In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Work of Alterity: Bataille and LacanJean Dragon (bio)The topic of alterity may appear at first to be beyond the scope of Bataille’s work, but it is from such questioning that his practice of writing takes its full contours and questions the renewal of literary textuality.Strangely, Bataille fights against writing, an attitude that shows a will to disappear in order to reach sovereignty. Writing, in such a context, (...) supports not only certain useful figures for his particularly heterogeneous works but also the presence of alterity. Feminine imagos, set as the literary equivalent of the eradication of meaning and words, act as levers from which a character produces itself or rather disarticulates and vanishes.Bataille’s fight against writing shows strong similarities to some Lacanian notions: the subject, pleasure (“jouissance”), and, of course, woman. Before trying to map out this perilous comparison—there is no possible perfect transition between the two—we must first extract the significant elements that make it possible. To this end, we propose some reflections on Bataille’s concepts of Oedipus and castration. In so doing, we will be in a better situation to link Lacan and Bataille’s works but also to understand where Lacan has been inspired by Bataille and how Lacan distinguishes himself in his interpretation of the imaginary, the symbolic, the Law, and feminine imagos—especially in the way Lacan, contrary to Bataille, “eradicates” alterity.These questions are necessary steps in opening up a reflection inspired by the work of Bataille and in our desire to actualize purposes yet also extend unresolved polemic effects which this paper can only partially address. To present the necessity of such polemical reflections fits Bataille’s thought as well, which refuses to conclude and takes its meaning from throwing away all possible speech.Feminine imagos are an essential leitmotif in Bataille’s narratives and, more importantly, a cohesion factor for his thought that transcends all domains of writing to give a foundation to the works. 1 With themes such as transgression, subversion, and the [End Page 31] renewal of the Law, we reach an aporia not only of Bataille’s text but also, as Susan Rubin-Suleiman puts it, of literary modernity:What does appear to me certain is that there will be no genuine renewal, either in a theory of the avant-garde or in its practices, as long as every drama, whether textual or sexual, continues to be envisaged—as in Bataille’s pornography and in Harold Bloom’s theory of poetry—in terms of a confrontation between an all-powerful father and a traumatized son, a confrontation staged across and over the body of the mother.[86–87] 2Indeed, if we look at the autofictional purposes and the literary production of Bataille, we must underline an “aporia” in the subversive nature of his texts. This challenge to Bataille generally focuses on his literary works without considering his theoretical works beyond some “canonical” titles. Nevertheless, the lesser-known texts may offer another reading of Bataille’s eroticism and defuse criticism strictly centered on the supposedly pornographic and phallocentric content of novels like L’histoire de l’oeil and Madame Edwarda.Before branding the works of Bataille as “sexist,” we must consider that he was one of the first male authors of his generation to denounce the “castration” dominating society and individuals. Mario Perniola, discussing a text of Georges Bataille, 3 emphasizes his condemnation of imperialism behind the use of many terms: “the imperialist image of the eagle, even when it presents itself with the attributes of revolution, unsuccessfully hides its Promethean and Icarian pretensions.” 4 This interpretation finds an echo in another text of Bataille, “L’oeil pinéal,” where Bataille directly links the castration to the myth of Prometheus: “the legend of Prometheus is linked to the castration complex,” 5 says Bataille. Perniola’s words point directly to the patriarchal order upon which this imperialism lies, disguising itself as revolution; they show Bataille’s profound disagreement with such a social and individual foundation.It is also difficult to affirm the predominance of a phallocentric stance in Bataille. The oedipal figures, for example, are much too paradoxical in their modes... (shrink)

'Ici sont les dragons.' C'est l'inscription que, jadis, on portait sur les cartes médiévales pour désigner les terres inconnues. Or, s'aventurer en terra incognita, c'est ce qu'assument, aujourd'hui, certaines tentatives - ou tentations - en appui sur la science contemporaine : Prouver l'existence de Dieu, en prolongeant des découvertes en Cosmologie. Envisager une quasi-immortalité du corps humain, grâce aux progrès de la miniaturisation, de la robotique et de l'intelligence artificielle. Montrer, en référence à une Physique anti-mécaniciste, qu'en tant qu'êtres de (...) conscience, nous sommes libres et immortels. La critique des deux premières tentatives devra éclairer la troisième, là où s'actualise la vocation chamanique de l'être humain, son aspiration à tenir l'interface entre le visible et l'invisible, l'ordre terrestre et l'ordre céleste, quête d'un pont entre le Monde humain et l'Univers physique que notre science charge d'énigmes à mesure qu'elle le dévoile."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

