There is a surprising number of deformed animal kinds mentioned in Aristotle’s biological works. The number is surprising because, according to the standard understanding of deformed animals in Aristotle, it should be zero. And the number is significant because there are just too many deformed kinds at too many classificatory levels mentioned in too many works to dismiss them as a minor aberration or as an infiltration of folk belief into biology proper. This paper has two (...) goals. The first is to develop an interpretation of deformed animal kinds in Aristotle, which focuses on the meaning of deformity applied to kinds. To my knowledge there is no adequate interpretation of the meaning of deformity applied to kinds in the scholarly literature. (shrink)

Given that they are chance events, there can be no scientific demonstration or knowledge of monsters. There are still, however, many recognizable elements of scientific explanation in Aristotle's Generation of Animals Book IV chapter 4. What happens in cases of monsters and deformities occurs in the process of generation, and there is much that we can know scientifically about this process—working from the animal’s essential attributes outward to factors that influence these processes. In particular, we find Aristotle looking for (...) and investigating whether “for the most part” correlations are causally relevant and linked to essence. Even though the birth of monsters is scientifically inexplicable, the features of animals that tend to produce them can be known about. I will explain how it is that producing more than one offspring per birth is a knowable feature of a kind. This feature, along with others, can then give us a much better grasp on what happens in particular instances of monstrous birth. (shrink)

With the innovation of computer, virtual clothing has also emerged. This research mainly discusses the real-time animation complex of interactive clothing design based on computer simulation. In the process of realizing virtual clothing, the sample interpolation synthesis method is used, and the human body sample library is constructed using the above two methods first, and then, the human body model is obtained by interpolation calculation according to the personalized parameters. Building a clothing model is particularly important for the effect of (...) trying on. The clothing that needs to be displayed can be scanned and then input into the computer to build the model. The model can be directly built in 3DMAX and other software and then its surface texture can be mapped, or the clothing model can be directly built. The 3D model in the 3ds file is loaded by the loop body nested switch branch selection structure. Correspondingly, the write-back operation of 3ds files is similar. Just follow the general structure of the 3ds file and write the root block, version information block, edit information block, key frame information block, etc. to a brand new file in sequence. The main reason for this article to perform the 3ds file write-back operation is that, after the clothing model is dynamically simulated through the dynamic principle, the deformed key animation frame needs to be saved as a 3ds file so that it can be further imported into the 3DSMAX software and generated by the renderer, form high-quality picture information, and finally get high-definition animation video. In the CPU-GPU hybrid method, modules such as force calculation, collision processing, and position update use the GPU method, while overstretching is processed by the CPU method, making the overall performance 10 times higher than the pure CPU method. This research helps to promote the development of 3D virtual clothing design. (shrink)

The deformation and wear events that underlie microwear and macrowear signals commonly used for dietary reconstruction in fossil animals can be replicated and quantified by controlled laboratory tests on extracted tooth specimens in conjunction with fundamental micromechanics analysis. Key variables governing wear relations include angularity, stiffness (modulus), and size of the contacting particle, along with material properties of enamel. Both axial and sliding contacts can result in the removal of tooth enamel. The degree of removal, characterized by a “wear (...) coefficient,” varies strongly with particle content at the occlusal interface. Conditions leading to a transition from mild to severe wear are discussed. Measurements of wear traces can provide information about contact force and particle shape. The potential utility of the micromechanics methodology as an adjunct for investigating tooth durability and reconstructing diet is explored. (shrink)

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity (...) through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women's theorising as a crucial component of the methodological metissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence. (shrink)

Going beyond the creolisation theories of Brathwaite and Glissant, I attempt to develop ideas concerning the gendering of creolisation, and a historicising of affects within it. Addressing affects as ‘physiological things’ contextualised in the history of the Caribbean slave plantation, I seek, importantly, to delineate a trajectory and development of a specific Creole history in relation to affects. Brathwaite's proposition that ‘the most significant (and lasting) inter-cultural creolisation took place’ within the ‘intimate’ space of ‘sexual relations’ is key to my (...) argument. In the light of this, I consider how Creole cultural knowledge about affect—as the primary motivational system inclusive of fear, anger, outrage and so on — might be identified, and what constitutes such Creole knowledge within which affect might be embedded. How might Glissant's relationality and Creole literary texts add to this knowledge? I focus primarily on three texts: Clarke's The Polished Hoe, Collins’ The Colour of Forgetting and Morejón's ‘Amo a mi amo’/‘l Love My Master’. Each text on which I draw is selected for its intersectional representation of gender relations, ‘knowledge about sexual difference’ and its representation of Creole subjectivities within the context problematised here as the ‘demonic ground’. Moreover, as auto-theorising texts, they represent both narrative and meta-narrative of a creolising of affects in and against the economy of the slave plantation. Each represents also a stage or aspect of the development of subjectivities and an affective community that inform this intervention concerned with theorising against consolidated, universalising and Eurocentric conceptualisations of affect. In the process, I attempt to offer a differentiated cartography and literary archaeology of affect. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

This is the first volume devoted to Aristotle's thoughts on evil or badness. The work calls attention to several relatively neglected areas of scholarship, and the contributions give any reader grounds for thinking that Aristotle has thoughts about to kakon that are sophisticated and worthy of deep philosophical engagement.The volume is divided into three parts: metaphysics and biology in the first, practical philosophy in the second, and the "presence of Aristotle in post-Aristotelian philosophy" in the third. The topics vary widely— (...) class='Hi'>deformed animal kinds, the worst constitutions, the subhuman vice of brutishness, the misfortunes of the virtuous etc.—but the volume presents no clear philosophical... (shrink)

The animal cell cytoskeleton consists of three interconnected filament systems: actin‐containing microfilaments (MFs), microtubules (MTs), and the lesser known intermediate filaments (IFs). All IF proteins share a common tripartite domain structure and the ability to assemble into 8–12 nm wide filaments. Electron microscopy data suggest that IFs are built according to a completely different plan from that of MFs and MTs. IFs are known to impart mechanical stability to cells and tissues but, until recently, the biomechanical properties of single IFs (...) were unknown. However, with the discovery of naturally occurring micrometer‐wide IF bundles and the development of new methodologies to mechanically probe single filaments, it is now possible to propose a more unified view of IF biomechanics. Unlike MFs and MTs, single IFs can now be described as flexible, extensible and tough, which has important implications for our understanding of cell and tissue mechanics. Furthermore, the molecular mechanisms at play when IFs are deformed point toward a pivotal role for them in mechanotransduction. BioEssays 29: 26–35, 2007. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

