Der Beitrag stellt die exemplarische Untersuchung eines Psychotherapiegesprächs mit Hilfe der »szenisch-narrativen Mikroanalyse« (SNMA) vor. »Jetzt-Momente« (»Now Moments«) und »Begegnungsmomente« (»Moments of Meeting«) im Sinne von Daniel Stern und der Boston Change Process Study Group wurden von unabhängigen geschulten Ratern identifiziert und in einer systematischen, psychoanalytisch interpretierenden Konsentierung evaluiert. Ziel des Verfahrens ist es, durch die Nutzung von Parallelprozessen die Übertragungs-Gegenübertragungs-Bewegung im Therapiedialog zu verdeutlichen und dadurch ein wesentliches Agens in (nicht nur) psychoanalytischen Psychotherapien nachzuweisen.

Hoerl & McCormack risk misleading people about the cognitive underpinnings of the belief in a privileged “now moment” because they do not explicitly acknowledge that the sense of existing in the now moment is an intrinsically temporally dynamic one. The sense of happening that is exclusive to the now moment is a better candidate for the source of belief in a privileged now.

플라톤의 『파르메니데스』는 내용상 초․중기 이데아론의 비판으로 구성된 1부와 이데아론을 구제하기 위한 연습으로 제시되는 ‘하나’에 대한 변증법적 탐구로 구성된 2부로 나뉜다. 그로 인해 본 대화편은 많은 학자들에 의해 서로 이질적인 플라톤의 초․중기 이데아론과 후기 이데아론을 이어주는 과도기적 성격을 띤 대화편으로 해석된다. 그러나 『파르메니데스』 2부에 등장하는 ‘하나’에 대한 변증법적 탐구가 단순히 논리적 연쇄만을 드러내고 있기 때문에, 이 과도기적 성격이 갖는 의미는 아직까지도 논란의 중심에 서 있다. 그래서 본 연구는 ‘하나’와 ‘이데아’의 관계와 의미를 규명하기 위해 『파르메니데스』 2부에 등장하는 ‘순간’ 논변을 중심으로 탐구한다. ‘순간 (...) 논변’은 시간 안에서의 존재 즉 ‘존재하는 하나’에 대한 변화를 탐구주제로 삼고 있다. 그리고 그 변화의 근거가 바로 시간 안에 존재하지 못하는 ‘순간’ 안에 놓여있다고 플라톤은 이야기한다. 왜냐하면 변화 이전의 시간과 변화 이후의 시간은 각각 변화와 관계없는 자신의 본래적 상태로 머물러 있어야 하기 때문이다. 이러한 입장은 결국 순간을 시간 안에 놓을 수 없는 시간의 초월자로 규정하게 만들며, 이러한 규정을 통해 순간은 자신의 존재성과 규정성마저 거부하게 되는 길로 나아간다. 시간의 초월자로서 순간은 시간 속 존재들을 초월해 존재하며 그들의 변화 근거로 작용한다. 그리고 플라톤에게 이러한 초월적 근거는 언제나 이데아이다. 그리하여 ‘순간에서의 하나’는 시간 속 가변적 존재의 근거인 초월적 이데아이다. 하지만 이러한 이데아의 초월성은 규정성을 거부하게 되고, 이러한 이데아의 초월성과 그에 대한 인식의 한계는 플라톤의 후기 이데아론에 대한 초석이 된다. (shrink)

The Boston-Theory about Now-Moments, Moments-of-Meeting and “present moments” up-to-date has not founded this impressive theory in a precise transcript. What are these moments in detail? How to recognize them? There are strong affinities between the microanalytic work of the Boston-Group and social-scientific conversation analysis, but there are deviations, too. In a first part, I will sound out affinities and differences intending to become able to more precisely determine what these moments are and how they can (...) be detected. In a second paper, I will turn to an interview with a holocaust-survivor with the methodological goal to find more methodological precise determinations of what now-moments are. (shrink)

A concept of the ‘actual now’ is introduced. The ‘actual now’ is negatively characterized by the fact that it is absent from the time-series. This does not mean that the ‘actual now’ is outside the time-series. For saying so would wrongly suggest the existence of an ‘outside’ where the ‘actual now’ could be located. Instead, one considers that the ‘actual now’ is just the name of ‘that with respect to which’ any event can be said to be past or future, (...) yet being no event by itself. It holds the same role with respect to time as Husserl’s transcendental ego with respect to the empirical self. McTaggart’s celebrated refutation of the reality of time is reinterpreted accordingly. To express this argument, one no longer needs to use the notions of ‘change’ or ‘time flow’, but only to point out the in-principle impossibility to refer to the ‘actual now’. (shrink)

