Este artigo tematiza o desamparo vivenciado pela consciência ante a ausência de bases sólidas para seus anseios de felicidade e para suas representações simbólicas. Com esse propósito, toma como objeto de reflexão um dos ensaios filosóficos de Albert Camus, O mito de Sísifo, equacionando a possibilidade de uma ética que estilize a vida, sem que se minimize a dolorosa precariedade da existência humana. Posteriormente, em diálogo com alguns textos de M. Foucault, a reflexão procura estabelecer os vínculos possíveis entre a (...) ética camusiana e a ética como uma estética da existência, tal como pensada entre os gregos antigos. This article discusses the helplessness experienced by the consciousness vis-à-vis the absence of solid bases for its longings for happiness and for its symbolic representations. For this purpose, the object of reflection of the article is one of Albert Camus' philosophical essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, and we inquire into the possibility of an ethics that stylizes life without minimizing the painful precariousness of human existence. Making reference to certain texts by Foucault, we attempt to establish possible connections between Camus' ethics and an ethics of the aesthetics of existence as found in the thinkers of ancient Greece. (shrink)

Cette réflexion s’articule en trois mouvements. Le premier aborde la question de l’évolution de la précarité comme objet d’expérience. Le deuxième tente de montrer l’évolution des processus de base auxquels se livrent les jeunes en situation de précarité lorsqu’ils veulent manifester leur sentiment d’existence et les opérations au moyen desquelles ils parviennent à construire ce qu’ils appellent une « petite vie ». Enfin, dans le troisième mouvement, se pose la question de l’originalité des relations symboliques qu’ils expriment, étant entendu que (...) cette réflexion se fonde sur l’expérience vécue d’une catégorie de jeunes dont les dispositifs situationnels de précarité portent à penser, au moins a priori, qu’ils se laisseraient plus facilement mener par les déterminations qui pèsent sur leur vie, qu’ils ne s’en écarteraient.This project is composed of three interrelated elements. The first deals with the problem of precariousness as a fact of experience. The second attempts to describe the evolution of the basic processes to which young people have recourse in a situation of precariousness when they wish to express their sense of existence, as well as the processes that allow them to succeed in constructing what they call a « day-to-day existence ». Thirdly and finally, we address the issue of the original aspect of symbolic relations expressed by young people. It is understood that the project situates itself upon the life experiences of a category of young people whose situational mechanisms of precariousness lead us to believe, at least a priori, that these young people would more easily let themselves be driven by social determinants that weigh them down than they would be to step away from them. (shrink)

Cet article présente une réflexion à propos de la souffrance des professeurs des écoles au Brésil. L’examen de ce phénomène a été réalisé à partir de la définition que Paul Ricœur propose de la « souffrance », à l’occasion de sa conférence « La souffrance n’est pas la douleur ». Dans le pays étudié, la souffrance est souvent liée à la précarité de l’exercice du métier d’enseignant : les classes en sureffectifs, les bas salaires, le cumul des postes, les ressources (...) matérielles dégradées et insuffisantes. Nous visons, cependant, à examiner les phénomènes de la souffrance à partir de la condition désignée dans nos recherches comme « précarité symbolique du métier d’enseignant ». De cette condition découle un changement dans la possibilité pour l’enseignant d’exercer ses capacités en tant qu’agent humain, ainsi que dans sa relation avec les autres. C’est donc à partir de ces deux axes que nous proposons une phénoménologie de la souffrance enseignante. (shrink)

The article discusses two bioart projects that bring the symbolically core human substances of blood, sweat and tears into technologically mediated relationships with plants and fungi to explore human kinship with other species: Tarah Rhoda’s BS&T (short for ‘blood, sweat and tears’) and OurGlass, and Saša Spačal’s MycoMythologies: Patterning. The article analyses the art projects through the lens of the molecular gaze and different perspectives on kinning, bringing anthropological conceptualizations of kinship together with Haraway’s pathways to connect with other species. (...) How can bioart use technologies to explore interspecies kinship through a molecular gaze? And may such artworks contribute to the toning down of human exceptionality in the face of a precarious future? We find that artworks providing a molecular gaze on interspecies biological processes may risk a decontextualized approach to complex relational processes but may also create new visions of filiation even with biological organisms imagined to be genetically distant from humans, thus spurring awareness of the fragile interrelationships among species. (shrink)