: The shepherd embodies a strange and disturbing society. Isolated, marginal, it forms a world apart and evolves in a wild space where mountains, valleys, meadows or forests make up the framework of its activity. In this non-domesticated nature the human presence is suspect. This confusing being is very often represented with an animalized, almost monstrous or deformed body which becomes a metaphor for social order. This grotesque body translates the prejudices of urbanites and elites. It fuels sexual fantasies (...) and symbolizes the disturbances of the natural and social order: freed from the laws of the city, it can try to seduce the young ladies and be insolent in front of the knights. It is a threat to the established order. But the shepherd also carries virtues. It is a model of Christian life: humility and holiness. It belongs to an original humanity, the form closest to divine creation. Two styles of representation of the shepherd therefore oppose the extremes. From texts from the end of the Middle Ages, we will see how the shepherd is an imaginary in opposition to an organized society but that his image has evolved positively until becoming the guardian of traditions and a being who lives in harmony with nature. Key words: stereotypes, shepherd, savagery, holiness, littérature, Middle Ages. Résumé: Le berger incarne une société étrange et inquiétante. Isolé, marginal, il forme un monde à part et évolue dans un espace sauvage où les montagnes, vallées, prés ou forêts composent le cadre de son activité. Dans cette nature non domestiquée la présence humaine est suspecte. Cet être déroutant est bien souvent représenté avec un corps animalisé, quasi monstrueux ou déformé qui devient une métaphore de l’ordre social. Ce corps grotesque traduit les préjugés des urbains et des élites. Il alimente les fantasmes sexuels et symbolise les dérèglements de l’ordre naturel et social : affranchi des lois de la cité, il peut tenter de séduire les demoiselles et se montrer insolent face aux chevaliers. C’est une menace contre l’ordre établi. Mais le berger est également porteur de vertus. C’est un modèle de vie chrétienne : humilité et sainteté. Il appartient à une humanité originelle, forme la plus proche de la création divine. Deux styles de représentation du berger opposent donc les extrêmes. A partir de textes de la fin du Moyen Age, nous verrons comment le berger est un imaginaire en opposition avec une société organisée mais que son image a évolué positivement jusqu’à devenir le gardien des traditions et un être qui vit en harmonie avec la nature. Mots clés : stéréotypes, berger, sauvagerie, sainteté, littérature, Moyen Age. Resumen. El pastor encarna una sociedad extraña y perturbadora. Aislado, marginal, forma un mundo aparte y evoluciona en un espacio salvaje donde montañas, valles, praderas o bosques conforman el marco de su actividad. En esta naturaleza no domesticada, la presencia humana es sospechosa. Este ser confuso a menudo se representa con un cuerpo animalizado, casi monstruoso o deformado que se convierte en una metáfora del orden social. Este cuerpo grotesco traduce los prejuicios de los urbanitas y las élites. Alimenta las fantasías sexuales y simboliza las perturbaciones del orden natural y social: liberado de las leyes de la ciudad, puede tratar de seducir a las jóvenes y ser insolente frente a los caballeros. Es una amenaza para el orden establecido. Pero el pastor también posee virtudes. Es un modelo de vida cristiana, de humildad y santidad. Pertenece a una humanidad original, la forma más cercana a la creación divina. Dos estilos de representación del pastor, por lo tanto, se oponen. A partir de los textos del final de la Edad Media, analizamos la imagen del pastor en oposición a toda sociedad organizada y la evolución positiva de su figura hasta convertirse en guardián de las tradiciones y en un ser que vive en armonía con la naturaleza. Palabras clave: estereotipos, pastor, salvajismo, santitad, literatura, Edad Media. (shrink)

1. I am going to work with an idea from Sellars, that knowledge—at least as enjoyed by rational animals—is a certain sort of standing in the space of reasons. My concern is a familiar philosophical dialectic, which I shall approach in terms of what happens to the Sellarsian idea when the image of standings in the space of reasons undergoes a certain deformation. That it is a deformation is something we can learn from how unsatisfactory the familiar dialectic is.

1. I am going to work with an idea from Sellars, that knowledge—at least as enjoyed by rational animals—is a certain sort of standing in the space of reasons. My concern is a familiar philosophical dialectic, which I shall approach in terms of what happens to the Sellarsian idea when the image of standings in the space of reasons undergoes a certain deformation. That it is a deformation is something we can learn from how unsatisfactory the familiar dialectic is.

Whether designing animals, insects, or plants, Nature draws upon symmetry and periodicity to play a fundamental role in defining the body plan. When implemented with the proper chemical mechanisms, these principles guide our bodies from single-celled embryos to bilaterally symmetric creatures with intricate periodic structures, such as the spine and rib cage. The properties of symmetry and periodicity also appear to be fundamental to visual perception. We will show that this is no coincidence, but is a consequence of the (...) fact that these properties are generated by the same underlying phenomenon, standing wave patterns formed from harmonic resonances. The symmetry in life forms arises from chemical harmonic resonances, whereas the symmetry in visual perception arises from harmonic resonances in the visual system. We will show that harmonic resonances have very interesting properties for the representation of geometrical form that make them eminently suitable for encoding geometric form for body plans as well as for visual perception. In particular, we will show that by being simultaneously invariant to perspective transformation and robust to deformation, such resonant representations have fundamental advantages over more traditional techniques. (shrink)

Aristotle's remarks about the differences between the sexes have become infamous for their implications for the social status of women. In his observations on female biology, Aristotle claims that "the female nature is, as it were, a deformity." In describing women's role in the public sphere, he claims that women are naturally subordinate because, while they possess a deliberative faculty, that capacity is "without authority." While both claims express the "inferiority" of female bodies/women relative to male bodies/men, it is not (...) self-evident that the defects Aristotle identifies in female biology have cognitive or moral manifestations that would justify the rule of men over women in political life. Marguerite Deslauriers here aims to construct a coherent picture of Aristotle's views on sexual and gender-based difference from these remarks and to show the extent to which his views on female biology and women's role in politics are causally connected. Without exculpating Aristotle from charges of misogyny, Deslauriers contextualizes his explanations of the role and origin of female animals in his biology and the role of women in his political philosophy; she shows how Aristotle developed these views and the importance they hold for his wider philosophical commitments. She then explores how Aristotle might have seen the link between the physiology of sex and the bearing it has on political life. She ultimately argues that in Aristotle's conception of sexual difference in biology and politics, there is a tension between his view of the inferiority of female bodies and women and his commitment to the idea that females and women are valuable both for generation and for the political life characteristic of human beings. In this tension she finds a difference between Aristotle and his predecessors: while previous accounts associate sexual difference with affliction, Aristotle sees sexual difference as a benefit, both to a species and a political community. This volume will be of interest to philosophers and students interested in ancient philosophy, feminist philosophy, as well as those studying moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Many historically-influential philosophers had profoundly wrong moral views or behaved very badly. Aristotle thought women were “deformed men” and that some people were slaves “by nature.” Descartes had disturbing views about non-human animals. Hume and Kant were racists. Hegel disparaged Africans. Nietzsche despised sick people. Mill condoned colonialism. Fanon was homophobic. Frege was anti-Semitic; Heidegger was a Nazi. Schopenhauer was sexist. Rousseau abandoned his children. Wittgenstein beat his young students. Unfortunately, these examples are just a start. -/- These (...) philosophers are famous for their intellectual accomplishments, yet they display serious moral or intellectual flaws in their beliefs or actions. At least, some of their views were false, ultimately unjustified and, perhaps, harmful. -/- How should we respond to brilliant-but-flawed philosophers from the past? Here we explore the issues, asking questions and offering few answers. Any insights gained here might be applicable to contemporary imperfect philosophers, scholars in other fields, and people in general. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

