In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Edict of Oedipus (Oedipus Tyrannus 223–51)Edwin CarawanI utter to all Cadmeans this proclamation! Whoever among you knows at whose hands Laius, son of Labdacus, perished, him I command to tell me all! If he is afraid that if he removes upon himself, well and good, he shall suffer nothing else unwelcome, but shall leave the land unharmed. But if someone knows another of you, or (...) a foreigner, to be the killer, let him not be silent; for I can dispense rewards, and gratitude also shall be his. But if you remain silent and someone, fearing for a friend or for himself, rejects this order—what I shall do then you must hear from me! I forbid all belonging to this land, over which I rule and sit upon the throne to receive him or to speak to him, or let him share in prayers and sacrifices to the gods, or to touch holy water; but all must drive him from their homes, since we are polluted as the Pythian oracle of god has just now revealed to me. This is how I shall fight side by side with the god and with the man who died.(223–45)[And I pray that the doer of the deed, whether a single man has gone undetected or he has acted with others, may wear away a miserable life in misery, miserable as he is. And I pray further that if he is by the hearth in my own house with my own knowledge, I may suffer the fate with which I have just cursed others.](246–51)1 [End Page 187]The speech of Oedipus to the assembled Thebans contains this notorious pronouncement of his own doom. It is a troublesome text and has been treated with much ingenuity. I quote above the recent Loeb translation by Lloyd–Jones, not because it has any singular defect, but on the contrary because it is an apt and representative treatment and the translator has fully justified his changes to the text. In the first paragraph he supposes that Oedipus sentences the killer of Laius to exile or excommunication, as almost all other commentators suppose: the penalties described in lines 228–29 and 236–41 must apply to the killer himself. Unfortunately, the text that has come down to us in the manuscripts does not quite say as much. So, as many scholars do, Lloyd– Jones finds a lacuna after line 227 and makes other alterations to suit; the curse against the killer in lines 246–51 now seems superfluous, so he brackets it. These changes are not prompted by any difficulty in the text itself but by the editor's understanding of what the text must mean. One presumes that Oedipus is addressing his every remedy against the perpetrator, the killer who slew Laius by his own hand.2 This essay challenges that presumption and the editorial license that derives from it.In the first section we consider the text that is preserved in the manuscripts, along with the major editorial changes, and find that modern editors, almost without exception, have proceeded on the assumption that the order for exile and excommunication can only apply to the actual killer or "author of the crime." The second section presents the evidence for a different assumption on the part of the ancient audience: that anyone who conceals and consorts with a killer bears a measure of guilt and may be punished accordingly. In the third section I offer a new interpretation of the edict and its implications later in the play, based upon this presumption of guilt by association.§ 1 The speech of Oedipus to the Theban assembly (216–75), as found in the manuscripts, has three sections. There is first a preamble (216–22), lamenting the difficulty of the task. We are then presented with what I shall call "the edict" (223–51), including various measures to assure discovery and punishment of the guilty parties and concluding with [End Page 188] the curse that Oedipus takes upon himself (the passage that Lloyd–Jones bracketed, 246–51). The edict is followed... (shrink)

Why do things happen as they do in the universe of Oedipus Tyrannus, consisting of the play itself coupled with the myth that surrounds and informs it? Why is Oedipus fated to kill his father and marry his mother? What part does Oedipus play in his own destruction? What role do divinities play? And what of human free will? In what follows I consider the power of curses, prophecy, prayer, fate, the gods, (...) and human self-determination as they serve to effect the action.Generally accepted is the notion that the Greek audience knew the Oedipus myth before entering the theater. Sophocles's use of dramatic irony depends on this. But where does the myth begin? Sophocles starts in medias res with the plague, but the myth... (shrink)

Apollo's oracle gives specific instructions concerning the treatment of the murderer of Laius. Oedipus issues an edict of excommunication and bindshimself under a curse. I wish to examine the relationship between these three pronouncements as they occur initially and as they are used throughout the play. The basis of what I have to say is tentative in that it consists in a particular interpretation of Oedipus' addres, 216 ff., and in the assumption that Sophocles employed a distinction (...) between an edict, that is a secular command of the kingas governing authority, and a curse which, once pronounced, is felt to operate independently. However, both the interpretation and the assumption are farfrom arbitrary, and if they are acceptable the resulting analysis reveals whatmight be called Sophocles' creative use of past episodes. The terms of the oraclegive way to an edict of excommunication, and this in turn, becomes the contentof a curse which initially had a different content. (shrink)

Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant has recently begun to gain the concerted attention of critics, who have noted the play’s signature blend of low and high, of ephemeral, late Regency politics with the classic genres of Sophoclean tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and mock epic. But Austin Warren’s famous and widely accepted definition of mock epic as “not mockery of the epic but elegantly affectionate homage, offered by a writer who finds [the serious epic] irrelevant to his age” does not describe Shelley’s (...) earnest goal of immediate political reform in authoring Swellfoot. Instead, the play evinces Shelley’s unique, conscious reconfiguration of four conventions characteristic of the high, classical epic: the “prosperous breeze”; the epic simile; katabasis or descent into the underworld; and divine intervention. I argue that Shelley’s comic adaptation of these epic conventions reflects his serious aim of helping effect reform through Swellfoot and embodies his absorption of the concept of Shakespeare’s history plays as an experimental hybrid of dramatic forms with epic subjects, gained during his earlier reading of A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Though the immediate suppression of Swellfoot prevented its relevance in its own historical moment, it comprises a singular hybrid of Aristophanic satire and Sophoclean tragedy with high epic conventions, while ironically also identifying Shelley as a proponent of the French neoclassical theory of the epic’s consciously didactic purpose propounded by Le Bossu. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Homeric Echoes in RhesusRobin Sparks BondWhen we think of Rhesus—if we do at all—we think of a play so structurally awkward, so dramatically unsatisfying, so inferior that it could not possibly be from the hand of Euripides.1 Our knowledge of the story's source—a selfcontained Iliadic episode (attractive for dramatic adaptation)—causes us to question the author's reasons for introducing new elements, such as Hector's contentious exchanges with the characters (...) around him and his apparent weakness as a leader. Our greatest difficulties with the play probably result from its episodic nature: first Dolon, then Rhesus, then Odysseus and Diomedes claim their time on the stage. So many seemingly discrete encounters detract from, or may even draw attention to the lack of, any sustained dramatic tension and most likely account for a second problematic feature—the absence of a clearly central hero. While Hector comes closest to filling this role, he fails to meet our expectations for a tragic hero of Athenian drama. His unchanging view of the circumstances around him and complete ignorance of what has happened, even at the end, leave us simply puzzled as to the author's interest or intent in putting these events on the stage.Albin Lesky has remarked on the play's "lifeless" quality: "no problems loom concerning the meaning of [the characters'] fate, nor are they convincing as human beings," 201. Other plays vaguely similar in structure or subject matter illuminate specific problems. Ajax, another drama in which a hero's death is the climax of the action, requires its characters to explore their predicament, to look forward to and then to confront the ramifications of a single deed. Oedipus Tyrannus, which [End Page 255] hardly falls short of Rhesus in the number of characters who take part in the unraveling process, is a highly effective example of a play in which the introduction of each character results in some type of forward movement in a progressive series of motivating questions (Who killed King Laius? Who was the robber? Who is Oedipus?). The process here is even more successful because of the surprising nature of the reversals which the various characters introduce. For instance, as Aristotle points out, "the man who comes to bring delight to Oedipus, and to rid him of his terror about his mother, does the opposite by revealing who Oedipus is."2 In effect, the initial (and all subsequent) reasons for the action and the development from one scene to the next are integrally linked. All this is, of course, well known. What we have not been so quick to perceive is its opposite, how Rhesus creates movement without necessity, and activity without realized implications, while its characters appear simply to act out a piece of epic oblivious to the real consequences of the events unfolding around them.If then Rhesus does not invite its audience to sympathize with the conscious suffering of its principal characters, we ought at least to feel compassion for the future hardship to which the play's ending points. It is not clear whether the audience is expected to know of the oracle about Rhesus, that if he should drink the water of the Scamander river he will become invincible.3 However, the outcome of the Trojan War is obvious, and Hector's enthusiasm for victory, which is constant throughout the play, seems to increase our awareness of his own inevitable doom. In fact, the play only concerns itself with enhancing the audience's anticipation of what they already know is going to happen, a quality which must result from the drama's adaptation of a Homeric source and which perhaps signals the author's interest in more than simply taking his plot from epic. Analysis of the nature of this anticipation and of Rhesus' reliance upon other Iliadic features reveals a guiding rationale behind much of its apparent quirkiness.The relationship between Rhesus and Iliad 10 has been explored by Bernard Fenik, who was primarily interested in explaining problems and [End Page 256] ambiguities in the Doloneia.4 He suggested that the play is based on a non-Iliadic version of the Rhesus story and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 29.2 (2005) 269-285 [Access article in PDF] Oedipus The King: Temperament, Character, and Virtue Grant Gillett Robin Hankey University of Otago I Recent discussions of ethics and literature suggest that there is a relationship between reading (or, better, immersing oneself in) literature (in particular, fiction) and the virtues. Nussbaum goes so far as to claim not only that good literature is conducive to moral sense (...) and sensibility but also that "the well-lived life is a work of literary art."1 The character development in most substantial fictional work that aims to engage us through its realism and truth to the human condition suggests that there is such a thing as a quasi-stable character and that an agent's character plays a significant role in the way not only that the person acts but also in the kinds of thing that happen to him or her. For a certain kind of virtue theorist, the internal harmony of character required for a person to do the right thing in a diverse range of situations involves cultivating exactly those skills required to live well. This thesis amounts to a claim that there is a close, indeed conceptual, relationship between right living and good living and that the type of character which results from cultivating the virtues is a character conducive to getting the best out of the situations that life throws in our way, whereas the vicious character reveals itself by causing strife, harm, and even tragedy.Gilbert Harman, criticizing virtue ethics on the basis of some key experiments in social psychology which have led to the idea of a "fundamental attribution error," argues that people do not have enduring character traits of the type required to sustain such a position.2 His critique has itself been attacked on the basis that what the experiments show is not the absence of character traits but their ability [End Page 269] to be influenced by the demands of a situation.3 Our objection is against the conception of virtues being attacked and also his sweeping conclusion about human nature and it has two strands. First we argue that phronesis, as the hallmark of a virtuous character, is a mix of skills, abilities, and attitudes honed in such a way as to allow the person to act fittingly in different life situations. Second, character runs true to type in an individual and even runs in families.We find support for both claims in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. This is, of course, a myth but one that has spoken to human beings across the ages and it recognizes both that different individuals show certain regularities in their modes of relationship and their conduct and that these tendencies are often familial, contributing significantly to the events marking family stories and traditions. Phronesis or practical wisdom is the skill to negotiate the challenges that life produces when fate deals one a hand of this (genetic and genealogical) kind. In the process of making the case we will support the claim that fiction "can significantly contribute to moral understanding by revealing what certain situations amount to" and therefore that it "can bring home to us the force of, for example, moral dilemmas" and indeed moral concepts, and we will use the Oedipus story to reflect on the lessons emerging from one version of virtue ethics.4We approach the Oedipus myth through Sophocles' tragedy in which an oracle about patricide and incest plays itself out in the lives of certain characters. The relevance for virtue ethics arises from the ways in which characters in the play react to their predicament and try to cope with the situations they must face. In moral life, individuals need to find strategies to deal with challenges they face both as individuals and as persons-in-relationships-with-others. The reactions portrayed in Oedipus make vivid not only the idea of character traits but also the role of virtue in moderating what we might do in situations that interact with our characters in potentially disastrous ways. II Harman's challenge begins... (shrink)

