This article develops two figures of the social imagination: the stereotype and the emblem. To start with we explore the notion of social imagination, principally from Emile Durkheim, Gaston Bachelard and Maurine Godelier. Secondly, the article deepens the two notions of stereotypes and emblems supported by the works of the historian Bronislaw Baczko and the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld’s. Throughout the paper, the theoretical aims are illustrated with reference to coal-mining memory and heritage in the north of France.  .

One is a science, the other an art; one useful, the other seemingly decorative, but mathematics and music share common origins in cult and mystery and have been linked throughout history. Emblems of Mind is Edward Rothstein’s classic exploration of their profound similarities, a journey into their “inner life.” Along the way, Rothstein explains how mathematics makes sense of space, how music tells a story, how theories are constructed, how melody is shaped. He invokes the poetry of Wordsworth, the (...) anthropology of Le;vi-Strauss, the imagery of Plato, and the philosophy of Kant. Math and music, Rothstein shows, apply comparable methods as they create their abstractions, display similar concerns with ratio and proportion, and depend on metaphors and analogies to create their meanings. Ultimately, Rothstein argues, they reveal the ways in which we come to understand the world. They are images of the mind at work and play; indeed, they are emblems of Mind itself. Jacques Barzun called this book “splendid.” Martin Gardner said it was “beautifully written, marvelous and entertaining.” It will provoke all serious readers to think in new ways about the grand patterns in art and life. “Lovely, wistful. . . . Rothstein is a wonderful guide to the architecture of musical space, its tensions and relations, its resonances and proportions. . . . His account of what is going on in the music is unfailingly felicitous.”— New Yorker “Provocative and exciting. . . . Rothstein writes this book as a foreign correspondent, sending dispatches from a remote and mysterious locale as a guide for the intellectually adventurous. The remarkable fact about his work is not that it is profound, as much of the writing is, but that it is so accessible.”— Christian Science Monitor. (shrink)

For many peoples the fall of the Soviet regime saw the disappearance of a structure that had ensured their membership of entities with which they had in fact been only partially able to identify. This is true of the Buryats and Russians living in Buryatia, a former autonomous republic on the shores of Lake Baikal in southern central Siberia.

A Choice of Emblemes and other Devices est un livre d'emblèmes adapté et traduit en 1586 par Geffrey Whitney. Il s'agit du premier livre d'emblèmes connu de langue anglaise.Cet ouvrage, qui comporte d'abondantes adresses au lecteur, mérite notre attention pour au moins deux raisons. Tout d'abord, certains de ces emblèmes, dans leur dimension picturale, semblent rendre un écho intéressant à quelques passages de pièces shakespeariennes, comme si le Barde avait trouvé là de quoi nourrir, entre autres sources, son inspiration. Par (...) ailleurs, d'autres emblèmes mettent en scène la vie des petites gens, centre d'intérêt iconographique assez rare pour cette période.Enfin, certains emblèmes présentent la particularité d'associer une iconographie gréco-latine et chrétienne, selon un cadre sémantique néo-platonicien et cabbaliste chrétien. Le dialogue du texte de l'emblème et de l'image peut ainsi permettre d'élaborer une interprétation relative à des divinités ou des symboles obscurs.L'étude que nous proposons abordera, tout d'abord, cet ouvrage comme source supplémentaire d'inspiration poétique et métaphorique pour Shakespeare, avant de le considérer comme un livre des arts et métiers concernant les petites gens. Enfin, notre dernière partie esquissera quelques tentatives d'interprétation d'emblèmes énigmatiques. (shrink)

This paper explores the power of womanist ethics to illuminate the Confederate monuments debate. First, I draw on Emilie Townes’s analysis of the “cultural production of evil” to construe Confederate monuments as products of the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” that render visible for whites the invisibility of “whiteness.” Second, I argue that Angela Sims’s work on lynching provides a vivid example of how “countermemory” functions as an antidote to the fantastic hegemonic imagination. Finally, I argue that Delores Williams’s re-evaluation of the (...) cross as a sacred symbol enables a reading of Confederate monuments as realist symbols of violence that require displacement from the center to the periphery of national sacred space. I conclude that although the debate on Confederate monuments is important, womanist analysis warns against an overly-narrow focus on this issue, lest we neglect the already obscured gendered, classist, homophobic, and xenophobic dimensions of structural injustice that the monuments represent. (shrink)

