In the digital sphere, users often find themselves in a situation described in Greek as idiotefsi (ιδιώτευση). They behave as “idiots” (idiotes/ιδιώτες), which in Greek means a private person. In this new structure of participation, the paper focuses on remoteness, on communication in the physical absence of the communicating parties, to make the point that the remote mode challenges the traditional understanding of an assembly, whether an Agora or a Parliament or even a party session, and at the same time (...) it challenges the constitutive myth of democracy. To illustrate this point, the paper uses Hannah Arendt’s approach of the public realm and action, i. e. a theory of civic participation with a strong deliberative ideal, relying on “visibility” and “appearance”. (shrink)

You are what you eat: thinking food otherwise -- Georges Bataille's pornographic food -- Samuel Beckett's alimentary Cogito -- Food, the fall, and the detective: the case of Paul Auster -- Food in Margaret Atwood's Dystopias -- Modernism, postmodernism, and the otherwise of eating.

This essay provides an overview of seminal examples of Western thought in which food features as a means to the conceptual differentiation of the human from the animal. Such an approach allows the emergence of a “structure” that seems to underlie the production of these distinctions. It is, paradoxically, human and animal mutuality – as this is manifested in their common need for, and consumption of, food – that has been utilised as their “differentiator” in the Western tradition and it (...) is this, I argue, that renders possible the functions of what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine.”. (shrink)

This article examines the homily titled Address on Vainglory, and the Right Way for Parents to Bring up their Children, concentrating upon the educational vision it expresses. The text is attributed to John Chrysostom, Christian saint and fourth century Patriarch of Constantinople. Uncertainty regarding the manuscript’s authenticity led to the exclusion of “Address on Vainglory” from most collections of John Chrysostom’s writings, which had seminal influence in a context when the church was united, and the homily has consequently received very (...) limited attention. Chrysostom earned the epithet "The Golden Mouthed” primarily by virtue of his training in rhetoric and his ability to translate the classical sources that he read into his own, Christian, context. He argues that education must not only cultivate all the faculties of the student’s mind, but also prepare the child to live and act ethically in the world. Chrysostom reconfigures this argument using the striking imagery of an Athlete for Christ, who cultivated not only the faculties of his mind, but also exercised those of the soul. (shrink)