A very special kind of feast belongs to the Christian Orthodox tradition: there is a specific liturgical celebration of the Images in the so-called Sunday of Orthodoxy. While in many cultures images are employed in order to celebrate an historic event, this is the only feast in which, on the contrary, images are celebrated for themselves. Nonetheless, the role of images in Orthodoxy is not univocally and positively accepted. In fact, the title’s expression.the wolf as a shepherd. belongs to a (...) Desert Father and refers to the role of images in our mental life. This is not reported by a heretical iconoclastic document, but by the well-known Philokalia, a kind of handbook of Orthodox Aesthetics. This paper aims to present these two aspects in their paradoxical partnership. First, I will present some historical, symbolic and liturgical aspects of this feast. Thus, we should be able to understand better why many contemporary authors claimed that the origins of our visual culture can be traced in this Feast. However, if we comprehend the philosophical value of Byzantine icons, we realise that they have little to do with our contemporary images, no matter whether we mean artistic, religious or media images. We often talk about the.power of images., but just to blame them -as if they were autonomous entities- or to praise them, in a generalized aestheticization of contemporary life. Iconophobia and iconodoulia, I claim, are emerging as ontologically impoverished versions of the former Byzantine theoretical models. What falls into oblivion is the paradoxical status of the image as.appearance of the essence of Being. that demands as a condition of its own existence its self-sublation. These dialectics, conceptually inspired by the Hegelian logic, are fully present in Byzantine Aesthetics, where the feast is considered as a precarious image, held in memory of a future image-loss event known as eschaton. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo analiza cómo se encadenan los planos de lo ontológico y lo óntico en la Teoría Política del Discurso de Ernesto Laclau. Se concluye que, desde el plano ontológico, la hegemonía constituye una forma político-discursiva de articulación y universalización relativa, precaria, contingente y parcial de los particularismos en significantes vacíos que actúan como puntos nodales. Desde el nivel fenoménico-político, Laclau pone en juego estos conceptos para mostrar el desplazamiento y contaminación discursiva entre lo particular y lo universal en (...) la operación hegemónica, que transforma las identidades políticas y construye un orden comunitario y un nuevo sentido común. Desde el nivel ético-político, la conceptualización de la hegemonía se articula a la construcción discursiva de una estrategia socialista y a una democracia radical. Este proyecto político lucha contra los esencialismos y las formas de explotación y opresión social y por un horizonte de liberación que amalgame las luchas de los grupos subordinados y reconozca las diferencias y particularidades como constitutivas y deseables. La teoría formal del populismo presenta algunas inconsistencias óntico-ontológicas en este esquema. Sin embargo, su sobredeterminación simbólica disuelve las disyunciones tajantes entre la lógica y el análisis histórico-político y entre la forma y el contenido. Ello pone de manifiesto el mutuo anudamiento entre lo óntico y lo ontológico y la centralidad de la noción gramsciana de hegemonía para el análisis político y crítico de fenómenos y procesos históricos contemporáneos.: This article analyzes how the ontological and ontic planes are interconnected in Laclau’s political discourse theory. It is concluded that, on the ontological level, hegemony constitutes a political-discursive form of relative, precarious, contingent and partial universalization and articulation of particularities in empty signifiers that act as nodal points. On the phenomenological-political level, Laclau shows the displacement and discursive contamination between the particular and the universal in the hegemonic operation which transforms political identities and builds a communitarian order and a new commonality. On the ethical-political level, the conceptualization of hegemony is articulated as the discursive construction of a socialist strategy and a radical democracy. This political project fights against essentialisms and forms of exploitation and social oppression of subordinate groups, and in favor of a horizon of liberation that recognizes conflicts and differences as constitutive and desirable. The formal theory of populism presents some ontic-ontological inconsistencies in this scheme. However, its symbolic overdetermination dissolves the disjunctions between logic and historical-political analysis and between form and content. This reveals the mutual interconnection between the ontic and the ontological, and the central relevance of the Gramscian notion of hegemony for the political and critical analysis of contemporary historical phenomena and processes. (shrink)

The Transamazon (Br-230) Highway in the state of Pará has had its image frozen for decades: themuddy road, the cars stopped or tractors tearing down a forest, empty of people, opening the amazonianspace to a project of an authoritarian modernization. Reproduced by and reproductive of the teachingsof geography – including for children and teenagers who live on the edge of the road, in settlements andcommunities on the sideroads (vicinais) – in textbooks and discourses that frame regional scale (astotalizing and explanatory) (...) instead of scales emplaced in situ. The result of such dinamics is not restricted to a gap between what one experiences as a phenomenon and what one learns as a concept,it goes towards the reproducibility of an “unexistance of the creative potential” of the people living onthe sideroads, places of the construction of a geography, as well as mapping, that, from there, push usto rethink the unwavering foundations of such frosen images , of the generalistic maps and theirstandardizing projections, scales and simbology. To do so, we have, along with students and teachersof 2 schools on the sideroads of the municipality of Pacajá (PA), in the period of the beggining of 2016to 2019, done several geocartographic exercises: mind maps developped with students about the past,present and the future of the vicinal (sideroad). That is, an attempt to provoque the body into the mapand the map into the body in a context of a limit situation of existance, given the precarious schoolconditions as well as the diferent challenges lived by students and teachers. Such corporal engagementas an attempt to think the sideroads as a location in construction and, from there, a situated opening tothe world, is what gives meaning to geocartography. It is possible to conclude that: a) facing thesedimentary representations paralysing and overview of the Transamazon in the state of Pará , thephenomenological exercise of reactivation of geocartogrphying provoques the emergence of asubjective significance that does not separate the emotional and symbolic perspectives on creatingmaps; b) the corporal engagement and the situated perspective of students and teachers, not only hasthe value of a totalyzing exemple, but that of an opening to what is new as they bring up a simbologythat reveals the need to build a dialogical bridge between what is lived on the sideroads and the worldthat classifies it as “unexisting”. (shrink)

