Aidan O'Neill remembers Britain as a fundamentally riven society twenty-five years ago under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher; a country divided by she who sought to rule it with certainty, but without compassion. The memories of Britain as a bitter and broken polity split asunder by a year-long strike of its coal miners were stirred again by a recent visit to the United States to attend a conference on Catholic Social Teaching where the growing social and legal acceptance of homosexuality (...) and the continued toleration of lawful abortion were both angrily denounced by two speakers who revealed a fundamental disjunction between their vision and hope for a properly Christian America, and their experience of an America which they characterized as misgoverned by a conspiracy of liberal judges and complaisant politicians. A subsequent roundtable discussion on the prospects for a written constitution for the State of Israel also revealed a picture of a profoundly divided society with utterly irreconcilable political visions competing for its future. In the face of such radical diversity in political vision the author suggests that the better way forward is to focus not on ends but on means, and always to honor the constitutional and legal processes which result in, albeit imperfect, decision making. Although a very thin form of consensus, it is suggested that such an approach is the sine qua non for any polity aspiring to the condition and ideal of democracy to be able to function, and, ultimately, to achieve some kind of justice. (shrink)

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a book of the moment. This Companion builds on successive waves of generational inheritance and debate in the novel's reception by asking new questions about how and why Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, what it means, and why it matters. Chapters on a selection of the novel's interpretative contexts, the literary histories from which it is inseparable, the urgent questions it raises, and the impact it has had on other kinds (...) of media, ranging from radio to video games, open up the conversation in an expansive way. Established concerns are presented alongside newer ones. Individual essays help us see in new ways how Orwell's most famous work continues to be a novel for our times. (shrink)

Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was ‘simultaneously dominator and dominated’ (Raymond Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on (...) narratology (its agential system, spacetime descriptions, and composition – ‘the Winston story’, the ‘Goldstein excerpts’, and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, ‘Tory anarchist’ stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell’s view there are ‘three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low’, but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. ‘No economics’ entails here ‘no class struggle’, and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell’s textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable ‘totalitarianism’. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom. (shrink)

The hero of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four defends a seemingly modest claim: "There was truth and there was untruth."1 It may be incoherent to deny this, but, as the novel shows, those who set no store in truth will not be browbeaten by contradictions. Orwell's last novel reflects his conviction that a commitment to "objective truth" was fast disappearing from the world—a prospect that troubled him more than bombs.2 Truth meant little in this "age of lies" and (...) was neither the aim nor horizon of intellectual debate (CW, 17, p. 11). Standards of rationality were opportunistically enlisted and jettisoned in the service of particular ends. Politics, he concluded, was "a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and .. (shrink)

Regardless of its ontological status and seemingly subsidiary role, the beyond—real, oneiric, imaginary, or otherworldly—constitutes, I intend to argue, an indispensable and complementary component of any dystopian reality. Paradoxically, it may be claimed that what lies outside a given dystopia—beyond its impassable boundaries—determines, ultimately, whether we deal with the Orwellian or the Hollywood type of "bad world."1 Contrary to the latter, the former systematically compromises and eliminates one kind of the beyond after another, leaving its inhabitants with neither space nor (...) time nor discourse that could allow them to imagine that they are behind the confines of dystopia. No matter how far Winston Smith... (shrink)

"It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need (...) is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not." (Syme, in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four) This chapter is about opposites and Newspeak in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. (shrink)

Shoshana Zuboff’s international bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal as a book that asks us ‘to pause long enough to think about the future and how it might be different from today.’ That description could work as the definition of the literary utopia or dystopia. In fact, Zuboff’s book has consecutive chapters titled ‘Big Other and the Rise of Instrumentalist Power’ and (...) ‘A Utopia of Certainty’. In the former chapter, the title of which seems to reference George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Zuboff argues that there now exists a ‘ubiquitous digital apparatus’ that ‘renders, monitors, computes and modifies human behaviour’. In the latter chapter she asserts that the ‘surveillance capitalist leaders [such as Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, CEOs of Facebook and Google respectively] are sui generis utopianists’. This article critically assesses Zuboff’s claims in relation to Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle, where the eponymous utopian/dystopian company’s name, as well its motto ‘ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN’ gesture towards Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon writings. This article explores Zuboff’s factual and Eggers’ fictional examinations of surveillance capitalism. While Zuboff’s and Eggers’ works have different points of departure and modes of representation, a comparative reading suggests key points of overlap and disagreement about the impact of surveillance in the contemporary world, about what the future might hold, and about how we should respond. (shrink)

Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's novel Brave New World have often been thought prophetic commentaries on economic, political, and social matters. I argue, with particular reference to the supposed applicability of these novels to issues of technology and privacy, that the novels are best understood as literary works of art, rather than as social science or commentary, and that when so viewed Orwell's novel in particular reflects a dissatisfaction with everyday life and a nostalgia for Romantic (...) values. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Against Ethical CriticismRichard A. PosnerOscar Wilde famously remarked that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” He was echoed by Auden, who said in his poem in memory of William Butler Yeats that poetry makes nothing happen (though the poem as a whole qualifies this overstatement), by Croce, and by formalist critics such as (...) Cleanth Brooks, a doyen of the New Critics, who insisted that edification was the function of religion but not of poetry. 1 George Orwell, though himself a didactic novelist, was of this view as well, 2 and it is one that most critics adopt when the issue is censorship. I accept Wilde’s thesis—the creed of aestheticism, of art for art’s sake—if understood to mean that the moral content and consequences of a work of literature are irrelevant to its value as literature; or as the critic Helen Vendler has put it, that “treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.” 3 This is not to deny that reading can have consequences, including moral and political ones. Information affects people’s outlook and behavior, and reading is a source of information. Imaginative literature conveys ideas, opinions, and information, often with great power. Think of the role that novels by Turgenev (Fathers and Sons), Dostoevsky (The Possessed), Conrad (The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes), Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Orwell (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four), and, of course, Solzhenitsyn played in exposing the horrors of anarchism and communism. Of A Passage to India it has been said that “as an account of the social conditions of British India it was powerful enough to have influenced events.” 4 Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is thought to have incited federal regulation of food processing; and few doubt the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) on the abolitionist cause. [End Page 1]At the core of the aesthetic tradition, which I shall be defending in this essay particularly against its opponents in the “law and literature” movement, are three theses. First, immersion in literature does not make us better citizens or better people. One might be able to pick out some works of literature that would have such an effect because of the information they convey or the emotional state they induce, but they would constitute a skewed sample of literary works. Second, we should not be put off by morally offensive views encountered in literature even when the author appears to share them. A work of literature is not to be considered maimed or even marred by expressing unacceptable moral views; by the same token, a mediocre work of literature is not redeemed by expressing moral views of which we approve. The proper criteria for evaluating literature are aesthetic rather than ethical. Third, authors’ moral qualities or opinions should not affect our valuations of their works.The insistence, in short, is on the separation of the moral from the aesthetic—but with two qualifications. Some literature has little interest or value apart from the didactic and for it the proper criticism is didactic. And the separation of moral from aesthetic values is not a rejection of the former. The aesthetic outlook is a moral outlook, one that stresses the values of openness, detachment, hedonism, curiosity, tolerance, the cultivation of the self, and the preservation of a private sphere—in short, the values of liberal individualism.The counter tradition in literary criticism to the aesthetic originates with Plato and insists upon the importance, in some versions to the near or even total exclusion of anything else, of the ethical or political content and effects of works of literature, and less commonly of the author’s own morality. Martha Nussbaum, for example, deems Greek tragedies and Anglo-American realistic novels a part of moral philosophy. 5 Reading novels, she argues, “develops moral capacities without which citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any moral or political theory, however excellent.” 6 Wayne Booth, disagreeing with his illustrious... (shrink)