The current literature that attempts to bridge between geometric morphometrics (GMM) and finite element analyses (FEA) of CT-derived data from bones of living animals and fossils appears to lack a sound biotheoretical foundation. To supply the missing rigor, the present article demonstrates a new rhetoric of quantitative inference across the GMM–FEA bridge—a rhetoric bridging form to function when both have been quantified so stringently. The suggested approach is founded on diverse standard textbook examples of the relation between forms and (...) the way strains in them are produced by stresses imposed upon them. One potentially cogent approach to the explanatory purposes driving studies of this class arises from a close scrutiny of the way in which computations in both domains, shape and strain, can be couched as minimizations of a scalar quantity. For GMM, this is ordinary Procrustes shape distance; in FEA, it is the potential energy that is stored in the deformed configuration of the solid form. A hybrid statistical method is introduced requiring that all forms be subjected to the same detailed loading designs (the same “probes”) in a manner careful to accommodate the variations of those same forms before they were stressed. The proper role of GMM is argued to be the construction of regressions for strain energy density on the largest-scale relative warps in order that biological explanations may proceed in terms of the residuals from those regressions: the local residual features of strain energy density. The method, evidently a hierarchical one, might be intuitively apprehended as a geometrical approach to a formal allometric analysis of strain. The essay closes with an exhortation. (shrink)

This essay offers a brief account of the rise of cls thought in the United States and of its development within a largely hostile legal academy. As the essay suggests, cls thought has been variously deformed, arrested, normalized, and diffused – leaving the contemporary American legal academy in a state of suspended animation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ContingenciesElizabeth RottenbergAnalysis does precious little, but the little it does is precious.—Therese BenedekI’d like to begin with an anecdote of a slightly confessional nature. If I mention this anecdote, it’s because it came to me by chance as an association to what French analyst and philosopher Monique David-Ménard, in her introduction to Éloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle, calls “positive contingency” or the “positive aspect of chance” (David-Ménard (...) 2011, 19–20), what in colloquial English we call a “happy accident.”So here’s the association. For reasons I cannot fully explain, the therapist I was seeing in graduate school encouraged me to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test (the MMPI, as it’s called), a widely used and researched psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. The test involved hundreds of simple, inoffensive questions, questions such as, “Do you read all the editorials in the newspaper every day?”1 and it took me hours to complete. A week or so after taking the test, I met with my therapist and we went over the results together. According to the test (which, interestingly, takes into account the performative aspects of test taking), I had answered all the questions in such a way as to appear neither excessively good nor excessively bad, that is, I had answered all the questions honestly and consistently. And as far as psychopathology was concerned, my answers showed few signs of hypochondriasis, hysteria, psychopathy, schizophrenia, or hypomania. On the other hand, when it came to depression, paranoia, psychasthenia, and social introversion, my scores were a little higher, and a shockingly high percentage of my answers [End Page 128] reflected “stereotypical masculine interests/behaviors.” None of this seemed to worry my therapist in the least. The only thing she pointed to were my “odd answers” (the MMPI also has a special category for odd answers—presumably the answers of academics). She wondered about my answer to this question in particular: “Do you see people or animals or things that other people don’t see?” “You answered ‘true’ to that question,” she said. “I don’t understand. Why would you answer ‘true’? You’re not psychotic.” I explained that I had read the “or”—do you see people OR animals OR things that other people don’t see—as a disjunctive rather than a conjunctive OR. “So, yes, it’s true, when I read texts, sometimes I see things that other people don’t see.” At the time, of course, I wasn’t thinking of Deleuze’s “contingent reason” or of Monique’s discussion of the inventive power of disjunctive synthesis in her Deleuze et la psychanalyse (2005). And I certainly wasn’t thinking that my figurative reading of seeing, my misreading of seeing, was indicative of the essential and indeterminable contingencies of reading. No, I was only giving what I took to be a perfectly accurate description of the déformation professionnelle that is ours and that belongs to anyone who is a stickler for grammar... a positive déformation, I might add.But this association immediately leads me to another (contingent) association, this time one that is intimately related to Monique’s discussion of Torricelli’s law and to Claude Bernard’s discovery of the exocrine function of the pancreas. My association is to Freud and to Freud’s astonishment before the transformative power of Jean-Martin Charcot’s dazzling, clinical insight. In Freud’s description of his teacher, Charcot is someone who sees things that other people don’t see:[Charcot]... had the nature of an artist—he was, as he himself said, a “visuel,” a seer. Here is what he himself told us about his method of working. He used to look again and again at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly [plötzlich] an understanding of them dawned on him.... He might be heard to say that the greatest satisfaction a [person] could have was to see something new—that is, to recognize it as new; and he remarked again and again on the difficulty and value of this kind of... (shrink)