This contribution delves into the concept of ‘corporate sovereignty’, where companies, akin to states, function not only as economic entities but also as political actors exercising a novel form of sovereignty. Although business ethics typically approaches corporate power from ethical, legal, and economic perspectives, these viewpoints prove inadequate in conceptually grasping the specific form of power, namely sovereignty. In an era of escalating corporate influence and contested state authority, political theology becomes indispensable. The political theology of Carl (...) Schmitt, though not prominently featured in business ethics, provides valuable insights into how corporate power manifests in contemporary reality, particularly as ‘corporate sovereignty’. Schmitt contends that sovereignty reveals itself in exceptional circumstances, a concept paralleled by companies exercising sovereignty. Political theology unveils the political concepts and power dynamics behind corporate sovereignty, necessitating a broader approach in business ethics where political philosophy and theology play a crucial role. (shrink)

The axiom at the heart of this article stipulates that everything that can be extracted from Heidegger's thought by way of political contribution can be so extracted only from a position that is itself essentially non-political. This means that everything Heidegger says about politics, or that can be seen to resonate with our political situation, is articulated from a position or a space that is itself not political, a space that, furthermore, defines and decides (...) the essence of politics. His contribution, then, is not to the political debate as such. Rather, it consists in asking whether what is historically at stake in politics and played out in political terms is itself political, and so a matter for political thought, or whether the questions and concepts of political thought are themselves shaped in response to a phenomenon, possibly an event, which it, as political thought, cannot interrogate, or even intimate. Following Heidegger, I envisage our political situation from a non-political perspective, and provide the measure for an evaluation of contemporary politics as an ontohistorical phenomenon. This, I do by following a lead Heidegger develops in the 1930s and 1940s, and by focusing on the concept of Macht, the translation of which will turn out to raise key philosophical issues. Despite its obvious political connotations and overtones, this concept will turn out to designate a phenomenon that is not so much political, as it is metaphysical: it is metaphysics itself, and metaphysics in its entirety, that is of power. This means that all metaphysics is metaphysics of power, and that power itself is through and through metaphysical. Politics, especially modern politics, turns out to be an effect of Macht understood as a metaphysical phenomenon. Having revealed the structure of power, its logic, imperatives and different regimes, I consider briefly the possibility of a politics that would not be governed by such a principle of power, the possibility of what I would call a politics of powerlessness, or a politics of the otherwise than power (Ohnmacht). Could that be ‘politics’ in the highest and ownmost sense? Could ‘Europe’ stand for such radical politics? (shrink)

This article draws on a close reading of the language of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus to explore how the text problematizes concepts of place, space, and movement through the ambiguous figure of Oedipus. Considering Oedipus’ role in the play as well as in the Western intellectual tradition as an archetypal reader of signs and interpreter of riddles, the essay goes on to investigate how Oedipus’ literal and figurative mobility reveals the elusiveness and instability that conditions (...) not only our interpretation of the play, but also the practice of interpretation writ large. (shrink)

The present article has as its purpose to analyze the “spectacle” (ὄψις), from the conceptions developed in the Poetics of Aristotle, as a fundamental part in the tragic conception of Sophocles, in the work Oedipus Tyrannus. The analysis focused on the exodus of the play to demonstrate how aspects of theatrical representation are present in the tragic text.

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, (...) class='Hi'>Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. (shrink)

This article considers the social implications of the uncertainty surrounding Oedipus’ identity in Oedipus Tyrannus. It argues that questions of legitimacy, citizenship, and social status are raised at critical points in the play, and teases out the implications of details whose significance has not been recognized. It interprets Oedipus’ famous speech at 1076–85, in which he declares himself a “child of Tychē,” as a response to the news that he is a foundling; Oedipus acknowledges (...) the stigma attached to those without a proven pedigree at the same time as he seeks to neutralize its effect on public perception. (shrink)

At the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, several countries declared “states of exception,” that is, authorized legal devices that, in the face of circumstances deemed catastrophic, permit the implementation of extraordinary measures and the temporary suspension of some rights in order to restore the previous state of affairs as soon as possible. This paper offers a comparative textual analysis of the different states of exception declared in the USA, France, and Spain. I argue that these texts constitute a privileged site (...) to explore how prevalent global political logics and mainstream discourses on illness are interwoven. Regarding the global political logics in play, I hold that these declarations constitute an instantiation of democracy’s autoimmune character; it attacks itself in order to protect itself. Regarding mainstream discourses on illness, I explore how illness is regarded as a threat to one’s self (by something seemingly other) and the notion that therapy must consist of securing the self’s triumph over anything seemingly other. This twofold analysis reveals that an aporetic dialectic between self and other—as regards politics and illness—operates in these declarations, most likely because it is, in fact, one and the same dialectic, upon which Western epistemology rests. Furthermore, I suggest that these texts reflect and promote these dominant logics, contributing to shape human relationships around the globe in a certain dangerous way. (shrink)

This volume of essays shows Leo Strauss to be one of the few living Americans who has succeeded in educating a generation of students. This is not surprising, for Strauss is one of the few who know what is relevant to thoughts about education. Strauss is commonly known for having revived the classics. These essays show, as indeed his own writings show, that he has also revived the moderns, or that he has made modern political philosophy intelligible to (...) class='Hi'>itself. It would be going too far to say that these essays move on Strauss' level, but, with perhaps one or two exceptions, they exhibit that tightness and cogency of argumentation that comes from knowing what questions are important for a given subject matter. Three of the fifteen essays are by Strauss' colleagues, and two are especially remarkable—Jacob Klein's "Aristotle, an Introduction," and Alexandre Kojève's "The Emperor Julian and His Art of Writing." Kojève is the only contributor who explicitly discusses Strauss' views on the art of writing, and while he begins with praise, he in fact continues the debate printed in On Tyranny. Kojève's praise of irony, one may say, is ironical, for he succeeds in trivializing Strauss' view by pretending that Strauss' surface presentation of it is the whole of it. As for Klein's essay, suffice it to say that its quality is the same as his other published writings. Of the essays by Strauss' students, Seth Benardette's "Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus" and Joseph Cropsey's "Hobbes and the Transition to Modernity" both excel in the treatment of broad questions, although if one looks closely it seems that both divorce wisdom from moderation.—H. C. (shrink)