This book defends antitheodicism, arguing that theodicies, seeking to excuse God for evil and suffering in the world, fail to ethically acknowledge the victims of suffering. The authors argue for this view using literary and philosophical resources, commencing with Immanuel Kant's 1791 "Theodicy Essay" and its reading of the Book of Job. Three important twentieth century antitheodicist positions are explored, including "Jewish" post-Holocaust ethical antitheodicism, Wittgensteinian antitheodicism exemplified by D.Z. Phillips and pragmatist antitheodicism defended by William James. The authors argue (...) that these approaches to evil and suffering are fundamentally Kantian. Literary works such as Franz Kafka'sThe Trial, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, are examined in order to crucially advance the philosophical case for antitheodicism. (shrink)

Most discussions of proper names in fiction concern the names of fictional characters, such as ‘Clarissa Dalloway’ or ‘Lilliput.’ Less attention has been paid to referring names in fiction, such as ‘Napoleon’ (in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) or ‘London’ (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). This is because many philosophers simply assume that such names are unproblematic; they refer in the usual way to their ordinary referents. The alternative position, dubbed Exceptionalism by Manuel García-Carpintero, maintains that referring names make (...) a distinctive semantic contribution in fiction. In this paper I offer a positive argument for Non-Exceptionalism, relying on the claim that works of both fiction and non-fiction can express the same singular propositions. I go on to defend my account against García-Carpintero’s objections. (shrink)

We pass all the time. I’m keen to maintain my standing as an oppression theorist, so I pretend I’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four when it comes up in conversations. I’ve failed to mention my penchant for puns and my extensive board game collection on first dates, because it turns out neither of those are particularly appealing for some mysterious reason. And I trained myself out of my Minnesotan accent in graduate school, after noticing that some folks were having (...) a little difficulty taking me seriously during presentations. Some people try to pass as younger, or older, looking for the opportunities and recognition that come with being thought a certain age. Some pass as members of different political parties, hoping to avoid attention or debate when they realize they’re in the minority at a gathering. Some pass as fans of popular figures or pastimes, seeing the value in fitting in with friends and coworkers, and some pass as aficionados of more selective pleasures, wanting to be seen as refined. Some pass as more confident than they are, more experienced than they are, more charitable than they are, more well-adjusted than they are, more appropriate than they are, more typical than they are. Sometimes the most advantageous identities or personal histories are not our own. (shrink)

This article uses differing interpretations of a thread of narrative taken from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a springboard to exploring the connection between philosophical truth and political liberalism. It argues that while no positive connection exists between realist truth and political liberalism, minimal negative connections do exist between Rorty’s humanistic account of truth and a basic commitment to democratic and liberal frameworks. It sees these minimal connections as limiting in their failure to provide a politics that moves (...) beyond an exclusive concern with liberty and democracy to more substantive political issues of equality and justice. However, it also sees them as reassuring in showing how acceptance of Rorty’s humanistic account of truth in no way necessitates adopting his own ethnocentric political stance. (shrink)

Hermann Glockner, von W. Ritzel.--Hermann Glockners Ethikvorlesung, von M. Trapp.--Folgenreiche Begegnung mit einem Lexikon, von J. Günther.--Das Einzelne, das Allgemeine und das Individuelle, von E. Heintel.--Philosophisches und mathematisches Kontinuum, von F. Kaulbach.--Fall, Norm, Typus, von K. Larenz.--"... als allein ein guter Wille," von O. F. Bollnow.--Kants Begründung der Gemeinschaft durch die Idee der Menschheit, von D.-J. Löwisch.--Dilthey und das Problem der Geschichtlichkeit, von J. Derbolav.--Gleichzeitigkeit--oder: Platon übersetzen, von A. Hübscher.--Zur Theorie des menschlichen Spiels, von H. Zdarzil.-Anlässlich eines Stillebens von Kalff (...) und eines Figurenbildes von Vermeer, von H. Schrade.--Pessimismus und Fortschrittsglaube, von W. Hof.--Orwells dialektischer Roman "Nineteen Eighty-Four, von H.-J. Lang.--Reisen mit Goethes Auge, von M. Weinhandl.--Incipit vita nova, von J. Overhoff.--Verzeichnis sämtlicher Veröffentlichungen von Hermann Glockner (p. 375-388)--Anschriften der Mitarbeiter. (shrink)