Group solidarity requires that members are committed to solidarity norms. Addressing the question of how such commitments are socially produced, the starting point of this article is Lindenberg's Theory of Social Rationality and its notion of solidarity frames. These frames consist of solidarity as a goal of action and associated stocks of knowledge and moral feelings. TSR makes it clear that solidarity frames are fragile and precarious. They must be regularly recharged with motivational energy and symbols in order to prevail (...) over compet-ing motives. However, TSR cannot satisfactorily explain how this works. This shortcoming is addressed by Collins' Interaction Ritual Chains Theory. It is argued that solidarity frames are a potential outcome of interaction rituals and it is clarified under which conditions this can be expected. A distinction is made between three essential types of rituals: identity rituals, governance rituals, and exchange rituals. (shrink)

In keeping with the focus of this special section, we concentrate initially on some of the problems of autonomist Marxist concepts such as `immaterial labour', `affective labour' and `precarity' for understanding work in the cultural industries. We then briefly review some relevant media theory (John Thompson's notion of mediated quasi-interaction) and some key recent sociological research on cultural labour (especially work by Andrew Ross and Laura Grindstaff, the latter drawing on Hochschild's concept of emotional labour), which we believe may be (...) more useful than autonomist concepts in developing empirically informed critique. The main body of the article then consists of an ethnographic account of working on one particular television programme, an account that aims to build on these theoretical debates. We analyse how the power to provide exposure or not to individuals in the talent show genre in contemporary television (a feature that derives from the symbolic power of producers to make texts that are then circulated to massive numbers of people) and disputes between commissioners and independent producers about how best to go about doing so (an organizational issue) are registered in the form of stress, anxiety and sometimes poor working relations among project teams of young television researchers (a matter of working conditions and experiences). We especially focus on how additional pressures are borne by these workers because of the requirements to undertake emotional labour, involving the handling of strong emotions on the part of talent show contributors, and to maintain good working relations in short-term project work, requirements generated by the need to ensure future employment. Ultimately, then, we support the view that creative work is `precarious' — but we go beyond the generalizations involved in concepts such as immaterial labour and affective labour to show the specific ways in which precariousness is registered and negotiated in the lives of young workers in one industry. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Amy Allen’s approach of gender issues in The Politics of Our Selves is precarious and partial insofar as it is focused on an analysis of subjection aiming to explain “how subordinated individuals come to be psychically invested in and attached to their subornation” 2. Although this is an undeniable aspect of gender subordination, it does not tackle the complexity of its symbolic and material causes. My main thesis is that Allen does not offer (...) the best model for feminist Critical Theory in light of the complexities of capitalist societies, much less to the feminist struggles in the Global South, deeply marked by poverty, social inequality, racism and all sorts of violence against women. (shrink)

