Paul Ricoeur declares that “being-entangled in stories” is an inherent property of the human condition. He introduces the notion of narrative identity—a form of identity constructed on the basis of a self-constructed life-narrative, which becomes a source of meaning and self-understanding. This article wishes to present chosen instances of life writing whose subjects resist yielding a life-story and reject the notions of narrative and identity. In line with Adam Phillips’s remarks regarding Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), such works—which (...) I refer to as fragmentary life writing—emerge out of a profound scepticism about any form of “fixing” oneself and confining the variety and randomness of experience to one of the available autobiographical plots. The primary example of the genre is Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1975)—an inventory of approximately 1,500 memories conveyed in the form of radically short passages beginning with the words “I remember.” Despite the qualified degree of unity provided by the fact that all the recollections come from the consciousness of a single person, the book does not arrange its content in any discernible order—chronological or thematic; instead, the reader is confronted with a life-in-fragments. Although individual passages could be part of a coming-of-age, a coming-out or a portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man narrative, Brainard is careful not to let any of them consolidate. An attempt at defining the characteristics of the proposed genre will be followed by an indication of more recent examples of fragmentary life writing and a reflection on its prospects for development. (shrink)

The work of scientists and doctors in advancing genetic research and its applications has been accompanied by plenty of discussion in the popular press—from Good Housekeeping and Forbes to Ms. and the Congressional Record—about such ...

This essay addresses the question of when evidence for a stronger claim H1 also constitutes evidence for a weaker claim H2. Although the answer “Always” is tempting, it is false on a natural Bayesian conception of evidence. This essay first describes some prima facie counterexamples to this answer and surveys some weaker answers and rejects them. Next, it proposes an answer, which appeals to the “Dragging Condition.” After explaining and arguing for its use of the Dragging (...) class='Hi'>Condition, the essay argues that the Dragging Condition provides a general account of, and solution to, the counterexamples with which the essay began. The essay briefly discusses the relevance of the Dragging Condition to the recently much-discussed topic of “transmission failure” in epistemology, applies the Dragging Condition to the problem of “bootstrapping” in epistemology, and discusses three important objections to the view defended in the essay. (shrink)

In the face of documented difficulties in the public understanding of genetics, new metaphors have been suggested. The language of information coding and processing has become deeply entrenched in the public representation of genetics, and some critics have found fault in the blueprint metaphor, a variant of the dominant theme. They have offered the language of the recipe as a preferable metaphor. The metaphors of the blueprint and the recipe are compared in respect to their deterministic implications and other associations. (...) The likelihood of the recipe metaphor framing cognition in more useful ways is called into question. (shrink)

In the last third of the twentieth century, humanists and social scientists argued that attention to genetics would heighten already‐existing genetic determinism, which in turn would intensify negative social outcomes, especially sexism, racism, ableism, and harshness to criminals. They assumed that laypeople are at risk of becoming genetic essentialists. I will call this the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” This model has not accurately predicted psychosocial impacts of findings from genetics research. I will be arguing that the failure of the (...) model can be traced to its inability to recognize the complexity of laypeople’s attitudes; its incorrect theory of how beliefs, attitudes, and discourse function; and its blindness to how academics’ own interests can override the available evidence. More specifically, I suggest that the substantial data about laypeople’s deployment of genetics supports what I will call the “laypeople are strategic essentialists model” better than the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” The strategic essentialists model holds that people tend to store multiple categories, including multiple causal forces, that they deploy “strategically” to serve context‐dependent goals. It will be difficult for academics to reorient ourselves to model laypeople as sophisticated strategic essentialists rather than as naïve genetic essentialists. Perhaps a little shift, however, will be of value. (shrink)

People respond to metaphors as much with regard to the emotions that they generate as to their referential, comparative contents. Interviews with non-geneticists about preferred metaphors for gene-environment interaction that illustrate this tendency are reported. These interviews also reveal the dynamic tendency of such emotional responses. A second set of interviews shows that lay people may preferentially use a metaphor of "virus" or "disease" for talking about genes, as opposed to the coding metaphors transmitted through the mass media and reportedly (...) preferred by geneticists. An explanation based on the differently situated emotions of these groups is proposed. It is proposed that the prominence of emotions in responding to genetics indicates the importance of incorporating analyses of emotions instead of simple principles into policy formulation about genetics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT “Lockdown!” has articulated our collective and individual fear response to the novel coronavirus. Two regnant specialized discourses fostered by the academy—science and ideology critique—could not redirect this inadequate response nor generate their own adequately broad and focused social responses. This suggests the desirability of the academy adding phronesis as a goal for its pedagogical practices.

