.Let us not despair: though we may be unable to define or exorcise the ghost of postmodernism, we can approach it, surprising it from various angles, perhaps teasing it into a partial light. In the process, we may discover a family of words congenial to postmodernism. Here are some current uses of the term: 1. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain), Ashton Raggatt McDougall's Storey Hall in Melbourne (Australia), and Arata Isozaki's Tsukuba Center (Japan) are considered examples of postmodern architecture. They depart from the pure angular geometries of the Bauhaus, the minimal steel and glass boxes of Mies van der Rohe, mixing aesthetic and historical elements, flirting with fragments, fantasy, and even kitsch. 2. In a recent encyclical, titled "Fideset Ratio," Pope John Paul II actually used the word postmodernism to condemn extreme relativism in values and beliefs, acute irony and skepticism toward reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or divine. 3. In cultural studies, a highly politicized field, the term postmodernism is often used in opposition to postcolonialism, the former deemed historically feckless, being unpolitical or, worse, not politically correct. 4. In Pop culture, postmodernism--or PoMo as Yuppies call it insouciantly--refers to a wide range of phenomena, from Andy Warhol to Madonna, from the colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw advertising a pachinko parlor in Tokyo to the giant, cardboard figure of Michelangelo's David--pink dayglo glasses, canary shorts, a camera slung across bare, brawny shoulders--advertising KonTiki Travel in New Zealand. What do all these have in common? Well, fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, anti-ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp. So, we have begun to build a family of words applying to postmodernism; we have begun to create a context, if not a definition, for it. More impatient or ambitious readers can consult Hans Bertens' The Idea of the Postmodern, the best and fairest [End Page 2] introduction I know to the topic. But now I must make my second move or feint to approach postmodernism from a different perspective. II Postmodernism/Posmodernity. I make this move by... (shrink)

This essay is an investigation of the relationship between homosexual interpretations of Jesus Christ and artistic explorations of the meaning of Christ to the LGBTQ community. I begin with an analysis of the public backlash to Enrique Chagoya’s 2010 lithograph The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals which features a depiction of Christ in a homoerotic situation. My analysis focuses both on Chagoya’s place in the historical canon of artists that create religious art that challenges heteronormative interpretations of Jesus and also (...) the resulting destruction of Chagoya’s work. My analysis examines the cultural importance of homosexual interpretations of Christ in the on-going debates about homosexuality as well as the biblical justifications for such interpretations. More, I argue that the public backlash to art that challenges traditionally held beliefs about Christ creates a cultural force for further marginalizing the LGBTQ community. I argue that traditional power structures, especially in contemporary America, rely upon the aesthetic marginalization of those individuals deemed to be engaged in subversive lifestyles in order to maintain their dominance in cultural discourse. Ironically, I argue, the attempts to subdue such artwork generates the necessary conditions for public discourse that will ultimately undermine the traditional cultural beliefs that undergird the protests against artists like Chagoya. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo mostrar, a través de los textos confucianos y de sus intérpretes, cuál ha sido la posición de la mujer en la filosofía china clásica. Se analizará el papel que en las Analectas de Confucio, en los textos rituales, en el “Clásico de Poesía” y en Mencio juega la mujer, así como las interpretaciones que sobre estos pasajes, en ocasiones demasiado escuetos para posicionarse claramente sobre ellos, han realizado los comentaristas, desde la Antigüedad hasta finales (...) de la Época Imperial. Un examen atento mostrará que el confucianismo, a pesar de no preocuparse excesivamente de la cuestión, supo desafiar la “concience collective” y resaltar el papel de la mujer en la historia y en la sociedad. Finalmente, a través de una breve comparación con lo que la filosofía clásica occidental tiene que decir sobre la cuestión del género, se concluirá con unas observaciones sobre el papel del confucianismo en las sociedades modernas asiáticas y su relevancia para la formación de un discurso feminista autóctono. (shrink)

As the interpretation of Plutarch’s prooemium to the Parallel Lives of Sertorius and Eumenes shows, an author’s capacity of irony often lies in the eyes of the beholder: While most historians take for granted that this passage is meant to make fun of Plutarch’s contemporaries for drawing ridiculous conclusions from historical parallels like namesakes or similar external attributes, most translators fail to see its humorous undertone. It becomes clear, though, that it is possible to establish objective criteria for ironic speech (...) in Plutarch that can be found in the prooemium as well, if one takes a closer look at ironic strategies in his polemical or colloquial writings. One of these is the ironic use of allusive names for dialogue partners or even the invention of characters bearing telling historical names. With this special ironic technique in mind one might even reconsider the authenticity of (Ps.‐)Plutarch’s Parallela Minora commonly termed spurious because of its cunning invention of fictitious sources on similar principles as those of the ironic Plutarch. (shrink)

The article consists of the following thematic threads: a) an overview of three interpretations of the term “ideology” in subject literature; b) a reconstruction of Max Horkheimer's ideology conception, presented in the first half of the 1930s in writings published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung [Social Research Journal]; c) an attempt to answer the question to what degree this conception was paradigmatic for the early Frankfurt School (here, for comparative purposes, the author cites writings by Leo Löwenthal and Paul Landsberg, (...) which were also published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung). (shrink)

Review of Moshe Idel, Mircea Eliade. De la magie la mit (Mircea Eliade. From Magic to Myth), translation by Maria‑Magdalena Anghelescu (Iași: Polirom, 2014).

At the most basic class impulse in the bud, hope is something beyond the mere impulse class, it has absorbed the fantastic imagination, ideological presumption is capacity. Hope is the most remarkable people the impulse to want to work with the community, awareness of the concept of composition and properties constitute a part of our anthropological basis. But those who hope in the imagination of people. The history of mankind is not only a history of class struggle, including also a (...) hope, planning, pre-presumption, poetry, education, philosophical discourse, political programs and struggles of history. Looking for hope and have every kind of political significance. Presumption is - hope - a dream not only the scope of Marxism is the political reality of the scope of the revolution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scepticism in the Sixth Century? Damascius’ Doubts and Solutions Concerning First PrinciplesSara RappeThe Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles, an aporetic work of the sixth century Neoplatonist Damascius, is distinguished above all by its dialectical subtlety. Although the Doubts and Solutions belongs to the commentary tradition on Plato’s Parmenides, its structure and method make it in many ways unique among such exegetical works. The treatise positions itself, at least (...) in part, as a response to Proclus’ metaphysical system. Thus the first principles alluded to in its title refer to a metaphysical structure consisting of five central elements, the Ineffable, the One, and the Noetic Triad, which Damascius both adumbrates in opposition to Proclus1 as well as subjects to his own, internal critique. In this article, I will be asking whether or not Damascius’ critique of Neoplatonic metaphysics is informed or inspired by ancient Scepticism. No doubt this question catches the reader off guard: if the last exponent of ancient Scepticism is Sextus Empiricus, how could this sixth-century Neoplatonist Scholarch, the last officially appointed Platonic Successor, revert to a tradition that seemingly disappears for well over three centuries?2 In what [End Page 337] follows, I suggest that a plausible historical context for such a reversion can be found in contemporaneous Neoplatonic allusions to Sceptical readings of Plato. I then analyze the Sceptical techniques deployed by Damascius in his critique of Neoplatonist metaphysics, focusing especially on his attacks on Neoplatonic theories of intellect and causation. I conclude by speculating on some ideological factors that shaped Damascius’ Sceptical affiliations, suggesting that here it is possible to see an initial volley in what was to become a centuries-long skirmish between reason and revelation.1. the neoplatonists read the sceptics?R. T. Wallis has suggested that Plotinus borrows from the Sceptics’ arsenal in voicing his own objections against Stoic or Stoicizing epistemology and theology. The seemingly radical stance that Plotinus takes against Stoic notions of divine rationality, virtue, and providence is anticipated by the Sceptics’ refusal to grant that an omniscient mind could stand in need of rational deliberation or exercise virtues that imply the presence of corresponding vices, etc. Not only is it the case that Plotinus makes a detailed use of specific Sceptical arguments in his own polemics against the Stoics, he seems to have been the first philosopher to have grasped the implications of Sceptical challenges to Stoic theology, and to have circumvented Sceptical dilemmas by means of his highly original formulations of nondiscursive thinking and negative theology.That this Platonist might side with Sceptics against dogmatic philosophy would hardly be surprising to the modern student of Plato, but it is also true that historically, this has been an uneasy alliance. In fact, it is just this question, the alliance between Platonists and the Sceptics, that gets rehearsed in the sixth century. Olympiodorus devotes Chapter 10 of his Prolegomena to the Study of Platonic Philosophy to the refutation of an ephectic, or nondogmatic Plato3: “Plato also superseded the philosophy of the New Academy since that school gave precedence to akatalepsia (nonapprehension), while Plato demonstrated that there do exist cognitions grounded in genuine knowledge. Nevertheless, some assert, assimilating Plato to the ephectics and to the Academicians, that he too maintained the doctrine of akatalepsia.” These remarks are curious, for we have no indication that a Sceptical reading of Plato was current or even conceivable at this time. In fact, as the context makes clear, the Sceptics are represented in this passage as a prior philosophical school; chapters 7 through 10 present a concise history of philosophy that is remarkably free from any notions of philosophical currency attributable to any of the views that fall [End Page 338] under its purvue: “there has been no shortage of philosophical haireseis [schools] both before and after Plato, yet he surpassed all of them by his teaching, his thought, and in every possible way”4 (Prolegomena, 7.1).Olympiodorus performs the exegete’s role throughout his refutation of a non-dogmatic Plato, turning first to the grammatical item, Plato’s use of what Olympiodorus terms the “hestitating” adverbs, such as “probably,” “perhaps,” and “as I imagine.” Nevertheless Olympiodorus manages... (shrink)

