This essay does not aim to investigate film-novel relationships per se, although the fact that the two genres now share certain generative procedures may be further evidence that fiction in print and on film lie to a great extent in a unified field not only of diegesis but also of structure. A diachronic or historical approach to the theory of fictional generators would show that, with the shifts which have occurred on present-day aesthetic thought, much of what once was (...) considered to be a static analysis of retrospective rules or established forms could now be regarded as the disguised beginning of generative theory. Aristotle's seemingly static doctrines of dramatic structure, involving such notions as peripeteia, discovery, or unity of action, to the extent that dramatists had consciously or unconsciously followed such doctrines, obviously served the production of their works, as well as their later analysis. In fact, any sort of artistic intentionality constitutes a kind of "generator," as does the deliberate adherence to outward forms as rhyme schemes, stanzas, cantos, or chapters. As we shall see, it is not always easy to distinguish between generative formulas and self-imposed forms or limits, such as the sonnet with its fourteen lines, its quatrains, and its tercets. Although the most advanced practitioners of generative theory, like Jean Ricardou, seem to view their work as a radical break with the past and the discovery of an entirely new domain of fiction, literary history would provide innumerable examples of precedents, from antiquity through the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, the Gongorists and Baroque poets, and many subsequent groups of writers down to and including the pre-modern and modern periods. Bruce Morrissette has published widely on French fiction of the classical period, Rimbaud and the Symbolist movement, the Nouveau Roman and Robbe-Grillet, and on contemporary film. He is the Sunny Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He translated Alain Robbe-Grillet's "ARTISTS ON ART: Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction" for the Autumn 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Much recent scholarly treatment of the theoretical and practical underpinnings of biological taxonomy from the 16 th to the 18 th centuries has failed to adequately consider the importance of the mode of generation of some living entity in the determination of its species membership, as well as in the determination of the ontological profile of the species itself. In this article, I show how a unique set of considerations was brought to bear in the classification of creatures whose species (...) membership was thought to be entirely determined by descent from parents of the same kind, in contrast with creatures whose generation could proceed spontaneously or through budding. Concretely, the relevance of mode of generation to the practice of taxonomy means that we must rethink the role of the early modern botanists in the development of a universal science of applied taxonomy. I argue that the task of classifying ‘higher’ biological kinds—those united, in Kant’s language, through their generative power—is one with its unique set of problems, arising as much from classical anthropology as from natural philosophy, and that the conception of zoological species that emerged in the early modern period was a consequence of these problems, and not primarily of the ‘applied metaphysics’ of classificatory practice. (shrink)

본고의 목적은 미적인 판단력이 어떻게 세계인식과 자의식의 실천이라는 발생론적 형식을 담고 있는지를 밝히는데 있다. 우선 ‘미적’이라는 용어는 ‘자의식’ 또는 주관적인 것과 밀접한 관련이 있다. 특히 칸트가 행하는 쾌나 불쾌의 느낌과 같은 대상의미적 판단 설명에서는 전적으로 주관적이고 개체적인 영역으로 머물고 있다. 그러나 다른 측면에서는 이런 만족과 불만족에 대한 언제나 개인적인 취향에 대립되는 보편적인 것을 요청하기도 한다. 다시 말하면, 왜 우리가 쾌나 불쾌의 감정을 가지는가에 대해서, 다른 사람들과 얘기하며 그 경험을 설명할 수 있다. 또한 그런 경험들이 비록 특정한 욕구에 있어서는 주관적으로 여겨진다고 (...) 해도, 단지 한 개체의 감각경험에만 한정되지 않는 보편적 감정을 전달하고자 하는 공감 역시 필요할 것이다. 이런 미적 감각과 자의식의 관계를 상세히 논하기 위해서는 주관적인 판단의 보편성의 유효성 근거에 대한 실러의 설명과 그 후로 이어진 딜타이의 해석학과 같은 전개과정을 살펴볼 필요가 있다. 딜타이에게 있어서는 예술에서 체험이란 단순히 예술적 창조물을 형성하는 토대만이 아니라, 역사적인 의식개념으로 이해된다. 예술가의 눈을 통한 삶의 개별 체험은 그 ‘의미성’의 파악을 통해 사실성이라는 차원으로 고양되며, 이는 작품 속에서 다른 개인들의 삶의 체험들과 연결되기에, 세계경험 전체로 확장하는 발생론적 성격을 지니게 되는 것이다. 따라서 이 논문의 목적은 독일관념론뿐만 아니라, 딜타이의 해석학, 후설의 현상학이 어떻게 세계인식 형식이라는 발생론적 사고를 포함하고 있는 가를 증명하는데 있다. (shrink)