This chapter shall mainly focus on strategies of resistance against the alleged neutral perspective adopted by the liberal tradition of social and political theory vis-à-vis the plurality of personal expectations about happiness and well-being. I shall first support that material and symbolic hindrances that individuals and groups find as they pursue happiness, as well as stave off pain and suffering, belong to a set of troubles that politics ought to face and attempt to forestall in the entangled context of (...) global neoliberal society. Second, I aim at tackling how the current provision of global standards of forms of life, spread as a homogeneous norm by large companies and media, brings about large spaces of precariousness, lack of recognition and social death, which are often misinterpreted in public as a subjective uneasiness, when not directly viewed as a personal disability. Finally, I shall explore whether the classical liberal disclaimer before economic and social misfortune of citizens has been seized by neoliberalism as an excellent opportunity to make of liveability an unexpected source of business and profitability, drawing as a conclusion that it engages a deep disrepair of our affective life and health. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chanter’s Democratizing PhilosophyMoira FradingerDeinvesting Fetishism, Embracing Radical DemocracyA radical democrat: This is how I have come to see Tina Chanter in our intellectual exchanges. She ceaselessly alerts us to the conditions of production of our privileges; the exclusions on which our social, political, sexual, racial identities are constructed; the blood of those others who “have crafted our eyes,” to recall Donna Haraway’s famous manifesto (Haraway 1988, 585);1 the suffering (...) that allows for our happiness; the “danger” that defines our “purity,” to pay homage to Mary Douglas’s early anthropological exploration of boundary-formations (Douglas 1966). Chanter’s questioning of all the exclusions that give meaning to our identities and social orders is not oriented to “include” that which is excluded, as if she aimed at an “adding approach.” Rather, Chanter aims at thinking about how inclusions can change what Jacques Rancière refers to as the “cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible” (Rancière 2009, 72). At stake is how to make inclusion speak of difference instead of sameness.Chanter has questioned major feminist thinkers (Irigaray, Kristeva) as to their failure to avoid reinstating exclusions, that is, to avoid the fetishistic logic, thoroughly studied by Chanter, whereby excluded elements are assigned a fixed meaning. Recently she has engaged Rancière’s thought on the radical premise of equality as a starting point for politics and critical thought. But long before this new development, and within the ranks of her discipline, Chanter was a practicing democrat of sorts in the Rancièrian sense, bringing to bear those concepts “with no part” (to use Rancière’s phrase) in philosophy, concepts coming from other disciplines, in order to denaturalize reified “partitions of the sensible” (again Rancière 2010, 36) as they appear in the discipline of philosophy.2 In other words, she was engaged in making philosophy hear the [End Page 144] “difference” of other regimes of thought without reducing them to philosophical categories, with the premise that they are neither “truer” nor “lesser” than philosophical thought (in contrast to certain philosophical traditions of understanding “art,” as Chanter has argued).3 Thus, Chanter’s engagement with such “impurities” (from the point of view of philosophy) as literature, performance, reception studies, or psychoanalysis redraws the boundaries of her home discipline.Rachel Jones calls this practice “Chanter’s ethics of restlessness,” an alertness to the ways in which we, as feminist critics, may reproduce the exclusions that we denounce as constitutive of the systems of representation we inhabit. Double alertness at that, or perhaps an ethical dimension proper to the democratic questioning of boundaries: Chanter alerts us also to the fact that our questioning is never enough. We need a scene of interlocution that can keep our questioning open when we are tempted to close it. We unravel processes of exclusion but we always remain “blind” to the exclusions effected by our own critiques. It is perhaps her engaging of psychoanalysis—for all her critique of its conceptualization of sexual difference—which shows here: a commitment, if I may say so, to the subject of the unconscious, to being subjected to representational systems modeling our perceptions beyond our consciousness. This is to redeem, for philosophical thinking, the strange failure of consciousness that we call “the unconscious,” to paraphrase Lacan’s musings on this concept in Seminar XI (Lacan 1998, 17–64). In other words, Chanter’s conscious attention to exclusions is also an attention to the experience of that which our language makes or leaves silent. It is an experience of an excess or a void—always an experience of precariousness with respect to our symbols, a fragility of our means of expression. A structural failure; a failure of “language as such” that is always already a failure of our language.The inclusion of the subject—individual or collective—is crucial here, and this is where I see the crux of Chanter’s “restlessness”: For it is not a question of philosophizing about “the” essential nature of language as always failing but rather of pointing to the radical singularity through which the failure becomes manifest in any given system of... (shrink)

Academic achievement is an important issue for families and Haitian adolescents from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. It represents a necessary step to escape difficult living conditions and achieve some social mobility. Any failure of these adolescents academically risk of them know a lot more difficult than that of their parents. It is therefore important to consider the factors that explain the academic success of some young people playing in a precarious environment. This article aims to analyze, in a clinic psychosocial perspective, (...) the results of a qualitative study of eight (8) Haitian school adolescents in some poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. The focus is on the construction of the narcissistic rage of the young as mobilization of psychic energy in the service of a wounded self, resulting in the case of these subjects, certain educational practices of their parents and a plug gradual realization of the precarious socio-economic conditions that characterize their lives and different symbolic insults, humiliation and contempt associated with these precarious conditions. Thus, the analysis shows how this insatiable thirst for revenge and self-repair, related to narcissistic wounds which are the subject of these teenagers, are a key element of their educational investment. (shrink)