One of the trends of modern mass perception of Dostoevsky, denial and controversy with a classic, is described in the article. The work also contains a brief history of this tradition of perception. From the point of view of its structure, any renunciation of Dostoevsky or any polemics with him is founded on the rejection of the ‘fantasticality‘ of his poetics or the identification of the writer with one of his heroes. The paradigm of this receptive tradition was defined (...) in the first lifetime responses about Dostoyevsky. In the twentieth century, the controversy with Dostoevsky turned into a purely ideological plane. New rethinking of the writer began only in the middle of the century. The article gives notoriety to the unknown until recently historical source - youth diary of Romain Nazirov, who later became the largest Russian literary scholar. The most recent element of negative perceptive tradition of Dostoevsky - is rejection of him as of boring cultural stamp. It is noteworthy that in recent decades the trend of mass and elite culture is largely identical in relation to Dostoevsky . From this perspective, the article analyzes the series of mass and elite interpretations of Dostoevsky in Contemporary Culture. (shrink)

Antisthenes was famous in antiquity for his studies of Homer's poems, his affiliation with Gorgias and the sophistic movement, his pure Attic writing style, and his inspiration of Diogenes of Sinope, who founded the Cynic philosophical movement. Antisthenes stands at two of the greatest turning points in ancient intellectual history: from pre-Socraticism to Socraticism, and from classical Athens to the Hellenistic period. Antisthenes' works form the path to a better understanding of the intellectual culture of Athens that shaped Plato and (...) laid the foundations for Hellenistic philosophy and literature. Antisthenes of Athens keeps in mind the goals and polemics framing each philosophical and textual discussion. The volume considers the ancient traditions about Antisthenes' rejection of Plato's “Theory of Forms,” his assertion of the paradox, “It is impossible to gainsay,” and his denial that definition of essence is possible, as well as the plausible intentions of Antisthenes. In cases where these questions are not easily settled, and where modern interpretation has varied, Susan H. Prince identifies the roots of the disagreements. The goal and meaning of Antisthenes' other famous ancient paradox, “I would rather go mad than have pleasure,” is illuminated by comparison with other evidence showing that pleasure does have a place in his ideology. Evidence for his relationship to Diogenes of Sinope, and for his receptions by the Cynics, Stoics, Skeptics, Christians, and Neo-Pagans is examined for both its historical value and its distorting tendencies. (shrink)

Give style to your character, a great and rare art.Nietzsche Gay Science What are we to make of Nietzsche? There has been an explosion of scholarship over the past twenty years, much of it revealing and insightful, a good deal of it controversial if not polemical. The controversy and polemics are for the most part straight from Nietzsche, of course, and the scholarly disputes over what he ‘really’ meant are rather innocuous and often academic compared with what Nietzsche meant (...) with his conscientiously inflammatory rhetoric and hyperbole. We have been treated to extended debates about Nietzsche's politics, his attacks on Christianity and morality, his famed notion of the übermensch and his less lampooned doctrine of the ‘eternal recurrence’. We have recently heard Nietzsche reinterpreted as an analytic philosopher, as a deconstructionist, as a feminist, even as a closet Christian and a liberal. Stephen Aschheim suggests in his recent book that Nietzsche provides us with something like a Rorschach test, inviting readers with amazingly different commitments and ideologies to ‘make their own Nietzsche’. But there is another approach to Nietzsche, something quite different from interpreting him in terms of his various ‘theses’ and positions, unpacking his ‘system’ or repeating unhelpfully that he displayed no such coherence and consistency, something more than finding out ‘who’ Nietzsche is as opposed to what we have made out of him. The simplest way of getting at this alternative approach might be to ask, what Nietzsche would make of us? I grant that this is a bit cryptic, and it invites a variety of unflattering answers. But I think it is very much in the spirit of what he are all about. It is an intimately personal approach to Nietzsche, an approach that will, no doubt, be somewhat different for each and every one of us. But that, too, of course, is just what Nietzsche would have demanded. (shrink)

Japan saw a sharp increase in the number of non-Japanese residents and migrants during the period of its high economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s. This impacted on how the justice system provides language assistance to non-Japanese speaking background parties in investigative interviews and courtroom proceedings. While the number of defendants who received interpreter assistance in Japanese criminal trials hit its peak in 2003, quality of legal interpreting is still a serious issue. In this article, we discuss how the (...) Japanese criminal justice system has approached issues in judicial interpreting in the last four decades by analysing how “court interpreting” and “court interpreters” have been represented in court decisions. By doing so, the paper aims to explore the judiciary’s ideologies about court interpreting and problematise these ideologies in looking towards improvement of language assistance in the Japanese legal system. (shrink)

In the article, composed of two parts with the titles Spektakl modernistyczny czy seans spirytystyczny? (A modernist spectacle or a spiritistic seance?) and Dlaczego Słowacki niszczy konterfekt księcia Józefa? (Why does Słowacki destroy the portrait of Prince Józef?), presents a contextual interpretation of Jan Lechoń’s poem Duch na seansie (A Ghost at a Seance). The author questions the opinion, which was widespread in literary criticism, that Lechoń together with other members of the Skamander group discredited Romantic poetry and national mythology (...) on the threshold of independence. The analysis of the poem made in the article leads to the conclusion that the poet fought stereotypes deeply rooted in public opinion, which in the eyes of the general public were also reinforced by Slowacki’s poetry. Thus, Słowacki appears at the seance to demystify a belief in the messianic, necrotic and patriotic tone of his poetry, in the bard-creator of the national Gospel, who is endowed with the power to discover absolute truths, and in the „master of the word” as well as the „creator of artistic beauty” as well as the only generally-accepted opinion. Optimistic signs of revival have dominated the symbols of suffering, the talkativeness has been replaced by silence, the word by the iconoclastic deed, the mystical heat by ironic distance. The symbols, images, references to literary texts and other signes of culture help to create a revalued portrait of Słowacki and mould a myth of gray heroism, which is a complete contrast to the myth of the „colourful uhlan”. The destruction of the portrait of Prince Józef Poniatowski and a reference to Piłsudski found in the last line of Karmazynowy poemat (The Crimson Poem) are the signs of the ideological declaration of the young poet, who referring to great Romantic tradition, discovers new and new meanings. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

Last year, Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson published a brief, bold book on a topic from which historians of political thought have tended to shy away, curiously enough—the relations between republicanism and liberalism as political ideologies in the age of the American and French Revolutions. Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns is relentlessly polemical, blaming this neglect on the historians and theorists responsible for resurrecting the early modern republican tradition over the last few decades. Pocock, Skinner, Wood, Petit, (...) and more are assailed for having indulged in what Kalyvas and Katznelson call “republican nostalgia”—that is, for having wrongly presented republicanism as an alternative to modern liberalism, rather than its parent and precursor. Instead, the authors of Liberal Beginnings set out to show the ways in which republicanism evolved into liberalism, in and through the works of a set of leading thinkers—Smith, Ferguson, Paine, Madison, Staël, and Constant. Their story has a happy ending. Whatever was valuable and actual in republicanism was smoothly incorporated into early liberalism, for which they turn the dictionary inside out in search of approbative adjectives—“situated,” “thick,” “sturdy,” “confident,” “open,” “immanent,” “heterogeneous,” and “syncretic.” How persuasive is their account? Not a few readers will detect a hint of protesting too much in this kind of cheerleading. “Thick,” “sturdy,” and “confident” are surely not the first terms to spring to mind in regard to this gallery of thinkers, Staël and Constant least of all. It also seems clear that Kalyvas's and Katznelson's coverage of French thought, confined almost entirely to that pair, is too cursory to sustain their case. At one end, Montesquieu and Rousseau, the titans who together defined republicanism for the revolutionary generation, make only the most fleeting of appearances in Liberal Beginnings . At the other, Tocqueville, acknowledged on all sides as the master thinker of French liberalism, is missing altogether. Nevertheless, the attempt at treating anglophone and French thinkers within a single interpretative framework is in itself a virtually unprecedented feat, for which Kalyvas and Katznelson should be congratulated. For who could doubt that they are on exactly the right path in chasing their prey onto French soil? (shrink)