This paper puts Jane Bennett’s vital materialism into dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference. Together these thinkers challenge the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that is bound up with both the instrumentalization of the earth and the disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal. In its place they seek to affirm a vital, generative materiality: an ‘active matter’ whose differential becomings no longer oppose activity to passivity, subject to object, or one body, self or entity (...) to its ‘other’. For both thinkers, displacing the hylomorphic conceptual structures that have tended to dominate western metaphysical thought is inseparable from critiquing the model of the individual subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. Such individualism is countered by the relational ontologies figured in Bennett’s ‘distributed agencies’ and Irigaray’s ‘placental economy’, and by a shared attentiveness to the capacities of the human body to bear others within. Nonetheless, this paper argues that each thinker renders this ‘other within’ in very different ways. On the one hand, Bennett’s approach complements and expands Irigaray’s notion of the elemental by affording a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matters. On the other, Irigaray’s conception of generative relationality and the ontological priority of the in-between allows us to think such material entanglements in ways that more fully displace the twinned logics of individualism and instrumentalization. Her project thereby affirms the relational and irreducible differences on which the ‘vitality’ of a vital materiality depends. If there is no more “earth” to press down/repress, to work, to represent, but also and always to desire, no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the ex-sistence of the “subject”? If the earth turned and more especially turned upon herself, the erection of the subject might thereby be disconcerted and risk losing its elevation and penetration. For what would there be to rise up from and exercise his power over? And in? Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman Jane Bennett has recently argued that “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption”, continuing that: “The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption”.11J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, ix. Henceforth VM. View all notes This insight is prefigured and re-affirmed by the work of Irigaray. Her sustained analysis of western thought and culture shows how its constitutive disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal is inextricably bound up with an equally deep-rooted disavowal of matter and corporeality. As the above passage from Speculum suggests,22L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 133. Henceforth S. View all notes Irigaray seeks to expose woman's reduction to an object for a subject and a maternal-material resource for man's speculations; but in disentangling woman from her symbolic identification with the earth, she also seeks to release the earth from its identification with a passive and manipulable matter. Her work thus bears directly on the revaluation required to transform human beings' relations to materiality: both their own, and that of the earth they inhabit. At the centre of this revaluation is Irigaray's work to displace the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that Bennett also critiques, and to affirm instead a sexuate materiality that is both living and generative. Her consistent troubling of hylomorphism is as unsettling for the subject as her question: “But what if the ‘object’ started to speak?” This question is echoed in Bennett's concern with “the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute idol speaks”.33 VM, 2, citing W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005, 157. View all notes As this passage indicates, Bennett's own project is more concerned with the agency of non-human materialities – including their role in the constitution of the human – than with specifically sexed bodies or a materiality inflected by sexual difference. It is these crucial differences in emphasis, I will suggest, that allow the work of these two thinkers to be brought together in productive dialogue. On the one hand, Bennett's approach affords a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matter; on the other, Irigaray's twinned ontology of sexual difference and maternal relation is better able to affirm the relational differences on which the “vitality” of a vital materiality depends. The paper begins by outlining several key elements