The book Chronicle of Separation is an attempt to write on Derrida, to Derrida and from Derrida on the basis of a pathetic experience, which, in various ways, describes and enacts the pathetic experience of deconstruction itself. The book tackles the weight of emotions that is at the heart of deconstructive reading, treating deconstruction's weak, fragile and parasitic mode of thinking as a deconstruction of emotion, on emotion and as emotion. Chronicle of Separation examines these themes beginning with (...) a descriptive and an analytic reading of Derrida's Memoirs: For Paul de Man and The Post Card, as embodiments of deconstruction's melancholic friendship which inscribes its disillusioned love in what it calls the 'postal condition'. The book then moves on to a feminization of Derrida, experimenting in different modes of writing. It firstly discusses Fred Zinneman's film Julia about a mournful friendship between women. Then it performs a deconstructive meditation on the anorexic person suggesting that anorexia constitutes a paradoxical embodiment of deconstruction. The concluding chapter presents a complete incorporation of Derrida into a fictional text that re-writes the biblical Book of Ruth. (shrink)

The 2015 judgment of the Namibia Supreme Court in Government of the Republic of Namibia v LM and Others set an important precedent on informed consent in a case involving the coercive sterilisation of HIV-positive women. This article analyses the reasoning and factual narratives of the judgment by applying Neil Manson and Onora O’Neill’s approach to informed consent as a communicative process. This is done in an effort to understand the practical import of the judgment in the particular context of (...) resource constrained public healthcare facilities through which many women in southern Africa access reproductive healthcare. While the judgment affirms certain established tenets in informed consent to surgical procedures, aspects of the reasoning in context demand more particularised applications of what it means for a patient to have capacity and to be informed, and to appropriately accommodate the disruptive role of power dynamics in the communicative process. (shrink)

The head and the stomach January 1996 -- Borges in Sarajevo March 1996 -- Fin de siècle and new millenarium May 1996 -- Cold racism July 1996 -- The last enemy November 1996 -- The grounded plane January 1997 -- Dialectic in the dialectic August 1997 -- Voyage to the country of the last sociologists November 1997 -- Justice in the past April 1998 -- The crisis of art or a crisis of thought July 1998 -- Is cinema to blame (...) March 1999? -- The nameless war May 1999 -- One image right can sweep away another October 1999 -- The syllogism of corruption October 2000 -- Voici/voila : the destiny of images January 2001 -- From facts to interpretations : the new quarrel over the holocaust April 2001 -- From one torture to another June 2001 -- The filmmaker, the people and the government August 2001 -- Time, words, war November 2001 -- Philosophy in the bathroom January 2002 -- Prisoners of the infinite march 2002 -- From one month of May to another June 2002 -- Victor Hugo : the ambiguities of a bicentenary August 2002 -- The machine and the foetus January 2003 -- Death of the author or all too living artist April 2003 -- Logic of amnesia June 2003 -- The principle of insecurity September 2003 -- The new fictions of evil November 2003 -- Criminal democracy March 2004 -- The difficult heritage of Michel Foucault June 2004 -- The new reasons for the lie A\august 2004 -- Beyond art October 2004 -- The politics of images February 2005 -- Democracy and its doctors May 2005. (shrink)

The chronicle of John of Worcester is one of the most important sources for earlier English history. Completed at Worcester by 1140, it is of considerable interest to historians of both the Anglo-Saxon period and the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its annals complement and add significantly to those in the surviving versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It has never been adequately translated and a modern edition has long been needed. In this volume, Dr McGurk uses all the (...) available manuscript evidence, as well as the additions for 1122-41 made in a Gloucester continuation of a manuscript started in Johns own handwriting. Taken with these interpolations, the chronicle offers crucial evidence for the first five years of King Stephens reign. The Chronicle will be published in three volumes. Volume II covers the annals from 450 to 1066, and Volume III from 1067 to 1140. Volume I will be published last, and will contain a general introduction and supplementary material. (shrink)

In his Analytical Philosophy of History A. C. Danto suggests that the main difference between an Ideal Chronicle (i.e. an account of events that is contemporaneous and exhaustive) and a History is that the Chronicle cannot by its nature treat adequately the significance of the events it describes. For, Danto claims, events derive significance from their relations with other events, including those that are future to themselves, and this latter type of significance cannot be described in a (...) class='Hi'>Chronicle since it would involve knowledge of the future. In the following discussion it is suggested that the difference between Ideal Chronicles and Histories, if it exists, cannot be the one suggested by Danto. It is claimed that all significance-giving relations are fully described in a Chronicle and that it is only by the order of its material that it differs from a History. (shrink)

This is the first complete translation into English of the Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, which covers the period AD 284-813 and is one of the most important sources of Byzantine history, that of the Arabs under the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties and of other neighbouring peoples. The Chronicle is a compilation of earlier sources, many of them now lost: in order to use it critically the historian needs to know what texts Theophanes had in front of him and (...) how he handled them. These have consequently been indicated in the text in so far as they can be indentified. Full annotation has also been provided on points of historical and topographical interest. The career of Theophanes, the character of the Chronicle, its manuscript tradition, and the use of earlier sources are discussed in the Introduction. (shrink)

