The controversy over vaccines has recently intensified in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with calls from politicians, health professionals, journalists, and citizens to take harsh measures against so-called “anti-vaxxers,” while accusing them of spreading “fake news” and as such, of endangering public health. However, the issue of suppression of vaccine dissenters has rarely been studied from the point of view of those who raise concerns about vaccine safety. The purpose of the present study was to examine the subjective (...) perceptions of professionals (physicians, nurses, researchers) involved with vaccines through practice and/or research and who take a critical view on vaccines, about what they perceive as the suppression of dissent in the field of vaccines, their response to it, and its potential implications on science and medicine. Respondents reported being subjected to a variety of censorship and suppression tactics, including the retraction of papers pointing to vaccine safety problems, negative publicity, difficulty in obtaining research funding, calls for dismissal, summonses to official hearings, suspension of medical licenses, and self-censorship. Respondents also reported on what has been termed a “backfire effect” – a counter-reaction that draws more attention to the opponents’ position. Suppression of dissent impairs scientific discourse and research practice while creating the false impression of scientific consensus. (shrink)

‘Teachers expect parents to teach you. Parents expect teachers to teach you. So actually you learn nothing and nobody wants to talk about it’. This quote from this research study is an adolescent girls’ cry for liberation from the silence related to sexuality because of the general reluctance of adults to talk to them about it. Given the growing concerns raised about the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents in South Africa, the aim of this study was to conduct research (...) with adolescent girls as subjects in order for girls’ voices to enhance adult researchers’ understanding of children’s need for support and guidance in the context of sexuality education. The purposively selected sample included 75 participants from three diverse high schools in the Western Cape. The research was conducted using a phenomenological approach that values the lived experiences of participants as significant in contributing to the knowledge on adolescent sexuality. A qualitative interpretative research design was applied to collect the data. This article argues that adults cannot help adolescents in their sexual emancipation – to be free – if they themselves are not free. If they were free, they would have been able and willing to engage with adolescents in every aspect, which includes their sexuality. Including adolescent girls as partners in transforming sexuality education is presented as a core principle for the sexual emancipation of both adolescent girls and adults. (shrink)

The sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is the sudden, unexpected death of an infant that is not explained by autopsy, death scene examination, and history. The etiology is unknown. Recent postmortem studies have discovered abnormalities in brainstem serotonergic neurons, but how these translate into dysfunction and cause SIDS is uncertain. Recently, lethal effects in transgenic mice with overexpression of the serotonin 1A autoreceptor have been described. Many die spontaneously between postnatal day 40 (P40) and P80, and some spontaneously exhibit bradycardias (...) and drops in body temperature. The severity of the autonomic dysfunction and its age dependence suggest relevance to SIDS. However, SIDS cases have decreased serotonin 1A autoreceptor binding, which is opposite to its overexpression in the mice, and the peak incidence of SIDS is between 2 and 6 months of age, which is arguably younger (in relative terms) than the ages at which the mice die. Nevertheless, the description of an animal model with serotonin defects that has autonomic dysfunction and spontaneous mortality at a young age is an exciting finding of possible importance for understanding SIDS. (shrink)

In a qualitative empirical research project on youth worship, we discovered that 'being together' is primary quality of youth worship. This primary quality consists of at least four aspects. Firstly, community is celebrated through physical presence. More specifically, the physical presence of siblings plays an important part in the participation of youth in worship. Secondly, an empathetic and emotional aspect is essential for adolescents. 'Being together' in youth worship means being together in unity and trust and in equality, as kindred (...) spirits. Thirdly, 'being together' in youth worship yields possibilities to cross social and ecclesiological boundaries. Fourthly, there is a theological aspect in 'being together' that could be described as 'sharing faith and being in God's presence'. (shrink)

"Avital Ronell's work studies the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Investigating ignorance, dumbfoundedness, and the limits of reason, Stupidity probes the pervasive practice of theory-bashing and related forms of paranoid aggression. A section on prolonged and debilitating illness pushes the text to an edge of a corporeal hermeneutics, "at the limits of what the body knows and tells.""--BOOK JACKET.