By the start of the Victorian period the school of British economists acknowledging Adam Smith as its master was in the ascendancy. 'Political Economy', a catch-all title which ignored the diversity of viewpoints to be found amongst the discipline's leading proponents, became associated in the popular mind with moral and political forces held to be uniquely conducive to the progress of an increasingly industrialised and competitive society. 'Political Economy' served in turn as the focus for critics of (...) equally diverse moral and political persuasions, who sought to challenge the materialism of contemporary society and offer their own assessments of the profound social changes of the time. In the introductory essay to the collection of readings from such 'critics of capitalism', the editors review the principles of the early economists, the way in which these principles were appropriated and applied by their Victorian successors and the contrasting modes which critics of popular economic ideas assumed. Subsequent extracts from the writings of the Owenite Socialist John Bray, Carlyle, Marx and Engels, J. S. Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, T. H. Green, William Morris and G. B. Shaw, demonstrate both the breadth of the possible grounds for ideological opposition to the prevailing philosophy and the shifting nature of the debate as 'Political Economy' itself was revealed as incapable of explaining or responding to the changing conditions of the 1870s. Headnotes to the extracts describe the genesis of individual debate and discuss distinctive stylistic features. Annotation in the form of footnotes and endnotes has been designed to gloss obscure allusions and arguments. In making more accessible the socio-economic writings of those authors now better known for their imaginative work, this volume will enable readers to reach a more profound appreciation of the central role such work played in developing the moral vision embodied in their more lastingly popular books and essays. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From Politics to Philosophy and Theology:Some Remarks about Foucault's Interpretation of Parrêsia in Two Recently Published SeminarsCarlos LévyAt the beginning of his seminar entitled Le courage de la vérité, Foucault gives a first definition of parrêsia (2009, 10–12), which I take as my point of departure.Parrêsia is a fundamental political concept; it denotes outspokenness, and Foucault distinguishes between two versions of it, one negative, the other positive. The (...) first meaning implies the articulation of everything, "n'importe quoi" (whatever), an expression that in French is indeed derogatory. For Foucault this meaning finds an illustration in a passage from Plato's Republic in which the philosopher describes the appalling state of the democratic city, where everyone tries to impose their own desires on others.1 The positive meaning implies that truth will be stated "without dissimulation, reservation, set clause, or rhetorical ornament that could encode or hide it" (2009, 11). But Foucault says that to effectuate this positive meaning it is not enough to merely state everything and state it truthfully. It is also necessary for the speaker of parrêsia, the parrêsiastês, to personally involve himself in what he says and to take a risk. As Foucault says himself, this is to speak "truth while taking the risk of violence" (2009, 12). [End Page 313] This risk is nonetheless attenuated by what Foucault calls "the parrêsiastic play," that is, the capacity of the interlocutor (assembly, tyrant) to tolerate outspokenness.Even though Foucault never sets the problem out in these terms, one may construe parrêsia as both a passion, since it entails an emotional investment, and a virtue, insofar as it is still linked to courage. It is common to say that somebody has "a passion for the truth" or that he has "the courage of his convictions." However, Foucault uses the term "passion" very sparingly. An analysis of word frequency in his seminars for the period 1982 to 1984 reveals that the term "virtue" occurs often, while "passion" is almost entirely absent, except about tragedy (2008, 105–35). By refraining from speaking of the "passion of truth," Foucault rejects the possibility of analyzing the concept of parrêsia in a more unitary way. For him, there is a good and a bad parrêsia, a situation that emphasizes the difficulties usually inherent in dualism: how can two opposite realities coexist, especially within the same concept? These difficulties are carefully analyzed in the seminars, but there is also a methodological difficulty: do historical sources force us to accept the dualistic interpretation or, better, the reconstruction proposed by Foucault in such a persuasive way? Or do they prompt us to introduce the notion of passion, somehow or other, as being present even in the "good" parrêsia?In my view, one does not compromise Foucault's position by saying that, for him, the dualism inherent in political parrêsia has a functional nature. It is linked to what he calls the right functioning and the worsening functioning of democracy, as they are articulated in his seminar of 2 February 1983 (2008, 157–69). In his exposé some postulates are expounded using the metaphor of the rectangle: the existence of parrêsia requires democracy, and thus democracy forms the first vertex of this rectangle. But one of the most interesting elements in Foucault's subsequent seminars is his effort to demonstrate that parrêsia can nevertheless exist under tyranny without its most essential features being undermined.Democracy, in Foucault's opinion, can't be lively and dynamic without the second vertex, which he calls "le pôle de l'ascendant"—the pole of ascending leadership; that is, in his own words, "the problem of those who, speaking before others and above them, are heard by them, persuade them, lead them, and have control over them" (2008, 157). Foucault's use of the term "problem" is itself somewhat... problematic. It is not clear why the existence of this ascendancy is a problem to the extent that it can be seen as the condition of a democratic and parrêsiastic functioning. In Foucault's [End Page 314] own words, the... (shrink)

In recent years there has been great attention paid to the so-called Italian theory in the field of political philosophy. This definition has brought to the fore Italian thinking, but at the same time also covers many reflections of the past several decades, by creating a category easily disclosable but also restricted to a few authors and topics. To this regard, I want to highlight the philosophical work of Ubaldo Fadini, professor of philosophy at the University of Florence, who (...) for many years has been dedicated to the German and French philosophical tradition, crossing different disciplines and combining aesthetic and ethical issues to frame the subjectivity and the institutions into the post-Fordist era. -/- Since his work is multi-faceted and broad, I would suggest first reading Il desiderio in America (The desire in America) for his ‘achipelago-politics’. Fadini addresses the issue of desire in Deleuze with an approach that escapes the opportunity and claim to be an interpretive key from which to see everything systemically. His work wisely touches on several authors and issues, from Kafka to Melville, Spinoza and Nietzsche, and many others, addressing the dynamics of a desire, debt, conscience, responsibility and law. These are, therefore, multiple inputs to desiring, which does not hide the dotted plurality of the brothers in the world, beyond the tight grip of the Oedipal triangle, i.e. the father-mother-child relationship. It follows a not only a psychological issue but also a political one, thus it regards the delineation of a field of forces in which ‘who’ acts – and speaks – is not only the person (a term which in Latin refers to theatrical mask, but well-defined identity fictitious necessary to enter the scene and carry on a story), but the scene itself, produced by relations not illuminated by the light of the show. The plural world of the brothers is the American one, in which the Oedipal relationship with the father-homeland is cut in the name of equality, contrary to colonial subjection (of which Fanon has also shown the psychic character revealing the mechanism of the colonized that internalized the oedipal function of the dominus. Fanon, in fact, has linked the production of subjectivity employee with the apparatus of colonial subordination). -/- To this aside to Deleuzian thought, Fadini adds another, but productively connects to the first: from the cut with the father was not born the son (as in Hegelian-Lacanian interpretation or dialectical-psychoanalytic who wants the definition of the son from by the conflict with his father), but the brothers, the concrete manifold in which the father is not necessary but is placed from time to time in the decision-making function of the uncertainty, in the mobile uncertainty of the brothers in their organization. That this is happening is not a scandal. That this would represent a danger, as Fadini states, is a necessary point to be aware. Maybe, the problem arises when this function is preached the need: no, the fathers are not necessary. And even mothers. We reiterate: it is a political issue around which affirms or denies the legal capacity of the many in favor of the one. The one may be different persons: those who came before, the old, the wise, the priest who runs the border between the world and underworld with the rules applied on the swinging from one place to another, the legislature, the owner. The reason why the scope of the one is so problematic is mainly related to the mechanism he establishes so to ex-istere. It is a mechanism for fault-liability-debt, such as a pyramid which is based on a ‘primary’ concept, namely that of the absence. The paternal function certainly sums up everything in a person: the father is the legislator, he was there before, is older, closer to the world of the dead, but even in that of the living, owns the world, provides rules – even interpretation – to be applied to the fluctuations of life. A really great invention, no doubt about it, higher than that of basileus-priest, more functional, yes, more functional. -/- As in The Wizard of Oz, a narrative that is served in an American election campaign and, as Graeber reminds us, explains the necessity of the idea of debt so to found the new relationship between money and gold, the legislator is microscopic compared to the effects of the conviction that is produced on a large scale, not only on his community but also on the foreigners who come to him in search of completeness. The vacuum is once again an instrument of domination, nothing else. Lack of confidence, of course. Lack of confidence in the ability of the brothers. In the story of The Wizard of Oz, the wizard was well-intentioned and therefore the trick is revealed, however, he reaffirms his role by giving foreigners a certificate of completion that settles the existential debt. Lack of confidence and perhaps even the reading of fairy tales. We don’t need ‘real’ narrations but concrete tales, and, as Fadini says, archipelagos and pirates and cartographers. (shrink)

