Peut-on utiliser la dimension théâtrale pour penser les généalogies de Michel Foucault? Quelle est la valeur de vérité d’une histoire qui affirme être une « fiction » et procède par scènes, personnages, « dramatiques de la vérité »? Pour répondre à ces interrogations, le présent article utilise la notion de théâtre dans un sens anti-représentatif et expérientiel : comme un mouvement toujours recommencé d’action et de transformation. En questionnant les critiques de la méthode foucaldienne formulées par des historiens tels que (...) Carlo Ginzburg et Hayden White, nous montrerons comment Foucault mobilise dans ses textes une pensée-théâtre historique qui joue comme une arme de problématisation ironique des grands mythes de l’histoire elle-même. Le théâtre est pour Foucault un instrument pour mener une réflexion historico-politique sur la vérité en dehors des catégorisations et des moralisations traditionnelles de la philosophie et de la science occidentales. Mais la dramatisation philosophique du discours historique opérée par Foucault ne représente-elle pas alors le risque concret d’un dangereux relativisme intellectuel et politique : l’exemple parfait d’une « rhétorique » de l’histoire, qui sacrifie la vérité à l’efficacité de la parole? (shrink)

This article explores the ethical imperative to dramatise in the work of Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, two of the most radical thinkers in twentieth-century philosophy, as a peculiar kind of askesis. Whereas askesis is often associated with asceticism or self-denial, in the sense of self-regulation and abstention, Bataille and Deleuze advocate training the self towards intensification of the liminal and extreme, which can rather be understood as a denial of self – its dissolution or laceration. Few attempts have been (...) made to compare their work, even though both share a commitment to resisting the closures that bind our desires and inhibit our full participation in and confrontation with the ebbs and flows of an impersonal, immanent life. Through careful consideration and comparison of their work, I argue that both offer important methods for engendering modalities of ecstatic being characterised by sensitivity to immanence, which have important ramifications for our ability to address phenomena of ethical indifference and resist the constrictions of social control mechanisms that decimate our political imaginations and inhibit our resolve to invent a different future. In the final sections, I interrogate the differences in their invocation of affect and art. (shrink)

The documentary genre is one of the audiovisual mechanisms with the greatest media efficiency in the transmission of reality. However, depending on the nature of the story, the construction of the textual and audiovisual discourse is altered. In this article, we consider the following questions: Is the documentary a format that is faithful to reality? What modifications does the discourse undergo so that the story is enhanced? To go deeper into this aspect, we intend to analyse the different elements that (...) make up the documentary discourse in its transition from reality to fictionalised narrative. To this end, an inspection of the environmental dissemination documentary My Octopus Teacher (Netflix, 2020) will be carried out. An audiovisual proposal in which the coexistence between human and animal life turns environmental dissemination into a powerful instrument for transmitting scientific knowledge. (shrink)

How does Plato view his philosophical antecedents? Plato and his Predecessors considers how Plato represents his philosophical predecessors in a late quartet of dialogues: the Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Politicus and the Philebus. Why is it that the sophist Protagoras, or the monist Parmenides, or the advocate of flux, Heraclitus, are so important in these dialogues? And why are they represented as such shadowy figures, barely present at their own refutations? The explanation, the author argues, is a complex one involving (...) both the reflective relation between Plato's dramatic technique and his philosophical purposes, and the very nature of his late philosophical views. For in these encounters with his predecessors we see Plato develop a new account of the principles of reason, against those who would deny them, and forge a fresh view of the best life - the life of the philosopher. (shrink)

This article is a survey of familiar ground—those passages of the Poetics of Aristotle which throw light on the treatment of legend by the tragic poets. Although sweeping generalizations are often made on the use of the traditional stories in drama, our evidence on the subject is slight and inconclusive. We have little knowledge of the form in which most of the legends were known to the Attic playwrights, for the few we find in the Iliad and Odyssey appear there (...) in very different versions from those they take on in the plays, and the fragmentary remains of epic and lyric poetry between Homer and the fifth century B.C. present us with a wide field for speculation, but few certain facts; while vase paintings and other works of art supplement only here and there the scanty information gained from literature.The comments of ancient writers on this aspect of tragedy are surprisingly few, and carry us little farther. The Poetics stands out as the one source from which we can draw any substantial account of the matter. Even Aristotle, of course, is not directly concerned with the history of drama, and deals with it only incidentally in isolated passages; and in considering these it must constantly be borne in mind that he is discussing tragedy as he knew it in the late fourth century, for the benefit of fourth-century readers. But even so, his statements are the main foundation on which our view of the dramatists' use of legend must be built. (shrink)