_The Test Drive_ deals with the war perpetrated by highly determined reactionary forces on science and research. How does the government at once promote and prohibit scientific testing and undercut the importance of experimentation? To what extent is testing at the forefront of theoretical and practical concerns today? Addressed to those who are left stranded by speculative thinking and unhinged by cognitive discourse, _The Test Drive_ points to a toxic residue of uninterrogated questions raised by Nietzsche, Husserl and Derrida. Ranging (...) from the scientific probe to modalities of testing that include the limits of friendship or love, this work explores the crucial operations of an uncontestable legitimating machine. Avital Ronell offers a tour-de-force reading of legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical grids that depend upon different types of testability, involving among other issues what it means to put oneself to the test. (shrink)

For twenty years, Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy.

"Avital Ronell's work studies the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Investigating ignorance, dumbfoundedness, and the limits of reason, Stupidity probes the pervasive practice of theory-bashing and related forms of paranoid aggression. A section on prolonged and debilitating illness pushes the text to an edge of a corporeal hermeneutics, "at the limits of what the body knows and tells.""--BOOK JACKET.

There are sons who grow up unhappily believing that no matter what they do, they cannot please their fathers. Often unable to shed their sense of lifelong failure, either they give up and suffer in a permanent sulk, or they try with all their might to prove they are worth something after all. These are the "loser sons," a group of historical men as varied as President George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Atta. Their names quickly illustrate that (...) not only are their problems serious, but they also make serious problems for others, expanding to whole nations. When God is conceived and inculcated as an angry and impossible-to-please father, the problems can last for generations. In _Loser Sons,_ Avital Ronell draws on current philosophy, literary history, and political events to confront the grim fact that divested boys become terrifying men. This would be old news if the problem didn't recur so often with such disastrous consequences. Looking beyond our current moment, she interrogates the problems of authority, paternal fantasy, and childhood as they have been explored and exemplified by Franz Kafka, Goethe's Faust, Benjamin Franklin, Jean-François Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Alexandre Kojève, and Immanuel Kant. Brilliantly weaving these threads into a polyvocal discourse, Ronell shows how, with their arrays of powerful symbols, ideologies of all sorts perpetuate the theme that while childhood represents innocence, adulthood entails responsible cruelty. The need for suffering--preferably somebody else's--has become a widespread assumption, not only justifying abuses of authority, but justifying authority itself. Shockingly honest, _Loser Sons_ recognizes that focusing on the spectacular catastrophes of modernity might make writer and reader feel they're engaged in something important, while in fact what they are engaged in is still only spectacle. To understand the implications of her insights, Ronell addresses them directly to her readers, challenging them to think through their own notions of authority and their responses to it. (shrink)

These are the "loser sons," a group of historical men as varied as President George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Atta.

Remembrance involves so many shots in the dark, part of an effort to locate the disappeared as they clock out. In the dead center of Hölderlin’s hymn, Andenken, the question flares: ‘But–where are my friends?’ Nancy, writing on Derrida’s inconceivable demise, says we await them, demanding a return in some form, drawing on a shadowing nearness, maybe an image that appears in distinction to the non-image of the living friend. Have they really elapsed –? Or, are they bound to show (...) up at midnight, like the Rat Man’s father or Hamlet’s ghost? Derrida wonders if we don’t take another few laps with them, worried and anxious about their well-being over there. Ach! Give us the off chance of an apparition, a sign, an alias vanishing down the block. With Derrida Nancy turns a radical corner: We don’t have at hand the syntax to say a disappearance so resolute. We have no cause to assert a fact that is not fact, the factum negativum, of one perpetually disappearing. For nobody is dead, not so dead or dead so, as if we were not still involved in naming a state of being, of being de-parted. That is why he offers a sidebar on rethinking the philosophical formulation, ‘God is dead’. (shrink)

‘America’, bloated with philosophical significance, serves as a meeting grounds for Heidegger and Derrida, flagging theoretical standoffs, identity crashes, a Nietzscean tipoff, and unstoppable poe...