Displayed on school walls during holidays, attached to floats and triumphal arches in processions, emblems played a part in all public events organized by the Jesuits in the 17th century. These verbal-iconographic compositions, which were used to illustrate the principal themes of the ceremony, were not a mere period detail or an ornamental device but constituted a means of expression which, by virtue of the particular relations governing the association of text and image, mobilized complex rhetorical, moral, and spiritual (...) elements simultaneously. By associating an image - seen as the “body” - with a textual element (inscriptio et subscriptio) - the “soul” - the emblem-maker sought to achieve a unity of meaning in which the two forms of communication complemented each other: it is precisely the way in which the two elements are connected, and the laws that regulate their composition, that constitutes the foundation of the language of the emblem. This language, which is used in a corresponding manner in a variety of other symbolic compositions (devices, hieroglyphs, symbols, coats of arms, medals, etc.), is based on the rhetorical operations of the metaphor, applied here as a model both for the word, with its mimetic properties, and for figurative codes. However, the metaphor, as a product of human ingenuity, is not only situated at the crossroads of a system of thought crystallized in a great number of inventions, but also bears witness to an ornamental aesthetic, typical of the 17th century's aristocratic culture and social rituals. While there does exist a vast bibliography of materials on the function and role of metaphor in Baroque culture, questions nevertheless remain about the numerous cultural practices to which the Baroque gave rise and the particular processes that the 17th century brought into play. My intention here is not to resolve all such questions but rather to provide an analytical framework by focusing my observations on emblematic compositions produced in the scholastic milieu of the Society of Jesus. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s theory of the subject has consistently opposed a vision of History as meaning and totality, for the sake of an internal, subjective and discontinuous grasp of the periodisation of political “sequences.” This article examines the theoretical trajectory that leads Badiou to dislocate the historical dialectic, generating a comprehension of political time which is no longer bound to an ordered matrix of expression and development; it also considers Badiou’s relation tovarious strands of anti-humanist anti-historicism and tackles the theoretical tensions (...) that inhere in his disjunction of nature and history. The article concludes by discussing the effect of Badiou’s notion of periodisation on the very historicity and mutability of his own philosophical apparatus, and the immanent threat posed to his thinking of the event by an ‘absolute historicism.’. (shrink)

The article provides a comparative analysis of the similarities of arguments put forward by discourses on mass imagery in the Renaissance and modernity. In particular, emblem theories are quite striking in the way they advanced similar arguments to theories about television. In both cases we find iconoclast and iconodule arguments, and in both cases we find an implicit, holy or unholy theological connection being made between mass medium, the image, and technology. The article will argue that the condemnation of or (...) fascination with images in mass media is a form of discursive, i.e. textual, self-protection. (shrink)

Resumen: Las políticas europeas de inmigración y refugio han sido criticadas por quienes las consideran emblemas de una concepción que pone en grave riesgo elementos básicos del Estado de Derecho y aun de la democracia. El epítome es la aparición de mercados de esclavos en Libia, a las puertas de la UE, un Estado fallido que la UE y sus Estados miembros se empeñan en elevar a la condición de partner privilegiado de sus políticas de externalización. Tomando como base los (...) análisis de Lochak, Agambem y Bauman y la concepción de la propuesta por el filósofo camerunés Mbembé, desarrollando tesis de Foucault (biopolítica), se proponen algunas alternativas que vienen presididas por la exigencia de reconocimiento y garantía de derechos básicos de inmigrantes y refugiados. Abstract: European immigration and refuge policies have been criticized by those who see them as emblems of a conception that puts in serious risk basic elements of the Rule of Law and even of democracy. The epitome is the emergence of slave markets in Libya (at the gates of the EU), a failed state that, nevertheless, the EU and its Member States are determined to raise to the status of privileged partner of their outsourcing policies. Based on the analysis of Lochak, Agambem and Bauman and the conception of the proposed by the Cameroonian philosopher Mbembé who develops Foucault's thesis about biopolitics, this text will propose some alternatives that are leaded by the requirement of recognition and guarantee of rights of immigrants and refugees. (shrink)

This article is about time. It is about time, or more precisely, about the absence of time in law’s digital future. It is also about time travelling and the seemingly ever-popular BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who. Further, it is about law’s timefullness; about law’s pictorial past and the ‘visual baroque’ of its chronological fused future. Ultimately, it is about a time paradox of seeing time run to a time when time runs ‘No More!’ This ‘timey-wimey’ article is in (...) three parts. The first part looks to a hazy remembered past of the legal emblem tradition as presented in Peter Goodrich’s Legal Emblems and the Art of Law to learn visual literacy and also to glimpse the essential elements of modern legality with authority, decision and violence. The second part maps how these images and icons of modern legality are manifest in the Doctor Who fiftieth year anniversary special ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The third stage looks beyond these first order meanings to understand the chronological chaos of ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The technicity of the image as a portal through time and space that the narrative revolves around charts the implications for the digital end of time for law. (shrink)

Illuminating innovatively the dialectic by which “sign” is induced “to signify” requires an analysis of the inferrer-entailed symbolics constituting “signified,” a process particularly observable during relative, purposeful re-signification, particularly at high-visibility sites. Because Nathaniel Hawthorne focused intently his romantic-dramatic oeuvre on cynosural women, because of his affinity for allegorical signification, and especially for his tangibility to feminist themes and axiologies of virtue transcending even the highly reformist nineteenth century, he is here chosen an interpretation-open “carrier wave” for that research. Climactically (...) and consonant thematically, also instructive is Umberto Eco’s unnamed, eponymous “Rose” for being an antiphrastic sign with a truth of its own signifying at least (like Hawthorne’s Puritan-oblique Hester Prynne) divergence from male/hieratic hermeneutics; at most (like Apuleius’s metaphysical Psyche, Hawthorne’s lodestar) ineffable, philosophical Good. As if to the generating premise, Eco wrote in The Name of the Rose, “Without an eye to read them[,] signs produce no concepts”; socially consequential signification-conditioned transformation, in that eye and toward those signifieds, symptomatic both historical and rhetorical, is here assayed. (shrink)