This text examines the tensions and the dissonances in the relation between religion and public sphere in contemporary Brazil. Based on a Sociology and on an Anthropology of the phenomena of secularization and secularity, the purpose is to demonstrate the “porosity” of the Brazilian public/political system with the religious milieu. By applying a socio-historical perspective, the work attempts to understand how the boundaries between religion and politics were precariously constructed throughout the constitution of our State in Brazil, without ever having (...) been institutionally well-delimited. This vacuum, which generated concessions on the part of the State to major Christian religions, guaranteed public legitimacy to their religious symbols in official state spaces, which are, in principle, neutral and secular. However, the 1988 Constitution represented the influx of modern and secular legislation that legitimized subjects of rights such as women, black people, indigenous peoples, LGBTs, environmentalists, etc. Given that background, this reflection aims at contributing to the interpretation of the complexity involved in the multiple and contradictory presence – in the public sphere – of both major Christian religions – which are based on an agenda of conservative religious values – and liberal and libertarian projects organized by segments of civil society and public agents, which generate tensions and dissonances. To understand this reality – as a mosaic of interactions and antagonisms –, we work with the notion of “pluri-confessionality” of Mexican sociologist Roberto Blancarte and also with the notions of secularity of “recognition” and of “integration” of French political scientist Philippe Portier. Hence, we attempt to reach theoretically and empirically a broader and nuanced understanding of our public-political system in the relation with the religious dimension. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to map out the perspective of ecstatic naturalism and its corollary theology of deep pantheism. Ecstatic naturalism begins and ends with the fissuring between nature naturing (nature perennially creating itself out of itself alone) and nature natured (the innumerable orders of the world). Nature naturing and its pulsating potencies could also be named: der Wille (Schopenhauer), firstness (Peirce), the transcendental psychoid (Jung), and creativity (Whitehead). Deep Pantheism rejects theism, with a fully transcendent deity, and (...) panentheism, with its deity both in and beyond nature. The “deep” in my form of pantheism refers to the otherness of the unfathomable depths of the unconscious of nature. The theism entailed is that of gods and goddesses, finitely located, that are archetypal images. The symbol of the Great Mother is a premier locus for grounding and enveloping the human psyche. The travail of mind involves the fitful and precarious transitions between finite and embedded mind within nature natured and the emergence of an awareness of the depths of the human, cultural, collective, and natural modes of the unconscious via nature naturing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 291-293 [Access article in PDF] Schizophrenia and the Void Jean Naudin and Jean-Michel Azorin It was Eugene Minkowski who, from the 1920s on, introduced the French to the work of Eugen Bleuler, whose student he had been. In the introduction to his first book, Schizophrenia: Psychopathology of Schizoids and Schizophrenics (Minkowski 1927), Minkowski nevertheless notes with regard to Bleuler that he could not (...) allow himself "to be restricted to this student's task." For Minkowski, Bleuler certainly enjoys the great merit of having substituted the notion of schizophrenia for that of dementia praecox and of having described autism with precision. But—Minkowski says—autism is badly defined when, relying upon the concept of Spaltung, Bleuler fails to break free of associationist psychology. Minkowski justifies his critical attitude by appealing, as does Binswanger, to Husserl and above all to Bergson. For Bergson, dissociation is a normal feature of thought. If, for Minkowski, it is important to pay attention to autism, it is because it attests not to a certain fragmentation of consciousness, but rather to an attitude whereby the subject seeks to preserve the precarious equilibrium of a personality that is threatened by a void.The article translated into English for this special issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology prefigures Schizophrenia and, like an earlier article on the theme of "morbid rationalism," already announces certain key concepts. Here these concepts are, so to speak, caught in their embryonic state, and one is forced to recognize with Tatossian (1993) how radically Minkowski differs from his master, Bleuler, in the choice of specific cases. By according exemplary significance to cases of "poor autism," Minkowski focuses on the reflexivity of the subjective experience of the patient rather than on the proliferation of the delusional state, which lends itself more readily to clinical observation. We must remember that Minkowski is above all a healer. If, like Bleuler, he is interested in the problem that generates the illness, it is only in order to be able to heal the patient. It is therefore not so much the isolated problem that interests him as the way the person tries to deal with it. So it should not come as a surprise that one of the essential themes of this article is what Minkowski calls "compensation." Like the psychoanalytical concepts to which Bleuler refers, compensation is a dynamic concept. But Minkowski takes care to distinguish the compensation that characterizes the interrogative attitude from motives of a more psychological kind aimed at meeting a lack by symbolically satisfying a desire. In the purely phenomenological sense in which Minkowski takes it, compensation does not refer to a hidden motive. It represents a way of getting around the void or sense of emptiness that results from the schizophrenic person's inability to project himself into the future by pursuing the practical goals of normal, daily life. In this case, the dynamic does not feed off the vicissitudes of drive but off the élan vital—or rather, off the decline of élan vital that such persons suffer. [End Page 291]Minkowski particularly insists upon the fact that Paul's interrogative attitude is not simple curiosity, even if Paul's questioning began with sexual curiosity. Confronted with incessant questioning reminiscent of a child, a psychoanalyst would be likely to invoke infantile curiosity concerning procreation and sexual difference. Minkowski, however, seeks to show that the prevailing motive in Paul's case is not so much desire for knowledge as the vital necessity of finding a way of—can one put it this way?—playing for time. In other words, the interrogatory attitude is a way of avoiding confrontation with the realm of practical concerns that, at bottom, makes the patient suffer. If this realm makes him suffer, it is because the absence of any vital attachment leaves him floating in a kind of void. The fundamental problem of schizophrenia is therefore identified as the loss of meaning going along with a deficiency in the individual's attachment to practical reality. Practical reality, or to put it otherwise, an orientation toward practical activity... (shrink)