Miroir, miroir de mes désirsAu seuil de la réversibilité, la libido ardente des imagesEn parcourant les perspectives de Lacan, Merleau-Ponty et Deleuze, je me propose de montrer comment l’image – une image dont le rôle, depuis Platon, a été réduit par la métaphysique occidentale à celui de simple copie – rend possible une pensée nouvelle non dualiste, une pensée ouverte par le désir, c’est-à-dire par ce qui dépasse tout dualisme simpliste et qui trouve dans l’image sa voie privilégiée.L’image du miroir (...) – considérée par le platonisme comme le simulacre par excellence, comme l’emblème de la copie déformante et trompeuse d’un modèle originaire harmonieux – donne à voir bien plus qu’elle ne nous montre : comme Lacan le remarquait dans son célèbre essai de 1949, devant le miroir, nous nous découvrons, comme les enfants, sujets du monde, mais aussi, inévitablement, sujets au monde. Le «je» – dont nous sommes in-formés par l’image du miroir – s’abîme, par cette même image, dans les l’inquiétante étrangété de l’autre, et par suite dans les gorges insondables de son désir. Si l’image du miroir nous permet d’embrasser la totalité de notre corps et d’apprécier en un regard notre statut de sujet, ce regard nous est toutefois restitué – aveugle et insistant – sous la forme d’un objet partiel qui nous interpelle comme sujets désubjectivés, comme sujets castrés, ou encore comme simples « taches » dans lapeinture du monde. L’image fixée par l’enfant dans le miroir fonde, paradoxalement, l’idée traditionnelle du sujet comme pôle dynamique de la relation je-monde. Comme le remarque Slavoj Žižek, en commentant Lacan, la capacité dynamique du sujet se fonde en somme sur une fixation excessive de l’image du sujet lui-même, fixation qui trouve son origine absente dans le regard entendu comme objet a, c’est-à-dire comme point aveugle de la conscience, lieu d’acquisition et de perte qui, par la castration du sujet, ouvre la plaie libidineuse et pulsionnelle de l’inconscient et renverse par là le désir de l’homme en désir de l’autre, comme le rappelle une célèbre formule de Lacan.Longtemps considérées comme porteuses d’illusions, comme l’illusion en tant que telle, les images nous montrent en fait la vérité de cette illusion : le monde est déformation et réversibilité, et nous-mêmes, prétendus sujets faisant face à son tableau inerte, n’en sommes que des taches. Au cours des mêmes années durant lesquelles Lacan élabore une théorie du regard, Merleau-Ponty, son interlocuteur direct – qui se réfère lui aussi au comportement de l’enfant devant le miroir – réfléchit sur la question du « en-être », c’est-à-dire de la réversibilité de la chair, ce tissu de différences qui nous constitue – les animaux et les choses – comme autant de plis d’un horizon commun. Pour Merleau-Ponty comme pour Lacan, dans une telle perspective, le sujet ne se défi nit pas positivement, mais comme écart par rapport à lui-même, comme coupure dans la peau de la conscience, comme plaie ouverte sur l’inconscient et sur le désir qui en jaillit abondamment. Ainsi, voir dans le miroir que, comme disait le poète, « je est un autre », implique que l’image soit libérée de son statut dévalorisant de « seconde chose » hérité du platonisme. Cela inaugure, en fait, une pensée sans dualisme. Gilles Deleuze travaillera lui aussi dans ce sens, lorsqu’il théorisera un renversement du platonisme à partir des images, dans son essai de 1966 Renverser le platonisme.Historiquement, le commencement de la philosophie a coïncidé avec la recherche d’une origine, d’une archè. Mais un monde où les relations nées du désir tracent des itinéraires imprévisibles, où le je et l’autre ne se distinguent plus, où sujet et objet ne connaissent plus de frontière, où la copie cesse de présupposer le modèle, un monde ainsi fait, a-t-il encore une origine accessible? Confronté à cette question essentielle, Merleau-Ponty théorisera – une fois encore à partir de la vision –, au lieu d’une origine en soi préétablie, un originaire en perpétuelle explosion. De son côté, Deleuze élaborera quelque chose d’analogue, à partir de la réflexion sur le cinéma qui l’occupera dans les années 1980 : il « encapsulera » les extases temporelles dans une image-miroir, une concrétion cristalline à plusieurs facettes où le monde se différencie sans cesse, dans un éternel retour.Mirror, Mirror of my DesiresOn the Threshold of Reversibility, the libidic Passion of ImagesIn a journey through the perspectives of Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, I shall show how images – the images that from Plato on have been relegated by Western metaphysics to the role of mere copies – allow us to trace the direction of a new and non-dualistic thought, a direction opened up by desire, that is to say, by something exceeding any simplistic dualism and fi nding precisely in images its privileged channel.The specular image – conceived by Platonism as the simulacrum par excellence, as the emblem of the deforming, deceiving copy of a harmonious preliminarymodel – makes us see more than it actually shows: as Lacan remarked in a renowned essay published in 1949, since childhood, in front of the mirror, we discover ourselves as subjects of the world, but also – and inevitably – as subjected to the world. The ego – of which we are in-formed by the specular image – is turned, through that very image, into the obscure, uncanny chasm of the other, and, consequently, in the unfathomable vortex of the other’s desire. Indeed, if in the mirror we can embrace the whole of our body and catch with a single gaze its status of subject, by the mirror that very gaze is however returned – blind and insistent – as a partial object summoning us as desubjectivized subjects, as castrated subjects, namely, as mere “stains” in the picture of the world. Quite paradoxically, the image fixed by the child in the mirror founds the traditional idea of the subject conceived as the dinamic pole of the relation between the ego and the world. In short, as Slavoj Žižek remarks commenting on Lacan, the dinamic capability of the subject is grounded on an excessive fixation of the image of the subject itself, fixation which finds its absent origin in the gaze meant as object a, namely, meant as that blind point of consciousness, that point of acquisition and loss which, by castrating the subject, opens the acies of the libidically throbbing wound of the unconscious and turns, to borrow a renowed Lacanian expression, man’s desire into the other’s desire.For long considered to herald illusions, images show us the truth of illusion itself: the world is deformation and reversibility and we – presumed subjects in front of its inert picture – are, on the contrary, its “stains.” In the same years in which Lacan was elaborating a theory of gaze, Merleau-Ponty, who was then a direct interlocutor of his, was articulating – by referring, as Lacan did, to the child’s behaviour in front of the mirror – a series of important reflections over the problem of the en-être, that is to say, over the problem of the reversibility of flesh, i. e., that differential fabric constituting us – animals and things – as variegated gatherings of a common horizon. For Merleau-Ponty, as well as for Lacan, according to such a perspective, the subject, far from being defined in a positive way, is defined by a gap in relation with its own self, that is to say, by a cut in the skin of consciousness, by a wound opening to the unconscious and to the desire spurting abundantly from the subconscious.To see in the mirror that, as the poet said, “I am an Other,” is to free images from the status of “second things” with which Platonism had dismissed them; it is, in other words, to inaugurate a non-dualistic thought. For his part, Deleuze will also engage in the same direction by theorizing a reversing of Platonism from the very standpoint of images in his 1966 essay Renverser le platonisme.The beginning of philosophy has historically matched with the search for an origin, namely, an arké. But in a world in which the relations inaugurated by desire trace unpredictable itineraries, in a world in which the ego and the other can no longer be distinguished, in a world in which the subject and the object know no more boundary lines, in a world in which model and copy cease to exist as the presupposition of one another, in such a world, I said, is it still possible to find an origin? By measuring himself with such a crucial question, Merleau-Ponty will theorize – once again from the standpoint of vision – an “originating in perennial explosion” instead of a narrow, pregiven origin. For his part, Deleuze will elaborate something similar in his reflection on cinema, which will keep him busy in the first half of the eighties, by capsulating the temporal dimensions in a mirror-image, i. e., a crystalline concretion in whose facets the world perennially becomes in an eternal differential return. (shrink)