Reflecting on the debts collected by Shoshana Felman's work, within the theoretical contexts of the time in which the 1977 Yale French Studies issue of ‘Psychoanalysis and Literature’ first appeared, this article takes as its point of departure Lacan's analysis of Hamlet's father as the barred Other, focusing on Hamlet's ‘complaint’. The nature of the complaint is then explored in relation to various writers and thinkers — Rilke, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, among others — and more specifically via a reading of (...) François Roustang's La Fin de la plainte, and his own interpretations of Freudian narcissism. Scanning the wreckage for which the little narcissists are responsible, the article aims to give more insight into the structuring principles of those who whine incessantly. (shrink)

Exploiting puns that reveal suggestive conceptual connections, this article incorporates a reading of Derrida on literature and democracy in a Derridean reading of Nietzsche, that antidemocrat, who offers a link by which to explore some of Derrida's more concealed utterances on the related subjects of futurity, political formations, the will to fiction, and acts of promising. Focusing on Beyond Good and Evil, riding the motif of testing, the question is taken up of a new species of philosopher, “the coming philosophers,” (...) and the problem of the feminine in Nietzsche, which should be grafted onto it, as an opening onto the “to come.”. (shrink)

A história da arte no Ocidente é a história da arte cristã. Imagens, motivos, símbolos, técnicas, personagens: o Cristianismo deu a marca distintiva da arte europeia e ocidental por dois mil anos; o Cristianismo balizou a arte do Ocidente. As raízes mais profundas da arte cristã, contudo, não estão expostas: sua natureza e suas mais legítimas pulsões são ignoradas, mesmo pelo público confessional. O resultado inevitável é a eclosão periódica de polêmicas e mal-entendidos. O objetivo deste artigo é demostrar que (...) a arte cristã nunca foi avessa a paradoxos estéticos, e que os elementos transculturais da criação pós-moderna foram gestados em um longo processo técnico e estético-filosófico precipuamente cristão. (shrink)

Quando me propus plasmar em música uma homenagem aos cem anos demorte de Friedrich Nietzsche, tinha em mente que era imprescindível que a composiçãodeveria conter, ainda que de forma simbólica, alguns elementos da filosofiado autor do Zaratustra. Considerando que esta forma de simbolismo de caráterjá abriga uma larga tradição na história da música ocidental, tendo seu ápice noEgmont de Beethoven, fui buscar não na pessoa de Nietzsche, mas em seus escritos, o impetus para a elaboração do meu trabalho.

_Parages_ brings together four essays by Derrida on the fictions of Maurice Blanchot. Three of the essays—"Living On," "Title To Be Specified," and "The Law of Genre," are by now canonical. The fourth, "_Pa_ce Not" as well as Derrida's 1986 introduction to the French edition of the book, appear here in English for the first time. This was a breakthrough publication in the analysis of Blanchot, a notoriously difficult writer. It is safe to say Derrida contributed much to that writer's (...) reputation in both French and English, always insisting on the philosophical pertinence of Blanchot's work to any discussion of the relationship between literature and critical thought. Through patient citation, and an ample collocation and readings of Blanchot's various motifs, Derrida explores a variety of questions, including the limits of genre, the procedure of crossing out, and the evocation of a non-dialectical and non-privative negativity. The book marks a crucial stage in Derrida's itinerary and provides a context for his later writings on apophatics in such works as _On the Name_ and his response to Heidegger on death in _Aporias_. (shrink)

Avital Ronell has won worldwide acclaim for her work across literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and popular culture, political theory and feminism, art and rhetoric, drugs and deconstruction. In works such as The Test Drive, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Telephone Book, she has perpetually raised new and powerful questions about how we think, what thinking does, and how we fool ourselves about the troubled space between thought and action. In this collection, some of today's most distinguished and innovative thinkers turn (...) their attention to Ronell's teaching, writing, and provocations, observing how Ronell reads and what comes from reading her. By reading Ronell, and reading Ronell reading, contributors examine the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations and carefully explicate, extend, and explore the paraconcepts addressed in her works. (shrink)

For twenty years, Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy. She has tirelessly investigated the impact of technology on thinking and writing, with groundbreaking work on Heidegger, dependency and drug rhetoric, intelligence and artificial intelligence, and the obsession with testing. Admired for her insights and breadth of field, she has attracted a wide readership by writing with guts, candour, and wit. Coyly alluding to Nietzsche's gay science, The UberReader presents a solid (...) introduction to Avital Ronell's later oeuvre. It includes at least one selection from each of her books, two classic selections from a collection of her early essays, previously uncollected interviews and essays, and some of her most powerful published and unpublished talks. An introduction by Diane Davis surveys Ronell's career and the critical response to it thus far. With its combination of brevity and power, this Ronell primer will be immensely useful to scholars, students, and teachers throughout the humanities, but particularly to graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary theory. (shrink)