In this ambitious and highly original study, McCabe presents an intricately structured argument designed to demonstrate Plato’s concern with fundamental issues of rationality and personhood. In doing so, she pursues themes announced in her Plato’s Individuals and in Form and Argument in Late Plato, a collection she co-edited with Christopher Gill. The development of her position via consideration of the philosophical importance of characterization and the dialogue form in the Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus leads her to focus in particular (...) on Plato’s depiction of his predecessors. These include, firstly, the Theaetetus’s Protagoras and Heraclitean flux theorists and the Sophist’s Parmenides and materialist giants, all “mean-minded opponents” whose views threaten the very possibility of rational inquiry. Refutation of them, accordingly, is Plato’s means of establishing certain basic principles of reason. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 115-116 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Plato and His Predecessors: The Dramatisation of Reason Mary Margaret McCabe. Plato and His Predecessors: The Dramatisation of Reason. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 318. Cloth, $59.95. This book originated with the W. B. Stanford Memorial Lectures delivered at Trinity College, Dublin in 1996. In it Mary Margaret (...) McCabe considers a "late quartet" of Platonic Dialogues: Theaetetus, Sophist, Politicus, Philebus. Her main task is expressly to consider how Plato viewed his philosophical predecessors, particularly Protagoras, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. McCabe argues that the key to understanding how Plato viewed his predecessors lies in the way they are presented dramatically in her late quartet. There they appear as "shadowy figures" with no voice of their own, unable to defend themselves against the arguments put to them by the main speakers, and it is by dramatizing their self-refuting position (for that is what their inability to defend themselves reveals) that Plato develops his most mature account of the principles of reason. In this way, McCabe argues, the dialogue form remains significant to Plato even in his latest works. The dramatic presentation of the dialogues in the late quartet only appears unnecessary if we focus on the relation between the main speaker and interlocutor. If we focus instead on the discussions between Plato and his predecessors, and understand the dialectical role of self-refutation, we can see how the dialogue form remains important. McCabe thus shows how her three main themes--Plato's relation to Presocratic philosophy, his use of the dialogue form, and his views about the principles of reason--are interrelated. It is not clear, however, whether she achieves the full integration of these three themes. McCabe attends much more diligently and thoroughly to the theme about the principles of reason than to either of the other two themes. In this respect her work fits better into the context of philosophical analysis of Plato's views, rather than, say, into the context of historical or hermeneutical approaches.McCabe's analysis of the dramatic elements of the late quartet is, in fact, somewhat narrow. There are extant commentaries on all the dialogues of her late quartet that examine in far greater detail their settings, characterization, dramatic structure, dialectical development, and so on. To judge from these commentaries, it is not clear that the late quartet is dramatically inferior to Plato's early and middle dialogues or that the discussions between the main speaker and interlocutor take a back seat, aesthetically or philosophically, to the dialectic between Plato and his predecessors. But McCabe's aim is the more limited one of finding at least one philosophically compelling reason to favor the dialogue form. She finds it in the way that the "mean-spirited opponents" of Plato--Protagoras, Parmenides, and Heraclitus--show up holding theories that are incompatible with more general views they themselves hold about reason. The only way to defeat such an opponent, one might suggest, is dialectically, by getting them to refute themselves. This is indeed one of the things the late quartet of dialogues shows, and through it McCabe forces us to see the dialectical tactics of refutation that are prevalent in Plato's late dialogues.It is not clear, however, that the positive "principles of reason" Plato is reputed to be developing--"that we are persistent, continuant entities, whose intellectual concerns focus on consistency with oneself and thus disagreement with others; whose autonomy depends on our beliefs belonging to us... and whose best life is constituted by the proper structuring of those beliefs into the single and complete structure of systematic understanding" (289)--require a dramatic presentation, or why Plato should think they require such a presentation. Plenty of philosophical arguments have been made, and were made in ancient [End Page 115] times, about personal identity, rationality, autonomy, and eudaimonia entirely outside of the context of dialogue or drama. Here, in the case of positive advocacy of his principles of reason, it is more difficult to see a... (shrink)

In this essay, I shall explore a reading of the Republic which does not buy into, but rather specifically brackets out and excludes, the institutional structure of the ideal state -- and by ‘institutional structure’ here I mean such things as the way the guardians live, the place and ownership of private property, the way the family is demoted, the fact that philosophers as such are the rulers, and the hierarchical social order as this is exemplified in, for example, the (...) distinction between guardians, auxiliaries and ordinary citizens. Much of the commentary on Plato's Republic focuses on just these elements. Many recent and contemporary commentators on the Republic are given to asking questions like, Is the ideal state totalitarian? Interesting as these issues and questions about the ideal state and its explicit institutions may be, they are for my purposes the least useful. To focus too much on these is to obscure other important elements in the Republic. (shrink)

Dramatisation d'un dialogue souhaite par Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz mais refuse par John Locke, les Nouveaux Essais sur l'entendement humain mettent en scene Theophile et Philalethe: et Leibniz pouvait ainsi donner la replique a l'Essay concerning Human Understanding de Locke. Longtemps consideres comme la simple synthese de la philosophie leibnizienne, les Nouveaux Essais ne nous presentent-ils pas plutot le philosophe de Hanovre empruntant des pistes originales d'analyse et offrant des orientations epistemologiques plus marquees que dans toute autre de ses oeuvres? (...) S'interessant a l'Essay, Leibniz avait declare:...] j'ai fort medite moi-meme sur ce qui regarde les fondements de nos connaissances....] De toutes les recherches il n'y a point de plus importante, puisque c'est la clef de toutes les autres. Ce sont les tenants et les aboutissants de ce jugement de Leibniz, qui fixait ainsi - par anticipation - le propos des Nouveaux Essais, auxquels les auteurs ont ici consacre leurs analyses. (shrink)

Poetics of futurism: Zaum, shiftology, nonsense -- Poetics of Deleuze: structure, stoicism, univocity -- The materialist manifesto -- Shiftology #1: from performativity to dramatisation -- Shiftology #2: from metaphor to metamorphosis -- The see-sawing frontier: linguistic spatiotemporalities -- Concllusion: Suffixing, prefixing.

Shows how Deleuze’s engagement with Stoicism produced many of his most singular and powerful ideas -/- Reveals a lasting influence on Gilles Deleuze by mapping his provocative reading of ancient Stoicism Unearths new possibilities for bridging contemporary philosophy and classics by engaging a vital yet recently rising area of scholarship: continental philosophy’s relationship to ancient philosophy Introduces the untranslated Stoic scholarship published by pre- and post-Deleuzian French philosophers of antiquity to the English-reading world -/- Deleuze dramatises the story of ancient (...) philosophy as a rivalry of four types of thinkers: the subverting pre-Socratics, the ascending Plato, the interiorising Aristotle and the perverting Stoics. Deleuze assigns the Stoics a privileged place because they introduced a new orientation for thinking and living that turns the whole story of philosophy inside out. -/- Ryan J. Johnson reveals Deleuze’s provocative reading of ancient Stoicism produced many of his most singular and powerful ideas. For Deleuze, the Stoics were innovators of an entire system of philosophy which they structured like an egg. Johnson structures his book in this way: Part I looks at physics (the yolk), Part II is logic (the shell) and Part III covers ethics (the albumen). Including previously untranslated French Stoic scholarship, Johnson unearths new possibilities for bridging contemporary and ancient philosophy. (shrink)