This paper examines the mechanisms involved in the interpretation of utterances that are both metaphorical and ironical. For example, when uttering 'He's a real number-cruncher' about a total illiterate in maths, the speaker uses a metaphor with an ironic intent. I argue that in such cases both logically and psychologically, the metaphor is prior to irony. I hold that the phenomenon is then one of ironic metaphor, which puts a metaphorical meaning to ironic use, rather than an irony used metaphorically (...) (§1). This result is then used to argue for the claim that in metaphor, it is metaphorical, not literal, meaning that determines the utterance‘s truth conditions. Gricean accounts, which exclude metaphorical meaning from truth conditional content and rely entirely on conversational implicature, are seen to be unsatisfactory. Five contextualist arguments are briefly discussed to the conclusion that metaphorical content is part of truth-conditional content, rather than implicated (§2). (shrink)

The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in (...) late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism. Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s. In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on. In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed. More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, _New Myth, New World_ offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century. (shrink)

In modern times many militant atheist thinkers and activists have tried to promote the idea that religions, as well as religious ways of life, are one of the main, if not the main source of evil in the social arena. Some other non-believer scholars, while taking a respectful approach towards religions and religious people, maintaining that it is more rational for people and communities to adopt a non-religious outlook on life and become members of the community of non-believers. In this (...) paper, I do not take issue with the militant non-believers. The reason is that their approach to religion is so ideologically driven that it leaves not much room for proper rational discussions; it only invites some polemical replies. My aim here is, instead, to enter into a dialogue with those non-believer scholars who view religion in a measured and rational way. My intention is to critically assess the claims of this latter group of scholars and explain why, contrary to what they suggest, certain interpretations of religion, and in particular, the Islamic faith, can provide them with better alternatives than their atheist outlooks. The arguments of this paper are mostly in reply to the views expressed by Professor Shearmur in his paper on critical rationalism and religion. (shrink)

The account of the death of Patroklos occupies a strategic position in the narrative economy of the Iliad: before this event, Achilles has withdrawn from combat out of indignation against Agamemnon; afterwards, his anger turns against Hector, whom he holds responsible for his friend's death. Achilles returns to battle and kills Hector in an act of vengeance that, as we have known from the beginning of the poem, will lead to his own demise, which is not actually recounted in the (...) Iliad. This episode stands out because it is atypical both in the contents of the narration and in the means of expression used (what are generally termed “formulas”). I will give some examples of these oddities and then propose an interpretation. Here is the text, in the translation by Richmond Lattimore:So long as the sun was climbing still to the middle heaven, so long the thrown weapons of both took hold, and men dropped under them; but when the sun had gone to the time for unyoking of cattle, then beyond their very destiny the Achaians were stronger and dragged the hero Kebriones from under the weapons and the clamour of the Trojans, and stripped the armour from his shoulders. And Patroklos charged with evil intention in on the Trojans. Three times he charged in with the force of the running war god, screaming a terrible cry, and three times he cut down nine men; but as for the fourth time he swept in, like something greater than human, there, Patroklos, the end of your life was shown forth, since Phoibos came against you there in the strong encounter dangerously, nor did Patroklos see him as he moved through the battle, and shrouded in a deep mist came in against him and stood behind him, and struck his back and his broad shoulders with a flat stroke of the hand so that his eyes spun. Phoibos Apollo now struck away from his head the helmet four-horned and hollow-eyed, and under the feet of the horses it rolled clattering, and the plumes above it were defiled by blood and dust. Before this time it had not been permitted to defile in the dust this great helmet crested in horse-hair; rather it guarded the hear and the gracious brow a godlike man, Achilleus; but now Zeus gave it over to Hektor to wear on his head, Hektor whose own death was close to him. And in his hands was splintered all the huge, great, heavy, iron-shod, far-shadowing spear, and away from his shoulders dropped to the ground the shield with its shield sling and its tassels. The lord Apollo, son of Zeus, broke the corselet upon him. Disaster caught his wits, and his shining body went nerveless. He stood stupidly, and from close behind his back a Dardanian man hit him between the shoulders with a sharp javelin: Euphorbos, son of Pantho(s, who surpassed all men of his own age with the throwing spear, and in horsemanship and the speed of his feet. He had already brought down twenty men from their horses since first coming, with his chariot and his learning in warfare. He first hit you with a thrown spear, o rider Patroklos, nor broke you, but ran away again, snatching out the ash spear from your body, and lost himself in the crowd, not enduring to face Patroklos, naked as he was, in close combat. (shrink)

Die wissenschaftlichen Unzulänglichkeiten der Soziologie Paretos sind oft erörtert worden. Ebensooft hat man die politische Bedeutung dieser Soziologie hervorgehoben. In seinem Aufsatz versucht A., wissenschaftliche Unzulänglichkeit und politische Bedeutung wechselseitig zu erklären.Im ersten Teil werden die Hauptthesen der Paretoschen Soziologie zusammengefasst. Der zweite Teil bringt eine Kritik der Paretoschen Soziologie. Die Methode Paretos wird mit der Psychoanalyse und mit der marxistischen Interpretation der Ideologien kurz verglichen und dabei klargelegt, dass Pareto weder die historische Bedeutung noch den psychologischen Ursprung der „dérivations“ (...) zu zeigen vermag. Die Paretosche Theorie des sozialen Ganzen ist durch den Psychologismus und die Verkennung der Geschichte verfälscht. Mit formellen und abstrakten Begriffen wie „hétérogénéité sociale, élite, force, consentement“ vermag man weder die Struktur einer besonderen Gesellschaft noch die verschiedenen Funktionen der Autorität zu kennzeichnen.Im dritten Teil wird Pareto als typischer „polemischer Denker“ gedeutet. Ohne den Rationalismus zu überwinden, kommt er zur Negation aller rationalistischen Behauptungen. Er kennt keinen Fortschritt, die menschliche und die gesellschaftliche Natur bleiben ewig dieselben, der Klassenkampf beruht auf unabänderlichen Gegebenheiten der individuellen und gruppenmässigen Psychologie.Im vierten Teil wird kurz die Soziologie Paretos in ihren Beziehungen zum faschistischen Denken interpretiert. Zynismus, Notwendigkeit einer Religion für das Volk und einer Propaganda, die die irrationalen Kräfte der Massen ausnützt, Machiavellismus der Führer, Rechtfertigung der Elite durch den Erfolg, hoffnungsloser Pessimismus, der die Unmöglichkeit jeder menschlichen Gesellschaft beweist und den Privilegierten ein gutes Gewissen sichert, bilden die Hauptpunkte dieser antiliberalistischen und antimarxistischen Ideologie, die typisch ist für die Periode des Übergangs von der Demokratie zum autoritären Staat. Nach dem Sieg des letzteren wird der metaphysische Schleier nützlicher als der offene Zynismus.The scientific shortcomings of Pareto's sociology have often been discussed, and its political significance noted. In this article, A. attempts to analyze the interrelations between the two.The article begins with a statement of the main theses of Pareto's sociology. In part two, Pareto's method is compared briefly with psychoanalysis and with the Marxist interpretation of ideology, and this comparison reveals that Pareto could show neither the historical significance nor the psychological roots of „derivations“. His theory of the social whole is erroneous because of his psychologism and his misunderstanding of the historical process. Formal, abstract concepts like social heterogeneity, élite, force, and consent, do not permit adequate analysis of the structure of a specific society or of the various functions of authority.Part three studies Pareto as a typical „polemical thinker“. He arrives at a negation of all rationalistic contentions without, however, overcoming rationalism. He does not recognize progress ; the nature of man and society are eternally the same ; the class struggle, for him, rests on unalterable facts of individual and social psychology.The last section is devoted to a brief discussion of the relationship of Pareto’s sociology to Fascist thought. Cynicism, the necessity for religion and for propaganda which will utilize the irrational forces of the masses, Machiavellianism of the leader, justification of the elite through success, a pessimism which insists on the hopelessness of every form of society and salves the conscience of privileged groups — these are the main elements of this anti-liberal, anti-Marxist ideology, typical of the period of transition from democracy to the authoritarian state. After the victory of the latter, the metaphysical veil becomes more useful than open cynicism. (shrink)

There have been many criticisms of “nativism” in “Cartesian linguistics,” attacking positions that neither Chomsky nor any well-known generative grammarian has ever thought to defend. Shanker's polemic is no exception. It involves two spurious claims: Cartesian linguistics vitiates understanding language structure and use; nativism permits linguistic anthropology only to “validate” and “apply” generative principles. Briefly, Chomsky's outlines a language system, LS, of the human brain. LS reflexively discriminates and categorizes parts of the flux of human experience as “language,” and develops (...) complex abilities to infer and interpret this highly structured, and structurally peculiar, type of human production. There is nothing intrinsically different about LS – concerning innateness, evolution or universality – than the visual system, immune system, respiratory system, or any other complex biological system. Much polemic is driven by distaste for “innateness,” “genes,” and “evolution.” Historical and ideological reasons explain this aversion - some well-justified. None bear on universal grammar. Biologists believe all life consists of universal, highly structured codings of biological information. Still, biologists go on to explore diversity at many different levels. Similarly, linguistic anthropology can use generative grammar to better comprehend the diversity of languages and the cultural worlds they describe. This includes the very issues about proper names that Shanker highlights. (shrink)