As symbols of adaptability and transformation, together with qualities of vigilance and intelligence, we argue the relevance of dragons for spatial planning in China. We develop a metaphorical concept – the green dragon – for grasping the condition of contemporary Chinese societies and for facilitating the development of theories and practices of spatial planning which are able to face the challenges of rapid change. We ask Chinese scholars and spatial planners to liberate Deleuzian potential for strategic spatial planning in (...) a ‘becoming-between, coming-together’ of concepts which can effectively make a difference in the world. Having outlined what we regard as key transversals or diagonals between our reading of Gilles Deleuze and aspects of Chinese philosophy, we then offer the metaphor of strategic spatial planning as Chinese literati landscape painting. This is a form of painting which rejects the idea of the world being supremely organised from a particular point of view, preferring to paint immanence and transformation. Chinese literati landscape paintings, like philosophy and strategic spatial planning, ‘look only at the movements’. We conclude that connections between what concepts of Chinese philosophy and those of Gilles Deleuze can do, suggest that in China, a conception of strategic spatial planning as metaphorical green dragon may offer academics and planning practitioners a transverse way to relate the legacies of past philosophies and current thinking. (shrink)

The purposes of writing -- The itinerary of a thought -- Vietnam : imperialism and genocide -- Czechoslovakia : the socialism that came in from the cold -- France : masses, spontaneity, party -- Kierkegaard : the singular universal -- Mallarmé : the poetry of suicide -- Tintoretto : St. George and the dragon -- The man with the tape-recorder -- Psychoanalytic dialogue -- Reply to Sartre--Pontalis -- Reply to Sartre--Pingaud -- A plea for intellectuals -- A friend of (...) the people. (shrink)

« Neque enim numquam inter se leones aut inter se dracones, qualia homines, bella gesserunt. » « Ni les lions, ni les dragons n’ont jamais déchaîné entre eux des guerres semblables à celles des hommes. »Sans doute est-ce la publication en 1992 du cours maintenant classique donné par Heidegger en 1929-1930, Les concepts fondamentaux de la métaphysique :...

« Neque enim numquam inter se leones aut inter se dracones, qualia homines, bella gesserunt. » « Ni les lions, ni les dragons n’ont jamais déchaîné entre eux des guerres semblables à celles des hommes. »Sans doute est-ce la publication en 1992 du cours maintenant classique donné par Heidegger en 1929-1930, Les concepts fondamentaux de la métaphysique :..

The idea of role‐playing makes some people nervous – even some people who play role‐playing games (RPGs). So the idea of immersion is central to understanding how Dungeons Dragons and other aspects of participatory culture work. Phenomenology is a kind of “philosophy of mind” associated with the works of twentieth‐century philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean‐Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, among others. The domain of phenomenology encompasses the entire range of experiences in the world, paying attention to what Husserl (...) called “intentionality,” or how our consciousness is directed toward particular objects in the world. The fact that this is presented as an atypical approach to play, or at least one that requires some effort, invites us to ask about typical modes of play if visualization of in‐game events is not that mode. This chapter concluded by scratch the surface of a complete phenomenological description of role‐playing. (shrink)

The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is presented in two volumes, together forming the most comprehensive anthology of Rousseau's political writings in English. Volume II contains the later writings such as The Social Contract and a selection of Rousseau's letters on important aspects of his thought. The Social Contract has become Rousseau's most famous single work, but on publication was condemned by both the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities in France and Geneva. Rousseau fled and it is during this period (...) that he wrote some of his autobiographical works as well as political essays such as On the Government of Poland. This volume, like its predecessor, contains a comprehensive introduction, chronology and guide to further reading, and will enable students to obtain a full understanding of the writings of one of the world's greatest thinkers. (shrink)