This book reconstructs and brings together the work of a number of social and political theorists in order to gain new insight on the emergence and character of modern Western society. It examines the intersection point of social theory and historical sociology in a new theoretical approach called "reflexive historical sociology". There is analysis of the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Eric Voegelin and a number of others. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines (...) the works of Eric Voegelin, Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Part 2 is concerned with the major conceptual tools such as experience, liminality, process, symbolisation, figuration, order, dramatisation and reflexivity, and themes such as the history of forms of thought, subjectivity, knowledge and closed space and regulated time. Finally, the book examines the most important insights of the thinkers discussed, concerning the historical processes that led to modernity. (shrink)

This paper rereads David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as dramatising a distinctive, naturalistic account of toleration. I have two purposes in mind: first, to complete and ground Hume's fragmentary explicit discussion of toleration; second, to unearth a potentially attractive alternative to more recent, Rawlsian approaches to toleration. To make my case, I connect Dialogues and the problem of toleration to the wider themes of naturalism, scepticism and their relation in Hume's thought, before developing a new interpretation of Dialogues part (...) 12 as political drama. Finally, I develop the Humean theory of toleration I have discovered by comparison between Rawls's and Hume's strategies for justification of a tolerant political regime. (shrink)

This paper begins with the lived accounts of emergency and critical care medical interventions in which an unhoused person is brought to the emergency department in cardiac arrest. The case is a dramatised representation of the extent to which biopolitical forces via reduction to bare life through biopolitical and necropolitical operations are prominent influences in nursing and medical care. This paper draws on the scholarship of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe to offer a theoretical analysis of the power (...) dynamics that influence the health care and death care of patients who are caught in the auspices of a neoliberal capitalist healthcare apparatus. This paper offers analysis of the overt displays of biopower over those individuals cast aside as generally unworthy of access to healthcare in a postcolonial capitalist system, in addition to the ways in which humans are reduced to ‘bare life’ in their dying days. We analyse this case study through Agamben's description of thanatopolitics, a ‘regime of death’, and the technologies that accompany the dying process, particularly in that of the homo sacer. Additionally, this paper illustrates the ways in which necropolitics and biopower are integral to understanding how the most advanced and expensive medical interventions make visible the political values of the healthcare system and how nurses and healthcare functions in these deathworlds. The purpose of this paper is to develop a greater understanding of biopolitical and necropolitical operations in acute and critical care environments, and to offer guidance to nurses in these spaces as they work to uphold ethical duties in a system that increasingly dehumanises. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze tells us that philosophical problems ‘compelled’ him to look to the cinema for answers, but he doesn’t tell us what those problems are. In this thesis I argue that the problems in question turn on the foundational role that Henri Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic illusion plays in the development of Deleuze’s ontological conception of difference – specifically in his 1956 essay “Bergson’s Conception of Difference.” The consequence of Bergson’s characterisation of human thought, perception and language as cinematographic (...) in their orientation is that any philosophy that seeks to grasp being in its own terms must overcome or surpass the human to do so. This necessity plays itself out across the Deleuzian oeuvre in diverse formulations in relation to the Nietzschean themes therein. In doing so, however, the human is ‘left behind,’ such that Peter Hallward is able to contend that the human and properly human concerns have no place in Deleuzian philosophy. My argument is that Deleuze turns to the cinema to think through the question of the human relation to being, on the basis of difference as such. Deleuze argues that the essence of the cinema is to be free of the cinematographic illusion - it ‘thinks’ in terms of real difference first of all. On that basis, it is able deduce the genesis of that illusion, and of the cinematographic orientation of human being and thought. The classical cinema dramatises the history of philosophy insofar as it remains subject to the cinematographic illusion and subordinates time to movement, but the modern cinema reverses this subordination in terms that do not ‘overcome’ or ‘surpass’ the human, but rather constitute its exposure to being as real difference. The modern cinema dramatises in turn the experience of what Kant calls the “fractured I,” which experiences its own thought not as spontaneity or power, but as time as the form of change. Deleuze’s Cinema books can thus be read as a response to the demands laid out in Solomon Maimon’s critique of Kant, locating the Cinema books and their treatment of the history of philosophy firmly in the context of Deleuze’s post-Kantian project. At the same time, the Cinema books thereby map out the relation of the human and properly human concerns to the difference of being as a creative and productive force that bears on those concerns without being reduced to them – the thought of being as the event of thought. (shrink)

Rulers of all kinds, from feudal monarchs to democratic presidents and prime ministers, justify themselves to themselves through a variety of rituals, rhetoric, and dramatisations, using everything from architecture and coinage to etiquette and portraiture. This kind of legitimation - self-legitimation - has been overlooked in an age which is concerned principally with how government can be justified in the eyes of its citizens. In this book, Rodney Barker argues that at least as much time is spent by rulers legitimating (...) themselves in their own eyes, and cultivating their own sense of identity, as is spent in trying to convince ordinary subjects. Once this dimension of ruling is taken into account, a far fuller understanding can be gained of what rulers are doing when they rule. It can also open the way to a more complete grasp of what subjects are doing, both when they obey and when they rebel. (shrink)