For nearly half a century, Quentin Skinner has been the world's foremost interpreter of Thomas Hobbes. When the contextualist mode of intellectual history now known as the “Cambridge School” was first asserting itself in the 1960s, the life and writings of John Locke were the primary topic for pioneers such as Peter Laslett and John Dunn. At that time, Hobbes was still the plaything of philosophers and political scientists, virtually all of whom wrote in an ahistorical, textual-analytic manner. Hobbes had (...) not been the subject of serious contextual research for decades, since the foundational writings of Ferdinand Tönnies. For Skinner, he was thus an ideal subject, providing a space for original research on a major figure, and an occasion for some polemically charged methodological manifestos. Both of these purposes animated his 1965 article “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” and his 1966 article “The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought”. The latter of these remains to this day one of the most widely cited scholarly articles in the fifty-year run of Cambridge's Historical Journal. Among other results of these early efforts was the scholarly controversy during which Howard Warrender chided Skinner for having reduced the “classic texts in political philosophy” to mere “tracts for the times”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Discussions :REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE Every discipline worthy of a name deserves to be criticized periodically, asked to explain its objects and assess its march. The history of science is no exception. Indeed, criticism at this juncture should be all the more welcomed since the subjcct has now won its place in the curriculum of Anglo-Saxon educational institutions, particularly in the United States where Ph.D. (...) program offerings are multiplying almost faster than students. 1 The pioneering days of the 1930's and 1940's are past--if not totally forgotten--and men of the "second generation" like myself who received their training in the 1950's will gain much from having their methodological presuppositions questioned. Curiously enough, there has been little discussion of this kind in print for the last decade, with the exception of articles published in Poland and Russia, where the discipline is passing through its own pioneering crisis.2 In the West, the older debates stirred up largely by British Marxists are nowadays generally disregarded and have had surprisingly little productive effect upon the field. Within the last few years, the most effective methodological discussions have stemmed from Karl Popper and his generally brilliant lot of disciples. Dr. Joseph Ag~ssi, now Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois and a member of this group, recently wrote a deliberately provocative essay entitled "Towards an historiography of science." a Agassi begins it with the arresting statement that the study of the history of science is "in a lamentable state" and ends with the implicit suggestion that an examination of the historiography of science is one of the most revealing ways to discover the discipline's failings. For Agassi, it is clear that the root of the historian's problems has been a false set of philosophical premises about the nature of science, and of its history as well. He finds that the discipline has suffered from two diseases named "inductive philosophy " and "conventionalist philosophy," for which there is a major new panacea, Popper's "critical philosophy of science." This refreshingly straightforward argument provides the essay with a ready-made structure, at the same time as it infuses it throughout with a polemical tone. Because of this tone and because of the importance of Agassi's message, he deserves to be answered. On one subject, I cannot agree more with Agassi--the need for a critical examination of the hisComell, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin have a long-standing tradition of graduate study in the history of science. In the last few years, they have been joined by: the Case IImtitute of Technology; Indiana; Johns Hopkins; M.I.T.; Princeton ; the Universities of California (Berkeley and U.C.L.A.), Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Washington; and Yale. Profeasor Duane Roller of Oklahoma has prepared a report on the present state of teaching of the history of science in the United States. 2Abstracts of the discussions can be found in the Bulletin signalgtique : Philosophie. Sciences humaines of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. See especially Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki u (1962), special issue; and Organon (1964), no. 1. 8History and Theory. Studies in the philosophy o] history, Beiheft 2 (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963),117pp. [235] 236 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY toriography of science. On the other hand, his interpretation of the way history of science has and is being written seems more like a misinformed caricature than a sincere effort to understand the past in all its complexity. But let us first examine his discussion of "inductivism," "conventionalism," and "Popperianism." Inductivists or Baconians---he uses the terms interchangeably--write history the way they insist science itself has developed. Just as they assume scientific theories to have emerged from the collection of evidence, they expect that the piling up of historical facts strung along a time-axis adds up to history. As Agassi sagely observes, historians of science, like other induetivists, delude themselves into the belief that such an approach guards them from subjectivity and prejudice. To be sure, philosophers since Kant have known that such naive empiricism is in fact fundamentally misleading, for even the most ardent Baconian has... (shrink)