of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference to show how it leads necessarily to a rethinking of matter. This rethinking is especially helpful for shifting away from the hylomorphism that has been a dominant strand in western thought, informing an understanding of the earth as a fundamentally inert and ever-ready resource. As I will show, the figures through which Irigaray re-articulates female specificity also allow her to refigure the earth as active matter that “turns upon herself ” in generative flux. In the second section, I will situate Irigaray's re-thinking of matter in relation to Bennett's “vital materiality”.44Bennett can be aligned with a number of thinkers who have come to be grouped under the heading “new materialisms”. See S. Alaimo and S. Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008; D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. View all notes An advantage of this concept is that it refuses the separation between humans and matter still implicit in concepts such as “the environment”. By attending to “our own constitution as vital materiality”, as well as the ways our “own” bodies are never “fully or exclusively human”, Bennett adjusts the status of human actants while re-evaluating non-human bodies “as actants rather than as objects”. As I will show, her approach provides a constructive critical perspective on Irigaray's work by drawing attention to the specifically non-sexuate nature of the elemental. Equally, however, Irigaray's insistence on sexuate difference problematises any appeal to a generic notion of “the human”. This is especially helpful, I will suggest, in relation to contemporary descriptions of climate change as “anthropogenic”. By homogenising human beings, such descriptions make it more difficult to address the ways in which current ecological problems are inseparable from global patterns of social, political and economic inequity. For both thinkers, challenging hylomorphism needs to be matched with a critique of the dominant modern model of the subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. And for both, this model is displaced and undone by the capacity of the human body to bear others within, in ways that engender and sustain human life. Yet as I will discuss in the final two sections, each thinker renders this “other within” in very different ways, with significant implications for the ethics and politics of a “vital materiality”. In the end it is Irigaray's rendering of a distinctively female capacity to bear an other within, explored via the generative relationality of a placental economy, that more fully escapes the individualism of the One and the Same. Together, Irigaray and Bennett show that to take seriously the ecological crises that currently confront us means overcoming the disavowal of both human beings' own fundamental materiality and our dependency on the sustaining materialities of the earth. In contrast, a dominant strand in contemporary responses to these crises is an environmental politics of “enlightened self-interest”55I borrow this phrase from H. Kopnina's critical discussion in “Forsaking Nature? Contesting ‘Biodiversity’ Through Competing Discourses of Sustainability”, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 7, no. 1 : 51–63. that precludes any serious re-evaluation of human beings' relations to matter and the earth. If human beings can be persuaded that current levels of environmental degradation are damaging to them, threatening perhaps their very survival, they are more likely to take decisive steps to alter their behaviour. Insofar as such approaches demand action only for the sake of human interests and ends, they are both anthropocentric and spring from the same instrumentalising rationality that has engendered the ecological crises we currently face. They may well be successful in prompting action. But by foregrounding the survival of “the human species” per se, such approaches foreclose discussion of whose interests are served if survival is all that is allowed to be at stake, and whose lives are thereby consigned to ongoing exploitation. Moreover, as I will argue below, the instrumental rationality that serves survival is at odds with an affirmation of life, as a becoming that depends on difference. With this in mind, I will problematise Bennett's proposed politics of “expanded self-interest”, while seeking to retain many of the insights her approach brings. To more fully displace the “rational” self-interest that has encouraged human exploitation of the earth, we might take up Bennett's “vital materiality” in ways informed by Irigaray's conception of generative difference and the relational space-time of the in-between. (shrink)