Towards the end of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s fragment ‘The Triumph of Life’ there are some famous lines which raise most of the questions that will concern me in this essay. Never mind, for the moment, the context: the lines I have in mind are these: “I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, And suddenly my brain became as sand “Where the first wave had more than half erased The track of deer (...) on desert Labrador, Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled amazed “Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore Until the second bursts—so on my sight Burst a new Vision never seen before.—1[…]Two kinds of things are happening here which I want to point out. The first is that even as the poem is attempting to represent the mind as passive and the experience of the mind as an empty succession of events, it is also making a quite contrary attempt to represent the mind as active and the succession as a structure. The lines dramatise how a play of mental events, as they are represented in language, may be reprocessed in such a way that some of them come to be classified as interruptions or breaks in the otherwise meaningful sequence composed by the others. As my first paraphrase suggested, it seems to make sense to recast Shelley’s narrative into the story of deer chased by a wolf, a story which is then interrupted by the wave which bursts on the shore and which threatens the coherence of the story by threatening to efface all sin that the deer have passed across the beach, have crossed the mind. 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Triumph of Life,’ in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers , II. 403-11. The most illuminating reading of these lines is Paul de Man’s in The Rhetoric of Romanticism , pp. 99-100. John Barrell is professor of English at the University of Sussex and author of a number of books on literature and the visual arts, most recently Poetry, Language and Politics . The Infection of Thomas De Quincey and The Birth of Pandora will be published next year. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Socrates' Trial and Conviction of the Jurors in Plato's ApologyDougal BlythI am going to argue in this paper that, in the three speeches constituting his Apology of Socrates, Plato presents the judicial proceedings that led to Socrates' execution as having precisely the opposite significance to their superficial legal meaning. This re-evaluation will lead to some reflections on the politics of Socrates' defence, and, similarly, on Plato's own aims in (...) writing the Apology. I want to show not only that the trial as portrayed demonstrates an inevitable dereliction of duty by the democratic jury, but also, more interestingly, that throughout the proceedings Socrates understands the meaning of the trial precisely in terms of his anticipation of the jurors' judicial incapacity.In the prooimion to his defence speech, Socrates requests that the jurors ignore his manner of speaking and concentrate on whether his case is just, "since this is a judge's virtue (), while that of a rhêtôr is to speak the truth" (18a5-6, cf. 35c2-5). We can gloss the expression "a judge's aretê" in this context as his function, or responsibility.1 Socrates claims that he, himself, fulfills his own responsibility as a defendant to tell the truth (17b4-c4, 33c1-2, cf. 34b5, 35b9-c2) in a speech that asserts his exemplary piety in Apollo's service and his beneficial influence on the Athenian youth. But if, in claiming that he is innocent of the charge, Socrates does tell the truth, then those jurors who thereupon convict him of impiety and corruption, and subsequently sentence him to death, have failed in their duty to judge rightly.My claim is that Socrates sees the trial as a test of the jurors' abilities. It is characteristic of Socrates to test people regarding their concern for virtue and justice, a habit to which he devotes extended discussion during his defence, even dramatising it provocatively in a central passage (29d7-e5) that I aim shortly to analyse in detail. Moreover, Socrates specifically withholds from the jury the title of dikastai or judges; he does finally award the title in his address following the sentence, but only to those who have voted [End Page 1] to acquit him (40a2-3).2 The possibility thus emerges that Socrates has treated the legal proceedings all along as a moral (and intellectual) test, or trial, of the empanelled jurors themselves, to see whether they are capable of the legal function to which they have been allotted. In that case, Socrates is putting on trial, not just those individual citizens, but the very legal system of democratic Athens.Socratic irony and truthfulnessBefore considering Socrates' own explicit judgement during those final remarks on the jurors' moral offence and punishment, I should first address briefly the issue of Socrates' irony. In the past, some writers have asserted that this irony involves him in not telling the truth about himself during his defence, in which case the jury might well have been justified in convicting him. Actually, there does seem to be a consensus among the more extended treatments of the Apology that have emerged during the last decade, at least on the point that Plato presents Socrates as committed to making as sincere an attempt at a defence of his case as is consistent with his philosophical commitment to virtue, and so to telling the truth.3I shall not re-argue this point in detail, but shall take it to be secured by two basic considerations: consistency with the Crito would require Socrates to recognise a legal obligation to make a sincere attempt at defence while his obligation to Apollo to continue his mission in Athens if possible would motivate that attempt with the goal of acquittal.4 Instead, I want to show what role irony does have in Socrates' defence, given that his principled law-abidingness requires him to attempt to persuade the jury, in accordance with truth and justice, that he is innocent (cf. 19a6-7, 18a7-b1, 18e5).Where Socrates acknowledges the obligation to defend himself, he remarks on the difficulty he faces, a difficulty that has resulted from the slander to which he has long... (shrink)

The period we are living through is one of restoration, reminiscent of the 1930s. In a bellicose atmosphere that has proved conducive to an unstable reassertion of imperialism, we have seen a renewed dramatisation of questions of demography and migration, leading to an ethnicisation of social and political relations. Though Europe actually has a structural need of a migrant labour-force, its States have instituted a differential management in dealing with questions of race, depending on the origins of the migrants (...) and the nature of the jobs involved. The result has been to reduce vast numbers of migrants to the condition of illegal, clandestine workers, while operating as a powerful factor in the aggravated exploitation of labour and, in some instances, as a factor in the collective criminalisation of migrants. What Europe’s former Nation-States are thus witnessing, is the emergence of a citizen-foreigner duality which both occludes and perverts the structure of class relations. (shrink)

In Robinson in Ruins, the third of Patrick Keiller’s trilogy of fictionalised documentaries concerning the wanderings and speculations of an unseen protagonist, the narrator informs us that Robinson had been reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which ‘locates the origin of twentieth century catastrophe in the development of market society in England’. Polanyi identifies how the self-regulating market is not a naturally emergent social form, but was the product of the active interventions of the state. For Robinson (and for Keiller) (...) the contradictions between displacement and dwelling generated by laissez-faire can be revealed and challenged by an exploration of the relationships between landscape, space and politics. The melancholy tone of this trilogy can also be sensed in one of Henri Lefebvre’s final essays, in which he laments the dissolution of the utopian promise of the urban that he once dramatised through his thesis of the ‘urban revolution’. This article explores the themes that drive Keiller’s approach in the Robinson trilogy and draws out the associations in these works to Lefebvre’s writings on the politics of space, Polanyi’s critique of laissez-faire capitalism, and Walter Benjamin’s response to the historical catastrophe we understand as ‘progress’. I will argue that Keiller’s engagement with the idea of catastrophe, through spatial, social and historical registers, is an attempt to link the material ruins of our present with utopian imaginings of alternative forms of sociality—beyond the conceptual limits of capitalist realism and the catastrophic futures of neoliberal space. (shrink)

Female behavior that is driven by ambivalent attachment is far from passive or withdrawn. As dramatised in the movie such women's emotional hyper-reactivity is often expressed in violence, which is antithetical to securing investment from mates or peers. Single motherhood, rather than reflecting an avoidant strategy in which close relationships are devalued, is often the result of ecological conditions in which paternal investment is desired but unavailable.