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler demonstrates the priority of rhetoric to ethics, noting that any giving of an account already involves the scene of address: a relational dimension of language which supersedes the account itself . You demonstrate in The Telephone Book and elsewhere that you are called into being, that the call precedes you, indicating the priority of rhetoric to a certain pre-Heideggerian ontology. A major concern of this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric involves the (...) ways in which “the human” is constructed and/or deconstructed through this predicament of addressivity, particularly when the address comes in from or goes out to a nonhuman other: say, an animal, an .. (shrink)

This article explores what it can mean to navigate notions of productive idiocy with aspects of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), through some recent art-as-activism practices of the author, Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Mark Harvey. The works explicated include Waitākere Drag and Auau in the Te Wao Nui ā Tiriwa forest ranges and Productive Promises, which was part of TEZA (Trans Economic Zone of Aotearoa) in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. Avital Ronell’s Nietzschean-influenced perspectives on idiocy are drawn from in relation to Western and Māori perspectives, (...) along with Roger Sansi’s work on idiocy as dissent. From this aggregation of epistemologies, it is proposed that idiocy can be productive through art as activism and that this can align with Indigenous Māori perspectives on playing the fool as a form of resistance and refusal. Examples of Māori concepts engaged with here include perspectives on relationship building, human relationships with forests and the environment, and sovereignty under Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi). These art-activism projects promised micro-attempts at making positive changes for the communities in which they were situated through performatively generated actions from a Māori perspective within the shroud of ongoing colonization and capitalism. (shrink)

This book answers the question of how soft factors such as corporate cultures and individual and corporate values can be transparently steered. With its C4 management tool and reflecting the seven driving forces of corporate culture, the Values Cockpit is a powerful solution designed to steer all dimensions and processes of a company, pursuing a lean approach. The book links strategic approaches on how to steer a company towards excellence with insights into the driving forces of human thoughts and actions. (...) It subsequently introduces the Values Cockpit, which allows individual corporate cultures to be developed and controlled on the basis of a rational approach. "This intriguing book breaks new ground in suggesting that values can be managed quite as systematically as any other centrally important asset" Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur Professor, Harvard University "... a deeply articulate, profoundly relevant explication of the role played by the culture of commerce... rich with actionable tools, insights and clear examples..." Richard J Hill IV, Founder, Gabriel Consulting Group, LLC "One seldom sees practical advice on HOW strong values can be automatically practiced on a daily basis by all concerned. That is what makes this remarkable book so refreshing... his book is taking the seminal findings of Jim Collins on building great companies a step further..." Julian Clarke, Chartered Accountant and Management Consultant, European Business Ethics Network Ireland "... a brilliant yet succinct guide to teach the significance of values-development in sustainable business management..." Professor Dr. Haifeng Huang, Assistant Dean, Peking University HSBC Business School, Shenzhen, China "He admirably rejects the fatalist interpretation of the immoral might of markets and replaces it with a counter-narrative of why and how companies can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem." Professor Dr. Claus Dierksmeier, Director of the Global Ethic Institute, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen "The values cockpit gives readers a coherent and comprehensive toolkit to help them prepare their companies for lasting success." Dr. Kurt Schmalz, C.E.O and Managing Partner J. Schmalz GmbH, Glatten, Germany. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Addressing Alterity:Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative RelationDiane DavisTeaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain.—Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and InfinityThere is always the matter of a surplus that comes from an elsewhere and that can no more be assimilated by me, than it can domesticate itself in me. A teaching that may part ways with Heidegger's motif of our being (...) able to learn only what we already understand—when does learning take place? what do we already understand?—the Conversation belongs, as ethical relation, to the effort of thinking the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger. None of this amounts to thinking an object.—Avital Ronell, DictationsFrom Rhetorical Power to Reception Histories Steven Mailloux has brilliantly performed and explicated a "rhetorical hermeneutics" that demonstrates the "practical inseparability of interpretation and language use and thus of the discourses that theorize those practices, hermeneutics and rhetoric" (1998, 3). Many rhetoricians have challenged the specifics of Mailloux's various arguments and have more generally objected that "rhetorical hermeneutics" leans too far toward the hermeneutical, reducing rhetoric to an analytic or critical art and giving its productive (political) function the squeeze.1 Yet within these lively debates, very few have challenged his basic premise that rhetoric and hermeneutics are inextricably intertwined: the question has not been whether they are indissociable but which side of the production-reception coin rhetorical studies ought to emphasize.2 Michael Leff, for example, flipped Mailloux's adjective-noun relation to spotlight production, promoting a "hermeneutical rhetoric" that focuses more on political than literary texts; nonetheless, he agrees that "all interpretive work involves participation in a rhetorical exchange, and that every rhetorical exchange involves some interpretive work" (1997, 197-98). [End Page 191] Rosa Eberly goes further in Citizen Critics, offering a hermeneutical rhetoric that is less interested in "already-written discourses" than in spotlighting "rhetoric's power as an art productive of discourses and subjectivities for the present and the future" (2000, 34). Yet Eberly, too, affirms Mailloux's basic premise, which was nudged in the direction of conflation in the introduction to the 1997 collection Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, in which the editors, Walter Jost and Michael Hyde note in passing that their title can "be understood as virtually tautological."And there is of course no doubt that rhetoric has a hermeneutic dimension; or, more carefully, that rhetoric constitutes the hermeneutic dimension. If "hermeneutics" indicates "the art of understanding," as Friedrich Schleirmacher wanted, then interpretation clearly depends upon production.3 "Rhetoric not only has its place within the sphere of objects surveyed by hermeneutics," as Werner Hamacher puts it, "but also constitutes an integral component of every hermeneutic operation. Every step in an interpretation corresponds to a rhetorical—or grammatical—figure" (1996, 70). Put more bluntly: intelligibility, including self-intelligibility, is a tropological product; cognition itself is a trope that can in no way be secured. Hermeneutics—as it's being used here—is completely dependent on, even absorbed by, rhetoric.4 I have no problem with this. Nor with Mailloux's suggestion that the reverse is also true:In some ways rhetoric and interpretation are practical forms of the same extended human activity: Rhetoric is based on interpretation; interpretation is communicated through rhetoric. Furthermore, as a reflection on practice, hermeneutics and rhetorical theory are mutually defining fields: hermeneutics is the rhetoric of establishing meaning, and rhetoric the hermeneutics of problematic linguistic situations.(Mailloux 1998, 4)I don't disagree: As the production and appropriation of meaning, rhetoric and hermeneutics are an indissociable team; together, they complete understanding's circle. I take this as a given.However, I want to suggest that there is also a non-hermeneutical dimension of rhetoric that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up significations to comprehension. This dimension is reducible neither to figuration nor to what typically goes by the name persuasion; it is devoted to a certain reception, but not to the appropriation of meaning. Preceding and exceeding all hermeneutic interpretation, it deals not in signified meaning but in the address itself, in the exposure to the other; it deals not... (shrink)