The Transcendence of the Ego may be regarded as a turning-point in the philosophical development of Jean-Paul Sartre. Prior to the writing of this essay, published in France in 1937, Sartre had been intimately acquainted with the phenomenological movement which originated in Germany with Edmund Husserl. It is a fundamental tenet of Husserl, the notion of a transcendent ego, which is here attacked by Sartre. This disagreement with Husserl has great importance for Sartre and facilitated the transition from phenomenology (...) to the doctrine of Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

A post-photographic cinema. The myth of "the myth of total cinema" -- The matrix: "a prison for your mind" -- The new realness -- Quid est veritas: the reality ofunspeakable suffering -- Social network -- Postscript: total cinema redux -- A chronicle of theBush years. 2001: after September 11 -- 2002: the war on terror begins -- 2003: invading Iraq-- 2004: Bush's victory -- 2005: looking for the Muslim world -- 2006: September 11, theanniversary -- 2007: what was Iraq and (...) where? -- 2008: the election -- Notes toward a syllabus.In praise of love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001) -- Avalon (Mamoru Oshii, 2001) -- Avant-garde goesdigital: Corpus callosum, Cotton Candy, and Razzle Dazzle -- Russian ark (AlexanderSokurov,2002) -- Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002) -- Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang,2002) -- Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003) -- The world (Jia Zhangke, 2004) -- Battle in heaven(Carlos Reygadas, 2005) -- The death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) -- Day night daynight (Julia Loktev, 2006) -- Southland tales (Richard Kelly, 2006) -- Inland empire (DavidLynch, 2006) -- Between darkness and light (after William Blake) (Douglas Gordon, 1997/2006)-- Lol (Joe Swanberg, 2006) -- Flight of the red balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007) -- Hunger(Steve McQueen, 2008) -- Opening ceremonies, Beijing Olympics (August 8, 2008) -- Carlos(Olivier Assayas, 2010) -- The strange case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010) -- Onceupon a time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011). (shrink)

Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, is in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves. They all are generated by the matrix. Simulations never existed as a book before it was "translated" into English. Actually it came from two different bookCovers written at different times by Jean Baudrillard. The first part of Simulations, and most provocative because it made a fiction (...) of theory, was "The Procession of Simulacra." It had first been published in Simulacre et Simulations. The second part, written much earlier and in a more academic mode, came from L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort. It was a half-earnest, half-parodical attempt to "historicize" his own conceit by providing it with some kind of genealogy of the three orders of appearance: the Counterfeit attached to the classical period; Production for the industrial era; and Simulation, controlled by the code. It was Baudrillard's version of Foucault's Order of Things and his ironical commentary of the history of truth. The book opens on a quote from Ecclesiastes asserting flatly that "the simulacrum is true." It was certainly true in Baudrillard's book, but otherwise apocryphal.One of the most influential essays of the 20th century, Simulations was put together in 1983 in order to be published as the first little black book of Semiotext's new Foreign Agents Series. Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, was in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves. They all are generated by the matrix.In effect Baudrillard's essay was upholding the only reality there was in a world that keeps hiding the fact that it has none. Simulacrum is its own pure simulacrum and the simulacrum is true. In his celebrated analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard demonstrates that its childish imaginary is neither true nor false, it is there to make us believe that the rest of America is real, when in fact America is a Disneyland. It is of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation. Few people at the time realized that Baudrillard's simulacrum itself wasn't a thing, but a "deterrence machine," just like Disneyland, meant to reveal the fact that the real is no longer real and illusion no longer possible. But the more impossible the illusion of reality becomes, the more impossible it is to separate true from false and the real from its artificial resurrection, the more panic-stricken the production of the real is. (shrink)