This doctoral thesis examines the phenomenon of Filipinization, specifically understood as the ideological construction of a “Filipino identity” or ‘Filipino subject-consciousness” within the highly determinate context provided by the Filipino ilustrado nationalists such as José Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar and their fellow propagandists inasmuch as it leads to the nineteenth (19th) century construction of the modern Philippine nation. Utilizing Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive thinking, this study undertakes a genealogical critique engaged on the concrete historical examination of what is meant by (...) the term “Filipino” across a select historical timeline (1864-1898) and the various notions of Filipino identity implied by the different contexts within which the term “Filipino” has been employed. More specifically, it undertakes a selective philosophical excavation of three seminal texts in the history of Filipinization, viz.: 1) the Manifiesto of Padre Jose Burgos; 2) the writings of the Filipino ilustrados in La Solidaridad; and 3) Jose Rizal’s Annotations on Dr. Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. -/- The philosophical claim of this work is the idea that Filipinization, taken as the differential construction of Filipino identity, is the effective translation of the colonial epistemic violence of Eurocentric racism and its consequent “horror of absolutism” into the homo-hegemony of Filipino nationalisms. By fetishizing the notion of a carefully constructed and essential “Filipino-identity,” Filipinization and the current nationalist discourses that utilize them, unwittingly, stands complicit with the same colonial violence and hegemony that they wish to combat. This happens precisely when the very structures of colonial oppression, on the ideological and practical levels, are transmogrified into nationalist ideals that assume legal and political power unto themselves in a self-referential and self-legitimating fashion. -/- Three processes will demonstrate the above thesis: first, by examining historical texts and setting itself against established nationalist historiographies, a genealogical analysis of the term “Filipino” reveals it as a pliable signifier whose semantics have evolved through time. From its originary referent in the Spanish criollo (creole), it has come to refer to people who would have been otherwise entirely alien to this class, viz., the mestizos (both Spanish and Chinese), the principalia (native elite), and eventually, the lowland Catholicized natives themselves. The historical hermeneutic of this identity-discourse in Padre José Burgos’ Manifiesto yields the fact that what gives the term “Filipino” its semantic consistency as a class concept is its essential constitution as a Hispanic and Catholic identity. -/- Second, from this semantic identification of the term “Filipino” as a Hispano-Catholic identity, we proceed to clarify the meaning of Filipinization in terms of the nationalist propaganda carried out by the Filipino ilustrados in the fortnightly periodical La Solidaridad. Here, the specific ilustrado construction of Filipino identity as a Spanish citizen (ciudadano Español) is revealed precisely as a political and legal construct that served as the basis for their own politics of social inclusion/exclusion. Filipinization can only be applied to those who have been hispanized and Christianized and never to those tribes who have resisted and remained outside Spanish colonial authority. Filipinization is thus revealed as a process of Hispanization and Christianization whereby the recipients of Spanish colonial hegemony are transformed into the religiously docile bodies of the Spanish Empire. -/- From this highly determinate context, the study proceeds to examine Rizal’s ontological grounding of collective Filipino-ness in the mythological construction of the pre-hispanic past as the source of a unique Filipino ancestrality. In his work on de Morga’s Sucesos, what is revealed is a mythologization that grounds a native, essential Filipino identity within a past unscathed by the Spanish colonial experience. Such mythologization, however, can only be possible through an anachronistic nationalist interpretation of historical data. Here, Filipinization is revealed as an exclusive prerogative, a nationalist program by which Rizal and the ilustrado class can combat the evils and excesses of the Spanish colonial enterprise. Ironically, though, this same struggle for emancipation also became an instrument by which the ilustrado class can retain their unjustified position of power over those who belonged to the colonial underside, thus, securing the possibility of perpetuating their own ilustrado bourgeois class interests. -/- Such discursive complicity is the essence of the myth of Filipinization: it presents nationalist identity discourse as an anti-colonial enterprise while being underlined by an economy of motives designed to cater primarily to the exclusive interests of the elite and ilustrado class. Thus, instead of securing the genuine, inclusive emancipation of all colonial subjects and a more humane existence for the poor and suffering majority, ilustrado nationalism has, ironically, merely reinforced those operative structures of colonial discrimination and oppression when the ilustrados: 1) grounded their racial theory upon the very same discourse of Eurocentric superiority that they are precisely supposed to question and 2) claimed a patrimony over Filipinas as their exclusive sovereign inheritance. These two factors illustrate how the manifest transfer of power from the Spanish Empire to the Philippine sovereign nation (and later as a nation-state) illustrate how Filipinization merely has transmogrified the face of Spanish colonialism into its new, subtle, and worse form in Filipino nationalism. -/- In this vein, the existence of the 19th century modern Philippine nation merely masked and deferred the crisis that was supposed to transfer power from the Spanish Empire to the multitude of the poor and suffering native indio majority. This crisis became all the more difficult to address be-cause of the duplicitous character of the discourse of Filipinization itself. It has not only effectively transferred power into the hands of the nationalist elite but also captured authentic emancipatory discourse within the identity-trap against which it can only hope to get out. This study concludes with the claim about the impossibility of ever escaping and overcoming the epistemic and practical violence necessarily contained within the historical discourse of colonialism. Or simply, we have no language or discourse that would enable us to overcome the complicity of Filipinization with the very (epistemic) violence against which it has set itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and MysticismJonathan M. ElukinSince the Reformation, European Christians have sought to understand the origins of Christianity by studying the world of Second Temple Judaism. These efforts created a fund of scholarly knowledge of ancient Judaism, but they labored under deep-seated pre judices about the nature of Judaism. When Jewish scholars in nineteenth-century Europe, primarily in Germany, came to study their own history as part (...) of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, they too looked to the ancient Jewish past as a crucia l element in understanding Jewish history.A central figure in the Wissenschaft movement was Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891). 1 In his massive history of the Jews, the dominant synthesis of Jewish history until well into the twentieth century, Graetz constructed a narrative of Jewish history that imbedded mysticism deep within the Jewish past, finding its origins in the first-cen tury sectarian Essenes. 2 Anchoring mysticism among the Essenes was crucial for Graetz’s larger narrative of the history of Judaism, which he saw as a continuing struggle between the corrosive effects of mysticism [End Page 135] and the rational rabbinic tradition. An unchanging mysticism was a mirror image of the unchanging monotheistic essence of normative Judaism that dominated Graetz’s understanding of Jewish history. Ironically, this narrative model of the history of mystic ism may have been influenced by Christian attacks on Judaism itself, a point which I can briefly take up at the conclusion of the article. First let us turn to the role that the Essenes played in Graetz’s historical ideology of mysticism.Graetz inherited a long intellectual tradition about the identity of first-century sectarians. Ever since the fourth-century historian Eusebius asserted that the therapeutae, a group mentioned by Philo, were actually Christian monks, the religious identity of these Alexandrian sectarians—distinct from the Essenes—had been the subject of constant debate. 3 Were they Jews or Christian ascetics? During the Middle Ages the tradition articulated by Eusebius gave the Church an additional claim for the antiquity of one of its central institutions. The religious identity of the Essenes, a seemingly similar sectar ian group mentioned by Josephus and other ancient historians, also became a point of dispute. 4 The secluded, monastic life of the Essenes made them equally likely candidates to be proto-Christians. The dispute over the alleged Christian nature of the therapeutae and the Essenes would survive, after generations of Catholic and Protestant sch olarly polemic, into nineteenth-century scholarship on late antique Judaism. 5It was in the work of Graetz that the Essenes and their putative relationship to Christianity received the fullest treatment by a Jewish historian. 6 Since the only documented therapeutae were in Alexandria, they could not be considered [End Page 136] likely sources—even if they were Jewish—for a nascent Palestinian Christianity. The Essenes offered more fertile ground to explore the relationship between Judaism and early Christianity.Graetz’s argument that Jesus and Christianity had their origins among the Essenes developed in the context of a fierce scholarly polemic between Christians and Jews in the nineteenth century as well as in the context of internal Jewish debates. Before exp loring this larger background, let us first see how Graetz made his case for the connection between Jesus and the Essenes. Making this connection was crucial for Graetz if Christianity was to be understood as the first systematic expression of a mysticism that had flourished among the Essenes.The Essenes were the first, according to Graetz, to articulate a firmly held belief in the coming of the Messiah, a belief which had grown in intensity during the turmoil and oppression of Roman rule. 7 Christianity, “or rather this Essenism intermingled with foreign elements,” had its origins in this messianic longing. 8 It was no surprise that John the Baptist was the first to proclaim the arrival of the Messiah, since he was so obviously an Essene. 9 Graetz makes his case for John’s Essene background on the apparent similarity of their habits, most notably the common theme of daily immersion and the fact that both John the Baptist (“oder richtiger der Essäer” [“or rather... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editorial Reflections on Philosophizing in Music EducationEstelle R. Jorgensen and Iris M. YobIn this article, we reflect on issues that go to the heart of teaching and scholarship in the philosophy of music education. After thirty years of editing Philosophy of Music Education Review, it is a good time to take stock of the philosophical work that has been and is being published and of challenges that remain.Over the (...) years, there has been a growing quality of philosophical articles published in the journal, due in significant part to the efforts of reviewers and the willingness of writers to work with their suggestions. Authors regularly express appreciation for the informed, critical, and constructive reviews their work receives. An exemplary body of philosophical scholarship in music education has been published over this time and PMER is regarded as a premier journal internationally devoted exclusively to the philosophy of music education. In thirty volumes of uninterrupted publication, we have sought to be responsive to important issues in music education. Our writers have engaged relevant subjects of interest to our readers, citations of articles remain strong, and articles are included in [End Page 109] university and college course reading lists. PMER is available in print and online via subscription; it has a wide digital exposure in search engines and leading indexes, and our readership continues to grow.Despite this progress, although the number of submissions has increased, their quality has sometimes been uneven. Our pedagogical commitment to foster philosophical writing and the philosophical inexperience of some writers has significantly impacted the work required to bring submissions to publication standard. Submissions sometimes evidence a lack of attention to formulating a tight argument, citing relevant sources, and polishing and editing the manuscript. The published style guidelines are too often ignored, creating a poor first impression with reviewers and editors. Writers are occasionally in a hurry to publish and less willing to entertain multiple revisions of their articles required to produce work of lasting value. The growing number of music education journals that publish philosophical work, while opening more fora, in some cases perversely result in ideologically driven, polemical, and philosophically uninformed articles in the name of philosophy. This is a good moment to reconsider the importance of philosophical fundamentals that should undergird our philosophizing in music education and what these mean for our academic responsibilities. To this end, we suggest several principles that need to be central to our philosophizing in music education. These principles also have broader implications for the expectations of scholarship in music education generally.WRITING PHILOSOPHYLike other subject areas in the academy, philosophy has its own intellectual structure, a canon of significant writings, its own interpretative methods, and its distinctive role and purpose. A philosophical paper in music education reads differently from papers in the history of music education, methods of teaching music, sociology of music education, empirical research in music education, multi-cultural, gender, and ethnic studies, music education curriculum building and policy making, and so on. And yet, the boundaries between these disciplines, which are artificial constructions when human knowledge is considered wholistically anyway, are somewhat porous with concepts and ideas and claims seeming to move easily from one discipline to another.To help distinguish between philosophy and other areas of study and research, it may be helpful to consider philosophy as a second-order activity. That is, first-order activity examines the raw data of research and experience and attempts to make sense of them. Using inference, pattern-seeking, deduction, hypotheses, statistical analysis, and so on, these activities result in claims, interpretations, and theories that give meaning to what we see, hear, and feel. [End Page 110]The second-order activity takes a step away from these first-order activities. It does not concern itself so much with raw data or with creating theories about them, but critically analyzes the claims and inferences that are made in regard to them. Where first-order disciplines analyze inputs from observation and experimentation, second-order disciplines analyze these analyses—that is, they function as meta-analyses. Philosophers do not need laboratories or fieldwork (which makes applications for grants to support philosophical research difficult to secure!). They need libraries... (shrink)

The article centres on Italian Neorealist cinema and its crucial role in negotiating the positioning of Italy in the transnational post-war scenario. Recent scholarship on the topic has come to challenge many deeply rooted assumptions about Neorealism, claiming that the disproportioned attention paid to this particular filmic trend has proven in the long term to be an hindrance to a full comprehension of the Italian visual culture of the period. I seek to contribute to such a renewed understanding of the (...) ideological and aesthetical issues at stake in the definition of Neorealism. It is indeed very important to underscore that the innovations brought about by Neorealist films (connected in particular to the diffusion of location shooting practices) must always be framed in the context of a lively relationship with popular genre cinema. The article thus focuses on the close reading of one specific filmic text, Sotto il sole di Roma (1948). Castellani’s film proposes an original blending of Neorealist techniques, melodramatic structures and comedic tones: an hybridization of genres representing in itself a most apt correlate to the moment of flux Italy and Italian cinema were experiencing at the time. The film’s use of Rome’s ‘Non-synchronous’ and ‘Heterotopic’ spaces can be read as an attempt to come to terms and overcome fascism’s agendas about history, community, and, last but not least, masculinity. While offering a very ironic interpretation of Italy’s deeply conflicted route to modernity, Castellani’s film also reflects on (personal as well as national) identity as the result of a performance: a performance in which loss and nostalgia play a major role. (shrink)