The Ladies of Besiktas are a discrete group of followers of Turkey's Besiktas FC. They propose a different ethos from that of the dominant fan culture. They refuse to downplay their femininity, they wear natty black-and-white garb to games, they make breezy videos and they blow whistles when they hear Besiktas fans express foul or insulting sentiments during matches. It seems that the Ladies have motivated most of the offending Besiktas fans to moderate their behaviour in their presence. This discussion (...) paper argues that, while the Ladies are genuinely oppositional and should be affirmed, critical facets of gender introduce a moral and ideological ambiguity, a result of which is the possible reinforcement of masculine hegemony. The discussion concludes with the recommendation that the Ladies elevate, alongside their femininity, elements of their identities that are not identifiably feminine. (shrink)

The year 1492 is only the last in a series of “ends” that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian (...) Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts. The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre. At stake are issues – texts and contexts – that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 310—311. Writing Death . Jeremy Fernando, foreword by Avital Ronell. Den Haag: Uitgeverij. 2011 ISBN: 978-90-817091-0-1 Rite and ceremony as well as legend bound the living and the dead in a common partnership. They were esthetic but they were more than esthetic. The rites of mourning expressed more than grief; the war and harvest dance were more than a gathering of energy for tasks to be performed; magic was more than a way of commanding forces of nature (...) to do the bidding of man; feasts were more than a satisfaction of hunger. Each of these communal modes of activity united the practical, the social, and the educative in an integrated whole having esthetic form.(1) Jeremy Fernando’s Writing Death is a sensitive attempt at exploring the depths and heights to which the processes of mourning can take us. Death, as an absence, renders all gestures (for what is mourning but a gesture with many faces) surrounding it at once as a possibility and an impossibility. Fernando poses questions that often elude the mourner and the mourned—the same, and different—by raising the specter of subject and object; by compelling the examination of what it actually means to mourn; and most crucially, by considering the very status of possibility itself that the act of mourning foregrounds. Mourning, he reminds us, is premised upon memory (remembrance, recollection), the shadow of forgetting upon which is perpetually cast—the inextricability between memory and forgetting haunts the living more than it does the dead. And if grief has anything to do with it, mourning can quite easily be mistaken for an attempt to remember in order to forget; an attempt, in other words, to deny death, deny the one thing that confirms mortality. As if living has anything to do with it. What, then, of writing death? It becomes an unceasing process of locating—and addressing—possibility itself: the passing as possibility; loss as possibility; impossibility as, and of, naming this possibility. In confronting the passing on, it is possible, nay inevitable, to move on, move away from the site of loss, of grief. All the while, we forget, Fernando reminds us, that mourning has little to do with the dead, and a whole lot to do with the living, the mourning self. Here, he echoes Dewey’s consolidation of rituals and ceremonies, of the dead and of the living, all as parts of a larger unity, of a social, public gesture meant to sate a private need: In trying to “get over it,” are we trying to get over ourselves? Or more than that: are we trying to get over the fact that we can never quite get over ourselves? (Fernando, 77) As if guilt has anything to do with it. And “it” continues to be the point that he is driving at, driving towards. “It” is the possibility and impossibility, death and life, memory and forgetting, lost and cherished. “It” is what eludes mourning, eludes attempts to overcome grief. Nonetheless, move on, he must. And Fernando does this in fewer moves than a 12-step program—hardly therapeutic, but intellectually satisfying. Writing Death attends to some of the pertinent aspects of the act of mourning—both as gesture and as meditation: eulogy, distress (call), tears, and the question of how (beyond ritual, beyond sentimentality) to mourn. And what’s love got to do with it? Everything and nothing. Mourning, after all, is an articulation of love, but it is also one that forces the mourner to be selective, as with myth-making, in the recollection: Remembering only ever occurs in exception to memory—quite possibly in betrayal of a memory. In this way, each remembrance is a naming of that memory, a naming of something as memory, bringing with it an act of violence. (40) Mourning is thus not only an act of fictionalizing, it is also an act of reading, to continually be compelled to respond to another, all the while keeping vigil against a reconceptualization of the dead, without, therefore, misreading the dead. This can only be done, Fernando argues, by all the while “maintaining the otherness of the other. After all, one must try not to forget that one cannot be too close—space is needed—to touch.” (82) There is also tacit acknowledgement that doing so foregrounds the fact that the selectivity of memory becomes exclusive, and concretizes into a singularity, thus negating the multi-dimensionality of a life lived – and thus killing the already dead. Writing Death is framed by two eulogies—or the approximations of eulogies; approximation because both foreground and call into question the eulogy as a genre. The first is Avital Ronell’s foreword to the book, remembering Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; the second is Fernando’s own response to the passing of a mentor, Jean Baudrillard. Both are not merely attempts to philosophize their way out of the act of mourning. Both are in fact deeply moving pieces that remind us of the emotional possibilities that may reside within any intellectual undertaking, that the latter need not be cold and devoid of feelings. And whereas Writing Death does not attempt to make any philosophical claim for humanism, the underlying wistfulness of both pieces does suggest that there is a proper place for deep-seated human response to death. We can (and the book does) intellectualize and problematize the acts of mourning and grieving, but these do not diminish the fact that we mourn and grieve. And, framing Writing Death as the two eulogies do, Jeremy Fernando perhaps finally, and inadvertently, names “It”—it is, above everything else, Human. August, 2011 Singapore NOTES (1) Dewey, John. Art as Experience . New York: Perigee, 1934. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Under the influence of a reading style that Avital Ronell has called “narcoanalysis,” this article performs a reading of addiction and humility through David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. Exploring both addiction and humility through the vector of habit, I argue that both habits indicate the non-self-sufficiency of a subject exposed to affection from outside. But while I position addiction alongside humility, both as habits, I also argue that humility parasitizes the totalizing logic of addictive habit. Neither identical to (...) nor simply the opposite of addiction, humility exploits addiction's structure of uncontrollable relationality. Even addiction depends on the affectability or rhetoricity of a subject always already exposed in language. Humility holds this rhetoricity open. (shrink)