“Mother dear, I simply cannot weave my cloth; I'm overpowered by desire for a slender young man—and it's Aphrodite's fault.”“The Greeks required a woman to devote herself to the sedentary tranquillity of woolwork.”Sappho, Xenophon: these two juxtaposed texts, chosen for their dissonant tones, well introduce the Greek representation of weaving as a privileged metaphoric terrain defining the presence and the essence of an imaginary feminine, often expressed in antithetical terms, as a polarized place, with an ever precarious equilibrium. As discourse, (...) weaving is no longer a naturalistic depiction of an edifying occupation of the gynaeceum, an answer to the day-to-day realty of household tasks. As a literary object or ritualized activity, the loom appears as a “gendered” space, a place symbolic of feminine activity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Listening Eye: Postmodernism, Paranoia, and the HypervisibleJerry Aline Flieger (bio)Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. Trans. of La transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes. Paris: Galilée, 1990.Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Trans. of L’inhumain. Paris: Galilée, 1988.Slavoj Zizek. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques (...) Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992.“To the insides of the ear belong those who have a sight of internal hearing.” That’s the nocturnal look, the listening eye.—Emmanuel Swedenborg, cited in Lyotard, The InhumanPostmodernism, Yet AgainIn this essay, I shall take a cue from Slavoj Zizek’s discussion of Lacanian anamorphosis, or skewed perspective (Looking Awry), in order to read three dissimilar works alongside one another, and from a “paranoid” slant. For in spite of sometimes radically incommensurate subject matter, the three works I discuss here—The Transparency of Evil (Jean Baudrillard), Looking Awry (Slavoj Zizek) and The Inhuman (Jean-François Lyotard)—all share a focus on the dehumanizing effects of technology as determinants of what Lyotard has called the postmodern condition. 1 Moreover, all three works themselves adopt something like a paranoid perspective, suggesting that under the sway of an ethic of sheer performativity, human contact—face to face—has been rendered obsolete by interface.In the bleak vision of The Transparency of Evil (1993), for instance, Baudrillard describes an isolated disembodied satellite man, cut loose from his moorings: “The centrifugal force of our proliferating technologies has stripped us of all weight.... Freed of all density, all gravity, we are being dragged into an orbital motion which threatens to become perpetual” [30–31]. Similarly, in “The Ecstasy of Communication” (1983), Baudrillard describes a robotic subject mesmerized by pornographic hypervisibility, [End Page 90] “more visible than the visible... the obscenity of what no longer has any secret, or what dissolves completely in information and communication” [130–31]. 2Like Baudrillard, Lyotard (The Inhuman) describes the loss of dimensional intersubjectivity, suggesting that space is no longer an enabling interval between subjects, the scene of the exchanged gaze: contemporary cyberspace is the scene of communication without community, saturated with hypervisible information. But while for Baudrillard, we are already in weightless orbit, in a postcatastrophic, fractal aftermath, for Lyotard our fate is not yet cast, although adumbrated disaster—the end of the species or of the universe—provides a telos for our existence.Slavoj Zizek is not nearly so metaphysical, nor so glum, as his fellow post-philosophers, but he is every bit as concerned with the optical, Looking Awry. Zizek is a patient and even cheery exegete of Lacan, attempting to “introduce” Lacanian thought by looking at film, detective fiction, and other user-friendly instances of modern culture as templates of theory. Indeed, compared to his fellow travelers, Zizek is resolutely quotidian, even earthbound, focusing on the contemporary human subject as consumer/spectator, seated not in a satellite capsule or at a computer terminal but at the movies, popcorn in hand.Yet in spite of his goodwill, Zizek’s take on postmodernism is anything but sanguine: he too depicts a subject who is prey to the fascination of overexposed “obscene” virtual reality (X-rated Hitchcock, if you will), and always threatened as well by the eruption of the menacing Lacanian real into the web of symbolic reality—an intrusion that awakens the paranoid “post-man” from an absorption in the image on the screen, with a reminder of the precariousness of all that appears evident or meaningful. Thus in “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity” [Looking Awry, chap. 8], Zizek describes a blot or stain that sticks out or refuses assimilation to the totalizing gaze, eclipsing the heretofore meaningful and legible symbolic universe with an ineffable real that “produces a radical opacity and blocks every essay of interpretation” [151]. I suggest that Zizek’s notion of the obscene object as blot—like the hair on the camera lens that “disturbs” our absorption in the screen—as well as Lyotard’s notion of obdurate matter, may... (shrink)