In July 2015, Rihanna released a seven-minute long video for her new single, entitled ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ (more widely known as ‘BBHMM’), the violent imagery in which would divide feminist media commentators for its representation of graphic and sexualised violence against a white couple. The resulting commentary would become the focus of much popular and academic feminist debate over the intersectional gendered and racialised politics of popular culture, in particular coming to define what has been termed ‘white feminism’. (...) ‘BBHMM’ is not the first time Rihanna’s work has been considered in relation to these debates: not only has she herself been very publicly outed as a survivor of male violence, but she has previously dealt with themes of rape and revenge in an earlier video, 2010’s ‘Man Down’, and in her lyrics. In this article I explore the multiple and layered ways in which Rihanna, and by extension other female artists of colour, are produced by white feminism as both responsible for perpetrating gender-based violence, and as victims in need of rescue. The effect of such liberal feminist critique, I argue, is to hold black female artists responsible for a rape culture that continually subjects women of colour to symbolic and actual violence. In this context, the fantasy violence of ‘Man Down’ and to a greater extent ‘BBHMM’ dramatises the impossibility of ‘being paid what one is owed’ in a culture that produces women of colour’s bodies, morality and personal trauma as abjected objects of consumption. I read these two videos through the lens of feminist film theory in order to explore how such representations mobilise affective responses of shame, identification and complicity that are played out in feminist responses to her work, and how their attachment to a simplistic model of representation conceals and reproduces racialised relations of inequality. (shrink)

Fourteen enjoyable papers, from the Theoretical Archaeology Conference held in Oxford in December 2000, which reflect on the relationship between archaeology and the outside world' and investigate the meaning of archaeology to the general public and the relevance of archaeology to society. Essays examine the development of archaeology as a discipline through the medieval, Romantic and Post-Modern eras, looking, for example, at the treatment of archaeological themes in the works of Mary Shelley and Byron. Contributors also consider the impact of (...) Stonehenge on astronomical studies, the influence of Roman finds and sites, including Bath and Caerleon, on Edwardian jewellery and children's stories and the dramatisation of the Iceman's' discovery in a recent play. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines Oscar Wilde’s liberal socialist tract, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’. It posits three discrete arguments. It argues, firstly, that in ‘The Soul of Man’ Wilde was deeply engaged with the socialist theory of William Morris. It claims that Wilde not only repudiated Morris’s aesthetic philosophy, rejecting Morris’s views about co-operation, usefulness, and tradition, and pouring scorn on the notion of dignity in manual labour, but that Wilde also echoed Morris’s utopian romance, News from Nowhere, in (...) two important respects: namely, in his account of crime and punishment on the one hand, and in his treatment of the notion of human nature on the other. Secondly, this article argues that, in ‘The Soul of Man’, Wilde drew on both Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Stuart Mill. It shows how Wilde plagiarised and repurposed ideas drawn from Emerson’s essay, ‘Self-Reliance’. But, in addition, it demonstrates how Wilde duplicated Mill’s view of democracy, individuality, and progress as set out in On Liberty. Finally, then, this article argues that, in his treatment of thrift, gratitude, discontent, and rebellion, Wilde was strongly influenced by Charles Baudelaire’s dramatisation of ‘true philanthropy’ in the narrative prose poem, ‘Let’s Beat Up The Poor!’. (shrink)

Plato’s early dialogues represent the failure of Socrates’ philosophical programme. They depict Socrates as someone whose mission requires that he make an intellectual and moral impact on those with whom he converses; and they portray him as almost never bringing about this result. One central problem, dramatised throughout the early dialogues, is that perceptual moral intuitions undermine the possibility of reason’s making significant changes to a person’s moral belief system. I argue that Republic presents a theory of education which aims (...) to circumvent this problem by training people so that they become like Socrates. Socrates’ status as ideal reasoner is tied to his love of argument (philologia) and his ignorance. The Republic offers an account of how these characteristics may be (non-argumentatively) instilled, which creates the psychological space for the possibility of abandoning one’s basic moral beliefs, thus securing the possibility of moral improvement by argument. ‘And how I am to persuade you, if you aren’t persuaded by what I said just now? What more can I do? Am I to take the argument and pour it into your very soul?’ (Republic 345b). (shrink)

The image-building of the political system through the public broadcasting corporation BRTn is analysed on the base of a content analysis of the political information in the television news during the period 1982-1991. The study shows that political coverage in the public television news is subject to actualisation, fragmentation, personifying, dramatisation and the introduction of entertainment-techniques. Political items are transferred to the back of the newsbroadcast and there is less room for interpretation of the facts. Journalists point out that (...) the attention for politics has diminished because the audience is less interested. However it is very likely that this is the result of the fact that the audience is uniformed because of the lack of information. In that way we enter a vicious circle that can only be broken through the media themselves. In order to achieve this, television shoud bring more interpretation and explanation of the facts. A parliamentary feature, incorporated in a current alfairs programme could attribute to this, but can do no miracles when commercial tendencies become stronger in the news itself. (shrink)

Philosophy and science fiction are two separate discourses that use counter-intuitive scenarios in two distinct ways. Where philosophy endeavours to ground counter-intuitive scenarios, science fiction as a transmedial fictional genre acts in a pragmatic and exploratory manner by seeking to imagine what it would be like if they were real. In this paper, I analyse David Cronenberg’s science fiction film eXistenZ, and defend two theses. The critical-theoretical thesis: Cronenberg thinks society is being gamified and seeks to dramatise the process of (...) gamification along with its pitfalls. The metaphysical thesis: Cronenberg’s diegetic world brings about a new articulation of the scepticism as an old philosophical problem. An attempt to excavate the metaphysical presuppositions of this work reanimates Cartesian interactionist dualism and Kantian transcendental idealism, as two well-known philosophical positions. (shrink)