"_The Moment of Complexity_ is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of _Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics_ The science of complexity accounts for (...) that inscrutable mix of chaos and order that governs our natural world. Complexity explains how networks emerge and function, how species organize into ecosystems, how stars form into galaxies, and how just a few sequences of DNA can account for so many different life forms. Recently, the idea of complexity has taken the worlds of business and politics by storm. The concept is used to account for phenomena as varied as the behavior of the stock market, the response of voting populations, and the effects of risk management. Even Disney has used complexity theory to manage crowd control at its theme parks. Given the startling development of new information technologies, we now live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With _The Moment of Complexity_, Mark C. Taylor offers a timely map for this unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept, but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic. Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes and captures a whole new zeitgeist in the making. To appreciate the significance of our emerging network culture, he claims, we need not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, and higher education. _The Moment of Complexity_, then, is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

There is a growing research interest in the value of participative arts-based strategies for enhancing wellbeing amongst adults living with dementia. One such intervention, centred around literature, is the group activity called Shared Reading. The purpose of this case study of weekly Shared Reading sessions of poetry in a care home in Merseyside is to investigate instances of how participants with mild to moderate dementia collaborate in processes of meaning-making that allow them shared experiences of being moved by poetry. An (...) under-thematised aspect of psychological wellbeing is the capacity for being moved and for sharing such moments. This article addresses the following question: how can the specific multimodality of the text in the Shared Reading model help to bring about such experiences? Using Stern’s concepts of Now Moments and Moments of Meeting, this case study discusses various instances of unpredictable, surprising and spontaneous intersubjective moments between participant and poem, participant and reader leader, participant and staff, participant and relative. (shrink)

It is the every person's daily phenomenal experience that conscious states represent their contents as occurring now. Following Droege (2009) we could state that consciousness has a peculiar affinity for presence. Some researchers even argue that conscious awareness necessarily demands that mental content is somehow held “frozen” within a discrete progressive present moment. Thus, phenomenal content seems to be minimally conscious if it is integrated into a single and coherent model of reality during a “virtual window” of presence.

Nurse clinician‐scientists are increasingly expected to show leadership aimed at transforming healthcare. However, research on nurse clinician‐scientists' leadership (integrating researcher and practitioner roles) is scarce and hardly embedded in sociohistorical contexts. This study introduces leadership moments, that is, concrete events in practices that are perceived as acts of empowerment, in order to understand leadership in the daily work of newly appointed nurse clinician‐scientists. Following the learning history method we gathered data using multiple (qualitative) methods to get close to their (...) daily practices. A document analysis provided us with insight into the history of nursing science to illustrate how leadership moments in the everyday work of nurse clinician‐scientists in the “here and now” can be related to the particular histories from which they emerged. A qualitative analysis led to three acts of empowerment: (1) becoming visible, (2) building networks, and (3) getting wired in. These acts are illustrated with three series of events in which nurse clinician‐scientists' leadership becomes visible. This study contributes to a more socially embedded understanding of nursing leadership, enables us to get a grip on crucial leadership moments, and provides academic and practical starting points for strengthening nurse clinician‐scientists' leadership practices. Transformations in healthcare call for transformed notions of leadership. (shrink)

A monumental work on the flow of time, from the universe's creation to "Now," by the best-selling author of Physics for Future Presidents. "Now" is a simple concept--you're reading this sentence now. Yet a real definition of "now" has eluded even the great Einstein. We know that time stretches and is affected by gravity and velocity. Yet, as eminent physicist Richard A. Muller points out, it is only today that we have all the physics at hand--relativity, entropy, entanglement, antimatter, and (...) the Big Bang--to explain the flow of time. With these building blocks in place, Muller reaches a startling conclusion: our expanding universe is continuously creating not only new space but also new time. The front edge of this new time is what we call "now," and this moment is truly unique--it is the only moment in which we can exercise our free will. Muller's thought-provoking vision is a powerful counter to established theories in science and philosophy, and his arguments will spark major debate about the most fundamental assumptions of our universe. (shrink)

Watchful waiting is a concept that is traditionally not associated with severe and enduring mental illness. This paper, however, boldly argues that the concept could be used as a ground-breaking and accessible antidote to the perceived inequality experienced by black service users experiencing both mild and severe mental illnesses in England. The novel concepts proposed in this paper are not intended to be consensual, but rather uncompromising to provoke critical thinking in mental health practice. A conceptual framework for watchful waiting (...) in mental health is suggested. (shrink)