Anorexia nervosa remains an enigma among Western cultures. Various causal explanations have been offered, encompassing biological, psychological, and sociocultural models. These explanations, however, focus on the immediate or proximal mechanisms of causation. A more thorough understanding of anorexia nervosa can be achieved by understanding the relationship between these factors and ultimate causation, the level of explanation which deals with individual reproductive fitness. This paper reviews the biological, psychological, sociocultural, and evolutionary models and indicates a necessary synthesis between proximate and ultimate (...) levels of causation in examining the anorexia nervosa puzzle. (shrink)

The human propensity for casting our social worlds as "us against them" is perhaps the primary impediment to deep and broadly inclusive understandings of the workings of rhetoric. Many decades ago, Kenneth Burke assailed that barrier with regard to Adolf Hitler. Surrounded by the satisfactions of vituperation against the leader of one of the world's most heinous social movements, Burke begged his readers to make space for understanding how Hitler's rhetoric brought about what it did. Philippe-Joseph Salazar's Words Are Weapons (...) makes a similar contribution for our era. He asks us to resist the gratifications generated by dismissing as "Islamaphobic" any critical analysis of what he calls "caliphal"... (shrink)

In order to study drag reduction mechanism in mud parts’ operation of surface machine tools for paddy field, this paper takes floating plate, the main working part of laminating mechanism, as the research object and systematically analyzes the mechanism of action of elevation angle, curved angle, penetrating angle, and local microstructure of floating plate on working resistance and local fluid flow characteristics of the laminating structure based on VOF model in Fluent. Using ship mechanics theory and fluid lubrication theory, the (...) drag reduction mechanism under different structural parameters of the floating plate is analyzed. The results show that, compared with the ordinary floating plate, the pressure difference resistance can be reduced by increasing the elevation angle by 60°, curved angle by 20°, and mud separation angle by 20°. The increase of the concave nonsmooth bottom surface structure can reduce viscous frictional resistance, and the total working resistance after structural optimization is comparatively reduced by 48.3%, with lowered hilling height in the forward direction and improved lubrication condition of the bottom surface, forming liquid lubrication effect. This study can provide theoretical references for the optimization design of muddy soil mud parts, mud-machine interaction research, and the development of paddy field laminating mechanism. (shrink)

Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change. By Celeste Michelle Condit.

Linear regression and its variants have been widely used for classification problems. However, they usually predefine a strict binary label matrix which has no freedom to fit the samples. In addition, they cannot deal with complex real-world applications such as the case of face recognition where samples may not be linearly separable owing to varying poses, expressions, and illumination conditions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the kernel negative ε dragging linear regression method for robust classification on noised and (...) nonlinear data. First, a technique called negative ε dragging is introduced for relaxing class labels and is integrated into the LR model for classification to properly treat the class margin of conventional linear regressions for obtaining robust result. Then, the data is implicitly mapped into a high dimensional kernel space by using the nonlinear mapping determined by a kernel function to make the data more linearly separable. Finally, our obtained KNDLR method is able to partially alleviate the problem of overfitting and can perform classification well for noised and deformable data. Experimental results show that the KNDLR classification algorithm obtains greater generalization performance and leads to better robust classification decision. (shrink)

Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change. By Celeste Michelle Condit.

Insights into the problem of our relation to language Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: A Rhetoric in Transition reflects the present transitional nature of rhetoric and society. Its purpose is to relate the rhetorical theory of Burke to the theories of four major European philosophers--Jürgen Habermas, Ernesto Grassi, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida--as they discuss the nature of language and its central role in society. This book describes a rhetorical world in transition but not a world in chaos. It points (...) to the centrality of symbolism in theories of language and rhetoric and illustrates Burke's influence as a pivotal things and theorist in the communication arts and sciences, suggesting that the observations regarding shifting paradigms and perspectives made by other scholars are indeed emergent in the realm of rhetoric. It also regards the powerful impact of language and symbolic action in both the critique and construction of human knowledge and augurs a central role for rhetoric in the intellectual and social transformations of this and the next century. (shrink)

This essay examines the Brazilian deforestation debate to explicate the beginnings of a post-modern theory of argumentation. Modernist argumentation reflects two distinct approaches, found in the deforestation controversy. The first approach, ‘universal minimilization,’ presumes that the survival of humanity is sufficient grounds upon which to base argument. The alternative, ‘strategic manipulation,’ results in argument being employed as a technical device to advance one's interest. In place of the modernist approach, we offer an ecocentric theory of argumentation. This conception calls for (...) individuals to set aside differences in values to sustain humanity but at the same time to be sensitive to differences in costs and benefits that accrue from common efforts to persons differently situated. Additionally, this view operates with a tacit working assumption that environmental questions are not discrete entities to be evaluated separately. Rather, people must act collectively on a range of interconnected issues to ensure survival. (shrink)