Alexander’s call for a cultural sociology that goes beyond hermeneutic reading to an understanding of how cultural texts are instantiated in action is considered in relation to earlier attempts to establish a tradition of symbolic analysis in American sociology. The sociological provenance of the dramaturgical model that Alexander appropriates from performance studies serves to underline the precariousness of cultural sociology as a project within the American academy. Alexander’s thesis on the critical importance of ‘refusion’ to the life of (...) societies is endorsed, as is his argument that the specificity of ‘post-traditional’ societies cannot be elided by drawing directly on conceptual tools developed in analysis of ritual in ‘traditional’ societies. His argument for sociological agnosticism in relation to the moral qualities of symbolic action, on the other hand, is called into question. (shrink)

To interpret the possibilities of a Lefort-inspired theory of citizenship requires first that we depart from traditional liberal and republican theories of citizenship that conceive of the citizen's attachment to the political order in terms of interest or virtue. A Lefort-inspired theory of citizenship must also reconfigure the object of citizen attachment from an ‘empty place’ of power to an ‘absent-presence’. The nature of modern democratic citizenship is framed in terms of ambivalence as a symptom of the symbolic order (...) of democracy, and the precarious nature of political attachment in modern democracy is read as paralleling the precariousness of the symbolic order of modern democracy. In the face of this ambivalence, the possibilities of a Lefort-inspired theory of citizenship are conceived of explicitly not in terms of identification between competing political principles but in terms of a partial gesture of love to a metaphysical limit of democratic political society. (shrink)

This article argues that Badiou's account of subjects of truth-procedures requires the Lacanian subject in order to be intelligible. Without an account of the Lacanian subject as void and precarious with respect to all identifications, Badiou is unable to explain how the subject of truth procedures is able to throw off its identifications and symbolic roles that characterize its existence as an individual or body in the situation, taking on, instead, fidelity to the truth that follows from an event.

The semi-commune “Little Home” is a cultural enclave whose beliefs and idiosyncratic, seemingly chaotic interactions are based on gender relations translated into the terms of the purity and impurity of the female body. This framework is the scene of fictional and real kinship relations that play distinct roles within this mini-society and are dominated by symbolic types, which determine their social context. This article examines a ritual of purification performed by the Father/leader of the semi-commune. In this ritual, the (...) Father enters into a symbolic type that is impure to restore male-perceived order and dominance. This is in response to the disordering capacity of a phenomenon I call a “wave,” which is perceived as the potential of the female. (shrink)

This book is the first to explore in detail the role that symbolic representation plays in the architecture of Kant's philosophy. Symbolic representation fulfills a crucial function in Kant's practical philosophy because it serves to mediate between the unconditionality of the categorical imperative and the inescapable finiteness of the human being. By showing how the nature of symbolic representation plays out across all areas of the practical philosophy - moral philosophy, legal philosophy, philosophy of history and philosophy (...) of religion - Heiner Bielefeldt offers a unique perspective on how these various facets of Kant's philosophy cohere. (shrink)

L’étude de l’empire a connu récemment un regain d’intérêt, même si (et peut-être parce que) sa définition pose problème. Elle permet en effet d’étudier plusieurs aspects du pouvoir symbolique : les formes d’administration, les modes d’appropriation d’un territoire, les intensités de la souveraineté, les marquages spatiaux de la domination, etc. L’empire de Charles Quint représente de ce point de vue un modèle heuristique, dans la mesure où l’empereur s’est rapidement trouvé confronté au gouvernement de territoires éloignés, de statuts différents, mais (...) rassemblés dans l’aspiration universelle de l’empire chrétien. (shrink)

The capacity to classify social groups legally is a central characteristic of modern states. Social groups, however, often resist the classificatory schemas of the state. This raises the following question: how do modern states exercise symbolic power in social fields beset by acute classification struggles? While existing scholarship has demonstrated that states exercise symbolic power, there has not been a concomitant effort to systematize and theorize the various strategies through which they do so. This article addresses this lacuna (...) through examining classification struggles centered on a number of “heterodox” religious groups that have historically been perceived as deviant from mainstream religions. Specifically, it looks at Falun Gong in China, Mormons in the United States, and Baha’is in Egypt. The analysis draws attention to three strategies through which states exercise symbolic power: coercive classification, wherein the deviant group is forcibly fixed as such in law; juridical normalization, whereby the deviant group is allowed to enter the mainstream by shedding “problematic” ritual practices; and legal erasure, whereby the deviant group is kept out of the official classificatory system so that it becomes a legal non-entity. In summary, this article both identifies the religious field as a critical domain in which states of various ideological orientations exercise symbolic power and deploys this analysis to identify distinct strategies through which they do so. (shrink)