The duration of “now” is shown to be important not only for an understanding of how conscious beings sense duration, but also for the validity of the phenomenological enterprise as Husserl conceived it. If “now” is too short, experiences can not be described before they become memories, which can be considered to be transcendent rather than immanent phenomena and therefore inadmissible as phenomenological data. Evidence concerning (a) the objective duration of sensations in various sensory modalities, (b) the time necessary for (...) sensations to enter consciousness and (c) the variability in the subjective sense of time's passing under different conditions is used to conclude that the duration of “now” can actually vary under normal conditions from about 10 ms to several seconds and in extreme cases up to several hours. Thus the immanent moment can be long enough to encompass a report of the contents of consciousness, making phenomenology a viable project. A further speculation from the evidence described is that consciousness takes discrete samples of the external world, at a rate inversely proportional to the duration of the “now” moment. (shrink)

In conversation, and in the company of a new generation of scholars working in the field, Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle re-explore the terrain and meaning of cosmopolitan studies now. This book offers a new survey and theorisation of cosmopolitan research, a burgeoning topic responding to increasingly complex patterns of human interaction in world society. It considers the question of cosmopolitan methodology: what are the methods needed for, or elicited by, studying cosmopolitan situations? and how are we to remain faithful (...) to the heteronomous human interiority and intentionality from which cosmopolitan moments are constructed? The volume focuses on the open-ended moment of ethnographic fieldwork that generates the concepts and methods needed to understand contemporary cosmopolitanization. The chapters cover a wide range of ethnographic situations and open up debate on what are the opportunities and responsibilities of a cosmopolitan anthropology in its exploration of human difference and commonality. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to conduct a Scenic Narrative Microanalysis of a modern dance performance, “Kontakthof” by Pina Bausch, performed by lay dancers over 65 years of age. SNMA analysis consisted of both individual and group sessions with students of the International Psychoanalytic University. The method was successfully applied to artistic material insofar as relevant moments in terms of “Now Moments” and “Moments of Meeting” were identified by the raters throughout the dance piece. The selection (...) of moments showed a notable overlap with the results of different and independent methods of analysis presented in this section. (shrink)

The duration of “now” is shown to be important not only for an understanding of how conscious beings sense duration, but also for the validity of the phenomenological enterprise as Husserl conceived it. If “now” is too short, experiences can not be described before they become memories, which can be considered to be transcendent rather than immanent phenomena and therefore inadmissible as phenomenological data. Evidence concerning (a) the objective duration of sensations in various sensory modalities, (b) the time necessary for (...) sensations to enter consciousness and (c) the variability in the subjective sense of time's passing under different conditions is used to conclude that the duration of “now” can actually vary under normal conditions from about 10 ms to several seconds and in extreme cases up to several hours. Thus the immanent moment can be long enough to encompass a report of the contents of consciousness, making phenomenology a viable project. A further speculation from the evidence described is that consciousness takes discrete samples of the external world, at a rate inversely proportional to the duration of the “now” moment. (shrink)

Singer returns to the major arguments and examples of his seminal 1975 work and brings us to the current moment. This edition, revised from top to bottom, covers important reforms in the European Union, and now in various U.S. states. On the flip side, Singer shows the impact of the expansion of factory farming due to demand for animal products in China. Singer describes how meat consumption is taking a toll on the environment, and factory farms pose a profound risk (...) for spreading new viruses even worse than COVID-19. Animal Liberation Now includes alternatives to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. Framed as an appeal to conscience, fairness, decency, and justice, it is intended for the supporter and the skeptic alike. -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This paper could be thought of as divided into two parts. In the first I show through a series of thought experiments that it is a mistake to think of one’s individual experience as necessarily belonging to only one particular place, time and organism. In repetitions across a universe large enough to host them, the particular experience that one finds oneself in, which can be individuated only by the detailed type that is the entirety of its momentary subjective content, would (...) exist equally in every occurrence of that type, much as a moment in the plot of a novel would exist equally in every copy of that novel. Each distinguishable subjective moment of experience is thus a ‘moment universal’. In the second part of the paper I draw from this the conclusion that there could not be any proper possessors of lines of experience - that there are no proper persons - no continuing subjects of consciousness and self-interest. About five years after writing this paper I came to see that the particular identity of an experience could not be confined by types of momentary subjective detail any more than it could be confined by particular places, times or organisms. All experience is equally here, now and mine and all conscious organisms are equally I. My argument for this crucial further development is presented in ‘One Self – The Logic of Experience’, Inquiry 33 (1991): pp. 39-68. (shrink)

A recently published hypothesis on the nature of time by physicist Richard A. Muller seeks to provide an objective account of the present moment and the ‘flow’ of time. Muller also claims that his hypothesis makes testable predictions. It is shown that the predictions offered cannot be used to test Muller’s hypothesis, that the hypothesis does not rate scientific status, has a number of questionable metaphysical premises, and is merely a re-fashioning of the Growing Block theory of time.