This essay aims to demonstrate that the concepts of conflict and prophecy play a key role in the thought of Mario Tronti and Sergio Quinzio – even though they are interpreted in a different way. Tronti describes them as “extreme think- ing and careful acting”, remaining “within and against” the mainstream sociopolitical system. Quinzio, instead, interprets conflict and prophecy as spes contra spem, “hoping against hope” ; hence, he observes the present lucidly, remaining tenaciously faithful to the promise of (...) the Second Coming of Christ. Tronti, rethinking some fundamental aspects of the Quinzio’s reflections, connects clearly the Marxian conception of the world, on the one hand, with the theological-political one, and, on the other hand, with the messianic one; in this way, it reveals itself as a resource of meaning, from which even today we can draw. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 60–63 Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes. From the forthcoming book Post-History , Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013. It is not necessary to have a keen ear in order to find out that the steps we take towards the future sound hollow. But it is necessary to have concentrated hearing if one wishes to find out which type of vacuity resonates with our progress. There are several types of vacuity, and ours must be compared to others, if the aim (...) is to understand it. The incomparable is incomprehensible. If we affirm that our situation is incomparable, we give up the effort to grasp it. The comparison that imposes itself is to the vacuity of the Baroque. There are innumerable traces in the present that evoke the Baroque. We bear the mark of the same somber rationalism (logics, informatics, cybernetics), and of the same magic and fanatic irrationalism (mass media, phantastic ideologies). But there is a decisive difference. Humanity advanced over a stage during the Baroque. All of its gestures, even the most sincere, were marked by theatricality. The vacuity that resonated under its feet was of the void under the stage. Baroque man represented. 1 For example he represented faith in waging religious wars. Baroque vacuity was the consequence of a medieval loss of faith in dogmas . Our vacuity is different. We do not represent anything. Our world is not a stage. We are not actors, and if we act, it is not to represent a drama, but to divert the audience's attention and our own from the subjects that really matter. We act like criminals that try to hide their tracks. We pretend. Our progress is a farce. The vacuity under our feet is not Baroque. We have not lost our faith in dogmas: we have lost faith in ourselves . We are as counter-reformists as was the Baroque (we want to cover up the recent revolution with warm cloths), but for different reasons. Although comparable with the Baroque, in certain aspects, our situation is in fact incomparable to any other. That is because an incomparable, unheard of, never before seen event happened recently, which emptied the ground we tread. Auschwitz . Other posterior events; Hiroshima, the Gulags, are nothing but variations of the first. Therefore every attempt to grasp the present leads to the following questions: how was Auschwitz possible? How can we live after this? Such questions relate not only to the ones directly or indirectly responsible, and not only to those who were directly or indirectly hit by it: they relate to everyone who takes part in our culture. Because what is so incomparable, unheard of, never before seen and therefore incomprehensible in Auschwitz, is that it was there that Western culture revealed one of its inherent virtualities. Auschwitz is a characteristic realization of our culture. It is neither the product of a particular Western ideology, nor of specific “advanced” industrial techniques. It springs directly from the depths of culture and of its concepts and values. The possibility to realize Auschwitzes is implicit within our culture from the very start: the Western “project” already harbored it, although as a remote possibility. Auschwitz lies within the initial program of the West, which progressively realizes all of its virtualities as history unfolds. That is why the question that Auschwitz poses before us is not: how did it happen? It serves no purpose to “explain” Auschwitz. The fundamental question is: how was it possible? Because what is being questioned is not the extermination camp, but the West. Thus one other question: how to live within a culture henceforth unmasked? Everything that happened afterwards resonates with such a question, with such vacuity. Every economic, social, political, technical, scientific, artistic, philosophic event is corroded by such an undigested question. The distance that separates us from the event does not mitigate the abyss, it erodes it even deeper. Because the distance progressively dissolves the aura of the horror that envelops the event, and it progressively opens up a vision of the scene. It progressively reveals that there all of our categories, all of our “models”, suffered an irreparable shipwreck. Auschwitz was a revolutionary event, in the sense that it overthrew our culture. Insofar as we seek ways to cover up such revolution with trips to the moon or with genetic manipulations, we are counter-revolutionaries: we are inverting the course of history in order to cover up the past. The unspoken in Auschwitz is not the mass murder, it is not the crime . It is the ultimate reification of people into amorphous objects, into ashes. The Western tendency towards objectification was finally realized and it was done so in the shape of an apparatus . The SS were functionaries of an extermination apparatus, and their victims functioned in function of their own annihilation. The extermination camp's program, once it started functioning, developed in an automatic fashion, autonomous from the decisions of the initial programmers, even if, as it effectively did, it contributed to the defeat of the programmers. The SS and the Jews functioned one in function of the other like cogwheels. The models for such functionality were provided by the highest of Western values: the SS behaved like “heroes” and the Jews like “martyrs”. This is an apparatus that functions at a borderline situation: objective even beyond death. What has just been said is intolerable. We cannot accept it and so we mobilize arguments against it. Good arguments. The SS behaved like criminals: they removed the gold teeth from the cadavers. The Jews behaved like victims: they rose up in the Warsaw ghetto. Such arguments are true, but they do not reach the nucleus, the “ eidos ” of the phenomenon: they do not grasp it. Although there was “normal” behavior: (theft, murder, revolt, heroism), there was also “abnormal” behavior: functionality during a borderline situation. And this is what counts. There, for the first time in the history of humanity, an apparatus was put into operation that was programmed with the most advanced techniques available, which realized the objectification of man, together with the functional collaboration of man. The previous horrors committed by Western society against other societies and against itself (and there are many) were crimes . They were violations of Western models of behavior: anti-Christian, anti-human, irrational. So that it is possible to condemn them and continue to be Western, even if the horror is so colossal, such as the enslavement of Africans. However, it is not possible to condemn Auschwitz and continue to adhere consciously to the West. Auschwitz is not a violation of Western models of behavior, it is, on the contrary, the result of the application of such models. Our culture allowed its mystifying mask to fall and must be rejected in toto if we admit that the purpose of every culture is to allow for the convivial existence of men that recognize each other mutually as subjects. However: it is not possible to reject one's own culture. It is the ground we tread . Those who seek to reject their own culture (as Nietzsche did in rejecting Judeo-Christianity), fall victim to madness. Those who reject their culture's models, are incapable of grasping the world in which they live. Cultural models are traps to catch the world. Those who seek to substitute their own models for other's (for example by shouting “Hare Krishna”) will find that such exotic models have already been caught by the very models to be substituted. There is no exit: we are condemned to use our models and to serve such models, even after they have been unmasked, if we wish to continue living. The only alternative would be to commit suicide. That is: we must continue our economic, political, scientific, artistic, philosophic activities despite Auschwitz. We must continue progressing despite everything . That is why there are those who recommend that we should seek to forget what happened, that we should repress the event. They sustain that enough has already been said and written about the subject and that it is time to “overcome” it. But such an ostrich strategy reveals itself disastrous. Because the result is that Auschwitz transfers itself from Poland of the 1940s to the post-industrial society of the future. What characterizes the extermination camp is precisely that it is not an event that can be “overcome”, because it is the first realization of an inherent virtuality within the Western project, which will repeat itself in other formats unless we become totally conscious of it. The advantage (if this is an appropriate term) that Auschwitz offers us, is to give us a concrete example of the West’s tendency towards the apparatus. For the first time in our history it is possible for us to experience concretely the utopia inherent in our culture. For the first time in our history we have the experience that utopia, no matter in what form, towards which we progress, is the extermination camp. Everywhere we can observe, as of now, the emergence of variations on the theme “Auschwitz”. Everywhere apparatus spring, just like mushrooms after a Nazi rain, from the ground that has become rotten. Certainly: such new apparatus are not externally similar to the Nazi extermination camps. Their labels are different, as are the ideologies that pretend to inspire them. Even the apparatus that admittedly envision extermination, such as the Gulags, the ones of a future nuclear war, or the ones that functioned in Vietnam, claim to be different from Auschwitz. Others claim to be “friends of mankind”, such as the scientific, technical and administrative apparatus. But such labels and such ideologies are deceptive and serve only to cover up the essence of apparatus. They are all just like Auschwitz, black boxes that function with complex inner-workings in order to realize a program. They all function according to an inertia that is inherent to them and such functionality escapes , from a certain point, the control of their initial programmers. In a final analysis such apparatuses function, all of them, towards the annihilation of all their functionaries, including their programmers. Exactly because they objectify and dehumanize man. Thus Western culture reveals itself as a project that seeks to transform itself into an apparatus. What characterizes the West is its capacity for an objectifying transcendence. Such transcendence allows for the transformation of all phenomena, including the human phenomenon, into an object of knowledge and manipulation. The space for such transcendence opened up thanks to Judeo-Christianity and resulted, in the course of our history, in science, technique and recently, in Auschwitz. The ultimate objectification of the Jews into ashes is the ultimate victory of the spirit of the West. It is social technique taken to the extreme. Certainly: the transformation of men into ashes is primitive, incipient social technique that progressively refines itself. It will be followed by less brutal objectifications, such as the robotization of society. But it does not matter which form it will assume: it will always be an objectifying manipulation of mankind. Although the apparatus of the immediate future are not necessarily incineration ovens, all will be, and not only the nuclear ones, apparatus for the annihilation of man. The Western program contains several virtualities, not only apparatus. Numerous virtualities have not yet been realized. In this sense the “history of the West” has not ended yet, the Western game continues. But all not-yet realized virtualities are infected by apparatus. That is why it has become currently impossible to engage ourselves in the “ progress of culture .” As it would be to engage ourselves in our own annihilation. We have lost our faith in our culture, in the ground we tread. That is: we have lost faith in ourselves. It is this hollow vibration that follows our steps towards the future. What remains is for us to analyze the event “Auschwitz” in all its details in order to discover the fundamental project that realized itself there for the first time, so that we may nurture the hope to project ourselves out of that project. Out of the history of the West. This is the “post- historical” climate in which we are condemned to live from hereon. NOTES 1. In Portuguese representar (to represent) also means “to act” or “to play a role.&rdquo. (shrink)

The Decline of LiberalismFrom the perspective of the Russian political philosopher Konstantin Krylov, Russia’s civilizational order is not liberal—in most respects, it is the very opposite of liberal. At the same time, Russia has, over the course of centuries, failed to properly come into its own as its own civilizational type. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, Russia has lingered in a stunted, oversimplified version of its own “Northern” national idea even as it has repeatedly taken up, like (...) children playing at dress-up, the civilizational ideas of others. Like much of the rest of the world, Russia at present is playing at liberalism.1 Writing in the late 1990s (the reader is urged to keep in mind that Krylov’s theory was formulated and put on paper not today but twenty-five years ago), Krylov predicted that Russia’s dalliance with liberalism would play itself out within a decade or so and that by about 2030 Russia would finally come into its own as a civilization of the “Northern” type. What Krylov means by this is something we will get to in due course. (shrink)

