This work is a collective reflection on the modern self as a narrative. Modernity as a metamorphic conglomeration of permeating discourses, new practices and institutional forms, a historical unfolding of centrifugal and centripetal discursive dynamics of regulation and normalization offers limitless grounds for a critical investigation. The modern self, both as the revelation of the inner self and as a reflection of the collective, arises from the dialogical interplay within the intersubjective communicative space of social discourse. The bestiary proposed in (...) this series of articles attempts to rethink the spectacle consisting of modern dichotomies by which the self is declined along ontological, metaphysical, and ethical premises: the real and the ideal, the said and the unsaid, the rational and the irrational, the bound and the free, the familiar and the exotic, the universal and the particular, self and world. The reader is therefore encouraged to engage in a multiple reading of the articles presented in this collection. As individual scholarly pieces of inquiry, these articles provide thoughtful insights into the inexhaustible topic of modernity and the modern subject-they tell stories of the past, the present, and of a prospective future. As academic works, however, they also reflect and/or unsettle disciplinary paradigms and scholarly practices, from which they acquire legitimacy and visibility; they conform, apply, reconfigure and/or experiment with new grounds by borrowing from an eclectic mix of various thinkers, their tools, and their axiomatic propositions that constitute their theoretical and critical apparatus. This exercise is ultimately an introspective journey in which we are placed not only as the spectator-the one who gazes through the bars-but also the spectacle-the beast subject to the gaze-finding itself in a predicament of which the subject, itself, is the architect. (shrink)

We explore how story has the potential to encourage environmental engagement and a sense of agency provided that critical discussion takes place. We illuminate this with reference to the philosophies of John Macmurray on personal agency and social relations; of John Dewey on the primacy of experience for philosophy; and of Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics, dialogue, dialectics and narrative. We view the use of fiction for environmental understanding as hermeneutic, a form of conceptualising place which interprets experience and perception. The (...) four writers for young people discussed are Ernest Thompson Seton, Kenneth Grahame, Michelle Paver and Philip Pullman. We develop the concept of critical dialogue, and link this to Crick's demand for active democratic citizenship. We illustrate the educational potential for environmental discussions based on literature leading to deeper understanding of place and environment, encouraging the belief in young people that they can be and become agents for change. We develop from Zimbardo the key concept of heroic resister to encourage young people to overcome peer pressure. We conclude with a call to develop a greater awareness of the potential of fiction for learning, and for writers to produce more focused stories engaging with environmental responsibility and activism. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the relationship between the philosophy of Theodor Adorno and the Bilderverbot , or biblical Second Commandment against images. My starting point is J. F. Lyotard's construction of the melancholic sublime in his essay `What is the Postmodern?', which I argue he uses to critique Adorno's aesthetics, and, more generally, his position as a `modern' thinker. To prove that Lyotard had Adorno in mind when he constructed the category of the melancholic sublime, I return to an (...) earlier piece by Lyotard — `Adorno as the Devil' — which is a reading of Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus , in which Adorno is said to be one of the faces of the Devil. My argument is that Lyotard's understanding of Adorno is flawed because he does not recognize the distinctly Jewish, albeit secularized, character of his thought. I set out to challenge Lyotard by demonstrating the central importance that the Bilderverbot plays in Adorno's work, which should not be understood as melancholic because the Jewish Messianism associated with the Bilderverbot is profoundly future-oriented. In short, I argue that Lyotard's depiction of Adorno is flawed because he reads him as a Christian, while he should be approaching him as a secularized Jew. Key Words: Theodor Adorno • aesthetic theory • Dr Faustus • the image prohibition • Jewish thought • Jean-François Lyotard • Thomas Mann • Messianism • representation • the sublime. (shrink)

The Wisdom of the Buddha. Jean Boisselier. Thames and Hudson, London 1994. 192 pp. £6.95. ISBN 0-500-30047-X. The Vision of the Buddha. Tom Lowenstein. Macmillan, London 1996. 184 pp. £9.99. ISBN 0-333-65380-7.

En général, une personne sait ce qu’elle pense, veut, ou ressent, sans avoir besoin pour cela de s’appuyer sur des observations d’elle-même. En ce sens, la connaissance de soi semble bénéficier d’un privilège par rapport à la connaissance d’autrui, celui de pouvoir apparaître comme vraie sans être fondée sur l’observation et l’inférence. Ce privilège se nomme, après Wittgenstein, l’« autorité de la première personne ». Pour expliquer ce phénomène, la métaphysique traditionnelle a postulé, à l’instar du cogito cartésien, que le (...) sujet aurait une sorte d’accès direct à son intériorité que ne peut avoir autrui. Or, la plupart des philosophes contemporains rejettent l’idée d’intériorité « privée », mais ils ne s’accordent cependant pas sur l’explication qui devrait la remplacer. Ce chapitre se concentre sur la solution que Richard Moran apporte à ce problème. Moran reprend la thèse sartrienne selon laquelle pour savoir et dire ce que je pense, veux, ou vais faire, je suis obligé de me décider, de m’engager plutôt que de m’observer. En ce sens, soutient Moran, le trait distinctif de la connaissance de soi en première personne n’est pas tant un privilège qu’une responsabilité à assumer. Mais pour s’engager de façon responsable, ne faut-il pas chercher d’abord à se connaître ? Nous considérons la force de cette objection, soulevée par Ferdinand Alquié contre Sartre, et tâchons d’y répondre. Ce faisant, notre but est de montrer en quoi l’engagement d’une personne exige un rapport à soi sans équivalent dans ses rapports à autrui. (shrink)