John Dewey's Experience and Education is an important book, but first-time readers of Dewey's philosophy can find it challenging and not meaningfully related to the contemporary landscape of education. Jeff Frank's Teaching in the Now aims to reanimate Dewey's text--for first-time readers and anyone who teaches the text or is interested in appreciating Dewey's continuing significance--by focusing on Dewey's thinking on preparation. Frank, through close readings of Dewey, asks readers to wonder: How much of what we justify as preparation in (...) education is actually necessary? That is, every time we catch ourselves telling a student--you need to learn this in order to do something else--we need to stop and reflect. We need to reflect, because when we always justify the present moment of a student's education in terms of what will happen in the future, we may lose out on the ability to engage students' attention and interest now, when it matters. Dewey asks his readers to trust that the best way to prepare students for an engaging and productive future is to create the most engaging and productive present experience for students. We learn to live fully in the future, only by practicing living fully in the present. Although it can feel scary to stop thinking of the work of education in terms of preparation, when educators reclaim the present for students, new opportunities--for teachers, students, schools, democracy, and education--emerge. Teaching in the Now explores these opportunities in impassioned and engaging prose that makes Experience and Education come alive for readers new to Dewey or who have taught and read him for many years. (shrink)

Consciousness has a peculiar affinity for presence; conscious states represent their contents as now. To understand how conscious states come to represent time in this way, we need a distinction between a mental state that represents now and one that simply occurs now. A teleofunctional theory accounts for the distinction in terms of the development and function of explicit temporal representation. The capacity to represent a situation explicitly as ‘now’ and compare it with past situations in order to prepare for (...) the future involves the separation of goals from the particular action required to attain them. That is, when a creature is able to consider alternative paths of action, it becomes necessary to conceive of alternate future times as distinct from the present moment. The developmental, functional approach of a teleofunctional theory is promising in its ability to integrate research from diverse empirical fields for support of its claims. (shrink)

There's a moment about halfway through Avatar where Jake Sully wakes up disoriented from the link to his avatar. “Everything is backwards now,” he says, “like out there is the true world and in here is the dream.” Jake's life in the Resources Development Administration (RDA) mining colony seems unreal, while his avatar life seems real. There are shortsighted and enlightened versions of anthropocentrism. In Avatar, the RDA corporation offers an example of anthropocentric thinking. Rather than frame the issue in (...) terms of shortsighted versus enlightened anthropocentricism, however, it is more helpful to think about superficial versus deep humanity. Avatar suggests that a superficial sense of our humanity involves shortsighted anthropocentrism. Not only does the movie work with the novel category of deep humanity, but it also depicts “relational reason”, the logic that deepens our humanity. (shrink)

Hoerl & McCormack's theory defines temporal behavior from an awareness of time, but lacks one critical element: the impact of “psychological presence” in the “moment now.” Central to experience of temporal non-stationarity: “Nowness” links future with past in the context of time flow. Does this differ between species? Evidence suggests not: Different temporal experiences between species requires greater critical evaluation.