It is now some years since Professor D. Daiches Raphael published his interesting book, The Paradox of Tragedy , which represented one of the first serious attempts made by a British philosopher to assess the significance of tragic drama for ethical, and indeed metaphysical theory. Since then we have had a variety of books touching on related topics: for instance, Dr George Steiner's Death of Tragedy and Mr Raymond Williams’ most recent, elusive and interesting essay, Modern Tragedy. To entitle an (...) essay Theology and Tragedy might be thought to invite needless trouble for oneself; to indulge to a dangerous degree the human intellectual obsession of supposing that ‘the meaning of a word is an object’. After all, if one confines one's regard to the Greeks, one has to recognise that between the treatments of their common theme of Electra , Sophocles and Euripides are in fact doing very different things. There is no gainsaying the significance for Euripides of the postponement of the murder of Clytemnestra till after that of Aegisthus, still less of his introduction into the play of the morally upright peasant, who has had the banished Electra in his keeping, and whose simple integrity contrasts both with the corruption of the court and the obsessive preoccupation with a dreadful, supposed duty of brother and sister. The element of propaganda is unmistakable; while in Sophocles’ Electra it is altogether absent, although Dr Victor Ehrenberg in his very interesting monograph on Sophocles and Pericles has argued strongly for an element of subtle political commentary in the treatment of Oedipus in the Oedipus Tyrannus , and of Pocreon in the Antigone. These remarks may serve to show that the title does not express a blind indifference to the multiple complexity of those works which we class together as tragedies. They are inherently complex, and various in emphasis; at best we can discern a family resemblance between them, and, in an essay like this, the author runs the risk not only of selecting examples tailor-made to his thesis, but also of imposing an appearance of similarity of conception where it is at least equally important to stress differences. (shrink)

The work of Sophocles shows the human suffering which might be caused by evil without the presence of guilt. Within the historic confrontation of the Athenian political stage, the presentation of the tragic conflict opposes the illustrated omnipotence: to present that what is divine as incomprehensible is one of the traditional features of Sophocles’ work and his announcement of anti-modernity. “Not-understanding” is the banner of silence when faced with the limit of natural reason. As a response to sophist thought, (...) which replaced the divine paradigm, the preponderance of the gods in the work of Sophocles might be seen as an affirmation. What is characteristic of the traditional restoration proposed by Sophocles is not only the appearance of the Gods in his works, but the particular way in which they reveal themselves. Knowing that what is divine is not characteristic of men because it is not a feature of the former to be understood to a lesser degree than that of its own nature. That is exactly the stage where the struggle between the reality of knowing and the relative appearance of knowing occurs. Bearing this interpretative intention in mind, the aim of the paper is to highlight the way in which evil reveals itself in Oedipus the King, as a device chosen by the gods to trigger the unfolding of the nature of the hero. (shrink)

The messianic messages delivered to Londoners by the self-styled prophet, Richard Brothers, were regarded by many sceptical observers and pamphleteers as eccentric or, worse still, the embarrassing utterances of someone wishing to reprise the political turmoil of a by-gone era marred by religious ‘fanaticism’. This article shows the extent to which Brothers's messages, as set down in his Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times (1794–1795), were absolutely central to the religious politics and culture of the 1790s—or what one (...) contemporary critic mockingly referred to as the ‘age of prophecy’. Brothers's prophecies came to the attention of the British government, which culminated in his arrest for treasonable practices in March 1795 when he became a cause célèbre, before being confined to an asylum for eleven years. He was deemed a criminal lunatic but, as this article seeks to demonstrate, his ‘prophetic imagination’ arose out of the same rich theological, political and cultural context that spurred ‘radicals’ like Tom Paine, whilst inspiring poets and artists such as William Blake. If the content of his prophecies were regarded by contemporary sceptics for having no validity, it remains true to say that Richard Brothers, as an educated gentleman and naval officer, dramatically altered 18th-century expectations and perceptions of what prophets were and the nature of prophecy itself. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

This text describes the changes affecting the field of reproduction in the era of « globalisation », ultimately to insert the famous « putting life to work » into the mechanism of the reproduction of capital. We show the consequences this has on the roles assigned to women, and equally how it opens a space for new hierarchies between women in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The author speaks of her own journey through politics as a practice of change, where (...) the collaboration between women of diverse cultures reveals itself to be essential, the fields of consumption and lifestyle becoming more and more those where the conflict with capital is played out. It becomes a question of locating such concepts as limit, dependence, autonomy, and liberty, firmly in the cultural model whose destructive effects are becoming so evident today. (shrink)

Iboga's Travel is the title of a global project which was conceived after a Gabonese initiation into ‘Bwiti’. The Bwiti is one of the few secret shamanic practices forced to open itself to the outside world by the disappearance of the Equatorial forest. Its traditions remain alive in Gabon, but it has to adapt to the changes brought by cultural globalization. The Bwiti is a rite in which the sacred and revealing plant called ‘iboga’ plays a central role. (...) It leads to visions supposed to widen the power of consciousness. Iboga's Travel can be analysed both in its political and spiritual dimensions. What questions the current globalization process is the author's very unusual presence in the Bwiti, and also when she obtained access to their traditional knowledge. This globalization has contradictory aspects, since it endangers the forest-based healing and initiation traditions on the one hand, and opens it up to the outside world on the other. This experience turned out to be a lot more than the political act that it was in the beginning. It showed us another way of comprehending our world. Making art about it was the author's own way of documenting this experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Musical Design in Sophoclean TheaterDeborah H. RobertsWilliam C. Scott. Musical Design in Sophoclean Theater. Hanover, N.H., and London: University Press of New England, for Dartmouth College, 1996. xxii 1 330 pp. Cloth, $45.Music and the chorus that performed most of this music were fundamental elements in Greek tragedy, but we know very little about the music of tragedy, and it is notoriously difficult to find a successful way (...) of staging the chorus in modern productions. Among the great theorists of tragedy, Aristotle, who knew the music, placed it considerably below plot in importance; Nietzsche, who didn’t, saw it as tragedy’s source and essence. Recent criticism, turning increasingly from text to context, and concerning itself with both social context and performance context, again leads us from a variety of perspectives to consider the role of music and of the chorus in Greek tragedy.In Musical Design in Sophoclean Theater, a sequel of sorts to his earlier book on Aeschylus, William Scott looks at music less as an aspect of context than as an aspect of text; that is, he works with all that remains to us of tragedy’s music, the metrical forms of lyric. He does not understate the difficulties that confront his project and notes our lack of knowledge about melody and even about rhythm. But he seeks by a detailed analysis of metrical patterning and strophic form to show how music may have contributed to choral persona, the progress of choral response, the interchange between characters, the statement of dramatic theme, and the workings of dramatic irony. Scott’s aim is in part to enable producers of Greek plays to translate Greek musical idiom into something analogous to assist the meaning of the play; to that end, here as in the earlier book, he provides an introduction specifically for readers working in translation.Scott gives a useful account of the basic meters of Greek tragedy, avoiding the more arcane reaches of metrical studies and eschewing debate (except in the notes) over the exact metrical interpretation of particular passages. Readers will need to supplement Scott’s text with some form of aural experience of meter (reading out loud themselves, listening to others) if they are to get any sense of musicality; but he does about as much as can be done on the printed page. His comments both general and particular on the Sophoclean chorus and its varied roles and voices clarify its sometimes enigmatic presence for the newcomer to tragedy and also have something to offer to the scholar and teacher. His interpretations of the plays are not themselves novel in either approach or conclusions (nor are they intended to be), but they are again helpful; and in showing how attention to musical elements may strengthen a particular reading Scott vividly brings out important aspects of the plays. Notes and bibliography are thorough, and Scott extensively cites earlier work on the Sophoclean chorus.After a brief introductory chapter, the book consists largely of readings of each of Sophocles’ extant plays informed by metrical analysis and interpretation [End Page 123] of all lyric and anapestic passages in the order in which they occur. The second chapter deals with Antigone and Ajax, and the third with Trachiniae, Oedipus Tyrannus, Electra, and Philoctetes. In the last chapter, after recapitulating the chief features of musical design in the earlier plays, Scott turns to a concluding analysis of Oedipus at Colonus, which he sees as peculiarly varied and innovative. For each play he seeks to show how “scansion patterns can offer a clue to the rich effects available in a full musical performance” and how “it is possible to see from the scansion patterns that there are ironies and enriched meanings in the words that are supported in the musical design” (9). He takes account of the well-known associations of a few meters (dochmiacs with heightened emotion, sequences of dactyls with allusion to epic and so forth) but is primarily concerned with the meanings meters and groups of meters take on in particular metrical and dramatic contexts. Central to Scott’s interpretations is the assumption that the Greek audience responded to the odes in... (shrink)