When worldviews clash, the world reverberates. Now a distinguished scholar who has written widely on thinkers ranging from Samuel Beckett to Eric Voegelin inquires into the sources of religious conflict—and into ways of being religious that might diminish that conflict. _Worldview and Mind_ covers a wide range of thinkers and movements to explore the relation between religion and modernity in all its complexity. Eugene Webb invokes a number of topical issues, including religious terrorism, as he unfolds the phenomenon of (...) religion in all its complications, from the difference between faith and belief to the diversities among—and within—religions. Building on Karl Jaspers’s psychology of worldviews and Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology, Webb looks at a broad spectrum of religions—especially the history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in their various forms—to explore the subjective factors that sometimes render religions conflictual and aggressive and to consider conditions that might foster more helpful and reconciling forms of religiousness. He explores what psychological analysis reveals about the relationship between stages of psychological development and ways of being religious—ways that range from closed-minded literalism to open-minded tolerance. He also identifies unconscious and developmental obstacles to religious maturity and depicts the mature person as one who participates in the mystery of self-transcending love. Webb argues that authentic religion need not succumb to dogmatism, or support fanaticism, or be consigned to the stages of immature culture. Responding to critics of religion, from Sigmund Freud to Daniel Dennett, he demonstrates that religious traditions have more spiritual depth than these critics have granted and a greater potential for development than they believe, along lines they might even favor. His insightful book proposes that, if religious people can step back from their traditions and consider them as partial ways of relating to transcendent ultimacy, the world’s religions might manage to develop a way of living together with mutual appreciation and respect. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Desire is Mimetic: A Clinical Approach Jean-Michel Oughourlian Université de Besançon, American Hospital ofParis What is the clinical expression ofmimetic desire? Rivalry. What I see every day in my practice is not mimicking, nor copying, nor learning; it is rivalry. Rivalry is recurrent, it repeats itself. The repetition syndrome identified by psychoanalysis is mimetic for two reasons: 1) because it is always the clinical expression of a rivalry (...) and that rivalry is always mimetic; 2) because it reproduces itself, duplicates itself, imitating the circumstances of the first rivalry and always looking for an impossible victory. That victory is impossible, since it stems from a situation which mimics the circumstances of defeat. But those circumstances are the only ones of interest, since the only battle worth winning is the one that has every chance to be lost. Mimetic rivalry (as I have tried to show elsewhere1) is always rooted in one ofthe two following claims: the claim ofthe selffor the ownership of its own desire; and the claim of desire for its anteriority, its seniority over the other's desire, the other desire that has generated it, on which it is modeled. Clinically, the self and the desire are going to develop various strategies to ascertain those two claims. The interdividual psychotherapy has to diagnose the nodal points of the mimetic conflict. It has to see ' See Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Puppet ofDesire: The Psychology ofHysteria, Possession, and Hypnosis, trans. Eugene Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Ed. 44Jean-Michel Oughourlian through the clinical variety of strategies and symptoms to the essential unity ofthe two claims underlying it. Let me give a few examples. Vengeance As we know, violence is mimetic. When violence cannot be immediately retaliated, imitated, duplicated, the energy for that retaliation is saved for later use. The more humiliating the violence, the greater the stored-up energy. Humiliation, in turn, stems from weakness: the humiliation of a child raped by an adult, ofa civilian beaten up by soldiers, ofa poor person insulted by a rich one, or, generally speaking, ofthe weak overpowered by the strong. Ifa weak person is the perpetrator ofthe first violence, it does not generate humiliation and, most ofthe time, does not entail vengeance. When an angered child kicks an adult, for example, this usually produces laughter rather than violence precisely because the child is smaller and weaker. As time goes by, the energy of postponed or deferred violence accumulates and increases. Clinically, it manifests itself in two ways: as a feeling ofhatred; and as a strength, a drive, a compulsive desire to destroy which will animate the offended and organize all his efforts in view ofthe vengeance that will set him free. The mimetic retaliation ofviolence will drive him until that retaliation is accomplished. In my experience, all the young girls who were raped by their fathers could not restore their mental health and psychological balance unless they were able, in one way or another, to avenge themselves. In the absence of such revenge, the enormous energy built up throughout their childhood and adolescence produced psychological symptoms which last for a lifetime. One such example is a patient, Miss L., 35 years old, who seeks treatment for alcoholism. It is a strange type ofalcoholism: each time, she must enter a meeting and speak before a group of people—and especially if her boss is in the group—she goes to the bathroom and drinks white rum from a hidden bottle. She has been in psychoanalysis for the past 12 years with no significant results. The history of her malady shows that she has wide mood swings, ups and downs often labeled as manic-depressive. Very quickly I see that she has stored within herself an enormous amount of violence which is fairly well controlled, but which manifests itselfthrough different types of aggressive behavior, especially towards men. A few sessions later, she finally tells me that she had been raped by her father and, as a consequence, that her parents had divorced. She was then obliged to remain with her father and take care ofhim. Psychoanalysis, of course, has Desire is Mimetic: A Clinical Approach45 commented extensively on the actual achievement ofher oedipal... (shrink)