In _“Beyond This Narrow Now”_ Nahum Dimitri Chandler shows that the premises of W. E. B. Du Bois's thinking at the turn of the twentieth century stand as fundamental references for the whole itinerary of his thought. Opening with a distinct approach to the legacy of Du Bois, Chandler proceeds through a series of close readings of Du Bois's early essays, previously unpublished or seldom studied, with discrete annotations of _The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches_ of 1903, elucidating (...) and elaborating basic epistemological terms of his thought. With theoretical attention to how the African American stands as an example of possibility for Du Bois and renders problematic traditional ontological thought, Chandler also proposes that Du Bois's most well-known phrase—“the problem of the color line”—sustains more conceptual depth than has yet been understood, with pertinence for our accounts of modern systems of enslavement and imperial colonialism and the incipient moments of modern capitalization. Chandler's work exemplifies a more profound engagement with Du Bois, demonstrating that he must be re-read, appreciated, and studied anew as a philosophical writer and thinker contemporary to our time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:736 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Carol Giardina MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism The first meeting of feminist protest in the 1960s was called to order by Dorothy Height, the president of the 800,000-member National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), in Washington, DC, on August 29, 1963. It was the day after the historic (...) March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (MOW).1 “We could hardly believe that after all we were doing in the Civil Rights Movement,” Height recalls, “the women came to feel that they were getting a kind of runaround” as they sought and were denied fair representation in the march because of their sex.2 “I was determined,” she said in her 2003 memoir, “to bring wise women together to learn and gather strength from the experience.”3 As “women talked freely of their concern about women’s participation,” Height observed, “we began to realize that if we did not... demand our rights, we were not going to get them. The women became much more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism in our dealings with 1. Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 146. 2. Dorothy Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 88. 3. Height, Open Wide, 146. Carol Giardina 737 the male leadership in the movement.”4 “That moment,” Height recalled, “was vital to awakening the women’s movement.”5 Black women’s fight for representation in the MOW appears narrowly framed in scholarly literature as a specific and isolated reaction to the sexism of male MOW planners. I argue, however, that the campaign of feminist protest meetings surrounding the MOW—and the political lessons that emerged—was a starting point in the chronology of the rebirth years of feminist upheaval in the 1960s. Why? Because the lessons of that campaign provided the crucial conceptual model of an “NAACP for women” that would be consciously and purposely adopted by the newly forming National Organization for Women (NOW). Together with Height, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the MOW planning committee, and longtime co-conspirator Pauli Murray, who spearheaded the MOW protests, were critical actors in NOW’s formation and brought the model to NOW’s more well-known white organizers. This model, and the Black women who developed it, opened the trajectory that led to NOW’s establishment in 1966, the first feminist organization of the decade. Black scholar activist Bernice Johnson Reagon called the Civil Rights Movement the “borning” struggle of its time.6 By the early 1960s, the impact of this phase of civil rights mobilization was felt nationwide from lunch counters in small towns to Congress and the Supreme Court. Since at least the 1955–1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, many thousands of African American women had been protesting, organizing, staging sit-ins and jail-ins, writing treatises, and giving speeches for Black civil rights. Although some white women did participate in the Civil Rights Movement, there were far fewer of them than African American women. Because of African American women’s collective confrontation with white supremacy, more of them were positioned to grasp the systemic nature of male supremacy and the need to fight it collectively. They understood sexism sooner than most white women because they 4. Height, “We Wanted the Voice,” 88–89. 5. Height, Open Wide, 145. 6. Mary King, Casey Hayden, Jean Wheeler Smith, Joyce Ladner, Prathia Hall, Kathie Sarachild, Michael Thelwell, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, “SNCC Women and the Stirrings of Feminism,” in A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, ed. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 150. 738 Carol Giardina had already learned the operations of power and exploitation. They were best prepared to challenge female oppression, as were the white women who participated in the Civil Rights Movement. After all, if the established order could be pushed back when it... (shrink)

In THE MISSING MOMENT a distinguished molecular biologist explores the nature of time and argues for a radical rethinking of how time affects our sense of self, our mortality, and the future of science and medicine. Only in the past few years have we learned enough about the brain for this remarkable book to be written. We know now that our brains continually filter the present through memories and emotions of the past. In fact, strictly speaking, we live in the (...) past: since it takes the brain a second to process perceptions, what we think is the present actually happened a second ago. We also know where and how the unconscious operates and how painful memories are repressed; repression is not a psychological defect but an evolutionary necessity for our species. All thought, even the most rational, is permeated with unconscious feelings, fears, and emotions. Scientists, like the rest of us, make choices for reasons they don't understand. Thus the direction of scientific research is driven by private demons, not public needs. We can see this in medical science, where doctors develop the tools to diagnose genetic diseases they cannot cure, bringing pain rather than comfort to patients. Today science can do more good than ever before, and it can also do more harm. The time has come for scientists and others to abandon the notion that there is any such thing as the disinterested pursuit of truth. Instead, they must strive for a therapeutic self-awareness of their unconscious agendas and work for larger goals than personal immortality. (shrink)

Consider the idea of the present moment in time. This is one of the most imprecise of concepts. Does it last for an instant or for three seconds? Do all the parts of a brain share the same present moment? Is the present moment one is conscious of even coherent enough to compare to the position of the hands of a clock? In a relativistic universe, can it ever be sensible to talk about a present? To the best of our (...) knowledge, the answers to all the above questions must be had at the expense of the integrity of the idea of ‘now'. People do not make very good clocks -- we are poor at sensing the absolute passage of time, and, even if we were better at it, relativity would only allow us to share a ‘now’ with compromised accuracy. Despite the looseness of the present moment, the fact that we can talk about it at all, even with imprecision and ambiguity, is an important bit of evidence to keep in mind when considering consciousness. Let's suppose the universe is, for practical purposes, deterministic. The universe in this case isn't ‘doing anything’ that can distinguish one moment from another. And yet the human perspective does achieve such a distinction. The vaguely perceived present moment is distinguished from other moments. This human ability reminds one of the old joke about a dancing bear: it's not that the bear dances well, but that he dances at all that charms an audience. The very concept of a present moment is only meaningful to one who is trapped in time by being conscious. (shrink)