As their title suggests, "legal philosophers" are more philosophers than lawyers; they are in the business of thinking generally about law rather than doing law in any practical way. While lawyers tend to be jurisdiction-specific in their affiliations and competence, legal philosophers are under no such restriction. At their most ambitious, legal philosophers claim dominion over a jurisprudential realm that is delineated by neither geography nor history. Indeed, presenting themselves as intellectual citizens of the whole legal world, their crafted contributions (...) are not intended to be judged by the contingent standards of local usefulness, but by the pure canons of universal validity. As such, the professional commitment and authority of legal philosophers is based upon their capacity to deal with parochial matters of law, but in a way that rises above and is not reducible to their local circumstances. Accordingly, while these legal philosophers might talk about morality and politics as they relate to law, they do so only in the most theoretical and abstract terms. For them, philosophy inhabits the realm of "truth and necessity" in which the contingent and the local holds little or no analytical sway. The contemporary champion of legal philosophy is undoubtedly Joseph Raz. His extensive and sophisticated work represents the high-water mark of analytical jurisprudence. With the recent publication of Between Authority and Interpretation, he has provided an accessible and stylish showcase of his philosophical theory of law that is as rigorous and demanding as it is provocative and controversial. Because this book builds on as it clarifies and develops the main themes of his work over the past four decades, it offers itself as a convenient focus for a more general assessment of Raz's whole oeuvre. In traversing law's terrain, he is adamant that, whatever the purposes and methods of other disciplines (e.g., sociology, history, anthropology, etc.), any philosophical analysis worth its name must concern itself with delivering insights and understanding about law that are of universal significance. While general conclusions about local laws and systems are important and helpful, they will have no philosophical value unless they can say something general and enduring about law as an institutional phenomenon. A corollary of this is that legal philosophy must insulate itself from contingent moral and political influences that will compromise or contaminate its project of making statements about law?s nature and operation that are not only universally valid, but also locally accurate. In this essay I challenge Raz's philosophical ambitions - and, therefore, much contemporary work in legal philosophy - by concentrating on his crucial methodological distinction between the local and contingent and the universal and necessary. It is my contention that, as there are no places where "moral and political desirability" do not play a role, "necessity" has no reign. Accordingly, I argue that legal philosophy cannot live up to its own methodological expectations and standards of validation. For all its impressive erudition and sophistication, therefore, Raz?s work is a manifesto of "local enthusiasms" that, while instructive and useful in themselves, can lay no claim to reveal the necessary features of law's existence. His work comprises some very contingent and localised generalisations that no amount of philosophical razzle-dazzle can elevate to universal and global truths about law. Blinded by the philosophical light, there is more formal brilliance than substantive bottom-line to Raz's jurisprudence. (shrink)

This paper argues that Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People constitutes one his most ambitious literary and political achievements. In literary terms, the play seeks to reinvent the genre of history drama in a manner deliberately opposed to Hegelian aesthetics. Ibsen does so by systematically deepening the play’s central conflict. What at first appears to be a problem grounded in personal rivalries, reveals itself to be a social and political struggle, which in turn yields a (...) moral crisis, to, finally, a problem of history. In this manner, Ibsen combines two positions that at first sight seem incompatible: the most relativistic impulses of the historicism of his day and a metaphysical form of tragedy that he identifies with Shakespeare. Politically, Ibsen stages what might be characterized as a profoundly pessimistic form of messianism. On that view, it is necessary to categorically reject any existing political project and instead champion the possibilities articulated by those in society who have no investment in the present. This is not because those individuals have greater access to utopian ideals that should be actualized, since any political success automatically invalidates the ideals in question. Instead, the defense of the socially marginalized is grounded in the view that their saving power lies with their ability to articulate ideals that have no stake in the persistence of our world. Against this background it becomes possible to fully understand the structure and continuing significance of this play. (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume _Homo Sacer_ project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps—in which some inmates are (...) reduced to a form of living death—are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with _Homo Sacer_, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben’s radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life. The contributors analyze Agamben’s thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors—Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists’ approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben’s arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to Schmitt’s _Political Theology_. _Politics, Metaphysics, and Death_ is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today’s most important political theorists. _Contributors:_ Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow, Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall. (shrink)

This paper attempts to establish that, and explain why, the practice of punishing offenders is in principle morally permissible. My account is a nonstandard version of the fair play view, according to which punishment 's permissibility derives from reciprocal obligations shared by members of a political community, understood as a mutually beneficial, cooperative venture. Most fair play views portray punishment as an appropriate means of removing the unfair advantage an offender gains relative to law-abiding members of the (...) community. Such views struggle, however, to provide a plausible account of this unfairly gained benefit. By contrast, on my account punishment 's permissibility follows more straightforwardly from the fair play view of political obligation: Specifically, the rule instituting punishment is itself among those rules with which members of the political community are obliged to comply. For criminal offenders, compliance requires submitting to the prospect of punishment. (shrink)

On the face of it, On Tyranny is a straightforward commentary on Xenophon's dialogue Hiero or Tyrannicus. As such it is a very model of thoroughness and learning. It amply repays careful study, and it goes a long way toward explaining Strauss's influence in training a generation of scholars. The dialogue proper takes up just under 20 pages. Its analysis runs to 90-odd pages, followed by another 30 pages of tightly packed notes that are largely devoted to parallels between the (...) Hiero, Xenophon's teaching as a whole, and the teachings of Plato, of Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, of Cicero. What at first appears as an exercise in textual analysis soon reveals itself as a much broader undertaking: the delineation of the main features of classical political philosophy. Strauss does not mean to deny that differences in perspective, procedure, and even conclusions separate the major representatives of classical political philosophy. He does want to maintain, however, that their agreements are more fundamental than are their differences. But even this is incidental to his main purpose: to understand classical political philosophy for the guidance it might provide in understanding the great moral and political problems that confront us here and now. He conceives of these problems in large measure as the consequence of modern philosophy, of what he calls "the modern project." But modern philosophy cannot be understood on its own terms alone any more than it can be understood by directly confronting it with the phenomena. For it does not owe its most characteristic features to such a confrontation. It owes them, rather, to the fact that, from its very outset, it defined itself in explicit contrast to classical philosophy. Modern philosophy is essentially derivative. It presupposes the tradition it opposes. Classical philosophy, and in particular classical political philosophy, on the other hand "... belongs to the fertile moment when all political traditions were shaken, and there was not yet in existence a tradition of political philosophy." Hence "only in the light of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns can modernity be understood. By rediscovering the urgency of this quarrel we return to the origins of modernity." It further follows from this line of reasoning that the quarrel must be re-kindled if we are once again to gain access to the phenomena themselves. To this end historical studies become necessary which do not presuppose that the whole issue has, for all intents and purposes, been settled in favor of the moderns. The most basic and most constant assumption of Strauss's historical studies is, therefore, the assumption that classical philosophy is truer than are any of the teachings that criticize or reject it. The passion and the inventiveness with which he defends this assumption sufficiently prove that he does not put it forward merely for reasons of method or of rhetoric. Yet it seems to fall short of being his settled belief. By stressing his agreements with the ancients and his disagreements with the moderns, by holding the moderns responsible for the great problems that face us while calling for a restoration of classical political philosophy, he fosters the impression that his own views coincide fully with those of classical political philosophy. But even if classical political philosophy spoke with a single clear voice, the fact remains that "no competent man of our age would regard as simply true the complete teaching of any thinker of the past." Presumably only someone who thinks himself competent would issue such a warning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 14.1 (2006) 77-88 [Access article in PDF] Revealing the Habitual: The Teachings of Unconventional Piano-Playing Tuomas Mali Vantaa, Finland Playing Experiences as a Source of Knowledge As a pianist, I know piano-playing from the inside as something I am accustomed to doing. For me, as for every serious pianist, playing is an everyday activity that has become so habitual as to be inseparable (...) from myself. As I am absorbed in piano-playing, I become musical in a way that more or less makes me forget myself. In the tumult of playing there is no objectifying gaze, no clear distinction between subject and object, performer and music; there is just skilful coping with musical tasks and concerns.1 For an experienced pianist the centrality of the lived body is a commonplace: to know piano-playing is to know one's own body in and through playing as one cultivates a "pianistic" way of existing. This calls for daily training.2 Although it is not always this obvious, the lived body is important to all knowing. Through regular practicing and performing I know piano-playing in the same direct way as we all know the world in and through living "in" it as human bodies, in and through our everyday coping, our "dealings" in the world.3 Juha Varto, the Finnish phenomenologist, uses the word "inspective" to describe this way of knowing, in a sense that emphasizes active bodily being-in-the-world.4 [End Page 77]To reflect on piano-playing, in contrast, requires one to distance oneself from playing, to adopt a perspective that is not present in the playing itself. The relationship between the knower and the world is now different. Here, Varto uses the word "perspective" as an adjective to designate this way of knowing. He illuminates the difference between "inspective" and "perspective" knowing with the image of a burning stake: the spectators certainly know that the stake is hot and that it kills, but the smell of one's own burning flesh makes it clear and certain in a radically different way without intermediary thought.5 Reflection makes it possible to "observe" piano-playing, to see it "in perspective," as part of a larger, ordered, cultural reality, as part of a considered "view" or "theory." When devoting oneself to reflection, it is typical to characterize the activity of playing as objective, as something that lies outside the lived experience of the body. But—and this is often deliberately ignored—a view or a theory arrived at through observation is also irrevocably bound to the embodied existence of the observer, even if the view often seems to be more or less a product of thought alone.While the distinction between concerned coping ("inspective" knowing) and reflective viewing ("perspective" knowing) is important, it should be kept in mind that in human life they are always interwoven. There is no way to eliminate one of them, no way to choose only one or the other. Rather, we are constantly negotiating between the "inspective" and "perspective," dealing on the one hand with our situated bodily experience and on the other hand with our recognition of a larger cultural perspective.Historically, valued knowledge about music-making has often been framed around a conception of reflection as detached, disinterested inquiry which as pure contemplation, has nothing to do with the lived body of the knower. A particular discourse or a quest for definition has often served as starting points for research—starting points that seemingly rule out the relevance of bodily experiences. However, it seems to me that there is no way to cut the link between knowing and experiencing; differences on the level of the lived body are often crucial for knowledge. For example, the difference in the experiential basis often results in a gap between the knowledge of a "maker" and that of a "viewer." When music is known mostly through making it, knowledge gained through observation often seems to miss what is essential, to distort and misinterpret the musical practice. This gap, and... (shrink)