The chronicle of John of Worcester is one of the most important sources of earlier English history. The chronicle, which was written at Worcester by 1140, is of considerable interest to historians of both the Anglo-Saxon period and of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its backbone is a translation of an Anglo-Saxon chronicle with varied connections, and this edition makes possible the detailed examination of these allegiances. Its annals for the second half of the ninth century (...) provide one of the earliest surviving witnesses to the text of Asser's Life of Alfred. The author had access to otherwise unrecorded sources of events in the eleventh century, and the chronicle's value as a contemporary source for the reign of Stephen has long been acknowledged. Dr McGurk has completed the edition of the work left unfinished by R. R. Darlington on his death in 1977. The chronicle will be published in three volumes. Volume II covers the annals for 450 to 1066, and volume III the annals from 1067 to 1140. Volume I will be published last, and will contain a general introduction and supplementary material. (shrink)

The director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life presents a series of essays on the philosophical implications of the Narnia series, exploring Lewis's ...

Epidemics that were probably influenza have been reported throughout recorded history. There were 13 fairly severe epidemics during the 18th century and 12 during the 19th century. Probably 8 of these 25 were influenza pandemics. In the 20th century there have been 4 pandemics (1918/19, 1957/58, 1968/69 and 1977) due to the emergence of new subtypes of influenza A virus. The great pandemic of 1918/19 caused an estimated 20 million deaths. Between pandemics usually there have been epidemics of varying severity (...) at intervals of one to three years and a trickle of sporadic cases every winter. The morbidity and mortality rates have varied greatly from epidemic to epidemic and from place to place during the same epidemic. Generally the morbidity has been lowest in people over 60 years of age, but, except for 1918/19, the mortality has been predominantly in old people. The epidemic behaviour of influenza has been so erratic and difficult to understand that there are still a few scientists who consider that extraterrestrial influences operate. These views are not taken seriously by most virologists but there are puzzling aspects of influenza that are not yet understood. (shrink)

This is the first English translation for forty years of a medieval classic, offering vivid and unique insight into the life of a great monastery in late twelfth-century England. The translation brilliantly communicates the interest and immediacy of Jocelin's narrative, and the annotation is particularly clear and helpful. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most (...) accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

The book examines the ethical aspect of journalistic activity in an attempt to understand and render explicit the values which guide journalists in their work, but it emphasizes the point that while such values reflect society's existing professional mores, this particular profession is also placed in such a way as to shape the consciousness and values of those who consume its working product. The central question of this work has to do with the ethical implications of journalistic activity, and more (...) exactly, the ethical responsibility of the media in framing public discourse. This question touches on how the journalistic profession conceives its own responsibilities, as reflected in its various professional codes, but it also relates to an account of its formative influence on human sensibilities in a culture in which journalism plays a major role in the interpretation and dissemination of knowledge. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

Review of Peter Mulholland's Love's Betrayal: The Decline of Catholicism and Rise of New Religions in Ireland.

This article seeks to trace the origins of contemporary ‘post-workerism’ in the formulation of concepts of political subjectivity, antagonism and insurrection in Tronti and Negri. In particular, it tries to excavate the seemingly paradoxical position which postulates the increasing immanence of struggles, as based on the Marxian thesis of real subsumption, together with the intensification of the political autonomy or separation of the working class. In order to grasp the political and theoretical proposals of Italian workerism and autonomism, Toscano concentrates (...) on the thesis of a historical transformation of capitalism into an increasingly parasitical and politically violent social relation, a thesis which is grounded in an interpretation of Marx’s notion of ‘tendency’ and which serves as the background to the exploration, especially in Negri, of increasingly uncompromising forms of antagonism. The article focuses especially on Tronti’s so-called ‘Copernican revolution’—giving workers’ struggles primacy in the understanding of capitalism—and critically inquires into the effect of this workerist axiom on Negri’s writings on proletarian sabotage and insurrection in the 1970s. By way of a conclusion, it notes the difficulties in prolonging the workerist gambit in light of capital’s continued effort, as Tronti would put it, to emancipate itself from the working class. (shrink)

The history of pragmatism is still to be written. At many points throughout we lack even the prerequisite of history, a firm chronology. As a specimen, I offer a chronology for a short span of the history of Peirce’s pragmaticism. I begin with 1865, when Peirce is twenty-five, a scientist in the employ of the United States Coast Survey, married, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when he has been for perhaps nine years a student of Kant and is already well (...) along in those “successive steps” by which, from being a “pure Kantist,” he is being “forced … into Pragmaticism.” The method I follow is to base the chronology at each point on dated documentary evidence of the year, month, or day in question. I do, however, make subsidiary use, but only within square brackets, of documents of later date, or without date. My own inferences, conjectures and comments are also bracketed. (shrink)

Scientific realism is dead, or so many philosophers believe. Its death was announced when philosophers became convinced that one can accept all scientific results without committing oneself to metaphysical existence claims about theoretical entities (Fine 1986, 112). In addition, the inability of self–proclaimed scientific realists, despite recurrent demands, to distinguish themselves from their rival anti–realists (Stein 1989) didn’t exactly help their cause. If realists cannot identify the key feature or features that set them apart from their opponents, then there is (...) really no need to conduct a debate on scientific realism, is there? (shrink)