The article uses the 2010 political success of the Tea Party phenomenon as a jumping-off point to examine a number of ideological tropes and rhetorical devices in American politics. It argues that the political language of the Tea Party is not – as is often assumed – empty moralizing at the expense of intellectual depth, but rather draws on a wide variety of American political and intellectual themes and traditions. The article uses the campaign literature and polemic of key Tea (...) Party affiliates – Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul – as entry points to discuss the movement’s political strategies and interpretation of the role of government, individual liberty, American exceptionalism, constitutionalism, the free market, and the common people. In placing these discussions in their historical and intellectual context, the article argues for taking the Tea Party’s political message seriously, not least as a reflection of prevalent democratic concerns and frustrations with the American political system in its current incarnation. (shrink)

In this study, the distortion of claims on the text of the Qur’ān in Tafsīr al-Qummī which is one of the main sources of Shī‘a has been investigated. al- Qummī, the first scholar of the Shi’ite scholars, claims that in the account of the commentary are distorted in the text of the Qur’ān with various subtitles, such as the verses that are in the land of Allah's descendants and distorted verses. While interpreting the verses, he discloses this claim in detail (...) and sometimes gives the correct shapes of the revelations as the difference of interpretation, sometimes based on the narrations, and sometimes in the way of reading the verse. In this study, the verses alleged to be literally distorted in his commentary have been determined and this claim has been compared with other commentaries. The purpose of the article in this context is; in the case of al-Qummī exegesis, it is the examination of the verses allegedly distorted in the Qur’ān and the determination of the Shī‘ī commentators based on the doctrine of sects by changing the text of the Qur’ān. Summary: The Glorious the Qur’ān by almight Allah, it is a divine book that has been revealed to Muhammad (pbuh) through Gabriel. It has been preserved from all kinds of changing, transmutation and distortion, since the day the Qur’ān was revealed. “ إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا الذِّكْرَ وَإِنَّا لَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ ” “We have, without doubt, sent down the message; and we will assuredly guard it (from corruption)”. This verse is the greatest proof that the Holy Qur’ān is under protection, and it has not been distorted or will not. Distortion (falsification) is the change of the sacred texts by adding or subtracting the original text, arbitrarily changing the meaning, or misinterpreting the actual text. This term is often used to describe Jews’ and Christians’ deliberately changing or misinterpreting their own sacred texts. However, this term is also used by the a few scholars of the Shī‘as Imamiyya sect for the Qur’ān. There are two schools who claims the distortion of the Qur’ān within the Imamiyya Shī‘ah. The first is the Akhbāris who claim that the Qur’ān has been distorted; and the second is the Usūlites who oppose this claim. Those who have Akhbārī thoughts do not only interpret the verses according to their sectarian teachings but go further and claim that these teachings are included in the text of the Qur’ān. As a matter of fact, one of those who have this idea is Qummī. The full name of Qummī, the first scholar of the Shi’ite scholars, is Abu’l-Hasan ‘Alī b. İbrāhīm b. Hāshim. It is mentioned that al-Qummī, who had no information about the date of his birth in the sources, died in 329 Hijri. He has written books in almost all of science such as Tafsīr, Hadith, Fiqh and History. Among the books of Qummi, only the book he wrote in the field of commentary has reached the present day. Shī‘a accepts this commentary as the main source. This work, which is classified under the category of tafsīr bil riwayah(narration commentary), is regarded as tafsīr bildirayah(acumen commentator) because he gives weight to his own opinions. Qummī, by trying to make the Qur’ān as book thats only support ʿAlī and his descendants, reflecting a complete ideology in the form of representation of political tafsīr in Shī‘a. It is seen in the issues mentioned in the preface of his tafsīr that he used the method that supports this ideology. As a matter of fact, that Qummī in the preface attempt to explain the doctrines of the sect such as the imāmate, prophecy and the seized of Ahl al-bayt rigt of caliphate in the context of the verses that are different from that which Allah has revealed, distorted verses and taqdim and ta’khir verses in the Qur’ān text. Briefly, Qummī in the preface to of his tafsīr gives examples of some verses that are literally distorted, and explains these distortions in detail when interpreting the verses in question. Qummī gives in the “distorted verses” section that there are deficiencies in some of the verses and claims that the verse is revealed in this way by adding words that are not actually found in the verse. According to Qummī, one of the words extracted from the text of the Qur’ān is “‘Alī” that version of this words in Arabic is “ علي ”. These words are usually in the verses as “ فى علي ” means that “about ‘Alī”, “ فى ولاية علي ” “guardian of ‘Alī”, “ فى حق علي ” “about ‘Alī’s right”. According to Qummī, another expression derived from the Qur’ānic text is “ آل محمد ” means that “family of Muhammad”. He sometimes bases his claim on the narrations that the verses revealed in that way and sometimes verse recited in that way among different recitations. Qummī says that some of the verses have been revealed as such by by adding various phrases to verses besides “ فى علي ” means that “about ‘Alī” and “ آل محمد ” “family of Muhammad”. Some of these words that added to verses are mentioned as the different style of recitation in other sources. In the other words this differentiate is related with how you are reciting. Qummī, another classification which he refers to regarding the allegation of distorting, is that some verses are different from those revealed. He gives examples of this issue in various forms. He sometimes claims that when someone reads a verse, he interrupts the recitation by saying that “the verse has been revealed in this way” base on the narratives; sometimes saying that the verse is revealed differently by indicating the verse is not appropriate in terms of meaning and sometimes without making any explanation claims that how the verse revealed. Qummī’s another distortion claim is that taqdim and ta’khir among the words constitute the verse. Qummī says that the verse is different from the one that was actually revealed, after he stated that it was taqdim and ta’khir among the words mentioned in the verses. Qummī proves the allegations of distortion on the text of the Qur’ān in various ways. One of the ways he follows in this context is that giving the expressions like “ هكذا نزلت ”/ “the verse was revealed in this way”, and “ نزل جبرائيل بهذه الآية هكذا ” “Gabriel sent down the verse in this way” by changing the the different kind of revealing of those verses. The second way Qummī follows is that mentioning the verse different from the fact that it is by changing the its originality. The third way he follows is that mentioning added words as the different kind of the recitation. However, Qummī did not use this method that much. Indeed, while Shī‘ī tafsīrs mention this kind of expressions as a different kind of recitation, Qummī mentions them as a different kind of revealing in his claim. Most of the verses alleged to have been distorted in the Qummī’s tafsīr are relate to the teachings of the Shī‘a sect. In this context, Qummī uses various expressions while explaining his claim that some verses in the Qur’ān has been distorted. By adding ‘Alī phrase, claims that “ فمحى اسمه من هذا الموضع ”/ “His name has deleted from this place”, and by adding “ آل محمد ”/ “Muhammad’s family”, claims that “ فأسقطوا آل محمد من الكتاب ”/ “Muhammad’s family has been reduced from the book”. Sometimes, making some changes on words such as changing the structure of the term “ أمة ”/ “ummah” as “ أئمة ” /“Imāmiyya”. Under the influence of the ideology of Shī‘a, Qummī asserts that Shī‘ah teachings such as prophethood, and Imāmiyya are not just the Qur’ānic interpretations but rather are the Qur’ānic teachings by adding words to the text of the Qur’ān and making some changes in the construction of the Qur’ān. (shrink)

Vladimir Solovyov’s aesthetic theory has been the subject of much research. However, aesthetic views of the philosopher’s contemporaries are analyzed less frequently. The purpose of this article is to consider the views of Yuri Govorukha-Otrok on the aesthetic ideas of Solovyov in relation to the issues of national identity. Despite the discrepancy in the interpretation of such concepts as “culture,” “national idea,” or “truth” the very fact of the polemics between the philosopher and the literary critic proves the continuity (...) of the religious and the philosophical dimensions of literary criticism. This study analyzes Govorukha-Otrok’s critical papers of Solovyov’s work, allowing for the possibility to compare integral ideological and philosophical systems in order to understand the influence of Govorukha-Otrok’s views on the whole body of Solovyov’s ideas. (shrink)