It is well known that the probabilistic relation of confirmation is not transitive in that even if E confirms H1 and H1 confirms H2, E may not confirm H2. In this paper we distinguish four senses of confirmation and examine additional conditions under which confirmation in different senses becomes transitive. We conduct this examination both in the general case where H1 confirms H2 and in the special case where H1 also logically entails H2. Based on these analyses, we argue that (...) the Screening-Off Condition is the most important condition for transitivity in confirmation because of its generality and ease of application. We illustrate our point with the example of Moore’s “proof” of the existence of a material world, where H1 logically entails H2, the Screening-Off Condition holds, and confirmation in all four senses turns out to be transitive. (shrink)

It is well known that the probabilistic relation of confirmation is not transitive in that even if E confirms H1 and H1 confirms H2, E may not confirm H2. In this paper we distinguish four senses of confirmation and examine additional conditions under which confirmation in different senses becomes transitive. We conduct this examination both in the general case where H1 confirms H2 and in the special case where H1 also logically entails H2. Based on these analyses, we argue that (...) the Screening-Off Condition is the most important condition for transitivity in confirmation because of its generality and ease of application. We illustrate our point with the example of Moore’s ‘‘proof’’ of the existence of a material world, where H1 logically entails H2, the Screening-Off Condition holds, and confirmation in all four senses turns out to be transitive. (shrink)

Which and how much of our current drives –individually and as a global community– are driven by ancestral, inherited traits or imprinted on our animal condition? An attempt to approximate this intriguing query is explored here. It pertains to our identity, social constructions, and our ecological interaction. The origin of our species has its roots in ancestral habits, behaviors and a survival drive, transformed from changing environmental conditions. We were not born in a mother-of-pearl cradle nor were protected by (...) magical agents. We grew on the thread of time within the complex nature of bio-ecological interactions. They carved our identity, our genetic expression and the possible origin of our beliefs, resulting in an arch of various behaviors and cultural phenotypes. The biological nature of our construction dragged through millennia through species trials with variable rates of survival times provided traces of inconstant and multiple evolutive chains. Our modern cultural contexts –norms, priorities, values– appear as newly born. Yet, socio-cultural ecology upon which our brain organization and behavioral constructs derive include shared basic behavioral drives with non-human primates. The emergence of humans with a sophisticated language allowed the development of complex virtual constructs based on symbolism and the instruments of culture. This has enhanced cognitive capacity and emotional interaction supported by processes anchored in neural networks distributed within cortical and subcortical levels. Basic, essential neural connectivities were preserved during the evolutionary development of the species. The biological matrix and inheritance are usually segregated from the social and cultural construction. Sophistication of our cultural development tends to set up a divisive fault from primitive foundations of non-human animal behavior (survival, territory, reproduction, prevalence, access to nutrients). These are basic templates and underlie essential individual and group basic drives, and cultural constructs. Humans have not ceased from being territorial (whether applied to virtual or material dimensions). Various forms of social inequities have been expressed in our time and through human history. On evolutive terms, the notion of individual social status within the social structure of a gregarious community generated the probability of an individual ascending or descending that hierarchy. Thus, becoming a potential figure of leadership, or the subordinate or the marginalized. Is there an evolutive antecedent for human social inequities? How do we construct a different future? Post-industrial societies became increasingly dependent on material consumerism and technological cultures, to the point of embraining them; conceptually becoming technological hybrids. Are these a developmental must, or an uncontrolled spin-off of human inventiveness affecting our future? Construction of supernatural agents played a significant role in the socialization/domestication processes. Agents’ intentionality flourished through altered states of conscience, or under fear of natural phenomena attributed to supposed inhabitants of the Natural Kingdom or virtual beings. This imaginary universe, reinforced by ritual behaviors, contributed to control personal/collective distress of various possible origins and conditioned our degrees of emotional and cognitive freedom. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of computer simulations with a community of actors playing a large number of voluntarily iterated two-person-PD. The simulations are designed to enable uncooperative actors to exploit partners, leave them and find a new partner who knows nothing about their previous behavioral history. Hit-and-run exploitation should thrive under these conditions. However, as Schuessler (1989; 1990) has shown, the setting is highly unfavorable to uncooperative players. The present study extends this result to a wider set of strategies (...) which can alternatively stay with defectors {and try to improve them) or leave them quickly. In addition, a class of seemingly clever strategies is introduced which try to exploit the expected dynamics of looking for a partner. Still, a high amount of egoistical cooperation can persist in the present scenario. (shrink)