Miroir, miroir de mes désirsAu seuil de la réversibilité, la libido ardente des imagesEn parcourant les perspectives de Lacan, Merleau-Ponty et Deleuze, je me propose de montrer comment l’image – une image dont le rôle, depuis Platon, a été réduit par la métaphysique occidentale à celui de simple copie – rend possible une pensée nouvelle non dualiste, une pensée ouverte par le désir, c’est-à-dire par ce qui dépasse tout dualisme simpliste et qui trouve dans l’image sa voie privilégiée.L’image du miroir (...) – considérée par le platonisme comme le simulacre par excellence, comme l’emblème de la copie déformante et trompeuse d’un modèle originaire harmonieux – donne à voir bien plus qu’elle ne nous montre : comme Lacan le remarquait dans son célèbre essai de 1949, devant le miroir, nous nous découvrons, comme les enfants, sujets du monde, mais aussi, inévitablement, sujets au monde. Le «je» – dont nous sommes in-formés par l’image du miroir – s’abîme, par cette même image, dans les l’inquiétante étrangété de l’autre, et par suite dans les gorges insondables de son désir. Si l’image du miroir nous permet d’embrasser la totalité de notre corps et d’apprécier en un regard notre statut de sujet, ce regard nous est toutefois restitué – aveugle et insistant – sous la forme d’un objet partiel (objet a) qui nous interpelle comme sujets désubjectivés, comme sujets castrés, ou encore comme simples « taches » dans lapeinture du monde. L’image fixée par l’enfant dans le miroir fonde, paradoxalement, l’idée traditionnelle du sujet comme pôle dynamique de la relation je-monde. Comme le remarque Slavoj Žižek, en commentant Lacan, la capacité dynamique du sujet se fonde en somme sur une fixation excessive de l’image du sujet lui-même, fixation qui trouve son origine absente dans le regard entendu comme objet a, c’est-à-dire comme point aveugle de la conscience, lieu d’acquisition et de perte qui, par la castration du sujet, ouvre la plaie libidineuse et pulsionnelle de l’inconscient et renverse par là le désir de l’homme en désir de l’autre, comme le rappelle une célèbre formule de Lacan.Longtemps considérées comme porteuses d’illusions, comme l’illusion en tant que telle, les images nous montrent en fait la vérité de cette illusion : le monde est déformation et réversibilité, et nous-mêmes, prétendus sujets faisant face à son tableau inerte, n’en sommes que des taches. Au cours des mêmes années durant lesquelles Lacan élabore une théorie du regard, Merleau-Ponty, son interlocuteur direct – qui se réfère lui aussi au comportement de l’enfant devant le miroir – réfléchit sur la question du « en-être », c’est-à-dire de la réversibilité de la chair, ce tissu de différences qui nous constitue – les animaux et les choses – comme autant de plis d’un horizon commun. Pour Merleau-Ponty comme pour Lacan, dans une telle perspective, le sujet ne se défi nit pas positivement, mais comme écart par rapport à lui-même, comme coupure dans la peau de la conscience, comme plaie ouverte sur l’inconscient et sur le désir qui en jaillit abondamment. Ainsi, voir dans le miroir que, comme disait le poète, « je est un autre », implique que l’image soit libérée de son statut dévalorisant de « seconde chose » hérité du platonisme. Cela inaugure, en fait, une pensée sans dualisme. Gilles Deleuze travaillera lui aussi dans ce sens, lorsqu’il théorisera un renversement du platonisme à partir des images, dans son essai de 1966 Renverser le platonisme.Historiquement, le commencement de la philosophie a coïncidé avec la recherche d’une origine, d’une archè. Mais un monde où les relations nées du désir tracent des itinéraires imprévisibles, où le je et l’autre ne se distinguent plus, où sujet et objet ne connaissent plus de frontière, où la copie cesse de présupposer le modèle, un monde ainsi fait, a-t-il encore une origine accessible? Confronté à cette question essentielle, Merleau-Ponty théorisera – une fois encore à partir de la vision –, au lieu d’une origine en soi préétablie, un originaire en perpétuelle explosion. De son côté, Deleuze élaborera quelque chose d’analogue, à partir de la réflexion sur le cinéma qui l’occupera dans les années 1980 : il « encapsulera » les extases temporelles dans une image-miroir, une concrétion cristalline à plusieurs facettes où le monde se différencie sans cesse, dans un éternel retour.Mirror, Mirror of my DesiresOn the Threshold of Reversibility, the libidic Passion of ImagesIn a journey through the perspectives of Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, I shall show how images – the images that from Plato on have been relegated by Western metaphysics to the role of mere copies – allow us to trace the direction of a new and non-dualistic thought, a direction opened up by desire, that is to say, by something exceeding any simplistic dualism and fi nding precisely in images its privileged channel.The specular image – conceived by Platonism as the simulacrum par excellence, as the emblem of the deforming, deceiving copy of a harmonious preliminarymodel – makes us see more than it actually shows: as Lacan remarked in a renowned essay published in 1949, since childhood, in front of the mirror, we discover ourselves as subjects of the world, but also – and inevitably – as subjected to the world. The ego – of which we are in-formed by the specular image – is turned, through that very image, into the obscure, uncanny chasm of the other, and, consequently, in the unfathomable vortex of the other’s desire. Indeed, if in the mirror we can embrace the whole of our body and catch with a single gaze its status of subject, by the mirror that very gaze is however returned – blind and insistent – as a partial object (objet a) summoning us as desubjectivized subjects, as castrated subjects ($), namely, as mere “stains” in the picture of the world. Quite paradoxically, the image fixed by the child in the mirror founds the traditional idea of the subject conceived as the dinamic pole of the relation between the ego and the world. In short, as Slavoj Žižek remarks commenting on Lacan, the dinamic capability of the subject is grounded on an excessive fixation of the image of the subject itself, fixation which finds its absent origin in the gaze meant as object a, namely, meant as that blind point of consciousness, that point of acquisition and loss which, by castrating the subject, opens the acies of the libidically throbbing wound of the unconscious and turns, to borrow a renowed Lacanian expression, man’s desire into the other’s desire.For long considered to herald illusions, images show us the truth of illusion itself: the world is deformation and reversibility and we – presumed subjects in front of its inert picture – are, on the contrary, its “stains.” In the same years in which Lacan was elaborating a theory of gaze, Merleau-Ponty, who was then a direct interlocutor of his, was articulating – by referring, as Lacan did, to the child’s behaviour in front of the mirror – a series of important reflections over the problem of the en-être, that is to say, over the problem of the reversibility of flesh, i. e., that differential fabric constituting us – animals and things – as variegated gatherings of a common horizon. For Merleau-Ponty, as well as for Lacan, according to such a perspective, the subject, far from being defined in a positive way, is defined by a gap in relation with its own self, that is to say, by a cut in the skin of consciousness, by a wound opening to the unconscious and to the desire spurting abundantly from the subconscious.To see in the mirror that, as the poet said, “I am an Other,” is to free images from the status of “second things” with which Platonism had dismissed them; it is, in other words, to inaugurate a non-dualistic thought. For his part, Deleuze will also engage in the same direction by theorizing a reversing of Platonism from the very standpoint of images in his 1966 essay Renverser le platonisme.The beginning of philosophy has historically matched with the search for an origin, namely, an arké. But in a world in which the relations inaugurated by desire trace unpredictable itineraries, in a world in which the ego and the other can no longer be distinguished, in a world in which the subject and the object know no more boundary lines, in a world in which model and copy cease to exist as the presupposition of one another, in such a world, I said, is it still possible to find an origin? By measuring himself with such a crucial question, Merleau-Ponty will theorize – once again from the standpoint of vision – an “originating in perennial explosion” instead of a narrow, pregiven origin. For his part, Deleuze will elaborate something similar (similar in a Deleuzian way, of course, that is to say, similar from the standpoint of a basic difference) in his reflection on cinema, which will keep him busy in the first half of the eighties, by capsulating the temporal dimensions in a mirror-image, i. e., a crystalline concretion in whose facets the world perennially becomes in an eternal differential return. (shrink)