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument has been (...) attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Towards a Realist Philosophy of History by Adam TimminsAviezer TuckerTIMMINS, Adam. Towards a Realist Philosophy of History. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. 192 pp. Cloth, $95.00The debate about scientific realism, whether science represents reality or just discovers measurements and correlations that are followed by theoretical stories about them, is at the center of the philosophy of science. One potent and frequently discussed antirealist argument has been Larry Laudan’s (...) “pessimistic induction”: Historically, all scientific theories, especially in physics, have been proven false. Hence, all contemporary scientific theories will be proven false and science cannot represent reality. This pessimistic induction relies on knowledge of the history of science, on historiographic realism. Luckily for the pessimistic induction, the history of historiography, the scientific representation of the human past, supports an optimistic induction: Since the revolutions associated with Ranke in historiography, Lyle in geological history, and Darwin in biological history, the historical sciences have made progress but have not [End Page 368] overhauled the founders’ representations of the past. We know more about the human past than Ranke did and much more about the biological past than Darwin did, but the modern historical sciences have not overturned their theories and conclusions. Though there are many new methodologies, historians still go to the archives to compare primary sources, and biologists still study fossils and assume natural selection.Though scientific antirealism assumes historiographic realism, it has received scant philosophic attention. Often it is perceived or presented as a naive “empiricist” concept of historiography that imagines historians “observe” history and then describe it in historiography. Radical antirealist theories of historiography that reduce it to fiction, myth, or manipulative ideology use this image of realism as naive empiricism to dialectically support its equally naive antirealist antithesis. Both ignore the evidential, mostly testimonial, justifications of historiography.Adam Timmins’s project is to articulate and justify a sophisticated historiographic realism that fits historiographic practices and premises. He argues that historiography is “successful in providing information and understanding about the historical past that is constrained by and reflects what actually happened in the past itself.”Timmins’s historiographic realism springs out of the philosophy of language rather than epistemology or philosophy of science. This distinguishes it from Murray Murphey’s historiographic realism, which argued that historiographic ontology is theoretical. Famously, Murphey compared George Washington to the electron as two well-corroborated but unobservable theoretical entities. Timmins retorts that Washington is a proper name and not a theoretical concept, and it is impossible to conduct experiments with Washingtons. Timmins inquires how the language historians use may be interpreted as referring to past events and how historiography can represent history. He does not devote much attention to how historians justify their statements about history to a degree that may warrant a realistic interpretation of historiography. Rather, Timmins assumes so. He proceeds through polemical dialogues with philosophers of historiography who took antirealist stances like Leon Goldstein, Frank Ankersmit, and Jouni Kuukkanen.Timmins’s realism is founded on the belief in a universally accepted core of historiographic facts. He does not inquire about the theoretical foundations of historiographic inferences that allow the emergence of such a consensus. Rather than consider historiographic epistemology, the critical methods of historiography, Timmins considers linguistic communities and entrenched uses of language. He confronts the problem of reference to the past in the absence of its perception by asserting that historiographic representations are of “mental files” that have names (for example, “the Renaissance,” “the Second World War”) and evolving core facts about those historical events (for example, Petrarch and Da Vinci in the Renaissance, the main battles in the war). Though the exact contents of these files may differ between historians, they still refer to the same events and have the same labels. Timmins suggests that experts gradually introduce fluid norms of reference on the basis of broadly accepted facts [End Page 369] whose references caused information chains that led to them. He suggests that complex or colligated concepts are in the mind but refer through mediation to some directly referenced events. For example, the First World War is a concept that through the mediation of facts like its main battles refers to real... (shrink)

Intellectual experiences of Russian philosophers of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries devoted to Russia demonstrate the intensive work of national self – knowledge. The concentration of thinkers on a certain range of topics, such as freedom and revolution, the state and society, culture and politics, religion and ideology, indicates a high density and polemical intensity of discussion. The thematic focus of Russian thought on national and cultural issues creates an end-to-end narrative with an open structure, where (...) texts are dialogically intertwined with each other. These statements often indicate a value and ideological conflict between various actors in the social history of Russia. This historiosophical narrative can be interpreted as a meta-text of Russian social and religious-philosophical thought, which in many senses is the practice of self-description of the national intelligentsia. It testifies to her spiritual and ideological quest, the struggle for a social ideal – about the moral choice of thinking Russian people, which encourages criticism of the historical experience of Russia. The main problem of this pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary discourse is the question of the moral and political responsibility of the educated class for the historical choice of Russia and its fate. The most important from a historical and philosophical point of view texts are the works of Russian Silver Age thinkers. Their arguments about Russia include both a reaction to the events of the three Russian revolutions and the Great War, which traumatized the consciousness of the intelligentsia, and a painful post-traumatic reception of their own intellectual tradition and the moral deformation of ideals that took place in it. Those ideals based on the idea of freedom and philosophical honesty in achieving the truth. (shrink)

The author reveals Fyodor Dostoevsky's works main features, his importance for Russian and world philosophy. The researcher analyzes the concept of "Russian Idea" introduced by Dostoyevsky, which became a study subject in Russian philosophy's subsequent history. The polemics that arose regarding the characteristics of Dostoevsky's soilness ideology and his interpretation of the Russian Idea in his Pushkin Speech and subsequent comments in A Writer's Diary are unveiled. The author concludes that Dostoevsky overcomes the limitations of soilness and comes to (...) universalism. The universal for him does not have a rootless cosmopolitan character but is born from the national's heyday. Diversity adorns the truth, and national diversity enamels humankind. People's real unity is in that all-human value that is found in the highest examples of each national culture. The truth is not in rootless cosmopolitanism or nationalism - it is in the "golden mean," which, in our opinion, the writer-philosopher sought to express. Dostoevsky wanted to rise above the dispute, to recognize the points of view of the Slavophiles and Westernizers as one-sided, to get out of any particularity to universality. (shrink)