To see nationalism as a cultural artifact is to argue against attempts at essentializing it. Anderson claims that nationalism can be better understood as obliquely analogous to such categories as religion and kinship. Membership in a nation draws on the vocabulary of filiation whereby one comes to understand oneself in relation to ancestors long gone and generations yet to be born. In addressing pasts and futures, nationalism resituates identity with reference to death, one’s own as well as others’. Herein lies (...) nationalism’s affective appeal, that which makes it possible to sacrifice oneself for the “motherland.” It lends to the accident of birth the sense of continuity and converts mortality into something that is meant for as much as it is realized by one. By placing one in a certain relationship to death and generativity, nationalist discourse therefore frames the arbitrariness of existence. “It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny”.However, while nationalism tends to mine the idioms of kinship and religion, the historical conditions of its emergence undermine the logic and stability of these inherited categories. Thus Anderson defines nations as “imagined communities.” Built on the rubble of traditional polities, the nation invokes a radically secular subjectivity that sets it apart from its predecessors. Dynastic states presumed power and privilege as functions of the purity of bloodlines guaranteed by a divine order. Colonial states as dynastic states in drag replicate the obsession with hierarchy by reorganizing social and epistemological categories according to a metaphysics of race and progress. By contrast, the nation envisions a more egalitarian community. “Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”. It thus reveals the mutability of all sorts of hierarchies. Rather than take power for granted as natural and inherited, nationalism asks about “rights” and thereby opens up the problem of representation: who has the right to speak for whom and under what circumstances? Vincente L. Rafael is assistant professor in the department of communication, University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. (shrink)

In trying to say what modernism is , we must remind ourselves that it cannot and must not—to be properly described and understood—be confined only to the arts of music, literature, painting, sculpture, theater, architecture, those arts with which we normally associate the term “culture.” Modernism can be said to embrace, in the broadest terms, not only the arts of Western culture but also science, technology, the family, marriage, sexuality, economics, the politics of democracy, the politics of authoritarianism, the politics (...) of totalitarianism, and such academic disciplines as philosophy and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology . Its influence and effects have been all-pervasive. No corner of twentieth-century life has escaped its profound alteration of both the individual and society. It has radicalized all levels of human existence.What, then, is modernism?Some have described it as a state of “chronic revolution,” that is, revolution against the past, against tradition, against history itself. Others have pointed to its voracious appetite for innovation, for the search for the “new,” for the hunger to be “original”—to be the first and last with something unique and difference, whatever that something might be or in whatever area of human endeavor it might arise.Still others have characterized modernism as the application to all realms of human life of forms of structural rationalization, that is, finding rationally structured ways of being and doing regardless of consequences and, more especially, rationalizing away the mysteries and questions which have to do with meaning, that is, morality and ethics—those areas that lie outside the purely rational. And still others have viewed modernism as a condition of freedom within which the individual can be himself, unfettered and uninhibited, released from the drag of superego and conscience, a separate entity of being, unanswerable to others whether in the form of individuals or society as a whole.Last but not least, there are those who continue to see modernism as a self-perpetuating form of avant-gardism, always at the point of the interface between the present and the future, always ready to move on to the next stage because living itself is a process of constant change, constant motion, perpetual transformation. George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music. He is currently writing his fifth symphony, on a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1983 he retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the Humanities. (shrink)

A work of striking originality bursting with unexpected insights, _The Human Condition_ is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of (...) our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its original publication, contains an improved and expanded index and a new introduction by noted Arendt scholar Margaret Canovan which incisively analyzes the book's argument and examines its present relevance. A classic in political and social theory, _The Human Condition_ is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely. Hannah Arendt was one of the leading social theorists in the United States. Her _Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy_ and _Love and Saint Augustine_ are also published by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading (...) dilute political agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender is a reader comprised of many of Himani Bannerji's English writings over a long period of teaching and research in Canada and India. Bannerji creates an interdisciplinary analytical method and extends the possibilities of historical materialism by predominantly drawing on Marx, Gramsci, and Dorothy Smith. Essays here instantiate Marx's general proposition that while all ideology is a form of consciousness, all forms of consciousness are not ideological. Applying this insight (...) to issues ranging from patriarchy through race, class, nationalism, liberalism and fascism, Bannerji breaks through East-West binaries, challenging the mystifying approaches to the constitution of the social, and shows that a sustained struggle against ideological thinking is at the heart of a fundamental socialist struggle. (shrink)

If biotechnology can be used to "upgrade" humans physically and mentally, should it be done? And if so, to what extent? How will biotechnology affect societal cohesion, and can the development be controlled? Or is this a Pandora's box that should remain closed? These are just a few of the many questions that arise as a result of the increasing ability of technology to change biology and, eventually, transform human living conditions. This development has created a new horizon of a (...) posthuman future that will influence contemporary life and politics in a number of ways. The book gathers researchers within the fields of biotechnology, medicine, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Among the contributors are Francis Fukuyama, Julian Savulescu, Maxwell Mehlman, Lone Frank and Chris Hables Gray. (shrink)