The training and experience of such academic philosophers as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam do not equip them with the economic and other social‐scientific tools necessary to make useful contributions to political discussion. In the case of Rorty, this has resulted in his being unable to make effective ripostes to left‐wing critics of his defense of “bourgeois liberalism,” his uncritical endorsement of simplistic arguments for social reform, and his embrace of false prophecies of doom, such as those found in Orwell's (...) novel Nineteen Eighty‐Four. Moreover, his disdain for “theory” has blinded him to the utility of mid‐level theories, such as those of economics, in dealing with concrete social problems. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to investigate some of the possible sources of inspiration for Orwell’s concept of the artificial language called Newspeak, which, in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is shown as an effective tool of enslavement and thought control in the hands of a totalitarian state. The author discusses, in this context, the putative links between Newspeak and really existing artificial languages, first of all Esperanto, and also between Orwell’s notion of “doublethink”, which is an (...) important feature of the totalitarian mentality, and Czesław Miłosz’s notion of “ketman”, developed in his book The Captive Mind. But the main emphasis is on the connection between Orwell’s book and the slightly earlier novel by C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. It is well known that Orwell knew Lewis’s book and expressed his mixed feelings about it. There are many specific, though far from obvious, similarities between the two books, but what seems to have been particularly inspiring for Orwell was Lewis’s vision of a thoroughly degenerate language that is used for political manipulation rather than for communication. (shrink)

This paper begins with the proposition that Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future is the most important theoretical contribution to utopian and science-fiction studies since Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. It argues that Jameson's derivation of 'anti-anti-Utopianism' from Sartrean anti-anti-communism will provide 'the party of Utopia' with as good a slogan as it is likely to find in the foreseeable future. It takes issue with Jameson over two key issues: his overwhelming concentration on American science-fiction, which seems strangely parochial (...) in such a distinguished comparativist; and his understanding of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as an 'anti-Utopia' rather than a dystopia. The paper argues that, for Nineteen Eighty-Four, as for any other science-fiction novel, the key question is that identified by Jameson: not 'did it get the future right?', but rather 'did it sufficiently shock its own present as to force a meditation on the impossible?'. It concludes that Jameson fails to understand how this process works for dystopia as well as utopia, for barbarism as well as socialism. (shrink)

Will language as we know it cease to exist? What could this mean for the way we live our lives? Shining a light on the technology currently being developed to revolutionise communication, The Future of Language distinguishes myth from reality and superstition from scientifically-based prediction as it plots out the importance of language and raises questions about its future.From the rise of artificial intelligence and speaking robots, to brain implants and computer-facilitated telepathy, language and communications expert Philip Seargeant surveys the (...) development of new digital 'languages', such as emojis, animated gifs and memes, and investigates how conventions of spoken and written language are being modified by new trends in communication. From George Orwell's fictional predictions in Nineteen Eighty-Four to the very real warnings of climate activist Greta Thunberg, Seargeant explores language through time, traversing politics, religion, philosophy, literature, and of course technology, in the process. Tracing how previous eras have imagined the future of language, from the Bible to the works H. G. Wells, and from Star Wars to Star Trek, the book reveals how perfecting language and communication has always been a vital component of utopian dreams of the future. Questioning the potential ramifications of recent and future developments in communication on society and its ideals, The Future of Language is a no holds barred investigation into the state of civilisation and the impact that changes in language could have on our lives"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Most interpretations of Orwell's political thought have concentrated on his critique of the ideology of totalitari-anism, especially as this ideology manifested itself in the 1930's in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in Nazi Germany under Hitler.2 These interpretations have provided valuable insights into Orwell's own perceptions of the dangers of cen-tralized state tyranny. However, they suffer from two weak-nesses connected with the concept of totalitarianism. First, the concept of totalitarianism as it has been developed in aca-demic political science has (...) been related specifically to the Soviet and Nazi experiences, and, thus, does not adequately account for other types of tyrannical regimes.3 Second, the application of the totalitarian model to the examination of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four tends to emphasize the pro-phetic aspects of the novel and to diminish its character as an investigation of contemporary political life.4 Instead of using the normal rubric of totalitarianism, I shall examine Orwell's political thought as expressed in Nineteen Eighty-four in terms of the conception of the modern state as a teleocracy, a con-cept which was elaborated by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. (shrink)