Miroir, miroir de mes désirsAu seuil de la réversibilité, la libido ardente des imagesEn parcourant les perspectives de Lacan, Merleau-Ponty et Deleuze, je me propose de montrer comment l’image – une image dont le rôle, depuis Platon, a été réduit par la métaphysique occidentale à celui de simple copie – rend possible une pensée nouvelle non dualiste, une pensée ouverte par le désir, c’est-à-dire par ce qui dépasse tout dualisme simpliste et qui trouve dans l’image sa voie privilégiée.L’image du miroir (...) – considérée par le platonisme comme le simulacre par excellence, comme l’emblème de la copie déformante et trompeuse d’un modèle originaire harmonieux – donne à voir bien plus qu’elle ne nous montre : comme Lacan le remarquait dans son célèbre essai de 1949, devant le miroir, nous nous découvrons, comme les enfants, sujets du monde, mais aussi, inévitablement, sujets au monde. Le «je» – dont nous sommes in-formés par l’image du miroir – s’abîme, par cette même image, dans les l’inquiétante étrangété de l’autre, et par suite dans les gorges insondables de son désir. Si l’image du miroir nous permet d’embrasser la totalité de notre corps et d’apprécier en un regard notre statut de sujet, ce regard nous est toutefois restitué – aveugle et insistant – sous la forme d’un objet partiel (objet a) qui nous interpelle comme sujets désubjectivés, comme sujets castrés, ou encore comme simples « taches » dans lapeinture du monde. L’image fixée par l’enfant dans le miroir fonde, paradoxalement, l’idée traditionnelle du sujet comme pôle dynamique de la relation je-monde. Comme le remarque Slavoj Žižek, en commentant Lacan, la capacité dynamique du sujet se fonde en somme sur une fixation excessive de l’image du sujet lui-même, fixation qui trouve son origine absente dans le regard entendu comme objet a, c’est-à-dire comme point aveugle de la conscience, lieu d’acquisition et de perte qui, par la castration du sujet, ouvre la plaie libidineuse et pulsionnelle de l’inconscient et renverse par là le désir de l’homme en désir de l’autre, comme le rappelle une célèbre formule de Lacan.Longtemps considérées comme porteuses d’illusions, comme l’illusion en tant que telle, les images nous montrent en fait la vérité de cette illusion : le monde est déformation et réversibilité, et nous-mêmes, prétendus sujets faisant face à son tableau inerte, n’en sommes que des taches. Au cours des mêmes années durant lesquelles Lacan élabore une théorie du regard, Merleau-Ponty, son interlocuteur direct – qui se réfère lui aussi au comportement de l’enfant devant le miroir – réfléchit sur la question du « en-être », c’est-à-dire de la réversibilité de la chair, ce tissu de différences qui nous constitue – les animaux et les choses – comme autant de plis d’un horizon commun. Pour Merleau-Ponty comme pour Lacan, dans une telle perspective, le sujet ne se défi nit pas positivement, mais comme écart par rapport à lui-même, comme coupure dans la peau de la conscience, comme plaie ouverte sur l’inconscient et sur le désir qui en jaillit abondamment. Ainsi, voir dans le miroir que, comme disait le poète, « je est un autre », implique que l’image soit libérée de son statut dévalorisant de « seconde chose » hérité du platonisme. Cela inaugure, en fait, une pensée sans dualisme. Gilles Deleuze travaillera lui aussi dans ce sens, lorsqu’il théorisera un renversement du platonisme à partir des images, dans son essai de 1966 Renverser le platonisme.Historiquement, le commencement de la philosophie a coïncidé avec la recherche d’une origine, d’une archè. Mais un monde où les relations nées du désir tracent des itinéraires imprévisibles, où le je et l’autre ne se distinguent plus, où sujet et objet ne connaissent plus de frontière, où la copie cesse de présupposer le modèle, un monde ainsi fait, a-t-il encore une origine accessible? Confronté à cette question essentielle, Merleau-Ponty théorisera – une fois encore à partir de la vision –, au lieu d’une origine en soi préétablie, un originaire en perpétuelle explosion. De son côté, Deleuze élaborera quelque chose d’analogue, à partir de la réflexion sur le cinéma qui l’occupera dans les années 1980 : il « encapsulera » les extases temporelles dans une image-miroir, une concrétion cristalline à plusieurs facettes où le monde se différencie sans cesse, dans un éternel retour.Mirror, Mirror of my DesiresOn the Threshold of Reversibility, the libidic Passion of ImagesIn a journey through the perspectives of Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, I shall show how images – the images that from Plato on have been relegated by Western metaphysics to the role of mere copies – allow us to trace the direction of a new and non-dualistic thought, a direction opened up by desire, that is to say, by something exceeding any simplistic dualism and fi nding precisely in images its privileged channel.The specular image – conceived by Platonism as the simulacrum par excellence, as the emblem of the deforming, deceiving copy of a harmonious preliminarymodel – makes us see more than it actually shows: as Lacan remarked in a renowned essay published in 1949, since childhood, in front of the mirror, we discover ourselves as subjects of the world, but also – and inevitably – as subjected to the world. The ego – of which we are in-formed by the specular image – is turned, through that very image, into the obscure, uncanny chasm of the other, and, consequently, in the unfathomable vortex of the other’s desire. Indeed, if in the mirror we can embrace the whole of our body and catch with a single gaze its status of subject, by the mirror that very gaze is however returned – blind and insistent – as a partial object (objet a) summoning us as desubjectivized subjects, as castrated subjects ($), namely, as mere “stains” in the picture of the world. Quite paradoxically, the image fixed by the child in the mirror founds the traditional idea of the subject conceived as the dinamic pole of the relation between the ego and the world. In short, as Slavoj Žižek remarks commenting on Lacan, the dinamic capability of the subject is grounded on an excessive fixation of the image of the subject itself, fixation which finds its absent origin in the gaze meant as object a, namely, meant as that blind point of consciousness, that point of acquisition and loss which, by castrating the subject, opens the acies of the libidically throbbing wound of the unconscious and turns, to borrow a renowed Lacanian expression, man’s desire into the other’s desire.For long considered to herald illusions, images show us the truth of illusion itself: the world is deformation and reversibility and we – presumed subjects in front of its inert picture – are, on the contrary, its “stains.” In the same years in which Lacan was elaborating a theory of gaze, Merleau-Ponty, who was then a direct interlocutor of his, was articulating – by referring, as Lacan did, to the child’s behaviour in front of the mirror – a series of important reflections over the problem of the en-être, that is to say, over the problem of the reversibility of flesh, i. e., that differential fabric constituting us – animals and things – as variegated gatherings of a common horizon. For Merleau-Ponty, as well as for Lacan, according to such a perspective, the subject, far from being defined in a positive way, is defined by a gap in relation with its own self, that is to say, by a cut in the skin of consciousness, by a wound opening to the unconscious and to the desire spurting abundantly from the subconscious.To see in the mirror that, as the poet said, “I am an Other,” is to free images from the status of “second things” with which Platonism had dismissed them; it is, in other words, to inaugurate a non-dualistic thought. For his part, Deleuze will also engage in the same direction by theorizing a reversing of Platonism from the very standpoint of images in his 1966 essay Renverser le platonisme.The beginning of philosophy has historically matched with the search for an origin, namely, an arké. But in a world in which the relations inaugurated by desire trace unpredictable itineraries, in a world in which the ego and the other can no longer be distinguished, in a world in which the subject and the object know no more boundary lines, in a world in which model and copy cease to exist as the presupposition of one another, in such a world, I said, is it still possible to find an origin? By measuring himself with such a crucial question, Merleau-Ponty will theorize – once again from the standpoint of vision – an “originating in perennial explosion” instead of a narrow, pregiven origin. For his part, Deleuze will elaborate something similar (similar in a Deleuzian way, of course, that is to say, similar from the standpoint of a basic difference) in his reflection on cinema, which will keep him busy in the first half of the eighties, by capsulating the temporal dimensions in a mirror-image, i. e., a crystalline concretion in whose facets the world perennially becomes in an eternal differential return. (shrink)