The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has threatened ethnographic inquiry, undermining its quintessential characteristic. Participant observation, then, has been thoroughly dismembered by the radical measures implemented to prevent the spread of the virus. This phenomenon, in short, has dragged anthropologists to a liminal state within which ethnography is paradoxically caught in an onto-epistemological unstable vortex. The question of being here and not there, during the pandemic, is epitomised in the instability of different spatio-temporal contexts that overlap through technological mediations. Reflecting on previous (...) fieldwork experiences and current virtual inquiries with the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon unfolds how COVID-19 has thoroughly reshaped how the author approaches subjects' socio-ecological settings. Against this background, the article argues that corporeal immersion remains a necessary condition for the anthropological scrutiny of multispecies relationalities amidst the challenging times of the Anthropocene. The article nevertheless demonstrates that the intellectual efforts to grasp the different material temporalities of virtual spaces embrace the ethical principles concerning the renunciation of fieldwork with vulnerable communities. Furthermore, a reflective and speculative stance is proposed to actualise the snapshots of faraway physicalities linking them to past embodied and multi-sensory experiences. It is ultimately theorised how these mnemonic devices operate as creative forms of inquiry that overcome the pandemic consequences, extra-stimulating our cognitive capabilities to reflect on prior and possible socio-material interactions. (shrink)

Comprehensie collection of historical and contemporary philosophies of technology, including Plato, Aristotle, St. Simon, Comte, Marx, Heidegger, Mumford, Foucault.

continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet , 1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none of us (...) in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. But Garcia was not just the subject of rumor, being already well known to the French public as a writer of fiction. His debut novel, La meilleure part des hommes , 2 was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore 3 and has already appeared in English as Hate: A Romance . 4 His follow-up novel, Mémoires de la jungle , 5 made clever use of a chimpanzee narrator. Nor was Garcia only published as a novelist before last November: his philosophical study L’Image 6 had already appeared when the author was just twenty-six, a year before he was crowned by the muses at the historic Café de Flore. And then in 2011, just months before the appearance of Forme et objet , Garcia published a widely distributed work entitled Nous, animaux et humains , 7 with its focus on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about animals. Given this prolific and versatile track record, an optimistic scenario might envisage the young Garcia as one of those combined literary/philosophical talents who appear intermittently in France across the centuries: Jean-Paul Sartre is merely the most famous recent case. While more time is needed to see how Garcia will channel his impressive mental energies, Forme et objet displays such breadth of insight that its author has a good chance to emerge as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. If we accept Aristotle’s dictum that the peak mental age is fifty-one, then to read Garcia’s massive book is to gain some idea of what European philosophy might look like in the futuristic-sounding 2030’s. The present article is confined to Forme et objet . At 486 pages, the work is obviously daunting in size. Indeed, it is even longer than it sounds, given that many of its early sections are printed in a smaller typeface to designate them as supplemental commentary to the main flow of the argument. But while the length of the book reportedly led to delays in French publication, and will probably slow the inevitable appearance of an English translation, the length of the book should not deter interested readers– much of it results from Garcia’s teacherly writing style. Whereas Quentin Meillassoux’s prose displays an arctic economy of means, Garcia’s style is reminiscent of the repeated lessons of oral classroom proceedings. Rarely is the reader given fewer than three or four chances to master an idea before the author moves on to the next. In practice, the style feels welcoming rather than long-winded. Otherwise, the structure of Forme et objet is surprisingly simple. There is a useful Introduction of less than twenty pages. Then comes Book I: Formally , running to approximately 135 pages. Here Garcia outlines the most basic features of a thing “no matter what it is,” or n’importe quoi , an everyday phrase that Garcia shapes into a technical term. This part of the book feels at times like a more amiable version of Hegel’s Science of Logic , a parallel emphasized further by the threefold articulation of its theme: 1. Thing; 2. Thing and World; 3. Being and Understanding. This is followed by the much longer Book II: Objectively , totaling more than 300 pages. It contains sixteen essay-like meditations on specific kinds of objects—including time, animals, humans, history, gender, and death. Here each chapter rolls smoothly into the next, making this second part of the book feel more like a different work of Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit . But these are merely analogies. Garcia is no Hegelian, even if the book contains a few dialectical flourishes that seem to reflect his early enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School. Forme et objet ends with a six-page Coda, followed by the usual page of acknowledgments. In what follows, I will briefly summarize each of these four parts of the book before ending with some more general remarks. Before doing so, it will be useful to situate Garcia biographically (as much as I am able) and philosophically. Though Toulouse is his native city, his formative years were spent largely in Algeria, where his family has deep roots. During our sole private conversation, Garcia mentioned that his parents are professors of literature. 8 As a student of philosopher Garcia flourished so early that many of his current ideas date to his teenaged years: “There are sentences in Forme et objet that I wrote when I was seventeen,” he said in response to a question on that cold night on the Canal St.-Martin. I recalled that remark when reading his brilliant account, late in the book, of the central role of adolescence in contemporary culture. While many prodigies blow through their formal academic training without serious obstruction, Garcia’s student memories are rich in tales of isolation and struggle, though equally rich in gratitude for a half-dozen or so exceptional teachers who provided the intellectual space he needed: Meillassoux and Alain Badiou are simply two of the most prominent figures on that list. Though there are many points of agreement between Garcia’s philosophical position and my own, he not only reached his position years before reading my work, 9 he arrived along a rather different path: not through phenomenology, but via the Frankfurt School, which may be one of the reasons for his profound fascination with aesthetics. Garcia’s cultural background is as broad as one could wish: he is no less informed about punk rock and European football leagues than about the spiritualist roots of Bergson’s philosophy. Curious about everything and contemptuous towards nothing, Garcia can be expected to write insightfully on dozens of topics in the years to come. Given that his philosophy is so personally tantalizing in its agreements and disagreements with my own, and given the great internal richness of Forme et objet itself, the present review is no better than a first effort at coming to terms with the challenges posed by this minstrel from the rising generation. This is especially intriguing for older Generation X’ers like me, since confrontation with the younger generation is one of the many themes treated insightfully in Garcia’s book. 1. Introduction Garcia begins in defense of a so-called “flat ontology,” in which all things are equally things. While Roy Bhaskar 10 used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda 11 (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, 12 the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, 13 and my own critique 14 of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects 15 and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.” 16 But for Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. Even so, he always remains an advocate of a flat ontology. Insofar as everything is equally something, no matter what it is ( n’importe qui ), everything is equally a thing, equally solitary in its relation with world. This is why his book abounds in those long lists of random, ontologically equivalent entities that Ian Bogost has playfully termed “Latour Litanies.” 17 The first litany in Garcia’s book runs as follows: “We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things.” (7) Yet Garcia is frankly dualistic; his flat ontology only lasts until page 159 and the end of Book I (entitled “Formally”), which deals entirely with things that are equally things. Thereafter Garcia turns his attention from things to objects, which are not flat in the least, but engage in hierarchical relations with one another. In agreement with both DeLanda and the speculative realists, Garcia proclaims that his book “proposes to put to the test a thought about things rather than a thought about our thought about things .” (8) Just as ducklings are “imprinted” (9) after hatching and treat the first creature they see as their mother, philosophers are imprinted by the idea with which they begin. Hence, philosophies that begin with human access will never truly find their way back to things. This makes Garcia rather suspicious of twentieth century philosophy, since “the twentieth century—to which in some way this work proposes to bid adieu—has been a period of theorizing modes of access to things rather than things...” (9) Among other possible benefits of the philosophy of things that Garcia proposes, it is fully able to account for thought as a special variant of things, while the reverse is not possible.