A major event in the history of twentieth-century thought, Notebooks for a Ethics is Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to develop an ethics consistent with the profound individualism of his existential philosophy. In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness , Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented (...) here for the first time in English, the Notebooks reveal Sartre at his most productive, crafting a masterpiece of philosophical reflection that can easily stand alongside his other great works. Sartre grapples anew here with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. Exploring fundamental modes of relating to the Other--among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt--he articulates the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. This work thus forms an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason . The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two additional essays, one on "the good and subjectivity," the other on the oppression of blacks in the United States. With publication of David Pellauer's lucid translation, English-speaking readers will be able to appreciate this important contribution to moral philosophy and the history of ethics. Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot , and The Freud Scenario , both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is presented in two volumes, together forming the most comprehensive anthology of Rousseau's political writings in English. This second volume contains the earlier writings such as the First and Second Discourses, the publication of which signalled the power and challenge of Rousseau's thinking. Rousseau's influence was wide reaching and has continued to grow since his death: major landmarks in world history, such as the American and French Revolutions, were profoundly affected by Rousseau's writing, as (...) were cultural and intellectual movements such as Romanticism and Idealism. This volume, like its successor, contains a comprehensive introduction, chronology and guide to further reading and will enable students to obtain a full understanding of the writings of one of the world's greatest thinkers. (shrink)

A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory Jean-Pierre Marquis. to say that objects are dispensable in geometry. What is claimed is that the specific nature of the objects used is irrelevant. To use the terminology already ...

This collection of writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, the renowned French critic and poet, delves into the history of philosophy to locate a fundamentally poetic modus operandi there. The book represents a daring mixture of Nancy’s philosophical essays, writings about artworks, and artwork of his own. With theoretical rigor, Nancy elaborates on the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of “making,” and outlines the tensions inherent in the faire, the “making” that characterizes the very process of production and thereby (...) the structure of poetry in all its forms. Nancy shows that this multiplication that belongs to the notion of art makes every single work communicate with every other, all material in the artwork appeal to some other material, and art the singular plural of a praxis of the finite imparting of an infinity which is actually there in every utterance. In the collection, Nancy engages with the work of, among others, François Martin, Maurice Blanchot, and On Kawara. (shrink)

Baudrillard's remarkably prescient meditation on terrorism throws light on post-9/11 delusional fears and political simulations. Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media society (...) meaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social." Once invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronic media society, all the masses can do—and all they will do—is enjoy the spectacle. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions. (shrink)

While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of love itself. Marion begins his profound and personal (...) book with a critique of Descartes’ equation of the ego’s ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists—“I think, therefore I am”—arguing that this is worse than vain. We encounter being, he says, when we first experience love: I am loved, therefore I am; and this love is the reason I care whether I exist or not. This philosophical base allows Marion to probe several manifestations of love and its variations, including carnal excitement, self-hate, lying and perversion, fidelity, the generation of children, and the love of God. Throughout, Marion stresses that all erotic phenomena, including sentimentality, pornography, and even boasts about one’s sexual conquests, stem not from the ego as popularly understood but instead from love. A thoroughly enlightening and captivating philosophical investigation of a strangely neglected subject, The Erotic Phenomenon is certain to initiate feverish new dialogue about the philosophical meanings of that most desirable and mysterious of all concepts—love. (shrink)

Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece that takesus far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon, and reveals a culture ofslavery, of blood sacrifice, of perpetual and ritualized warfare, of ceremonial hunting andecstasies.In his provocative discussions of various institutions and practices including war,marriage, and the city state, Vernant unveils a complex and previously unexplored intersection ofthe religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. He concludes with a genealogy ofthe study of (...) myth from antiquity to the present, and offers a critique of structuralism.Jean-PierreVernant is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions at the College de France inParis. (shrink)

Characterizing it as a "mythic discourse," Jean Baudrillard proceeds, in this brilliant essay, to dismantle the powerful, seductive figure of Michel Foucault. In 1976, Jean Baudrillard sent this essay to the French magazine Critique, where Michel Foucault was an editor. Foucault was asked to reply, but remained silent. Forget Foucault made Baudrillard instantly infamous in France. It was a devastating revisitation of Foucault's recent History of Sexuality—and of his entire oeuvre—and also an attack on those philosophers, like Gilles (...) Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who believed that desire could be revolutionary. In Baudrillard's eyes, desire and power were interchangeable, so desire had no place in Foucault's work. There is no better introduction to Baudrillard's polemical approach to culture than these pages, in which Baudrillard dares Foucault to meet the challenge of his own thought. This Semiotext edition of Forget Foucault is accompanied by a dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, "Forget Baudrillard," a reevaluation by Baudrillard of his lesser-known early works as a post-Marxian thinker. Lotringer presses Baudrillard to explain how he arrived at his infamous extrapolationist theories from his roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth century social and anthropological works of Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, and Emil Durkheim. (shrink)