This paper will provide an immanent critique of the political theory of Herbert Marcuse. I argue that Marcuse’s politics are often inadequate when considered from the standpoint of his theory of socialism, the latter being understood as the realization of the negative human capacity for creation in all those fields within which the human being is active. Although Marcuse’s politics often reveals itself as instrumental and managerialist in orientation, I will argue that there nevertheless remains a certain countertendency (...) in his philosophy, one which can be seen as affirming a negative and nonidentitarian politics of overcoming that looks always toward creation. (shrink)

In the introduction to her book, Praxis und Logos bei Aristoteles, Friederike Rese rightfully bemoans a common prejudice within the secondary literature that mistakenly attempts to identify Plato, the so-called ‘idealist’, as the philosopher of λόγος and Aristotle, the so-called ‘realist’, as the philosopher of πρᾶξις. This traditional distinction between the philosophical life devoted to the pursuit of λόγος and the political life devoted to the pursuit of πρᾶξις as mutually exclusive forms of human activity also manifests itself (...) as a double tendency within Aristotelian scholarship: either to situate the theoretical philosophy above the practical philosophy, or to simply invert the hierarchy by emphasizing the practical over and against the theoretical. Both tendencies in their false play of oppositions generally fail to consider the comprehensive unity of both λόγος and πρᾶξις within Aristotle’s philosophy as a whole. By bringing into question some of these highly problematic divisions separating Aristotle’s theoretical philosophy from his practical philosophy, Rese aims to rehabilitate and recover the genuine transformation of λόγος within Aristotle in order to ultimately reveal its primordial unity with πρᾶξις. Rese’s aim is nothing less than to restore to Aristotle his rightful claim as the philosopher of λόγος: “If it was Aristotle who first described λόγος as the action of both reason and speech, then Aristotle was also the first who gave the concept of πρᾶξις its status as a philosophical term”. What really distinguishes Rese’s work from other works regarding the subject is the ingenuity of her central thesis, which focuses on the capacity of λόγος as a form of reason and speech to be responsible for both the determinacy and indeterminacy of human life and action. As a form of reason, λόγος establishes limits between determined and undetermined possibilities of action insofar as every determination of πρᾶξις must necessarily take into account those undetermined possibilities produced by λόγος. Rese’s thesis incorporates the principle of non-contradiction in Aristotle’s Metaphysics by designating λόγος as the limit of reason that orients a human being towards opposing possibilities of action. As a form of speech or saying, λόγος literally functions as the actualization of Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction: “The same thing cannot at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect”. Every saying and deliberating of something is at the same time a delimitation of something from something else. Therefore, saying something is merely the performative aspect of deliberation which externalizes itself in the moment of decision determining the action. Because λόγος can produce a multiplicity of possibilities for any given action, the capacity of λόγος to exclusively determine an action separates human life from the indeterminacy of animal life. “While the possession of λόγος distinguishes the human being from all other life-forms, the activity of λόγος is also the actualization of life by arriving at the determining relation that characterizes the human being”. (shrink)

Political theorists can at times forget that the origins of political theory lie in the struggles of concrete political life. This paper focuses on one arena of political contestation: the collision between dissenters and their communities’ legal systems. It focuses on The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670), a purported transcript of the trial of William Penn and William Mead for disturbance of the peace. The trial plays an important role in the emergent principle of (...) jury independence and a key role in Penn’s career as a political actor during the 1670s, culminating in his American colonizing enterprise. After a few remarks about the trial itself, the paper proceeds in two parts, each emphasizing an aspect of the text’s performative nature. First, akin to canonical works of the Anglo-American tradition, Peoples presents embedded principles: coherent and substantive visions of legitimate government, justified by reference to authoritative texts, arguments, and practices. But the defendants in Peoples also enact and embody political dissent in ways other than overt and explicit argumentation: Penn and Mead themselves appear as characters performing a politics of dissent. As a work of both political theory and political theater, Peoples offers insights into Deleuze’s notion of “dramatization,” and can lead us to a broader appreciation of the many different genres that constitute political theory. (shrink)

Logical positivism is widely associated with an illiberal technocratic view of politics. This view is a caricature. Some members of the left Vienna circle were explicit in their criticism of this conception of politics. In particular, Neurath's work attempted to link the internal epistemological pluralism and tolerance of logical empiricism with political pluralism and the rejection of a technocratic politics. This paper examines the role that unified science played in Neurath's defence of political and social pluralism. Neurath's project (...) of unified science addressed problems that lie at the centre of recent debates around liberalism concerning the possibility of social co-operation in conditions of pluralism. His response is distinctive in calling upon an empiricist tradition that differs from Kantian proceduralist approaches that have predominated in recent liberalism. While Neurath's position has problems, it deserves reconsideration, especially in so far as it questions the Kantian assumption that a thin language of abstract rights provides the best basis for the cosmopolital lingua franca required by conditions of social pluralism. An investigation of the role that unified science plays in Neurath's politics also gives reasons for revising common misconceptions about the nature of the unity of science programme itself. (shrink)

What is the riddle of Oedipus? This paper is an exploration of the philosophy involved in Sophocles’ famous play Oedipus Tyrannus. The play involves a riddler who becomes king, a man who is famously good at understanding what others find obscure, and yet is unable to see it when he is confronted by an obvious set of uncomfortable truths about himself. As well as for Oedipus, the play poses a number of different riddles (...) for us: in particular it is a study of responsibility and shame, and of deliberation and choice. Like any work of art, the play does not tell us what conclusions we should reach; but it does show us some questions that need asking, and indeed some riddles that we face. (shrink)

Examines the political dimensions of Aristophanes’ comic poetry. This original and wide-ranging collection of essays offers, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of the political dimensions of that madcap comic poet Aristophanes. Rejecting the claim that Aristophanes is little more than a mere comedian, the contributors to this fascinating volume demonstrate that Aristophanes deserves to be placed in the ranks of the greatest Greek political thinkers. As these essays reveal, all of Aristophanes’ plays treat issues of (...) fundamental political importance, from war and peace, poverty and wealth, the relation between the sexes, demagoguery and democracy to the role of philosophy and poetry in political society. Accessible to students as well as scholars, The Political Theory of Aristophanes can be utilized easily in the classroom, but at the same time serve as a valuable source for those conducting more advanced research. Whether the field is political philosophy, classical studies, history, or literary criticism, this work will make it necessary to reconceptualize how we understand this great Athenian poet and force us to recognize the political ramifications and underpinnings of his uproarious comedies. Jeremy J. Mhire is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Louisiana Tech University. Bryan-Paul Frost is James A. and Kaye L. Crocker Endowed Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the coeditor (with Jeffrey Sikkenga) of History of American Political Thought. (shrink)

The social function of jazz in its theoretical aspects is the subject of the present article. The author opens his discussion with a technical analysis of jazz music, on the basis of which the social significance of jazz phenomena is elucidated.The peculiar effects of jazz music are by no means limited to the upper layers of society ; they permeate the whole of society. The music has a pseudo-democratic quality, characteristic of the monopolistic phase of capitalism.Jazz music is usually trite, (...) and its orginality, however limited, manifests itself chiefly in the variations of forms in which it is reproduced*The realm of jazz ranges from „salon music“ to the military march* The former expresses a false individualism ; the latter a false collectivism. The Jazz represents a sort of conduit between these two poles, particularly in its form of „hot music“. A theory of jazz will have to dwell especially on this ambivalence. Its meaning is explained by an analogy to eccentric clowns whose inability to obey the norm of regular movement reveals itself finally as a superiority over these rules, which allows the eccentric to play with them. Thus the idea of jazz is to prove that divergence from the norm is observed as a rule throughout the total structure.The pattern of this breaking and observing of the rule at the same time is the syncope. The mechanism of its function is interpreted as a kind of unconscious and paradoxical unity of fear and fulfillment, through obedience and reward by society. The antagonistic character of jazz is expressed by the formula that the „subject of jazz“ permits itself to be annihilated by society in order to feel itself endorsed and vindicated by society.L'article présente certains éléments d'une théorie sociale du Jazz* Il utilise en particulier l'analyse technique, dont les résultats sont interprétés comme expression psychologique de réalités sociales. Le Jazz est défini „phénomène d'interférence“ entre une liberté d'improvisation du sujet, liberté tout apparente, et l'instance sociale à laquelle le sujet est soumis et qui est représenté dans la musique par le rythme et le son fondamentaux rigidement maintenus. Le Jazz lui-même n'est pas irrationnel ou archaïque, il est donné comme tel, il est „fuite du monde des marchandises dans le monde des marchandises“ ; ses traits archaïques sont en tant que tels modernes, c'est-à-dire des régressions psychologiques. C'est pourquoi, précisément en tant que marchandise, il doit se donner à la fois pour ancien et nouveau, original et banal.A l'origine, le produit est banal, originales sont, dans des limites très étroites, les transformations de celui-ci par la reproduction. Mais l'apparente liberté de la reproduction est démasquée par la démonstration qu'elle ne touche pas à la „substance“ banale. Même la rationalisation, en apparence progressive, du processus du travail entre production et reproduction ne correspond pas à la réalité. Particulièrement importante, sur ce point,, est la signification de l'amateur comme représentant du public. Au pôle opposé on trouve la musique d'art d'hier, dépravée et dépouillée de ses éléments progressifs : celle de l'impressionnisme.L'extension du Jazz est limitée par les pôles extrêmes de la musique de salon d'une part, et de la marche d'autre part, celle-là expression d'une illusoire subjectivité, celle-ci expression d'une instance sociale inhumaine. Entre ces extrêmes la „Hot Musique“ prend une position intermédiaire paradoxale et elle s’est stabilisée aujourd’hui en „Jazz classique“. C’est celui-ci que doit considérer en premier lieu la théorie du Jazz. Celle-ci est rapprochée de la figure de 1’ „excentrique“ : de même que l’incapacité de celui-ci d’obéir aux lois du mouvement s’affirme comme un jeu supérieur, ainsi l’idée du Jazz est de démontrer la rupture de la norme — la syncope — à travers toute la structure comme l’achèvement de la norme même. Le mécanisme qui agit dans ce cas, comme dans celui des „steeps“ ralentis (Gehtanz) est de nature érotique : unité d’angoisse, de tentative d’évasion, et d’assouvissement par le fait de trouver dans la société à la fois place et récompense. (shrink)