Silvio Berlusconi constitue un phénomène original, et même un cas unique, puisqu'il est le seul chef d'entreprise du secteur des médias qui accède, à deux reprises, aux fonctions de Premier ministre dans une grande démocratie. L'arrivée au pouvoir du dirigeant de la grande entreprise de la communication répond à la crise de la représentation politique et inaugure dans l'Europe latine, une «néo-politique». Comme toute figure symbolique, l'image de Berlusconi est ambivalente et ne peut laisser indifférente. Si Berlusconi suscite tant de (...) réactions d'adhésion ou de rejet, c'est parce qu'il inscrit toute son activité publique dans l'espace de l'image, de la séduction et de l'émotion, plus que dans le champ rationnel et traditionnel de la représentation politique. Il sait être l'ordonnateur du débat public en le dramatisant autour de clivages simplistes, notamment pour ou contre l'État, pour ou contre l'impôt... Il promeut ainsi une politique faite de passions et de croyances, comme dans une fiction télévisuelle. Le phénomène ne relève pas pour autant du populisme, voire du « télépopulisme ».Silvio Berlusconi represents an original phenomenon, or even a unique case, in that he is the only company manager from the world of media who twice rose to the office of Prime Minister in a major democracy. The coming to power of the manager of this large media firm is an answer to the crisis of political representation; it ushers in a "neo-policy" in Latin Europe. Like any symbolical figure, Berlusconi's image is ambivalent and cannot leave indifferent. If Berlusconi gives rise to so many reactions of support or rejection, that is because he places his whole public activity in the field of image, seduction and emotion rather than in the rational and traditional field of political representation. He knows how to organize public debate by dramatizing it around simplistic divides, such as for or against State, for or against taxes... Thus he promotes politics built on passions ans beliefs, as in a television fiction. For all that, the phenomenon does not fall into populism, nor even into "telepopulism". (shrink)

How did Romans perceive the changing relationships among leaders, the people, and the public sphere as their commonwealth (res publica) fell under the control of an emperor? This paper examines Ovid’s uses of the Latin adjective publicus, ‘public, common, open’, to explore strands of implicitly ‘republican’ political thought behind his poetic corpus. Ovid first celebrates Augustus’ material benefactions as common goods for private consumption; then dramatises the tragic consequences of arbitrary domination; and finally, from exile, treats the emperor himself as (...) a public property, subject to his people’s spectatorship and sovereignty of judgment. A final section draws on Ovid’s thinking on privacy, publicity, and information access to explore themes related to America’s ‘imperial presidency’, from the Founders’ emphasis on a free press to the recent interplay of secrecy, celebrity, and ‘sunshine’ laws. (shrink)

The article examines Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977) in conjunction with du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) in order to present an argument about the similarities they share with the male masochistic fantasy as theorised by Deleuze in his Coldness and Cruelty (1989). Barthes’s insistence on the connection between art and love directs my approach. Trilby deals with love and aesthetics in the contexts of art, music, and narrative. The discourses of Trilby’s competing lovers over the same woman serve as a point (...) of comparison against which I read Barthes’s dramatisation of a lover’s discourse. I argue that Barthes’s lover shares a number of central discursive figures with the Deleuzian masochistic lover. I examine Barthes’s suggestion about the tension between the non-narrative discourse of love and the metalanguage of conventional love stories. I focus on those figures in a lover’s discourse that Barthes identifies as keeping this discourse from turning into a love story. My argument is that many of these figures are among the hallmarks of the masochistic fantasy. In particular the formula of disavowal safeguards the lover’s discourse, hindering it from turning into a conventional narrative about love. (shrink)

Tout pouvoir politique se manifeste et par sa maîtrise de la contrainte et par la possibilité qu'il a de se dramatiser dans des cérémonies qui visent à intégrer et à mobiliser les administrés pour des actions communes. Il affirme simultanément sa légitimité, ses hiérarchies et ses priorités. Les exemples des rites du protocole, des élections municipales, des inaugurations et intronisations énoncent comment le politique se donne en spectacle et quels effets sociaux produisent de telles démonstrations. Outre les conditions les plus (...) favorables à l'apparition des rites, sont examinées la dynamique et l'obsolescence de ceux-ci selon les régimes politiques, ainsi que les raisons expliquant l'intérêt actuel des anthropologues pour les liturgies politiques.All political power is manifested and his mastery of stress and the ability he has to dramatize in ceremonies designed to integrate and mobilize administered for joint actions. He says its legitimacy simultaneously, hierarchies and priorities. Examples of rites protocol, municipal elections, inaugurations and state inductions how politics makes a spectacle and what social effects produce such demonstrations. In addition to the conditions most favorable to the emergence of rites are examined the dynamics and obsolescence as these political regimes, as well as the reasons for the current interest anthropologists liturgies for politicians. (shrink)

La philosophie de Souriau a pour objet ce qu’il appelle les existences virtuelles, un mode d’existence fragile et précaire qui concerne tout processus d’instauration. Ces virtualités sont en état d’abaliété, elles existent « en et par autre chose », de manière relationnelle et indéterminée. Ces particularités ontologiques posent un problème de connaissance : celui de connaître de telles singularités, aussi appelées « âmes ». De nouveaux outils, issus de l’esthétique, accompagnent la connaissance. La fiction et la dramatisation viennent jouer (...) un rôle épistémique. Les êtres de fiction, qui existent selon un mode spécifique d’existence, font naître un sentiment esthétique, qui devient la base créatrice de la philosophie et de la connaissance. (shrink)

Sartre tire son originalité de la tension forte qui existe chez lui entre des convictions politiques révolutionnaires profondes et un attachement persistant mais critique aux formes artistiques traditionnelles. Cette étude met en lumière le rôle fécond de passeur joué par Sartre entre deux périodes historiques. La première partie, centrée sur les positions politiques révolutionnaires de Sartre, explore durant la Guerre Froide, son opposition à la vision gaulliste de la France et sa relation problématique avec le Parti Communiste, puis, au lendemain (...) de Mai 68, ses affinités avec le mouvement maoïste. La seconde partie, consacrée à ses positions dans le domaine culturel, analyse de manière critique la dramatisation des enjeux politiques dans son théâtre, sa perception idéologique de la sculpture et de la peinture, et la diffusion de ses idées politiques par le biais de la presse, de la radio, et de la télévision. Au cœur de l'entreprise intellectuelle de Sartre réside la croyance fondamentale en la capacité humaine à librement réinventer les pratiques politiques et les formes culturelles. Cette unique association d'allégeance politique et d'invention culturelle explique le récent regain d'intérêt pour Sartre et garantit une place pour ses idées dans les cœurs et les esprits des lecteurs du XXIème siècle. (shrink)