In Human Nature and Politics in Utopian and Anti-Utopian Fiction, Nivedita Bagchi's purpose is primarily to examine "human nature" as a historical concept that can help us to make sense of the political theory of her chosen works of fiction within their authorial context. Bagchi does not use the term "Human nature" first and foremost as a category for analysing the present but rather to address historic texts on terms their authors would have understood.Following an introduction, the book's four (...) main chapters cover Thomas More's Utopia, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The conclusion also contains an analysis of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68Ronald ShustermanLogics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68, by Peter Starr; xi & 232 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.Failed revolt? For many people, current French theory is more a revolt of failed logic. Anyone yearning for a definitive refutation of these threatening foreign trends will get no satisfaction from Peter Starr’s volume. His (...) concept of the “logics of failed revolts” involves the obsession of revolutionaries with what they see as the inevitable return of the past. Starr proposes to examine the explanations given for the failure of revolutionary action “in representative texts by Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and others” (p. 2). The “revolution” in question is the May 1968 uprising.George Orwell, as a defender of proper usage and an explorer of politics and the English language, always insisted that the title of his Nineteen Eighty-Four be written out in full; the informality of the abbreviation “May ‘68” is emblematic of the spirit of the events of that year: May ‘68 was supposed to be a liberation from useless tradition and constraint. That the movement was seen as a failure is the first premise of Starr’s argument; what he proposes to analyze is the theorization of the failure. Starr sees three “scenarios”: “the logic of specular doubling” is where “revolutionary action is doomed to repetition because revolutionaries inevitably construct themselves as mirror images of their rivals” (p. 2). There is also a “logic of structural repetition” and a “logic of recuperation” in which revolutionary actions actually reinforce established structures of power (pp. 2–3). Starr goes on to argue that “these logics served as argumentative pretexts, allowing Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, and others to construct the existing political field as an impasse in order to justify significant displacements of political energies (including a politicization of the literary text)” (p. 7). This seems like a fancy way of saying that these thinkers used theory to find a decent way out of direct political commitment. Indeed, once one has understood and granted the point, there really is not much else in Starr’s book but fancy ways of repeating it.Starr tries to delineate a specific “theoretical moment” (p. 4) beginning in 1965 and ending in 1977, but it is difficult to be so definitive about the limits of a period when one is writing only twenty years later. This lack of temporal distance leads to certain debatable assertions. For example, Starr claims that tier-mondisme—France’s obsession with models taken from the Third World—“never recovered” from certain fatal “blows” (p. 4). Yet there is no actual evidence given for this claim. The problem with this kind of history is that it either makes concrete statements which are easy to contest, or it ends up vacuous: Starr sees in his period “a play of continuity and discontinuity” (p. 7). Who could deny such an assertion? All periods involve both continuity and discontinuity (except perhaps the period of the sinking of Atlantis...). Starr [End Page 191] mentions works on specific French thinkers by other theorists (such as Culler) and points out that his “aim has been to bridge the gap between such studies on the one hand and the work of historians and sociologists on the other” (pp. 10–11). The question is whether such an interdisciplinary project is feasible or even desirable. The theorists do not really care about the genealogy of the theory; the historians do not need to know if the theory is right. To take one example, Starr gives us statistics of the evolution of university enrollment in France (p. 113) a few pages after discussing Lacan’s “phallic comedy” (p. 104). How many readers are going to be equipped for, or interested in, a study which combines sociological statistics, political theory, general history, psychoanalytic principles, and feminist criticism?I was convinced by Starr’s basic argument that French thinkers were obsessed by this vision of the inevitable failure of revolt. Nevertheless, the point is both belabored and often tenuous. There are times when Starr’s... (shrink)

Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia served as models for most of the literary utopias written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, dystopian novels began to displace their positive counterparts. Five dystopian fictions published between 1891 and 1949—Jerome’s “The New Utopia”, Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—exhibit many common themes, such as isolation, totalitarianism, technology in service of the state, rigid social organization, uniformity (...) and social control. In the twenty-first century, some of these characteristics of fictional dystopian societies have become realities in the form of unseen technological surveillance and control. Nevertheless, utopia lives on as an ideal, for instance in philosophical transhumanism. (shrink)

Although to the readers of Utopian Studies Darko Suvin remains perhaps best known for his criticism of science fiction, much of his recent writing has fallen into the category of Marxist political epistemology. Of note are In Leviathan's Belly: Essays for a Counter-Revolutionary Time (2012), his analysis of former Yugoslavia in Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (2017) as well as a number of shorter works on subjects that range from the Russian Revolution to George Orwell's (...) class='Hi'>Nineteen Eighty-Four. For decades, Suvin has also written (about) poetry: he discussed verse already in the 1979 The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre and his... Read More. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68Ronald ShustermanLogics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68, by Peter Starr; xi & 232 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.Failed revolt? For many people, current French theory is more a revolt of failed logic. Anyone yearning for a definitive refutation of these threatening foreign trends will get no satisfaction from Peter Starr’s volume. His (...) concept of the “logics of failed revolts” involves the obsession of revolutionaries with what they see as the inevitable return of the past. Starr proposes to examine the explanations given for the failure of revolutionary action “in representative texts by Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and others” (p. 2). The “revolution” in question is the May 1968 uprising.George Orwell, as a defender of proper usage and an explorer of politics and the English language, always insisted that the title of his Nineteen Eighty-Four be written out in full; the informality of the abbreviation “May ‘68” is emblematic of the spirit of the events of that year: May ‘68 was supposed to be a liberation from useless tradition and constraint. That the movement was seen as a failure is the first premise of Starr’s argument; what he proposes to analyze is the theorization of the failure. Starr sees three “scenarios”: “the logic of specular doubling” is where “revolutionary action is doomed to repetition because revolutionaries inevitably construct themselves as mirror images of their rivals” (p. 2). There is also a “logic of structural repetition” and a “logic of recuperation” in which revolutionary actions actually reinforce established structures of power (pp. 2–3). Starr goes on to argue that “these logics served as argumentative pretexts, allowing Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, and others to construct the existing political field as an impasse in order to justify significant displacements of political energies (including a politicization of the literary text)” (p. 7). This seems like a fancy way of saying that these thinkers used theory to find a decent way out of direct political commitment. Indeed, once one has understood and granted the point, there really is not much else in Starr’s book but fancy ways of repeating it.Starr tries to delineate a specific “theoretical moment” (p. 4) beginning in 1965 and ending in 1977, but it is difficult to be so definitive about the limits of a period when one is writing only twenty years later. This lack of temporal distance leads to certain debatable assertions. For example, Starr claims that tier-mondisme—France’s obsession with models taken from the Third World—“never recovered” from certain fatal “blows” (p. 4). Yet there is no actual evidence given for this claim. The problem with this kind of history is that it either makes concrete statements which are easy to contest, or it ends up vacuous: Starr sees in his period “a play of continuity and discontinuity” (p. 7). Who could deny such an assertion? All periods involve both continuity and discontinuity (except perhaps the period of the sinking of Atlantis...). Starr [End Page 191] mentions works on specific French thinkers by other theorists (such as Culler) and points out that his “aim has been to bridge the gap between such studies on the one hand and the work of historians and sociologists on the other” (pp. 10–11). The question is whether such an interdisciplinary project is feasible or even desirable. The theorists do not really care about the genealogy of the theory; the historians do not need to know if the theory is right. To take one example, Starr gives us statistics of the evolution of university enrollment in France (p. 113) a few pages after discussing Lacan’s “phallic comedy” (p. 104). How many readers are going to be equipped for, or interested in, a study which combines sociological statistics, political theory, general history, psychoanalytic principles, and feminist criticism?I was convinced by Starr’s basic argument that French thinkers were obsessed by this vision of the inevitable failure of revolt. Nevertheless, the point is both belabored and often tenuous. There are times when Starr’s... (shrink)