Marked sharply by its time and place (Paris in the 1970s), this early theological text by Jean-Luc Marion nevertheless maintains a strikingly deep resonance with his most recent, groundbreaking, and ever more widely discussed phenomenology. And while Marion will want to insist on a clear distinction between the theological and phenomenological projects, to read each in light of the other can prove illuminating for both the theological and the philosophical reader - and perhaps above all for the reader who (...) wants to read in both directions at once, the reader concerned with those points of interplay and undecidability where theology and philosophy inform, provoke, and challenge one another in endlessly complex ways." "In both his theological and his phenomenological projects Marion's central effort to free the absolute or unconditional (be it theology's God or phenomenology's phenomenon) from the various limits and preconditions of human thought and language will imply a thoroughgoing critique of all metaphysics, and above all of the modern metaphysics centered on the active, spontaneous subject who occupies modern philosophy from Descartes through Hegel and Nietzsche. (shrink)

Philosopher, novelist, dramatist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the greatest writers of all time. He was fascinated by the role played by the emotions in human life and placed them at the heart of his philosophy. This brilliant short work - which contains some of the principal ideas later to appear in his masterpiece Being and Nothingness - is Sartre at his best: insightful, engaging and controversial. Far from constraining one's freedom, as we often think, Sartre argues (...) that emotions are fundamental to it and that an emotion is nothing less than 'a transformation of the world'. With a new foreword by Sebastian Gardner. (shrink)

Contractarianism in some form has been at the center of recent debates in moral and political philosophy. Jean Hampton was one of the most gifted philosophers involved in these debates and provided both important criticisms of prominent contractarian theories plus powerful defenses and applications of the core ideas of contractarianism. In these essays, she brought her distinctive approach, animated by concern for the intrinsic worth of persons, to bear on topics such as guilt, punishment, self-respect, family relations, and the (...) maintenance and justification of the state. Edited by Daniel Farnham, this collection is an essential contribution to understanding the problems and prospectus of contractarianism in moral, legal and political philosophy. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about society, culture, and government are pivotal in the history of political thought. His works are as controversial as they are relevant today. This volume brings together three of Rousseau’s most important political writings—_The Social Contract and The First Discourse _and_ The Second Discourse _—and_ _presents essays by major scholars that shed light on the dimensions and implications of these texts. Susan Dunn’s introductory essay underlines the unity of Rousseau’s political thought and explains why his ideas (...) influenced Jacobin revolutionaries in France but repelled American revolutionaries across the ocean. Gita May’s essay discusses Rousseau as cultural critic. Robert N. Bellah explores Rousseau’s attempt to resolve the tension between the individual’s desire for freedom and the obligations that society imposes. David Bromwich analyzes Rousseau as a psychologist of the human self. And Conor Cruise O’Brien takes on the “noxious,” “deranged” Rousseau, excoriated by Edmund Burke but admired by Robespierre and Thomas Jefferson. Written from different, even opposing perspectives, these lucid essays convey a sense of the vital and contentious debate surrounding Rousseau and his legacy. For this edition Susan Dunn has provided a new translation of the _Discourse on the Sciences and Arts _and_ _has revised a previously published translation of _The Social Contract._. (shrink)

‘I should like to show here that the Ego is neither formally or materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world.’ _Jean-Paul Sartre _ _The Transcendence of the Ego_ is one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications and essential for understanding the trajectory of his work as a whole. When it first appeared in France in 1937 Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in a provincial French town. Attacking prevailing philosophical theories head on, Sartre (...) offers a brilliant and radical account of the self as a product of consciousness, situated in the world. He introduces many of the themes central to his major work, Being and Nothingness: the nature of consciousness, the problem of self-knowledge, other minds, and anguish. This translation includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context. _Jean-Paul Sartre_. The foremost French thinker and writer of the early post-war years. His books, which include _Being and Nothingness, Nausea, The Age of Reason _and _No Exit_ have exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, politics and drama. __. (shrink)