Since the publication in 1975 of Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology, the range of Virilio's critical works and their impact have now become clear within a variety of subjects. Making astonishing interventions into art and architecture, geography, cultural studies, media, literature, aesthetics and sociology, the momentous implications of which have yet to be entirely understood, Virilio is the cultural theorist for our troubled twenty-first century. Responding to this growing interdisciplinary interest, Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies comprises Sean Cubitt's critical (...) overview of Virilio's aesthetics of disappearance, an important newly translated text by Virilio interrogating the impact of contemporary art, and eight other major original essays by noted scholars on the wide scope of Virilio's writings, inclusive of Adam Sharr on Virilio and the architect Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus chapel, and Nigel Thrift's crucial assessment of Virilio's City of Panic. Substantial coverage of Virilio's essential texts such as The Information Bomb is presented alongside his hypermodern conjectures on television and speed, globalization, media and representation. Navigating Virilio's 'accident of art', the 'aesthetics of disappearance' and widespread cultural devastation, additional essays bring together considerations of financial adversity, war, calamity and the apocalypse. Dazzling yet perceptive, these texts on the 'post-nuclear imagination', terror and dread are simultaneously creative and theoretical extrapolations from Virilio's 'scenic imagination' and companion essays to his most contemporary, highly original and powerful books such as The Original Accident and The University of Disaster. Clearly introduced by the editor, Virilio Now is the preeminent single volume on Virilio's work and world available today."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Lindroos constructs an alternative interpretation on history, time, politics and art, approached through the moment of the Now (Jetztzeit). In the first section, she elaborates the critique of chronologic-linear way of understanding history. Through a close reading of Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay, the second section examines the problems of origins, authenticity and traditions of art through the ideas of artistic avant-garde and politicization of aesthetics. The end of the book discusses the concept of image and the new images as (...) an Image-Space (Bildraum) of action. (shrink)

[Newspaper Opinion] Before the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying fall in oil prices, a carbon price would have been immediately painful for the countries that imposed it, but far better for everyone over the longer term. In this unprecedented moment, introducing a carbon price would be beneficial both now and for the future.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Now?Mike AbellThe cry broke the church’s uncomfortable silence. It actually was more of a moan than a cry. It was deeper, coming from her core. I’d heard it only once before and knew it as a sound caused by a loss that will never be recovered. No one in the church had to turn to discover its source. We all knew the mother had entered to say goodbye (...) to her 19–month–old son.We watched as the now composed mother, along side her husband, followed the small casket—a family rendered incomplete. As they passed our pew, my wife clutched my arm and we wept tears of sympathy, guilt and fear.Just 15 months earlier our now, 2–and ½–year–old son, Jun, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor not dissimilar from the child in the casket. The tumor has a different name, but it’s equally complicated, and comparably rare and aggressive.Over nine months, Jun endured two craniotomies, three rounds of induction chemo, three rounds of high dose chemo with stem cell rescue, 28 days of proton radiation, a sub–dural shunt placement, a port placed and removed, a broviac placed and removed and many, many blood and [End Page 16] platelet transfusions. As of his last scan, there was no evidence of tumor.Jun has now been out of treatment for six months. His hair has grown back. He’s stronger. The meals have stopped arriving. And we no longer are the recipients of sad eyes at playgrounds and restaurants.In many ways we have returned to a somewhat normal life. If you didn’t know Jun was in remission for a brain tumor, you wouldn’t know. Despite all this, cancer still strangles us with fear.Brain tumors often come back. Too often. We’ve heard a few different numbers on the likelihood. And while we’ve never paid too much attention to statistics, they are too scary to ignore. Especially knowing that should it recur, there is no cure. This is our day–to–day reality.A lot of our time is spent analyzing, over analyzing and obsessing. We watch him closely. Every time he stumbles, coughs, or sleeps fifteen minutes longer than normal, we wonder if it’s something more. I’ve called our oncologist about a 99–degree temperature. Something I wouldn’t have done during treatment (I usually waited to 100). I’ve questioned whether hiccups are a sign of recurrence. Admittedly, I’ve even Googled that last one just to be sure.All the anxiety builds the closer you get to an MRI date. My son has scans every three months so I’m beginning to recognize the cycle. It starts a couple weeks out. Normally it begins as a twinge the moment the date is set. But each day it grows, occupying more and more of my mind. This is not to say, I don’t think about it everyday. I do. But the thoughts become more paranoid and frequent. Worst–case scenarios play out. It’s different from the time during treatment. We always had the comfort of knowing that there is still more treatment.By the time we reach MRI day, bring Jun back to the machine room, watch the anesthesiologist put him under, and leave him to be scanned for the next two and half hours, I feel close to nauseas. In my mind, at this point, someone knows. I know they may be a technician and are not necessarily trained to read an MRI. But they know. They’ve seen it before.There usually is a waiting period between the time of the scan and the time you can meet with your oncologist or someone else qualified to read and interpret the scan. I do whatever I can to make that window as narrow as possible. I leave radiology with a disc in hand and head directly to the clinic to pass it off. I’ve heard of people waiting days for an appointment. That’s not an option for me. There would be no eating, no sleeping, and no resting heart rate without knowing. Fortunately, our oncologist is... (shrink)