A l'automne de 1534, alors que le débat religieux en France est dominé par l'interférence des doctrines luthériennes et sacramentaires, et soudainement dramatisé par l'" affaire des Placards ", Guillaume Budé - tout en jetant sur son temps un regard lucide et souvent prophétique - écrit le livre qui couronne une quête spirituelle de plus de vingt années, justifiant ainsi (au sens théologique du terme) sa propre vie intellectuelle et l'humanisme dont il est le champion. Ce " livre-testament ", tout (...) vibrant d'une éloquence tendue, somptueuse et savante, opère dans sa complexe écriture le transfert de toutes les ressources des lettres profanes (dont le mot hellénisme est l'indice) au christianisme. Alchimie de la culture, alchimie du verbe. (shrink)

La théorie exerce-t-elle une sorte de contrôle axiologique, en plus du contrôle épistémologique? Cela concerne, entre autres, la valeur que peut revendiquer la théorie en tant que théorie, en tant que faire de la théorie est un rôle social. Pour approfondir cet aspect, il vaut mieux opposer la pratique plutôt que le fait à la théorie, s’agissant de son statut pratique. Que se passe-t-il quand une Professeure de sémiotique des médias tue pour la théorie? Cette question dramatise le propos, mais (...) nous renvoie en même temps à la communication pratique ordinaire. C’est en effet le thème de l’épisode 20, intitulé A Space Oddity, de la saison 9 des Experts, Las Vegas ( Crime Scene Investigation Las Vegas ). (shrink)

La presse italienne a suivi de très près l'agonie et la mort du pape Jean-Paul II. Il s'agit certainement de l'événement le plus médiatisé depuis les attentats terroristes du 11 septembre 2001. Les quatre titres italiens, malgré leur positionnement politique différent, analysent l'événement avec le même degré de dramatisation et d'intensité. Ils proposent un récit fortement sentimental à travers le recours à un langage émotionnel, à des images touchantes ou, encore, à une mise en page spécifique. Les thèmes qui (...) reviennent le plus souvent font appel au caractère et au charisme de Jean-Paul II, à son recours aux médias dans le but de véhiculer le message chrétien. Son rapport avec les jeunes est également un des sujets privilégiés par la presse italienne, pour cela son Pontificat est qualifié de révolutionnaire. Si les quatre quotidiens italiens étudiés proposent une analyse similaire, à travers leur récit d'un « événement d'émotion planétaire », des différences persistent. S'adressant à un public spécifique, chaque titre emploie son propre langage, il renvoie à des références précises et touche des sensibilités diverses. Malgré une uniformisation substantielle, le clivage droite-gauche semble persister.The Italian press has closely followed the agony and death of Pope John Paul II. It is certainly the most publicized event since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The four Italian titles, despite their different political positions, analyze the event with the same degree of intensity and drama. They offer a highly sentimental story through the use of emotional language, images or touching, even to a specific layout. The themes that recur most often involve the character and charisma of John Paul II, in his use of the media in order to convey the Christian message. His relationship with young people is also one of the subjects favored by the Italian press for his pontificate that is called revolutionary. If the four studied Italian newspapers offer a similar analysis, through their narrative of a "global event emotion", differences persist. Addressing a specific audience, each title uses its own language, it refers to specific references and touches different sensibilities. Despite a substantial uniformity, the left-right divide seems to persist. (shrink)

Childhood innocence has often been treated by scholars as an empty, idealised signifier. This article contests such accounts, arguing that innocence is best regarded as a powerfully unmarked training in heternormativity, alongside class and race norms. This claim will be demonstrated through attention to two recent films addressing childhood: Celine Sciamma’s Tomboy and P.J. Hogan’s Peter Pan. The films characterise young femininity as an ‘impossible space’, in which subjects face the contradictory, schizoid demands to simultaneously show both childhood innocence and (...) heteronormative femininity – or else face the threat of a spoiled identity. The plot of each film traces how the protagonist attempts to manoeuvre in the face of and precisely using this contradiction. In dramatising such manoeuvring, the films reveal the surprising forms of subjectivity that can be inhabited for a time in the interstices between age and gender norms, and which might have lasting value. Both films thus drama... (shrink)

This article discusses the Australian government’s immigration policies in the context of the global refugee crisis in the years 2015–2016, as reflected and dramatised through the polemical novel b...

In Elephant , director Gus Van Sant dramatises a massacre at a suburban American high school in order to examine narrative cinema's ethical capacity to respond to that which resists being framed as a meaningful event. In the film, this stubborn stuff is experience shot through with contingency. Van Sant depicts acts of violence that are indiscriminate and, at best, ambiguously motivated, as well as school-day activities that appear coincidental and insignificant. This essay argues that the director aims to screen (...) contingency to mount a critique of conventional narrative film's terror of contingency, its anxious drive to convert all cinematic time to good, signifying use. It also argues that Van Sant complicates or crosses up this aim by constructing a self-reflexive text attuned to the inherent irresponsibility in assuming that radical contingency's dead time could be fully and faithfully animated on screen. While the film camera and a still camera used by a student photographer in the film shoot people with the ostensible aim of capturing contingency in all its otherness, both projects are, at the same time, linked, in complex ways, to the student killers who shoot people with the aim of eliminating all otherness. The film's recognition of its own drive to plot in a deadly fashion thus illustrates Van Sant's profound sensitivity to the challenges of responding responsibly to a time of terror and, more broadly, to the terrors of time. (shrink)