For a long time, the accepted explanatory model of language acquisition was the so-called Principles and Parameters framework (P&P). P&P seemingly provides an elegant answer to the central puzzle of generative linguistics: How do children acquire their native language given the limited time and input resources available to them? Yet P&P tells a story that is evolutionarily implausible, and for this reason it has since been abandoned. I argue that this is an unwarranted move, and that it could and (...) should be avoided by reassessing the epistemic status of P&P. In particular, I argue that contrary to extant accounts, P&P ought to be retrospectively construed as a highly idealized (toy) model of language acquisition. The proposed reinterpretation is vindicated, I argue, insofar as it paves the way for a reconciliation of the two central explanatory challenges of modern generative linguistics. (shrink)

The hermeneutical dimensions of Chinese philosophy from the Changes of Zhou through its Confucian, Daoist, and contemporary developments have been a creative inspirational source and guiding intellectual thread in the thought of Chung-ying Cheng. Cheng's extensive engagement with the Classic of Changes, its role in the formation of the Chinese philosophical tradition and its comparative interconnections with occidental philosophies, has disclosed its deep hermeneutical orientation. The Yijing encompasses processes of empirical observation, empathetic feeling, and self-reflection in the generation of “images,” (...) or prototypical models that are “form-objects” or “process-events,” which performatively enact a comprehensive ontological and situationally appropriate understanding of nature, society, and one self. I examine three issues in outline arising from Cheng's works in this situation: to what extent Chinese philosophy is hermeneutical with respect to modern European understandings of hermeneutics, and the possibility of the distinctive “onto-generative hermeneutics” that has been articulated for over forty years in the context of Chinese and Western thought in Cheng's prolific works concerning the Yijing. (shrink)

This book addresses fundamental issues in linguistic theory, including the relation between formal and cognitive approaches, the autonomy of syntax, the content of universal grammar, and the value of generative and functional approaches to grammar. It focuses on the grammar of case relations, signalled by morphological case, prepositions, and word order. Part I offers a critical history of modern grammars of case, focussing on the last four decades and setting this in the context of earlier, including ancient, developments. (...) The subjects considered include the evolution of ideas concerning deep structure and semantic and grammatical relations, and arguments for the maintenance of the traditional central position of case in the grammar. In parts II and III Professor Anderson examines the category of case and central unresolved issues in the grammar of case. The latter include questions relating to the idea of an ontologically-based grammar, particularly the degree to which syntactic categories and relationships are grounded in meaning, and the notion of linguistic creativity. This involves a consideration of the way in which cases may be identified and whether their distribution is determined through semantics. The book sheds new light on the interactions between meaning and grammar and on the structure and development of lexical and grammatical systems. The argument and its far-reaching consequences will be of wide interest to linguists, philosophers and others seeking to understand the workings of language. (shrink)

A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the replacement of behaviorism by cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a borderland, muddy and much trespassed-upon. This paper relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar, Chomsky mounted a highly publicized attack on behaviorist psychology. Yet when he first developed that approach to grammar, he was a defender of behaviorism. His anti-behaviorism emerged only in the course of what became (...) a systematic repudiation of the work of the Cornell linguist C. F. Hockett. In the name of the positivist Unity-of-Science movement, Hockett had synthesized an approach to grammar based on statistical communication theory; a behaviorist view of language acquisition in children as a process of association and analogy; and an interest in uncovering the Darwinian origins of language. In criticizing Hockett on grammar, Chomsky came to engage gradually and critically with the whole Hockettian synthesis. Situating Chomsky thus within his own disciplinary matrix suggests lessons for students of disciplinary politics generally and – famously with Chomsky – the place of political discipline within a scientific life. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the relevance of Bergson's theory of durée for an understanding of sculpture by focusing on the work of three canonical artists in the history of twentieth-century modernism: the French Cubist Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and the London-based Vorticist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. While these sculptors produced widely divergent aesthetic forms, I argue that they all endorsed Bergson's notion of durée as a spontaneous process of qualitative differentiation. These artists reconfigured their medium in terms of (...) Bergson's process philosophy, whether in the guise of an artists? generative imagination (Duchamp-Villon), representations of the human body as a living center of indetermination (Boccioni), or the act of direct carving as an intuitive response to a sculptor's chosen material (Gaudier-Brzeska). These Bergsonian paradigms enable us to reassess Jack Burnham's evaluation of Bergson's impact in his seminal text Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (1968). Finally, by drawing on recent discussions of cybernetic and new media art, I will highlight the limitations of Burnham's categorical dismissal of Bergsonism as an outmoded metaphysics, irrelevant to newer conceptions of ?sculpture as system.? (shrink)