I recently read through the most recent 24 issues of Environmental Health Perspectives—the National Institutes of Health journal of, among other issues, scientific research into how environmental contaminants impact animal and human health. It is a catalog of horrors from a public health perspective. Fish and frogs with their sex scrambled; deformed frogs with altered hormone levels in their blood; a nearly threefold increase in birth defects among Minnesota farm children exposed to pesticides; 2,4-D exposure reducing hormone levels in (...) men; insignificant levels of four environmental chemicals adding up to a significant dose; a third study reconfirming a 50% sperm decline in U.S. men, 1934–1996; phthalates elevated in the blood of Puerto Rican girls developing breasts before they are 8; some 6,000 chemicals declared candidates for study as hormone disrupters ; children living near incinerators having delayed sexual development; hypospadias linked to organochlorine levels in the blood of mink, otter, and polar bears; and “No living organism may be considered DDT-free.” Nothing definitive, but it all suggests that things are tending in a direction that is perfectly awful. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“It’s not true, but I believe it”: Discussions on jettatura in Naples between the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth CenturiesFrancesco Paolo de CegliaIntroduction: What is Jettatura?Non èvero...ma ci credo (“It’s not true... but I believe it”) is the title of a comedy by the Italian actor and playwright, Peppino De Filippo, younger brother of the more famous Eduardo, which was staged for the first time (...) in 1942. The narrated events take place in the twentieth century and concern Gervasio Savastano, a Neapolitan businessman who is tormented by the fear of jettatura. The character, victim of grotesque events, first sacks a worker, believing him to be a jettatore, and then hires another, who is a hunchback and so should bring him good luck. In the end, however, it is discovered that the presumed jettatore has never harmed anyone and that the hunchback is not what he seems: he has stuffed his jacket in order to enter into the good graces of the gullible businessman and marry his daughter, with whom he has planned a con trick. The “lucky” events ascribed to his presence can therefore be considered casual. The epilogue? In keeping with the logic of compromise, typical of the brothers De Filippo’s theater, even though the character is rationally convinced of the unfounded nature of his beliefs, he remains adamant: “It’s not true, but I believe it” in other words.1 [End Page 75]“Where I come from, jettatura rules,” wrote the journalist and scriptwriter Giuseppe Marotta in 1947. Indeed, it is still a part of popular Neapolitan culture today.2 Often confused with similar beliefs, such as fascination (fascino) and the evil eye (malocchio), jettatura assumed its present form between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when a polite debate on its nature was taking shape in the city. In this period, the epistemological pluralism animating the discussions was translated into a variety of interpretative hypotheses and literary genres, in which grotesque atmospheres and spirited quips also found room, all perfectly in line with what could be considered the Weltanschauung of Savastano. It is the purpose of this article to examine these discussions, which even spread the term abroad and, with it, the “local color” of the concept.Nineteenth-century European writers on jettatura knew the Neapolitan authors well, and either quoted them explicitly or associated them with characters whose names were a deformation of real people’s: for example, Volitta for Valletta (Stendhal), don Jo (Stendhal) or Ojori (Dumas) for De Jorio. They explained that jettatura corresponded to the more familiar evil eye, but they left the term in Italian, as if to underline the fact that it was untranslatable.Is jettatura a mere anthropological issue, linked to a “primitive” culture, in the face of which official science would remain refractory? A belief that could not be exported or shared by those educated in more “highly developed” contexts? Well, in part, yes. Nevertheless, in the 1840s there was a visitor to Naples who expressed himself in the following terms: “When a foreigner arrives in Naples, at first he laughs at jettatura, then, little by little, he becomes troubled by it, and finally, after a stay of three months, you will see him covered in horns and with his right hand forever clenched [to ward off evil].”3 [End Page 76]So wrote the novelist Alexandre Dumas, père, one of the many travellers who, after having completed the Grand Tour of southern Italy, decided to describe its picturesque scenes and backward customs.4 Creating a veritable topos of travel literature, in the same period the philologist Karl August Mayer commented, “often foreigners let themselves be influenced” by local “superstitions.”5 Indeed many of them were captivated by these Neapolitan beliefs, despite their desire to remain objective and detached; and so they were “converted,” and driven to seek scientific explanations, often after meeting “a Real Jettatore,” whose image had nothing in common with the exotic fantasies of “a French Novelist’s Idea of Jettatore.”6Actually, Dumas and Mayer probably exaggerated somewhat in order to make their descriptions more... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“We Need to Cut the Neck!”Confronting Psychological and Moral Distress during Emergency Cricothyrotomy1Stephanie CooperEnoughYou didn’t die in the ER, but rather, began your inexorable demise. The last, first, and only words I ever heard you utter was the weak mewl “tight, tight” as the blood pressure cuff constricted your left arm. You were 98–years–old, bed–bound, at the end. Your world was already partitioning itself from us, your brain tunneling (...) down the uneven corridors of consciousness. A concretion of otoliths muffled your hearing, and fatigue burdened your ancient heart.Your name–band encircled your skinny ankle like a bird. Deformed by arthritis, you were caged within yourself, imprisoned by senescence. You could not declare yourself to us. Words disintegrated into moans and your grimace became animal.When you came back from x–ray—hypotensive with multiple neck fractures confirmed—you could speak no more. Your pulse slowed, your blood pressure plummeted. I jammed a gloved finger against your femoral pulse, faint and tired. [End Page E5]“What’s her DNR status?” I gravely asked your nurse.The DNR paperwork for once had arrived with the patient. “No CPR” she said with relief. But then the paperwork went on, forcing me—the waitress of tragedy—to serve up the hash of an impossible menu.As health care providers, we are all often tasked with performing contradictory actions: the pain of IV insertion followed by the morphine push, drilling deeper into broken bone in order to plate it, the inadvertent cracking of ribs during chest compressions. We sometimes must perform violent action in the hope of sustaining and resurrecting life. We are asked to perform the impossible, the contradictory, the painful. And sometimes the actions we must take catalyze an inexorable chain reaction of actions, which can end in death–prolonging and painful interventions that we did not intend.Although our culture may imagine that one can choose one’s meal at the end–of–life fast–food franchise of death, such is not the case. You can’t suddenly decide you’re a vegetarian. You can’t order the cheeseburger without the cheese—and we all are getting the burger, in the end. Ordering the heart–squeezing drugs without the CPR to circulate them, or the antibiotics without the fluid to counter dehydration, is like ordering the burger without the bun. Sometimes the possible choices are not necessarily realistic choices. You get served what you get served, and perhaps we should question the assumption that we have the ability to choose at all.Your DNR form proclaimed no CPR but then said that antibiotics and intubation were okay—the cheeseburger without the cheese. An unfortunate choice for you, me, and the rest of us, as your death menu led to a very unhappy meal.You were comatose. I stuck a tongue blade deep into your desiccated throat. You did not gag. This means I should have intubated you, but morally, I couldn’t. To what end? You were 98 years old, broken, moribund. If you hadn’t suffered multiple neck fractures, or if you were a vibrant elder who had just walked off Mt. Rainier, maybe the story would have been different. But you? I doubted that you truly had a chance of ever feeling joy again. You were somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother. I knew this step would lead to the domino of unstoppable steps. I refused to flog your corpse.I called your daughter Kay on her cell phone, told her that you were in critical condition and that she should come to the ER immediately. But how to begin to tell a daughter her mother is dying, let alone over a cell phone? Gentle but surreal and impersonal, my voice tried to tell your daughter that the interventions you needed would likely kill you. I have seen enough human suffering to know. To me, the choices were clear: death by nature’s irrefutable course, versus a more painful, protracted, and violent death by what we’d do to you.Kay arrived in a wheelchair and scooted up to your bedside. Like all daughters, she wasn’t ready for you... (shrink)