What are the prospects of a Christian ethics of responsibility? In the article the versions of a Christian ethics of responsibility that have been developed since the nineteen eighties in dialogue with the philosopher Hans Jonas by the four Protestant theologians William Schweiker, Wolfgang Huber, Johannes Fischer and Ulrich Körtner, are critically discussed. It is pointed out that the disparity of their views is the main reason why a responsibility ethics school within Christian ethics could not have developed (...) up till now. An attempt is made in the article to identify common denominators for such an ethics by extracting from the views of the theologians a number of ways in which responsibility can and should today qualify Christian ethics fundamentally. (shrink)

Children often refer to things ambiguously but learn not to from responding to clarification requests. We review and explore this learning process here. In Study 1, eighty-four 2- and 4-year-olds were tested for their ability to request stickers from either (a) a small array with one dissimilar distracter or (b) a large array containing similar distracters. When children made ambiguous requests, they received either general feedback or specific questions about which of two options they wanted. With training, children (...) learned to produce more complex object descriptions and did so faster in the specific feedback condition. They also tended to provide more information when requesting stickers from large arrays. In Study 2, we varied only distracter similarity during training and then varied array size in a generalization test. Children found it harder to learn in this case. In the generalization test, 4-year-olds were more likely to provide information (a) when it was needed because distracters were similar to the target and (b) when the array size was greater (regardless of need for information). We discuss how clear cues to potential ambiguity are needed for children to learn to tailor their referring expression to context and how several cues of heuristic value (e.g., more distracters > say more) can promote the efficiency of communication while language is developing. Finally, we consider whether it would be worthwhile drawing on the human learning process when developing algorithms for the production of referring expressions. (shrink)

This paper surveys the meaning of aither in Empedocles. Since Aristotle, Empedoclean aither has been generally considered synonymous with air and understood anachronistically in terms of its Aristotelian conception as hot and wet. In critiquing this interpretation, the paper first examines the meaning of “air” in Empedocles, revealing scant and insignificant use of the term. Next, the ancient controversy of Empedocles’ “four roots” is recast from the perspective that aither, rather than air, designates the fourth root. Finally, the (...) class='Hi'>nineteen instances of aither in Empedocles’ fragments are considered, revealing a bright and energetic root closely related to the force of life. (shrink)

Nineteen eighty-seven was a year of financial paradox. During the 1980s there was the strong perception that the Americans, the Europeans, and the Japanese were living well, contrasting with the accounting data that suggested the house of cards was about to fall. Three factors dominated the financial economy of 1987: the 25-percent drop in equity prices in mid-October, the apparent collapse of the U.S. dollar in the foreign exchange market, and the formal recognition by the major international banks (...) that their losses on developing country loans would amount to at least $250 billion. The key question at the end of that year was whether the world economy was moving into a period of inflation or deflation. This essay identifies three possible scenarios. First, the decline in the foreign-exchange value of the U.S. dollar would lead to a rapid increase in U.S. net exports, an excessively large increase in demand for U.S. goods, and a run on the U.S. dollar, which would prompt more contractive monetary policies from the Federal Reserve and an increase in interest rates on U.S. dollars. Second, an increase in U.S. net exports would offset the decline in domestic spending from the smaller fiscal deficit and the less rapid growth of consumer spending. Interest rates on U.S. dollar assets would fall, which in turn would facilitate the expansion of income, and the U.S. fiscal deficit would automatically decline. Or, third, a second stock market meltdown might cause consumer and investment spending to decline more than the increase in net exports, resulting in a recession and a decline in the inflation rate and interest rates. (shrink)