Politics is on the one hand an attempt to implement certain good, a desire for achieving agreed objectives, on the other hand – as Max Weber says – a simultaneous a#empt to avoid a particular evil. If in defining the notion of politics there are references to good and evil, purpose and desire, it has to include the non-political spheres – culture, axiology, religion. Mark Lilla argues that for decades we have been aware of the great and final separation (...) that has taken place in Western Europe between political and religious life. This awareness implies a conviction, which is obligatory today in most countries and societies, that to separate politics from religion is a great achievement. For many thinkers and politicians this is an undisputed success from which the West learns to benefit while preparing other regions of the world for such separation. Therefore it seems that modern politics should be free from religious inspiration and temptation. On the other hand, many sociologists and political scientists show the vitality of religious attitudes, proving that in its deepest essence religion is an expression of human behaviour. Each person and each community always has an element of irreducibility which is an internal defence against reducing man to “here and now”, restricting his world to what is useful and usable. We experience that in man there is a natural opening to what is transcendent. Thus, if man is ever to achieve individual and social reconciliation with himself, he will always look for rational and moral meanings. This situation creates a platform for the emergence of a completely new a#itude in society and politics – to seek and pursue spirituality in a world without religion. Increasingly, the understanding of religion reveals itself in a wide etymological sense, sociological and ethnological: religare – “to connect”, “to bind”, “to build community ties”. Religion so understood would be a great solution to the dilemma of separation – the adoption of religion (bonds) without the doctrine, while ensuring social cohesion, strengthening the feeling of being together, maintaining a spiritual connection. Many thinkers are convinced that we cannot base social life only on fear, discipline and economy; we need a deeper and stronger foundations for Community Cohesion. But is such a project possible at all? Is politics becoming a place for the formation of relationships, education and conservation of values, a narrative space which tells citizens what is good and right and what is wrong and alien? Can it replace religion in its deepest essence – in its intimate sense of an exploration and discovery of transcendence? Will it not become a caricature of religion, and a caricature of politics, and ultimately a trap for freedom? (shrink)

The concepts of nature and nation are both rooted in the notion of birth. Thus both can be conceived anew if the underlying vision of natality is conceptualized, following Hannah Arendt, not as a set of inexorable biological processes, but as the fundamental human capacity for political action. This reconceptualization of natality allows proposing an alternative to the prevalent commonsensical ethno-nationalist definitions of nation-hood, and also allows a view of the realm of nature itself as inherently political. (...) Arendt's theory finds an interesting referential point in modern developments in biotechnology that threaten to undermine the `naturalness' of existing notions of ethnically conceived nations. Similarly, nature might be revealed to have a polis working at the very heart of what seemed to be a set of inexorable processes, independent from human beings. (shrink)

Education reveals itself as an area of priority use of the basic vocabulary of society, and at the same time that is why in the education it is best field to start correcting and refining this vocabulary. The war aims to radically reconsider social values, to abandon unjustified compromises, and the proper way to do this is to correct the names. At one time, with the help of naming, people recorded important characteristics of the world, categorized and classified them, (...) set appropriate markers for vital phenomena and processes. This is reflected, in particular, in the biblical myth of Adam, who gave names to living beings. The Chinese philosopher Confucius had explained and conceptualized the situation of name rectification as a necessary procedure to which society should periodically turn. However, one should not wait until a war or other deep social crisis necessitates the rectification of names – the correction of names should be carried out constantly, as a routine procedure, as an element of the application of critical thinking. However, in contrast to the traditional view of critical thinking, the correction of names also requires faith – to establish those values that are not subject to critical review. In times of war, it is faith in Victory. Correction of names has its bearer – a new generation, whose values were formed by participation in the war. Russia’s current war against Ukraine largely reproduces the value disposition of the Southern Confederate war against the North in the United States in 1861-1865 – important lessons from the war can be learned from this. One of the most important tasks is to properly name evil as evil, to oppose the unanimous public outrage at the desire of the strong to establish themselves at the expense of the weak. The naming of evil as evil opens up the possibility of establishing good as a force, of discovering the economic, political, and military advantages of moral right. (shrink)

How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the (...) social body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity (or not) of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writings on the scream, as a vehicle to uncover new terrains of struggle and new possibilities for collectivity. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence, while presenting itself as a novelty in the fields of education, science and the business industry, is likely being used as a hegemonic tool for economic and political control. Concerns about privacy ethics, class division and the specter of AI-incited biowarfare controlled by supremacist-minded entities that benefit from the datafication of individuals for economic profit and the attainment of politicized control-seeking objectives are the axial arguments of this position paper. As a result, this review makes a (...) case that AI is being used as a tool of hegemony by presenting an analytical framework derived from the ‘less mainstream’ varied corpus of literature published between 1984 and 2024. Furthermore, while the literature also reveals attempts to monitor misuse of AI, to date there have been no solutions offered concerning privacy and surveillance, alternatives to the potential loss of jobs through automated AI or the menace of AI-operated biological warfare already being tested in war-torn parts of the world. Resolving the existing hegemonic challenges is of paramount importance and must be properly addressed in order not to be met with an existential crisis threatening the continuity of humanity. (shrink)

If, today, ‘politics is in culture and culture is relentlessly political’ (Brown, 2002), if the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ can no longer be easily distinguished or kept separate, then contemporary political theory requires an understanding and analysis of cultural politics. This essay undertakes the first stages of such a project by trying to theorize ‘cultural politics’. I argue that ‘cultural politics’ proves to be an object of discourse — it indeed has a certain discursive (...) existence — but not an object of discipline, since no single field or discipline produces it as an object of knowledge. I read this disciplinary failure optimistically, arguing that the study of cultural politics requires a reorientation of theory. The sort of interdisciplinary and multiple-genre work needed to study cultural politics produces a conception of theory as fugitive. Fugitive theory must travel among disciplines, calling on a variety of theoretical and political resources to sustain itself; it refuses the very notion of ‘applied’ theory, insisting that theory ‘is already at work’ in politics (Butler, 1997). To link politics to culture is to practise fugitive theory. And the practice of fugitive theory therefore has the capacity to reveal and explore the workings of cultural politics. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt described the political in existential terms. The political consists in the distinction between friend and enemy, a distinction between collectivities that are existentially different. This led Richard Wolin to label Schmitt a “political existentialist” whose work relies on a specific cultural and philosophical climate of “vitalism.” Consequently, Schmitt’s thought is treated as ideology by Wolin. Instead of focusing on Schmitt’s underlying ideological affinity with a particular cultural climate, this paper attempts to conceptualize the notion of (...) “political existentiality” as a crucial element in Schmitt’s understanding of the political and defend it as a notion that reveals something about the political condition itself. In order to understand the meaning of existentiality, we will conceptualize it against the background of Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis and conclude that through the notion of political existentiality Schmitt conceptualizes the political sphere as a locus of meaning and values and thus reenchants the political. (shrink)

The early Nishida has conventionally been seen as an apolitical thinker, concerned primarily with religious philosophy. In itself this constitutes a political reading of Nishida's work, since it represents an attempt to distance (and thus "save") his wider philosophy from his dubious political practice during the 1930s and 1940s. However, a fresh reading of Nishida's debut, "Zen no kenkyū" (An inquiry into the good), reveals a distinctive political agenda and a sophisticated philosophy of political ethics. (...) Counterintuitively, this essay suggests that Nishida's politics, at least in his "early period," provides a sound philosophical basis for a critique of imperialism and ultranationalism. (shrink)

Exposure is key element of photography as well as in the relationship between the category of regime and the subjects it entails. This article sets out to re-examine the characteristics of exposure across these different contexts and on the basis of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought. The article focuses on the relation between the practice of photography and civil actions pursued by human rights organizations. Combining theoretical ­considerations, analysis of photographs and interviews with human rights workers, the article points to the key (...) role that exposure plays in civic action and seeks to articulate its complexity. Adopting an ­interdisciplinary methodology, the article argues that exposure is no simple relation between an ‘exposer’ and that which is ‘exposed’, but, rather, that as a process exposure reveals complex social political dynamics which defy ­conventional binary determinations of such relations. (shrink)