The animal that therefore I am (more to follow) -- But as for me, who am I (following)? -- And say the animal responded -- I don't know why we are doing this.

Observations of animals engaging in apparently moral behavior have led academics and the public alike to ask whether morality is shared between humans and other animals. Some philosophers explicitly argue that morality is unique to humans, because moral agency requires capacities that are only demonstrated in our species. Other philosophers argue that some animals can participate in morality because they possess these capacities in a rudimentary form. Scientists have also joined the discussion, and their views are just (...) as varied as the philosophers’. Some research programs examine whether animals countenance specific human norms, such as fairness. Other research programs investigate the cognitive and affective capacities thought to be necessary for morality. There are two sets of concerns that can be raised by these debates. They sometimes suffer from there being no agreed upon theory of morality and no clear account of whether there is a demarcation between moral and social behavior; that is, they lack a proper philosophical foundation. They also sometimes suffer from there being disagreement about the psychological capacities evident in animals. Of these two sets of concerns—the nature of the moral and the scope of psychological capacities—we aim to take on only the second. In this chapter we defend the claim that animals have three sets of capacities that, on some views, are taken as necessary and foundational for moral judgment and action. These are capacities of care, capacities of autonomy, and normative capacities. Care, we argue, is widely found among social animals. Autonomy and normativity are more recent topics of empirical investigation, so while there is less evidence of these capacities at this point in our developing scientific knowledge, the current data is strongly suggestive. (shrink)

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our use of animals as part of (...) our pandemic and climate change mitigation efforts and increase our support for animals as part of our adaptation efforts. Applying and extending frameworks such as One Health and the Green New Deal, Sebo calls for reducing support for factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade; increasing support for humane, healthful, and sustainable alternatives; and considering human and nonhuman needs holistically. Sebo also considers connections with practical issues such as education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, as well as with theoretical issues such as well-being, moral status, political status, and population ethics. In all cases, he shows that these issues are both important and complex, and that we should neither underestimate our responsibilities because of our limitations, nor underestimate our limitations because of our responsibilities. Both an urgent call to action and a survey of what ethical and effective action requires, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves is an invaluable resource for scholars, advocates, policy-makers, and anyone interested in what kind of world we should attempt to build and how. (shrink)

Ugliness is a neglected topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. This is regrettable given that this topic is not just genuinely fascinating, but could also illuminate other areas in the field, seeing as ugliness, albeit unexplored, does feature rather prominently in several debates in aesthetics. This paper articulates a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness. Ultimately, I argue that deformity, understood in a certain way, and displeasure, jointly suffice for ugliness. First, I motivate my proposal, by locating a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness in (...) aesthetic tradition, offering examples in support, and rejecting related alternative suggestions. Second, I argue that the proposal boasts considerable merits. Not only does it capture much of what we ordinarily think of as ugly, but it also comprises an objective criterion for ugliness, offers unity and comprehensiveness, and is informative and explanatorily potent. Third, I discuss a number of objections, thereby demonstrating that the proposal withstands reflective scrutiny. (shrink)