“Hot seating” is a form of creative drama in which the participants play themselves but imagine themselves in someone else’s position, some taking the role of interrogators and others the role of persons in the “hot seat”. This paper documents the case of marketing students who dramatised an ethics enquiry supposedly held under the auspices of a professional marketing association to investigate breaches in its code of professional conduct. Interpretive research, in the form of a cartoon test, was employed to (...) examine the contribution of the educational drama activity to student perceptions of learning within a role-playing experientially-based marketing unit at an Australian University. Findings reveal that students preferred the hot-seating exercise to conventional teaching methods in terms of enjoyment, “real-life” experience, new understandings of both marketing and ethics, and their motivation to learn more about marketing ethics implications for themselves, customers and the profession. Strategically, the convention was found to involve the students emotionally and intellectually with some intensity, while revealing that some students may be fearful of the drama or even over-stimulated by the sometimes tense and powerful environment.This pedagogical approach was also seen to be particularly suitable for instruction for the delicate, contentious and personal issues often raised by ethics. (shrink)

This article presents a critical account of Agamben’s understanding of the logic of sovereignty and of the notion bare life, particularly Agamben’s approach to the paradox of sovereignty and its relation to Aristotle’s metaphysical category of potentiality. With regards to bare life, it brings together an analysis of the figure of the homo sacer with an account of Agamben’s use of paradigms as methodological tools. The first part of the paper argues that Agamben ontologises sovereignty by dramatising the paradox of (...) its structure as im-potentiality. The second part claims that even though an account of Agamben’s methodology serves to respond to the different critiques that his notion of bare life has raised, Agamben’s notions of sovereignty and of bare life ultimately rely on Schmitt’s decisionism. El artículo hace un recuento crítico de la forma en que Agamben entiende la lógica de la soberanía y la noción de nuda vida, particularmente su abordaje de la paradoja de la soberanía y su relación con la categoría metafísica aristotélica de la potencialidad. Con respecto a la nuda vida, combina el análisis de la figura del homo sacer con un recuento del uso que hace Agamben de los paradigmas como herramientas metodológicas. En la primera parte del ensayo, se argumenta que Agamben ontologiza la soberanía al dramatizar la paradoja de su estructura como im-potencialidad. En la segunda, se afirma que aunque la descripción de la metodología de Agamben sirve para responder a las diferentes críticas suscitadas por su noción de nuda vida, sus nociones de soberanía y de nuda vida dependen, en última instancia, del decisionismo de Schmitt. Este artigo apresenta a versão crítica do entendimento de Agamben sobre a lógica da soberania e da noção de vida nua. Em particular, a aproximação de Agamben para o paradoxo da soberania e da sua relação com a categoria metafísica da potencialidade de Aristóteles. No que diz respeito à vida nua, reúne uma análise da figura do homo sacer com uma explicação do uso de Agamben de paradigmas como ferramentas metodológicas. Na primeira parte deste artigo, argumenta-se que Agamben ontologiza a soberaniadramatizando o paradoxo de sua estrutura como im-potencialidade. Na segunda parte, será alegado que, apesar de uma explicação da metodologia de Agamben ter servido para responder às diferentes críticas que sua noção de vida nua tenha levantado, em última análise, duas noções da soberania e vida nua de Agamben dependem do "decisionismo schmittiano". (shrink)

The narrated self: time and the dramatisation of historical agency -- The publication of the self: the sublimation of personal identity in publicity and art appreciation -- The disintegration of the self: the origins of abstraction and the de-objectification of the world -- The democratisation of the self: the integration of creative endeavour into the fabric of daily life and the death of art -- The trans-personalisation of the self: the material culture of communication and the communalisation of identity (...) -- The psychological self: the pathology of art and cinematographic modes of self-remembering -- The linguistic self: the de-verberation of the self and the end of meaning. (shrink)

The Magic of Unknowing is a unique philosophical and literary work. Cast in the dialogue form, it unfolds in the mood of soliloquy. Mervyn Sprung has created an imaginative meeting of the minds of great western philosophers: Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Pyrrho. All are brothers, the more skeptical sons of Aristotle. Later they hear as well from Chang, a Taoist, and Nagaraj, a Buddhist, both lately adopted into the family. The dialogue dramatises the erosion in modern times (...) of Aristotelian rationality under the pressures of its own logic. The two eastern thinkers throw the weight of their own skepticism into the discussion at the critical point. In the end the brothers realize that they have moved away from Western philosophy's faith in the singular power of reason to establish truth and sense in the human world. They discover the magic of unknowing that lies in the reciprocal penetration of knowledge and behavior, each receiving its sense from the other. They discover that philosophies are not the issue of reasoning alone but are themselves already inseparably thought and action. And they realise that this entails an unheard-of future for philosophy. (shrink)

The current scientific and political discussion on the under‐representation of women within the Internet once again associates women with disinterest in technology in an essentialist manner. Gender‐specific attributions are unquestioningly transferred to the new media, and it is assumed that women behave in unfailing conformity with existing gender stereotypes. The intention of this paper is to show that gender research has to perform differentiated empirical studies of actual Internet use. Gender studies can then make a concrete contribution to the task (...) of overcoming the genderdifferentiated inequalities in the access to and the use of the Internet. I shall begin by briefly outlining the dilemma of gender studies in the technical area. In the second section I shall describe the reasons for the gender‐differentiated Internet access data, using quantitative Internet studies from the USA, calling for a de‐dramatisation of difference in this context. In the third section, I will overcome the dichotomous view of the digital divide and present a research framework for differentiated study of differing use habits and use requirements. This section illustrates that such an approach does not make the gender category superfluous, but challenges gender studies to present context‐related studies, in which individual behaviour may be interpreted in the context of gender symbols and structures. My fourth step will be to explain how the new possibilities of online research can and should be used to gain further understanding in the sense of differentiated study designs. Finally, I will finish with a short outlook where I am calling for an equal representation of all societal groups in the Internet and therefore for an empowerment particularly of women. (shrink)

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for (...) a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film – Leviathan – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being. (shrink)