An early work in which Baudrillard became Baudrillard. When Fatal Strategies was first published in French in 1983, it represented a turning point for Jean Baudrillard: an utterly original, and for many readers, utterly bizarre book that offered a theory as proliferative, ecstatic, and hallucinatory as the postmodern world it endeavored to describe. Arguing against the predetermined outcomes of dialectical thought with his renowned, wry, ambivalent passion, with this volume Jean Baudrillard mounted an attack against the “false problems” (...) posed by Western philosophy. If his Marxist days were firmly behind him, Baudrillard here indicated that metaphysics had also gone the way of sociology and politics: the contemporary world demanded nothing less than Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's absurdist philosphy that described the laws of the universe supplementary to this one. In effect, with Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard became Baudrillard. In his extrapolationist manner, Baudrillard sought to replace Western philosophy's circular arguments with a ritualistic Theater of Cruelty. Using this line of thought developed in Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard went on, throughout the 1980s, to find new and shatteringly accurate ways of discussing American corporatocracy, arms build-up, and hostage taking. Fatal Strategies asserts a profound critique of American politics, and it is an important step towards his examination of evil.Jean Baudrillard was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur. His Simulations instantly became a cult classic and made him a controversial voice in the world of politics and art. (shrink)

Philosopher, novelist, dramatist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the greatest writers of all time. He was fascinated by the role played by the emotions in human life and placed them at the heart of his philosophy. This brilliant short work - which contains some of the principal ideas later to appear in his masterpiece Being and Nothingness - is Sartre at his best: insightful, engaging and controversial. Far from constraining one's freedom, as we often think, Sartre argues (...) that emotions are fundamental to it and that an emotion is nothing less than 'a transformation of the world'. With a new foreword by Sebastian Gardner. (shrink)

This paper proposes a synthetic presentation of the proof construction paradigm, which underlies most of the research and development in the so-called “logic programming” area. Two essential aspects of this paradigm are discussed here: true non-determinism and partial information. A new formulation of Focussing, the basic property used to deal with non-determinism in proof construction, is presented. This formulation is then used to introduce a general constraint-based technique capable of dealing with partial information in proof construction. One of the baselines (...) of the paper is to avoid to rely on syntax to describe the key mechanisms of the paradigm. In fact, the bipolar decomposition of formulas captures their main structure, which can then be directly mapped into a sequent system that uses only atoms. This system thus completely “dissolves” the syntax of the formulas and retains only their behavioural content as far as proof construction is concerned. One step further is taken with the so-called “abstract” proofs, which dissolves in a similar way the specific tree-like syntax of the proofs themselves and retains only what is relevant to proof construction. (shrink)

Jean-Marc Coicaud's article begins by stressing the contemporary importance and the current trend of political apology. Recent political apologies offered in Australia and Canada to their indigenous populations form a significant part of this story. He then analyzes a number of intriguing paradoxes at the core of the dynamics of apology. These paradoxes give meaning to apology but also make the very idea of apology extremely challenging. They have to do with the relationships of apology with time, law and (...) the unforgivable. The most intriguing of these paradoxes concerns apology and the unforgivable. Indeed, the greater the wrong, the more valuable the apology. But, then, the more difficult it becomes to issue and to accept an apology. This latter paradox is namely examined in the context of mass crimes, taken from Europe, Africa and Asia. As a whole these paradoxes are all the more intriguing considering what apology in a political context aims to accomplish, for the actor who issues the apology, for the one who receives it, for their relationship, and for the social environment in which this takes place. Jean-Marc Coicaud concludes his article by outlining what the rise of apology means for contemporary political culture. (shrink)