(10) In Book I of Forme et objet , Garcia’s “things” are so flat, so de-determined, that he is forced to renounce some of the most basic features ascribed to things by most realists. As he tells us in his foreboding third footnote: “We will maintain that the solitude [of things] is less than unity, less than identity, and that it does not imply acceptance (any more than refusal) of the principle of non-contradiction.” (11) In a contemporary world cluttered with too many things, Garcia’s flat and formal plane provides us with some breathing room: “The formal plan of thought enables or re-enables us to cut short all accumulation—whether of knowing, experience, or action—by a simplicity, an impoverished surface...” (13) As Garcia says elsewhere in responding to a Deleuzian critic of the book, his starting point in flat ontology is designed to obstruct the claims of both analytic philosophy and Hegelianism: “Hence, this work seeks to protect each thing—real, imaginary, inconsistent, contradictory—both against Ockham’s Razor and against the Aufhebung or dialectical process.” 18 Yet contrary to the equalizing spirit of many flat ontologies, “we will add to our formal ontology of the equal, an objective ontology of the unequal.” (13) But initially, Garcia joins all flat ontologists in holding that everything is irreducible: “this irreducibility, which we will term the ‘chance’ of each thing... also marks the refusal of a positive thought that reduces things exclusively to natural things, or social things, or historical things, etc.” (15) This irreducible “chance” of a thing emerges as an important technical term in the book, always paired with its inverted brother, the “price to pay” ( prix à payer ). On pages 17-19, we find the only diagrams in the book. What they illustrate is that Garcia wishes to avoid two equally dangerous extremes. The first is the philosophy of substance, featuring the thing-in-itself as a mighty river fed by attributes as if by subordinate tributary streams. This model can be found in many of the classic thinkers of West and East alike. In it, “there is obviously a hierarchization between that which is dragged towards something other than itself, and this other which serves it as an ontological support while supporting its proper being.” (16) For Garcia, the second extreme worth avoiding is the philosophy of events: “One thus conceives trajectories of being, identified as events, facts, powers, intensities, or intentionality. These vectors of being come first, bearing and supporting being, displacing it, but without ever finding a stopping point, a buffer, an objective consistency.” (17) The first model gives us a thing too wrapped up in itself, too compact . This word “compact” (the French and the English are the same) is another technical term for Garcia. But if the “compact” model of things leads us to something more than things, the philosophy of events gives us less than things, by dissolving them into a play of vectors. Garcia’s alternative lies midway between these two extremes: Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. And a thing is nothing other than the difference between the enters and the being that comes out. Thus, the circuit of being is never halted. In the thing, there is never the thing-in-itself. And the thing is never in-itself, but outside of itself. Nonetheless, being is not eventally “pollinated” by vectors: it possesses an objecting halting-point... (19) This single idea is the key to Garcia’s book: the thing is neither a self-contained durable lump nor some sort of evental flux. Instead, the thing is the difference between its various components and its relations with its environment. Or stated differently: “the price to pay for this disposition is a circulation of being that systematically distinguishes two senses of things: that which is in the thing , and that in which the thing is , or that which encompasses it and that which it encompasses,” (19) translating comprendre here as “encompass.” 19 In a beautiful description of a piece of black slate, Garcia sums up the various minerals, qualities, and shapes that compose [ comprend ] it, and calls them “that which is in the thing,” (20) noting that this tells us nothing about “that in which [the slate] is”—namely, all the various situations in which the black slate can be found. Instead, the slate is the difference between these two: the most characteristic principle of Garcia’s philosophy. 2. Formally Book One of Forme et objet , “Formally,” is concerned with the formal equality of all things in a flat world. “Two questions mark the boundaries of reflection: of what is everything composed [ composé ], and: what do all things compose?” (27) Looking downward, we wish to know what everything is made of; looking upward, we want to know the ultimate result of the combination of all things. Here we must turn our attention to the thing n’importe quoi— no matter what it is. (30) Anything with finite qualities is obviously too specific to be relevant to global ontological questions. To an equal degree, something possessing all qualities (think of Whitehead’s God) 20 would not be n’importe quoi either, since it would still be too definite, even if incredibly vast. The same holds for contradictions, since these all differ from each other. The square circle, the non-white black white, and the non-city city are all too distinct to count as the thing no matter what it is. The n’importe quoi must be devoid of all specific qualities, including contradictory ones. In one of the more intriguing points in his book, so reminiscent of Meinong, Garcia proclaims that “the ‘no matter what it is’ is neither a reality nor an abstract construction, nor both of these at once; the ‘no matter what it is’ is simply the plane of equality of that which is real, that which is possible, that which is inexistent, that which is past, that which is impossible, that which is true, that which is false, that which is bad.”(39-40) Since everything has two faces, it would be a grievous mistake to focus on just one of them at the expense of the other, as physicalism or materialism do when reducing the world to minuscule physical underpinnings. For scientistic materialism, “it is either atoms, particles, or fields of force... which are the things.” (47-48) Moreover, “these more-than-things are accompanied by less-than-things: for example, ideas or facts of consciousness are determined by the state of matter and are not autonomous things, but manifestations reduced to secondary effects of material processes...” (48) On this point, Garcia’s position is in complete accord with my own critique of undermining and overmining. 