This article, from my onto-generative and onto-hermeneutic theories, will explore how Confucian virtue ethics could be modernized and globalized by answering challenges of civic duties, human rights, policy planning and decisionmaking regarding social and communal development with considerations of maximal sustainable goodness or benefits to both individual and groups. In doing so, we come to recognize the multifunctional potency of Confucian virtues in meeting modern and postmodern needs and demands in a complicated global-local environment, and see how this (...) development of civic and other kinds of virtues form a unifying foundation for the justification, discovery and sustainable source of insights and motivations for vital action. (shrink)

This article, from my onto-generative and onto-hermeneutic theories, will explore how Confucian virtue ethics could be modernized and globalized by answering challenges of civic duties, human rights, policy planning and decision-making regarding social and communal development with considerations of maximal sustainable goodness or benefits to both individual and groups. In doing so, we come to recognize the multifunctional potency of Confucian virtues in meeting modern and postmodern needs and demands in a complicated global-local environment, and see how this (...) development of civic and other kinds of virtues form a unifying foundation for the justification, discovery and sustainable source of insights and motivations for vital action. (shrink)

This essay seeks to resolve three conceptual puzzles raised by Milton’s conception of the new modern matter. First, in both his epic poem Paradise Lost and theological treatise The Christian Doctrine, Milton depicts a motive and generative matter and regards it as the substantial principle that produces all manners of life. Meanwhile, he also represents God as the primary fountain of beings. The priority of the primal matter seems to directly challenge the putative primacy of the divine deity. (...) Second, in conceiving of the substantial principle as both good matter and wild chaos, Milton appears to posit two kinds of primary matter, which runs counter to his allegedly monistic outlook. Third, Milton’s monism seems to contradict his apparent distinction between corporeal and spiritual beings as well. The ancient philosophy of the monad as reformulated by Giordano Bruno and developed by the Conway Circle, I argue, provides a pertinent framework for Milton to negotiate the theological implications of the new matter. The monadic model can account for at once the tensions between Milton’s substantial and theological principles of unity, between his good matter and wild chaos, and between his monistic vision and images of corporeal and incorporeal beings. (shrink)

Pāṇini's fourth century BC Sanskrit grammar uses rewrite rules utilizing an explicit formal language defined through a semi-formal metalanguage. The grammar is generative, meaning that it is capable of expressing a potential infinity of well-formed Sanskrit sentences starting from a finite symbolic inventory. The grammar's operational rules involve extensive use of auxiliary markers, in the form of Sanskrit phonemes, to control grammatical derivations. Pāṇini's rules often utilize a generic context-sensitive format to identify terms used in replacement, modification or deletion (...) operations. The context-sensitive rule format is itself defined using Pāṇini's more general method of auxiliary markers, the latter used to define many dozens of linguistic categories and rules controlling derivations of Sanskrit sentences through the manipulation of ‘non-terminal’ and ‘terminal’ symbols. This technique for controlling formal derivations was rediscovered by Emil Post in the 1920s and later shown by him to be ca... (shrink)

The paper addresses the way in which modern linguistics, − in particular, but not exclusively, the generative tradition − , has constructed its core concepts. It argues that a particular form of construction, reminiscent of, but crucially different from, abstrac- tion, which is dubbed ‘idealisation’, plays a central role here. The resemblances and differences between abstractions and idealisations are investigated, and consequences of the reliance on idealisations are reviewed.