A travers une analyse des concepts d’affirmation originaire, d’attestation et de reconnaissance, cet article tente de reconstituer le sens et les motivations du cheminement réflexif qui conduit Ricœur de L’Homme faillible à Soi-même comme un autre et à Parcours de la reconnaissance . Pour ce faire, il s’efforce d’abord de montrer ce qui fait la continuité profonde, de problématique et de méthode, du projet anthropologique ricœurien; afin de dégager ensuite les difficultés centrales liées à l’idée d’une constitution poétique du soi, (...) qui conduisent Ricœur à réélaborer les concepts directeurs de son herméneutique du soi. A la lumière du dialogue constant de Ricœur avec la philosophie de Nabert, il tente enfin de montrer comment les concepts d’attestation et de reconnaissance trouvent, pour l’essentiel, leur genèse dans un approfondissement de la notion d’affirmation originaire, lui-même prolongé par une réflexion sur le témoignage.  . (shrink)

Fragments presents a set of brilliantly intriguing interviews with Jean Baudrillard whose work today occupies center stage in the analysis of consumerism, terrorism, and contemporary culture. In these frank discussions with François L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard reveals for the first time in detail the thinkers who have been the dominant influences on his work during his career. Instead of examining his work as a project of intellectual accumulation, he challenges all the major interpretations of his work by suggesting he has always (...) adopted an anti-system, anti-totality strategy. Even globalization is accompanied in his view by a Western culture which itself is no longer a well-founded confident universalism. Perhaps most interestingly, Baudrillard discusses his life's work in relationship to his contemporaries -- Bataille , Barthes, Lyotard and Deleuze - and explores his position as an outsider in the field of French philosophy. Baudrillard in these interviews is in sparkling form, and in his ownwords he presents not only a lively introduction to this great thinker but also gives readers a window into a brilliant mind. (shrink)

The hypothesis that the particular linear tracks appearing in the measurement of a spherically-emitting radioactive source in a cloud chamber are determined by the positions of atoms or molecules inside the chamber is further explored in the framework of a recently established one-dimensional model. In this model, meshes of localized spins 1/2 play the role of the cloud-chamber atoms and the spherical wave is replaced by a linear superposition of two wave packets moving from the origin to the left and (...) to the right, evolving deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation. We first revisit these results using a time-dependent approach, where the wave packets impinge on a symmetric two-sided detector. We discuss the evolution of the wave function in the configuration space and stress the interest of a non-symmetric detector in a quantum-measurement perspective. Next we use a time-independent approach to study the scattering of a plane wave on a single-sided detector. Preliminary results are obtained, analytically for the single-spin case and numerically for up to 8 spins. They show that the spin-excitation probabilities are sometimes very sensitive to the parameters of the model, which corroborates the idea that the measurement result could be determined by the atom positions. The possible origin of decoherence and entropy increase in future models is finally discussed. (shrink)

This collection of essays brings together an international roster of contributors to provide historical insight into women’s agency and activism in education throughout from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Topics discussed range from the strategies adopted by individual women to achieve a personal education and the influence of educated women upon their social environment, to the organized efforts of groups of women to pursue broader feminist goals in an educational context. The collection is designed to recover the variety of (...) the voices of women inhabiting different geographical and social contexts while highlighting commonality and continuity with reference to creativity, achievement, and the management and transgression of structures of gender inequality. (shrink)

Ao colocar em evidência a legitimidade de uma instituição defendida por Locke, ou seja, o direito genérico que todos os membros da espécie humana têm de utilizar os recursos da natureza para preservar a sua existência, fca nítido que a propriedade privada exclusiva só é justifcável com o acréscimo de obrigações sociais rigorosas, apresentadas pelo próprio autor, para garantir que ela não prejudique a preservação da existência de qualquer dos membro da espécie, pelo simples fato de que a realidade de (...) uma instituição não pode contradizer o fundamento que lhe confere legitimidade. A partir disso, este texto se propõe a contestar a conclusão de Matthew Kramer de que a tentativa de Locke de estabelecer a legitimidade da propriedade privada no estado de natureza está fadada ao fracasso. (shrink)

En historien des mots, des idées et des littératures, J. Starobinski met en lumière les grands épisodes de la vie du couple action/réaction, depuis le rôle que lui attribua la scolastique jusqu'aux interrogations qui entourent aujourd'hui la notion de progrès, sans laquelle la réaction politique ne peut être pensée.