Symbolism is a primary characteristic of the mind, deployed and displayed in every aspect of our thought and culture. In this important and broad-ranging book, Israel Scheffler explores the various ways in which the mind functions symbolically. This involves considering not only the world of science and the arts, but also such activities as religious ritual and child's play. The book offers an integrated treatment of ambiguity and metaphor, analyses of play and ritual, and an extended discussion of the relations (...) between scientific symbol systems and reality. What emerges is a picture of the basic symbol-forming character of the mind. In addition to philosophers of art and science, likely readers of this book will include students of linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, religion, and psychology. (shrink)

This book deals with correspondence truth. It critically analyses selected known correspondence truth theories and proposes - as an alternative - the symbolic truth conception in which correspondence is a symbolisation and not copying.

A ring is said to be clean if every element of the ring can be written as a sum of an idempotent element and a unit element of the ring and a ring is said to be nil-clean if every element of the ring can be written as a sum of an idempotent element and a nilpotent element of the ring. In this paper, we generalize these arguments to symbolic 2-plithogenic structure. We introduce the structure of clean and nil-clean (...) symbolic 2-plithogenic rings and some of its elementary properties are presented. Also, we have found the equivalence between classical clean(nil-clean) ring R and the corresponding symbolic 2-plithogenic ring 2-SPR. (shrink)

v. 1. Language.--v. 2. Mythical thought.--v. 3. The phenomenology of knowledge.--v. 4. The metaphysics of symbolic forms.

In this volume, the contributions view the human being primarily as _animal symbolicum_ who creates, interprets and is affected by symbolic structures. The book examines modern and postmodern crises of symbolic structures, which are processes of transformation that also provide new opportunities.

Purpose This paper aims to explore the technologization of peace work through “remote support monitors” that use social and digital media technologies like social media to alert local violence prevention actors to potentially violent situations during demonstrations. Design/methodology/approach Using a distributed cognition lens, the authors explore the information processing of monitors within peace organizations. The authors adopt a qualitative thematic analysis methodology composed of interviews with monitors and documents from their shared communication and discussion channels. The authors’ analysis seeks to (...) highlight how information is transformed between social and technical actors through the process of monitoring. Findings The authors’ analysis identifies that the technologization of monitoring for violence prevention to assist nonviolent activists produces two principal and related forms of transformation: appropriation and hidden attributes. Monitors “appropriate” information from sources to fit new ends and modes of representation throughout the process of detection, verification and dissemination. The verification and dissemination processes likewise render latent supporting informational elements, hiding the aggregative nature of information flow in monitoring. The authors connect the ideas of appropriation and hidden attributes to broader discourses in surveillance and trust that challenge monitoring and its place in peace work going forward. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to focus on the communicative and information processes of remote support monitors. The authors demonstrate that adoption of social and digital media information of incipient violence and response processes for its mitigation suggests both a social and technical precarity for the role of monitoring. (shrink)

In a prior article, “Symbolic Difference,” I followed the indications provided by certain data in order to focus on the ontological locus of the symbol. A difference then appeared in the origin, which revealed itself through gesture, sign, use, and trace. The symbol, distended by definition between man and his origin, is the privileged region of language where this difference is thematized for itself. The search for the concealment-manifestation at work in the symbol led to the difficult problems surrounding (...) its interpretation, and it culminated with a summons or provocation towards existence. I mentioned some historical examples in which the symbol’s efficacy with regard to a life was blatant: the symbol opens up a path whose course makes one experience the origin. The condition of this experience is to “live without why,” to let that which is, be. (shrink)

In a prior article, “Symbolic Difference,” I followed the indications provided by certain data in order to focus on the ontological locus of the symbol. A difference then appeared in the origin, which revealed itself through gesture, sign, use, and trace. The symbol, distended by definition between man and his origin, is the privileged region of language where this difference is thematized for itself. The search for the concealment-manifestation at work in the symbol led to the difficult problems surrounding (...) its interpretation, and it culminated with a summons or provocation towards existence. I mentioned some historical examples in which the symbol’s efficacy with regard to a life was blatant: the symbol opens up a path whose course makes one experience the origin. The condition of this experience is to “live without why,” to let that which is, be. (shrink)