In Quarles' world the emblem as traditionally conceived must strain across a widening gap between the verbal and the visual. Rosemary Freeman's criticism of Quarles, that in a mechanical "imposition of meaning" the text of the emblem applies an interpretation to, rather than discovers a significance within, the image, is more apt than Freeman realized. With the semantic congruence between word and image no longer guaranteed, artists attempting to yoke the two would have to reconceive the relationship between them. Seen (...) as a response to this need, Blake's illuminated books complicate the emblem tradition in an art of dazzling improvisatory juxtapositions. Indeed, his revaluation of the ties between "body" and "soul" may be taken in one sense as a revision of the emblematist's traditional distinction. Words, once the soul of the emblem, now become truly animate for Blake - flowing, sprouting, multicolored - while their quirky energy, no longer restrained by standardized print, is embodied on sensual, quasi-pictorial shapes; images speak in a new and private vocabulary of emblematic birds, curling tendrils, and other forms that gesture allusively from plate to plate. These frame, underscore, celebrate, intrude upon, parody, or oppose themselves by "contraries" to the meaning of the adjoining text. If Quarles' work signals the failure of the emblem in England, its success in probing the problems of combining language and imagery points toward the renewal of the form in Blake. Ernest B. Gilman, assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of The Curious Perspective. He is currently working on a book on joint literary and pictorial forms in the Renaissance. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a critical exploration of the functional features underpinning the unconscious of institutional attachment—namely an attachment which is understood in terms of the subject-infant’s love for his institutional parent-power holder, and the indefinite need for a subject to remain within its infantile condition under the parenthood of the State. We venture beyond the Paternal metaphor and move towards the neglected metaphor of the Mother, so focal in the individual process of identification, assumption of language and the permanent attachment (...) to the space of prohibition and Law. A new position in Language is defined. To understand how the psychic space of the infant is artfully subjugated in the making of the Western culture and domination of the Western system of legal interpretation, an enquiry into the legal emblematic history of representations is necessary to map the process through which the subject learns its legal self and relationship with otherness through what Pierre Legendre coined as the Occidental Mirror and the triangular logic of reflexivity. A final enquiry interrogates the way the legal institution places itself in the position of the specular image that captivates the subject-infant within a procreated legal order, a law-giving and law abiding life starting from the laws of the familial structure reinforced by the role of the parents and by analogy, by the State assuming that role in the institutional life of the ad infinitum infant. (shrink)

The image of the Moor in Spanish literature reveals a paradox at the heart of Christian and Castilian hegemony in the period between the conquest of Nasrid Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of the Moriscos by Philip III in 1609.­­ Depictions fall between two extremes. On the “vilifying” side, Moors are hateful dogs, miserly, treacherous, lazy and overreaching. On the “idealizing” side, the men are noble, loyal, heroic, courtly—they even mirror the virtues that Christian knights aspire to—while the women (...) are endowed with singular beauty and discretion.Anti-Muslim diatribes are fairly common and predictable: they are flat and repetitive in their assertion of Old Christian superiority over every aspect of the lives of Muslims or crypto-Muslims. Any sign of cultural otherness is ridiculed; the conquering caste, insecure about its own lofty standards of limpieza de sangre , laughs away whatever trace of old Hispano-Arab splendor might remain in the Morisco. Or, conversely, the uneasy master recasts wretched Moriscos as ominous brethren of the Ottoman Turk.The truly vexed problem, however, consists in determining the meaning of idealized Moors in historiography, ballads, drama, and the novel. Roughly speaking, modern criticism divides into two camps in attempting to explain this curious phenomenon of literary infatuation with a cultural and religious minority subjected to growing popular hostility, Inquisitional hounding, and economic exploitation. I will call one camp “aestheticist” and the other “social.” Israel Burshatin, assistant professor of Spanish at Haverford College, is currently preparing a critical edition of Pedro del Corral’s Crónica sarracina. (shrink)

Since its inception, existential psychotherapy has been the principal ‘site,’ whereat philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology join hands. The Swiss psychiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger, is among the first psychiatrists to develop a philosophically grounded vision of psychiatry and psychology. Binswanger is indebted to Heidegger, Husserl, and Buber and becomes the pioneer and founding father of Daseinsanalysis, an existential–phenomenological anthropology for the study of psychoses. Later, in the hands of Medard Boss and under the guidance of Martin Heidegger, Daseinsanalysis evolves as the first (...) and, so far, only psychotherapeutic approach crafted in direct collaboration between a philosopher and a mental health.. (shrink)