This special issue of the _South Atlantic Quarterly_ focuses on theory’s role in contemporary politics, reading, and critiques of literature. Although there will always be questions raised about what theory is, what it can do, and its overall efficacy, “Theory Now” argues that those questions obscure the fact that theory is, and always has been, the precondition for thought. This issue demonstrates what it means to engage with theory in this particular historical moment. One contributor takes a critical look at (...) Michel Foucault’s final lectures, which have only recently been published in French, and evaluates their potential to instruct contemporary theory and politics. Another contributor contemplates Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s legacy and insists that the only way to read her work is to anticipate the effects it may have in the future rather than assume that interpretations of her scholarship are now settled. With this issue, recently appointed editor Michael Hardt inaugurates “Against the Day,” a new section composed of short essays that focus on a topic of contemporary political importance. (shrink)

If we take the indexical, “I”, to be epistemologically identical across different contexts, as in, for example, it is the same “I” that at one moment observes, “I see a puddle of water on the floor”, and then, subsequently, exclaims, “I detect a leaking tap”, and, furthermore, we attribute not only self reference but self awareness in the use of the indexical, “I”, then a question arises as to how the “I” finds itself to be in reference to the speaker (...) in one context and not another. We cannot look to the ingredients of the context that the “I” inhabits for the answer because, based upon the above assumptions, the identity, or character, of the “I” stands independently of the context of the speaker. The answer, I argue, requires both the admission of the unreality of space and time, as well as an explanation as to why we have a sense of the here and now despite space and time being unreal. To this end, I turn to the juxtaposition of Kant’s a priori forms of inner sense and outer sense to explain how the cognitive faculty arrives at a sense of time and place despite the declared unreality of time and space. To sustain this explanation in the face of the problem of localisation, I draw on the full implications of Kant’s transcendental idealism in which the properties of time and space are not only withdrawn from things as they exist externally to the mind but also from mental representations insofar as mental representations can be said to exist in themselves. (shrink)

For the first time Thich Nhat Hanh shares his inspiration and experience of living in stillness and timelessness. Written to pull you into the moment as he sees it, Inside the Now offers teachings inspired by the spirit of poetry. More personal than the majority of his writing, Inside the Now shares the Zen Master's experience using poetry and meditation to endure and move beyond violence and oppression. Inspired by Being Time by Zen Master Dogen, Thich Nhat Hanh shares short (...) meditations along with revelations from his past to give the reader a sense of entering a space of timelessness. In these meditations, he reveals his own doubts and his own searching. (shrink)