The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in (...) late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism. Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s. In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on. In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed. More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, _New Myth, New World_ offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Social Cartesianism: François Poulain de la Barre and the Origins of the EnlightenmentSiep StuurmanMore than sixty years ago Paul Hazard demonstrated that the major ideas usually associated with the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment were voiced as early as the 1680s. 1 Hazard situated Cartesianism squarely at the origins of his story: Descartes himself may have wanted to remain a moderate in political and religious matters, but his followers behaved like (...) the proverbial apprentis sorciers, stopping at nothing and criticizing everything under the sky. 2 Reviewing Hazard’s argument after half a century, Margaret Jacob warns against an interpretation of Cartesianism that sees it solely as an oppositional movement. In the French situation, Cartesianism also “provided arguments for absolutism as well as for the domination over society by those... groups capable of mastering the new science.” 3 Cartesianism thus appears as a Janus-faced phenomenon that contained the germs of both an emergent “rational absolutism” and an iconoclastic critique of established authority.The chief interest of the first generation of Cartesian philosophers who published their work in the 1660s and 1670s was with natural science, and when drawn into the ideological minefield of theology, they usually bent over backwards to deny any and all materialist implications of their philosophy. Generally, they were inclined to keep aloof from social and political matters. There were, however, exceptions. The most conspicuous of these was François Poulain de la Barre who is hardly ever mentioned today outside the historiography [End Page 617] of early-modern feminism. 4 In the 1670s Poulain published three egalitarian-feminist treatises which must be considered the first examples of a self-conscious Cartesian social philosophy. The three books went to the press in an impressive staccato 5 : De l’Egalité des deux Sexes. Discours Physique et Moral, où l’on voit l’importance de se défaire des Préjugez (Paris, 1673); De l’Education des Dames pour la Conduite de l’Esprit dans les Sciences et dans les Moeurs. Entretiens (Paris, 1674); and De l’Excellence des Hommes contre l’Egalité des Sexes (Paris, 1675). 6In these texts, produced in a few years of frenzied intellectual activity, Poulain presents the case for the equality of the sexes in all fields of social life, from intellectual pursuits to military skills. Of the three the first is a systematic treatise, the second a dialogue, and the third a polemical tract in which Poulain first attempts to show that the Christian tradition is on his side, then “refutes” himself, and finally demolishes his own refutation, thus returning to his original argument. These writings are organized around his feminist program, but even a cursory reading of his books makes clear that his philosophical ambitions went beyond the issue of gender as such. Poulain himself states that he is going to attack male supremacy because it is the most deeply ingrained prejudice of all: if that can be subverted, all other prejudices will in due course follow suit. 7Poulain’s egalitarian philosophy was actually the first sustained attempt to apply Cartesian reasoning to the analysis of society, authority, and power. Previous treatments of Poulain’s thought have chiefly centered on his feminism, but the other aspects of his philosophy have received far less attention. Furthermore, Poulain has generally been portrayed as a lone radical, and the intellectual origins of his thought have so far escaped systematic investigation. 8 [End Page 618]Poulain’s writings are best seen as an attempt to construct an overall egalitarian view of society, which I shall call social Cartesianism. His critique of masculine rule widens out into an attack on unjustified power in other domains, such as race and rank. Poulain mounts an epistemological attack on traditional authority in all fields of human activity and even formulates a first, tentative conception of social change, taking issue with the alleged fixity of the concept of “nature” in the theory of modern natural law. Moreover, his thought almost literally prefigures themes and theses habitually associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In the historiography of Cartesianism and the early Enlightenment, however, we find him scarcely mentioned, still less given serious attention. 9In the historiography of... (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of a (...) wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Don Quijote and the Law of LiteratureCarl Good (bio)The part is one of these beings, the whole minus this part the other. But the whole minus a part is not the whole and as long as this relationship persists, there is no whole, only two unequal parts.—Rousseau, Social Contract, cited by Paul de Man in Allegories of ReadingBut it is not just that, because it is also a performative.... (...) There is first a performative, the act of positing..., which then moves to a system of tropes; a kind of anamorphosis of tropes takes place, in which all the tropological systems are engendered, as a result of this original act of positing.... It is circulation which is out of hand,... the sheer circulation or play of the signifier, and which is, as you know, the root of error, madness, stupidity and all other evil.—Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony”Amid a confusion of narrative inversions, misleading appearances, and unresolvable disputes, at least two things are consistent in Don Quijote de la Mancha: first, the knight’s singular fidelity to what I will refer to as a law of literature, which persists like a phantasm of continuity throughout the larger narrative; and, second, the many interruptions of this narrative by the stories, or episodes, recounted by the characters who cross don Quijote’s path (including the knight himself), in the form of speeches, testimonies, plays, jokes, poems, and so on. In at least one strict sense, these other stories have nothing to do with that path other than their interruptions of it and by it. Such a claim has its own strategic value and does not entirely contradict the reasonings of a long history of critics of the Quijote who have tended to argue from a variety of different standpoints for some kind of ideological cohesion that would bind the smaller episodes to the larger story that they interpolate. But at a certain ground zero of interpretation—albeit a paradoxical ground that prohibits a scholarly shelter to be built on it—no argument would be sufficient to establish such a coherence among the work’s separate narrative parts, since such an argument would live in the brief, oneiric intensity of the critic’s testimony and that testimony’s potential effects rather than in the composition of the work itself somewhere beyond its apprehension by reading. Nonetheless, out of the dismembered ensemble of the Quijote what does perhaps effect its own strange kind of life is the very play of ironic interruptions and frictions between the dismembered parts, the profusion of which seems to impose itself as the work’s own aggressive insistence on itself as something which makes sense possible by constantly provoking and unsettling sense. That is where we could begin to speak of don Quijote himself, not only as the phantasmatic agent of this unsettling but also as the mad promise of justice that could be said to motivate it.The play of interruptions in don Quijote’s own story begins to outline the shifting contours and living contradictions of this novel as a “text” in the sense in which Derrida [End Page 44] and others have used the term: that which “names or relates in its way... [a] conflict without encounter between law and singularity” [“Before the Law” 187]. Although the story of this “encounter” has been often recounted, it bears another citation here, at least because it seems to be forgotten more often than it is told. Even when it is told, the story is often muted in homage to the name of Derrida by writers who tacitly assume that Derrida’s is the only possible version of this “conflict without encounter.” That version would be better described as merely one particular ethical shaping or forcing—a powerful one—of a story that has been told, and remains untold, in uncountable ways. Nonetheless, such a democratic assessment of Derrida does not quite justify a dismissal of his version as merely one among others, since, for one thing, it would be unable to account for the astonishing hold that different versions of Derridean “deconstruction” continue to have on the imagination of North American... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Parables of Narrative ImaginingDavid Herman (bio)Mark Turner. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.The literary mind? The literary mind? The literary mind? Any which way you parse it, the title of Mark Turner’s provocative, elegantly written study seems to beg important questions, assume things that do not by any means go without saying. First parse: is there in fact a literary (part of the) mind? That is, is there (...) some nondiscrete but semi-autonomous module of cognitive capacities required for using and understanding literary discourse—a module that takes information (as its input) from other modules, operates on that information in some way, then feeds the transformed information (as its output: “literature”) into yet other modules, which in turn take that information as their input? 1 Second parse: assume that there is some module involved in the production and interpretation of literary discourse. Then of what nature, exactly, are the operations performed within that module, and how do they operate on the input in a way that makes the output specifically literary? How precisely is literature born from this process or set of processes? Doesn’t this kind of account suffer from all the disadvantages (inexplicitness, for example) that it inherits from its parent model, the black-box explanation? Third parse: should we even be talking about “minds” at all in connection with literature and the study of literature? Hasn’t “The Intentional Fallacy” and everything that has happened since in the fields of critical and cultural theory—from Marxism and poststructuralism to New Historicism and cultural studies—taught us to center critico-theoretical discourse anywhere but in “the mind”? Hasn’t all this research exposed the mind (of the author, reader, subject, or postsubject, as the case may be) as a construct with more or less noxious political and cultural properties? Are not the discourses of and about the mind so many strategies of interpellation—vehicles by which ideology can work to implant the illusions of inviolable inwardness, unchanging essence, and predetermined identity within a subject that takes such imagined realities to be its real conditions of existence? 2Turner does not directly address any of these questions—at least in the way that I have framed them. That may be grounds for criticism: if you are using a title that can be construed as polemical, then the onus is on you to explain just how the title positions your work in a wider context of argumentation. But at the same time, Turner’s analysis reformulates the underlying problems to which some of my questions point, thus raising [End Page 20] other, equally important issues. Coming to terms with these other issues may change the way we ask questions about things like literature and the mind. Specifically, as part of a larger “cognitive revolution” now unfolding in social-scientific and humanistic disciplines ranging from linguistics to literary and narrative theory, Turner’s book provides ample reasons for not thinking the idea of mind tantamount to an ideology of mind. 3 After all, reducing mind to an ideology of inwardness leaves unexplained any number of basic facts about perception, cognition, and language processing. There is, for example, our ability to use “image schemata” such as motion along a path and bounded interior to make sense of events like milk being poured into a cup, on the one hand, and contained spaces like the ones inside bottles, heads, and houses, on the other hand [Turner 16]. Relying on such schemata, I don’t regularly try to pour wine into a cutting board or to measure, in miles per hour, the speed of an asparagus stalk as it sits on the kitchen counter.There is also—to invoke a slightly different cognitive-scientific vocabulary—our ability to make predictions about emergent situations and sequences of events on the basis of prior, stereotypical situations and sequences stored in the memory as knowledge representations sometimes called frames and scripts [see Schank and Abelson]. For example, the script associated with making a purchase guides me in my interaction with the person at a cash register, such that I can make seemingly effortless predictions about what this person wants me to do... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Colonial Figures and Postcolonial ReadingSuvir Kaul (bio)Jenny Sharpe. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.Sara Suleri. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Biologists tell us that racialism is a myth and there is no such thing as a master race. But we in India have known racialism in all its forms ever since the commencement (...) of British rule. The whole ideology of this rule was that of the herrenvolk and the master race, and the structure of government was based upon it; indeed the idea of a master race is inherent in imperialism. There was no subterfuge about it; it was proclaimed in unambiguous language by those in authority. More powerful than words was the practice that accompanied them....—Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946)Sara Suleri begins The Rhetoric of English India with a critique of “some of the governing assumptions” of the field of colonial cultural studies, which she sees as subject to a debilitating “concept-function”: “While the representation of otherness has long been acknowledged as one of the must [sic] culturally vexing idioms to read, contemporary interpretations of alterity are increasingly victims of their own apprehension of such vexation. Even as the other is privileged in all its pluralities, in all its alternative histories, its concept-function remains too embedded in a theoretical duality of margin to center ultimately to allow the cultural decentering that such critical attention surely desires” [1]. Suleri enumerates some of the problems attendant upon “alteritist” methods of reading: “While alteritism begins as a critical and theoretical revision of a Eurocentric or Orientalist study of the literatures of colonialism, its indiscriminate reliance on the centrality of otherness tends to replicate what in the context of imperialist discourse was the familiar category of the exotic.” In its single-minded devotion to the analysis of difference, alteritism runs the risk of “representing ‘difference’ with no attention to the cultural nuances that differentiation implies. Instead, alteritism reads to reify questions of cultural misapprehension until ‘otherness’ becomes a conceptual blockage that signifies a repetitive monumentalization of the academy’s continuing fear of its own cultural ignorance” [12].In her account of academic processes, Suleri is surely right in claiming that, “in contravention of the astounding specificity of each colonial encounter... contemporary critical theory names the other in order that it need not be further known” [13], thus providing theoretical models and vocabularies whose easy portability and schematic applicability become the reasons for their institutional success. Now that a loose affiliation of texts, revisionary reading practices, and literary histories are being institutionalized (particularly in departments of English) under the disciplinary rubric of colonial and postcolonial discourse studies, such a questioning of the protean versatility [End Page 74] and analytical usefulness of notions of “otherness” or alterity is timely. 1 In much academic writing, the critique of colonial discourses ends where perhaps it should begin, by positing the many forms of alterity that are invoked in the writing of the imperial, nationalist, or even subaltern subject. Particularly in the work of literary theorists, this dynamic of self and other proves entirely compelling when charted in and through textual representation, and the metropolitan archive, both literally and figuratively open in our moment of decolonization, provides ample opportunity to think about the reiterated motifs of “civilization” and “barbarism,” modernity and its antecedents, trade and empire, warfare and conquest.Yet what is to make such intellectual work “postcolonial” in any significant sense? Today, “postcolonial studies” in the Anglo-US academy often suggests simply the opening up of a new archive or a bringing together, in different ways, of various interpretative or reading techniques developed by poststructuralist theorists. There is little evidence that such intellectual work derives any of its critical functions and polemical urgencies from the present-day cultural and intellectual life of the “postcolonial” nation or nations whose historical legacy is under study. Metropolitan concerns and agendas dictate the nature and process of inquiry, rather than a more appropriate sense of the pressing issues that have priority in the national debates of once-colonized countries. What is required is a different... (shrink)