21 Where we disagree is that Garcia is more deeply suspicious of the notion of substance, which I view as salvageable with a few needed changes, while Garcia sees this operation as hopeless: “A substance, in the history of philosophy, is the more-than-thing par excellence.” (51) Another agreement between our positions is visible when Garcia claims (correctly, in my opinion) “that it is vain to distinguish between things which are material and those which are not.” (52) Yet we also find an even more important disagreement, since for Garcia withdrawal cannot be the quality of a thing. Instead, the absence of a thing is simultaneous with it, embodied in all that is not it– the absence of the sculpture of a woman is to be found in the mold that appears at the same time as it, and thus withdrawal must be viewed as an “event” rather than as something pertaining to an object. For Garcia, nothing withdraws beyond access. Since we must distinguish between “that which is something” and “that which something is,” and since the former is identified with “no matter what it is is” and the latter with “ not no matter what it is,” we can say that “everything is thus a milieu, a fragile link between ‘no matter what it is’ and ‘ not no matter what it is.’” (62) And here we find Garcia’s critique of the thing-in-itself: “A thing is never defined en bloc . We can affirm that a thing is this or that, but that does not suffice. It is still necessary to state precisely that which is this thing .” (62) Stated differently, “something is not in itself : for that which is in the thing is not the thing, and that in which the thing is is not the thing.” (62) And here Garcia and I, facing the same evidence, draw opposite conclusions. For me, the fact that nothing can be identified with either its components or its concrete location means that the thing must be something in-itself distinct from both of these. Yet for Garcia, to be in-itself would mean to be identified with just one of these two extreme terms, and hence the thing can only be the difference between them. Garcia is equally suspicious of the classical tendency to view “unity” as a property of the thing, since in his eyes unity is too relational a property to belong to things. (65) While specific things are situated determinately with respect to other things, we are still speaking here about the thing no matter what it is, and this can be viewed only in terms of solitude, which all things share: a human being, a hand, or a chair or all equally things insofar as they are on their own , not insofar as they are one . (64) A thing is alone, and relates only to the one thing that is not another thing: world. In a striking parallel to my own argument for a partial revival of occasionalism, Garcia tells us that “the things communicate only by their solitude: it is because everything is equally on its own in the world that things can be together, enmeshed in one another.” (67) Alone in their solitude, things all relate to world, which serves as a mediator allowing them to become mixed up in one another. As we have seen, one reason that nothing can be in itself is because everything is in something else. For Garcia, “to be in something and to be something are equivalent.” (69) Stated more broadly, “being is thus the difference between the two aspects of each thing: that which is it, and that which it is.” (70) And even more vividly: “a thing is almost like a sack: there is that which one puts in the sack and that which remains outside the sack.” (70) But not quite like a sack, “since a thing is not a thin skin or film. Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between that which is this thing and that which thing is, between content and container.” (71) Nothing can be in-itself because everything is two selves at once. For example, we cannot say that our self is defined by our consciousness: “Everything has a self because nothing is in itself. The self is not the quality of that which is related to itself (which is conscious, for example) or which thinks itself related to itself. Nonetheless, for an entity called ‘conscious’ to be related to itself, it is necessary that this very relation should be another thing than the self to which it is related.” (71) Consciousness cannot be the self, precisely because it is other than that of which it is conscious. Nothing is able to grasp itself. The self is “the function by which being and composition [ compréhension ] are mutually excluded...” (72) The self is “the point of shadow of everything that projects some light...” (72) The in-itself faces two opposite dangers: “For something to be in-itself is to be a self. Something which is a self flies out through one of its two sides... Stated differently, being in-itself is simply the possibility of a double failure.” (73) The in-itself can be termed compact : “There remains to us a means of thinking that which does not fully enter into the world, though without exiting from it. This means is what we call the compact.” (76) In a sense, the compact is the opposite of the world. For in the case of the world, everything enters it and it enters nothing; as for the compact, it enters the world (since it is something, after all) while nothing enters it. (77) The compact marks the presence of the impossible in the world. (78) It is not impossible, but possible only on the condition that it fails. (78) The time has come to speak of where a thing is located. “The sole condition of a thing is that of being in another thing than itself, and thus in another thing than something.” (78) A condition is “that which determines something, that which forms something, that in which something is.” (78) As for humans, “the condition of someone is his situation; my social condition is that which socially determines me, my place and my function...” (79) More generally, “to be conditioned is to find oneself reduced to that in which one is.” (79) Everything is conditioned, but nothing is reducible to this condition. To determine the condition of something is to determine in what it is. A thing is located in that which contradicts it, just as a statue exists in its mold, which is precisely that which it is not. Since the thing is finite and definite, its condition or form must be infinite and indefinite. That in which all things are is the world, which Garcia also terms “the whole.” (81) “To try to be in-itself is to attempt to remain outside the world. And indeed, to try to be in-itself is only a path of entry into the world.” (83) For Garcia, “the world is not the pre-existent container of the things it contains, a priori , nor the construction by the mind of a fictional ensemble of all things, a posteriori .” (85) Instead, the world is simultaneous with all things; the two always go together. The world cannot be a determinate world, such as the physical universe or mathematical space, since these are already too specific and limited. “Every determinate world, which is in fact a universe , is a ‘big thing’ [ grosse chose ]: it is a set, however vast, of composite things which itself embodies a thing.” (85) Every determinate world is really just a “big thing.” Stated differently, “it is nothing other than a balanced milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes.” (85) We generally picture the world as a physical univer. (shrink)

The Human Condition is a response to the growing disenchantment in the Western world with contemporary life. John Kekes provides rationally justified answers to questions about the meaning of life, the basis of morality, the contingencies of human lives, the prevalence of evil, the nature and extent of human responsibility, and the sources of values we prize. He offers a realistic view of the human condition that rejects both facile optimism and gloomy pessimism; acknowledges that we are vulnerable (...) to contingencies we cannot fully control; defends a humanistic understanding of our condition; recognizes that the values worth pursuing are plural, often conflicting, and that there are many reasonable conceptions of well-being. Kekes emphasizes the importance of facing the fact that man's inhumanity to man is widespread. He rejects as simple-minded both the view that human nature is basically good and that it is basically bad, and argues that our well-being depends on coping with the complex truth that human nature is basically complicated. Finally, Kekes argues that the scheme of things is indifferent to our fortunes and that we can rely only on our own resources to make what we can of our lives. (shrink)