In the spirit of Pierre Hadot’s analysis of the value of the present moment in Hellenistic philosophies on happiness, the following argues that the Neoplatonic tradition heralded a similar view about the soul’s well-being. Primarily, the value of the present moment in Plotinus focuses on his arguments regarding the immortal soul’s desire for eternity that is lived in the ‘actuality of life’ right now. In contrast, the following analyzes the later Platonists and argues that Proclus offers a more practical and (...) thick understanding of human happiness in relation to the present. Overall, for Proclus the good is revealed in the connective nature of the present moment, a good discovered in the soul’s temporal activities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Catholic Postliberalism in the Ruins of "the Catholic Moment"James F. KeatingA historically conversant reader interested in the current state of discourse regarding Catholicism and American politics will find a good amount of familiar discord. He will discover, for example, that the life issues continue to bedevil. Can a Catholic vote in good conscience for an abortion-rights candidate over a pro-life competitor if that candidate is more supportive of other (...) policies in line with Catholic Social Teaching? This issue has, of course, been with the American Church for some time now, even if it has taken on renewed urgency given the coincidence of the overturning of Roe v. Wade with the presidency of Joseph Biden, the second Roman Catholic to hold that office and a recent convert to pro-choice stridency. The action of the Supreme Court and the battles within the various states will ensure that abortion remains at the political heart of American Catholicism for years to come. One can say something similar about other issues, such as immigration, gun control, and economic justice. None of this will be found to be particularly surprising. The same cannot be said, however, of the return of a more fundamental question, one thought to have been settled since the mid-1960s. That question is whether Roman Catholicism and American liberal democracy are incompatible to the extent that Catholics ought to seek, if possible, another constitutional arrangement, one more friendly to the Catholic cause.Our reader would be familiar with the standard narrative that, while the existence of a medieval Church in a modern polity that upholds religious freedom had been a matter of concern since the dawn of the Republic, it [End Page 991] became serious only in the first half of the twentieth century as the number of Catholics and their influence grew. Until that time, American bishops, such as Archbishop John Ireland (1815–1918), made a special point of speaking publicly on the benefits of American freedom for the Church, just as they made clear that Catholics could be as patriotic as any other citizen. If there were tensions, they came primarily from anti-Catholic bigotry and governmental overreach. Things changed, however, when the point at issue was no longer primarily a religious one of Catholic believers infecting their Protestant neighbors with erroneous doctrine, but rather the threat so many Catholics posed to the fate of American freedom itself. In a postwar America concerned with the spread of Soviet communism, Paul Blanshard found a ready audience for his scholarly anti-Catholic diatribes, American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949) and Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power (1951).1 Without much difficultly, he pointed to various statements of Gregory XVI and Pius IX condemning the separation of Church and state, the freedom of religious conscience, and democracy as the best governmental form. To top things off, he had Leo XIII's Testem Benevolentiae, an 1899 letter to the Cardinal Archbishop James Gibbons of Baltimore, warning him and his fellow bishops not to speak of the constitutional arrangement of the United States as a political ideal. While Leo had positive things to say about the American system, his admonition followed the traditional line: while constitutional protections of religious freedom are necessary when Catholics are in the minority, the ideal situation is a state that officially confesses and supports the Catholic religion. Of more recent vintage, Blanshard could quote the response of America's best-known Catholic theologian, Monsignor John A. Ryan, to the question of whether non-Catholics would be permitted to practice their religion in this ideal state:If these are carried on within the family, or in such inconspicuous manner as to be an occasion neither of scandal nor of perversion to the faithful, they may be properly tolerated by the State,... Quite distinct from the performance of false religious worship and preaching to the members of the erring sects, is the propagation of the false doctrine among Catholics. This could become a source of injury, a positive menace, to the religious welfare of true believers. Against such an evil they have a right of protection by the Catholic State... If there is only one true religion, and... (shrink)

After acknowledging Wim Drees’s excellent contribution to the science-religion debate, this essay considers three ‘beyonds’ unhelpful to a response to the climate emergency. These are ‘beyond as sudden destruction’, stemming from an over-reliance on the apocalyptic texts of the New Testament; ‘beyond as up’, focussing on the release of the immortal soul from the material world; and ‘beyond time’, addressing the cosmological predictions of the ultimate end of the universe through God’s transformation of creation. The essay proposes in contrast that (...) the same event in the present can be viewed through four parallel lenses, of which eschatology is one. It draws on proposals from Drees’s Beyond the Big Bang and the detemporalised eschatology of Kathryn Tanner to propose an eschatology of the present moment, informed by divine judgment and longing, and the human vocation to respond to that judgment and longing with parallel longing, and with both action and consolation. (shrink)

Evidence‐based practice (EBP) first appeared on the healthcare horizon just over a decade ago. In 2003 its presence has intensified and extended beyond its initial relation to medicine embracing as it does now, nursing and the allied health disciplines. In this paper, I contend that its appearance and subsequent growth and development are the effects of potent ‘regimes of truth’, four of which bear the names: positivism, empiricism, pragmatism and economic rationalism. My aim is to show how EBP generates the (...) controversy it does because its nature and methods are inextricably interwoven with the way it has become politicised and professionalised. This exegesis is an attempt to outline how the combined effects of the four forms of rationality mentioned above allow for both the methods and objectives of EBP to be constructed as they are, while at the same moment producing the particular effects of knowledge and power in terms of who sells and who buys the idea of EBP in the culture of contemporary healthcare. (shrink)

With special relativity, we seem to be facing a conundrum. It is a very well-tested theory; in this way, the Minkowski spacetime must be “capturing” essential features of space and time. However, its geometry seems to be incompatible with any sort of global notion of time. We might only have local notions of now (present moment) and time flow, at best. In this note, we will explore the possibility that a pretty much global notion of now (and time flow) might (...) be hiding in plain sight in the geometry of the Minkowski spacetime. (shrink)

The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida’s final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign”, as the explicit themes of the seminar—namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal—come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world. The book begins with Derrida’s analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context of (...) his other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–30, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events—the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq—and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida’s corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end—just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments. (shrink)