The generative and governing "idea" of radical modernity is spawned by the technique of mathematical construction deployed and interpreted by the major early-modern thinkers and their legatees. ;Chapter I is a survey of this legacy as it appears in Vico, Kant, Fichte, Marx and Nietzsche and in the post-Nietzschean inheritance of contemporary philosophy, hyperbolic in the case of Derrida et al., elliptical, in the case of Carnap and Goodman. ;In Chapter II I try to show how the pre- (...) class='Hi'>modern mathematical tradition, represented by Euclid, aimed at keeping the enticements of technical facility in check by means of didactic phronesis and how the post-Kantian interpretation of "existence" in Euclid as constructibility betrays his usage and self-understanding. I suggest that his focus in the postulates and elsewhere is on the undistorted iterability of graphic evocations of the items already intelligible thanks to the definitions or to the pre-understanding shared by the teacher and student. ;In Chapter III, devoted to Descartes the principal claims of modern constructivism are brought to sight. After examining Descartes' fabulous autobiography and its emphasis on self-origination, I turn to the style, contents and under-pinnings of the Geometry in an effort to extract from that text what he once referred to as "the metaphysics of geometry." The latter yields the conditions of successful problem-solving, i.e., dimensional homogeneity and kinematic continuity. These conditions, in turn, find their justification in Descartes' theses in the Rules concerning order, measure and the uniformity of "mental" activity. In the final section I apply the lessons learned from the Geometry and the Rules to one critical issue in the later Meditations, the transition from essence to existence. Descartes' "solution" generates a sequence of perplexities with Hobbes, Leibniz, Kant and other radical moderns continue to wrestle. (shrink)

Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity is an edited collection of sixteen essays on the idea of the modern sovereign individual in the western cultural tradition. Reconsidering the eighteenth-century realist novel, twentieth-century modernism, and underappreciated topics on individualism and literature, this volume provocatively revises and enriches our understanding of individualism as the generative premise of modernity itself.

Synthesizing important research traditions in information theory, structuralist semiotics, and generative linguistics, at least three main types of semiotic indeterminacy must be distinguished: Kolmogorov’s notion of randomness defined as sequential incompressibility, de Saussure’s principle of contingency of sign which ensures the possibility of translation between different sign systems, and Chomsky’s idea of indefiniteness in generative mechanisms as a requirement for the explanation of semiotic creativity. These types of semiotic indeterminacy form an abstract system useful for the description of (...) concrete sign processes in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimension. In his philosophical reflections on modern biology, Jacques Monod used the conceptual opposition chance versus necessity to analyse several phenomena of indeterminacy (especially in molecular biology). The biosemiotic approach to life permits to apply the suggestedsystem of semiotic indeterminacy on these phenomena. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of the nature and development of "modern" political thought, typical features of which include the "state of nature" and "social contract." Specifically, I argue that modern thought is constructive, which is to say that thinking is seen as, at least to some extent, generative of its objects. I focus primarily on Hobbes and Marx as liminal thinkers in the development of modern political thought. I begin with a discussion of the nature (...) of construction in modern thought generally, and in Hobbes specifically. I then ground the claim that Hobbes's texts are originary for modern political thought in two ways. First, I show how many of the methodological principles explicitly adopted by Hobbes are implicitly assumed by Locke. Then, I differentiate Hobbesian metaphysical and epistemological assumptions from two alternate sets of assumptions which Hobbes viewed himself as opposing: Machiavellian virtu; and Christian, medieval neo-Platonism. I then read Hobbes's texts in their relation to Bacon's usage of construction and Hobbes's own development of the social contract. I then transition, via Hegel, to a study of Marx. After providing an account of Marx's early reaction to Hegel, I attempt to show that many of the objections Marx makes to Hegelianism are also made against modern political thought in general. I thus read sections of Marx's early works to illustrate his engagement with early modern thought, and to show how he characterizes this thought as a "despotism" because of its reliance on a "manufactured originary state." I then provide readings of Marx's dissertation critique of Democritus to develop more carefully what Marx means by an atomic or originary state; and of sections of the Holy Family to explore Marx's understanding of "history," and to show how that understanding differs from Hegel's. I conclude with an extended reading of sections of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts, in order to develop more fully his critique of modern political thought, and to sketch his early understanding of what an alternative way of thinking politics might incorporate. (shrink)

Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity is an edited collection of sixteen essays on the idea of the modern sovereign individual in the western cultural tradition. Reconsidering the eighteenth-century realist novel, twentieth-century modernism, and underappreciated topics on individualism and literature, this volume provocatively revises and enriches our understanding of individualism as the generative premise of modernity itself.

In a tribute to the intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick, this article explores the poiesis of modern law, as a constitutive ambivalence distilled in the affinity between law and literature. Reading with Fitzpatrick, the resolution of the contradictions of this law in myth depends, paradoxically, upon its fundamental irresolution. Reflecting upon the profound significance of his revelation of the mythology of modern law and its scholarly reverberations, I consider the constitutive tensions of this law as exemplified in the (...) relation between praxis and poiesis, the operative function of the former dependent upon the creative unfolding of the latter. The alchemy of autopoiesis, by which law boldly proclaims itself law, is made explicit in the eschatology of its archive and the formation of its sovereign subject in negation. Revealing the literary dimensions of this law, the conceit of autonomy is nonetheless subject to the subversive substitutions of the supplement. Pressing yet further, the autopoiesis of law is found to be enfolded within a generative sympoiesis, constituted by the movement between its apposite dimensions. Ultimately, extending Fitzpatrick’s rendering of the irresolution of modern law as decolonial, I explore the possibilities afforded by a reading of the fundamental mutuality of myths, and the decolonial conviviality of poiesis. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie The appearance of Ayn Rand's 'lost' novel Ideal, 80 years after it was written, gives us cause to examine the life and works of the humanist author, playwright and philosopher.

Modern, Stevie In a dark uniform, she walks swiftly through the tram carriage, her movements machine-like and efficient. Wordlessly, she punches passengers' tickets and passes money from the coin-changer strapped to her hip. The passengers pay small attention, their gazes vaguely forward. They do not see the face of evil, the anonymous official who stands above them returning their ticket stub. The tram clatters on through Berlin's streets.

Modern, Stevie March 15, 2016: A 19 year-old American tourist is arrested in Jerusalem. Police authorities had found him asleep in a prohibited cave area, deep under the Muslim quarter of the Old City. A search finds his backpack loaded with rubble dug with a pickaxe, at a site where myth tells of lost religious treasure. The tourist claims no memory of his actions. Israeli media reports the story as a possible case of 'Jerusalem Syndrome' - a religiously themed (...) psychosis. The syndrome affects nearly 100 people each year out of millions of tourists who visit Jerusalem. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie At its annual general meeting in May this year, the Council of Australian Humanist Societies voted in support of volunteer ethics teachers entering public schools and teaching ethics programs to students as a secular alternative in religious education. The motion was put to the meeting by the NSW Society with the support of the Humanist Society of Victoria. The motion was opposed by the Queensland, Western Australian and South Australian Societies. Here is why the motion is a (...) grave mistake, and why Western Australia moved its own motion against it. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie The September 11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero opened in May this year, nearly 13 years from the date when 2,983 people were murdered by Islamist hijackers. It is 20 years from Al Qaida's first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.

Modern, Stevie In the movie Exodus set in 1947, Paul Newman plays a Jewish 'people smuggler' Ari Ben Canaan in an amusing early scene where he disguises himself as a British soldier. Ben Canaan fools a commanding officer into signing off on the transport of recent holocaust survivors out of detention in Cyprus, making the officer believe the survivors would be shipped back to Germany.

These photographs, essays, drawings, and original texts document the rich agit-art legacy of the Situationist International, a group of European artists and writers who emerged from such avant-garde movements as COBRA, Lettrisme, and the Imaginary Bauhaus and from the breakup of surrealism to launch a strategy of art as cultural critique.