Many male traits are well explained by sexual selection theory as adaptations to mating competition and mate choice, whereas no unifying theory explains traits expressed more in females. Anne Campbell's “staying alive” theory proposed that human females produce stronger self-protective reactions than males to aggressive threats because self-protection tends to have higher fitness value for females than males. We examined whether Campbell's theory has more general applicability by considering whether human females respond with greater self-protectiveness than males to other threats (...) beyond aggression. We searched the literature for physiological, behavioral, and emotional responses to major physical and social threats, and found consistent support for females' responding with greater self-protectiveness than males. Females mount stronger immune responses to many pathogens; experience a lower threshold to detect, and lesser tolerance of, pain; awaken more frequently at night; express greater concern about physically dangerous stimuli; exert more effort to avoid social conflicts; exhibit a personality style more focused on life's dangers; react to threats with greater fear, disgust, and sadness; and develop more threat-based clinical conditions than males. Our findings suggest that in relation to threat, human females have relatively heightened protective reactions compared to males. The pervasiveness of this result across multiple domains suggests that general mechanisms might exist underlying females' unique adaptations. An understanding of such processes would enhance knowledge of female health and well-being. (shrink)

La foi et la raison. La foi, don de Dieu. La raison, don de l'homme ou don de Dieu? La foi et la raison eurent à combattre, comme si le ciel et la terre vivaient en conflit incessant. Le combat demeure, différent certes, parce que l'homme oublie ses origines sans en regarder la cause. Jean-Paul II s'est lancé dans cette épreuve, en rédigeant une encyclique, pour enfin tenter de sortir l'homme de son enfermement dialectique. Le magistère de l'Eglise catholique (...) lui en donne l'autorité et la lui demande, pour enfin réconcilier l'homme avec lui-même et avec Dieu"-- Back cover. (shrink)

Using methods of abstract logic and the theory of valuation, we prove that there is no paraconsistent negation obeying the law of double negation and such that $\neg(a\wedge\neg a)$ is a theorem which can be algebraized by a technique similar to the Tarski-Lindenbaum technique.

Albert Einstein.--Bertrand Russell.--John Dewey.--R.A. Millikan.--Theodore Dreiser.--H.G. Wells.--Fridtjof Nansen.--Sir James Jeans.--Irving Babbitt.--Sir Arthur Keith.--J.T. Adams.--H.L. Mencken.--Julia Peterkin.--Lewis Mumford.--G.J. Nathan.--Hu Shih.--J.W. Krutch.--Irwin Edman.--Hilaire Belloc.--Beatrice Webb.--W.R. Inge.--J.B.S. Haldane.--Biographical notes. Note: This book was re-published by AMS Press, 1979.

Jusqu’à présent l’adelphie a peu retenu l’attention des sciences sociales bien qu’il s’agisse d’un lien de parenté proche présent dans le quotidien des familles. Si les analyses de la parenté privilégient la filiation ou l’alliance, des enquêtes consacrées à l’adelphie ont vu le jour depuis quelques décennies. Elles montrent que ce lien est peu normé, « dérivé » car dépendant de son insertion dans la parentèle et marqué par des inégalités en partie déniées du fait d’un rapport ambigu à l’imaginaire (...) égalitaire. L’auteur, sociologue, montre que les transformations récentes du lien adelphique sont aussi le reflet des tensions croissantes entre parenté génétique et parenté intentionnelle qui caractérisent les mutations de la famille. (shrink)

There are other options than the opposition set by Mele between his own account and the strict interpersonal model. The notion of collective self-deception or “social hypocrisy” is discussed and shown to be nonparadoxical. When an individual consciousness lies to itself, there is often a form of “negative collaboration” with another.

The Reveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme are one of the important books of the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this text, Senancour limns an image of the world in accordance with the scientific thought of his time. It is a disenchanted image, dominated by mechanical necessity, and in it the distinction between good and evil no longer holds. God is absent; the world is not his creation. And Senancour expresses no regret:Everything in nature is indifferent, for everything (...) is necessary: all is beautiful, for all is determined. The individual is nothing, as a being apart: his cause and his end lie beyond him. Only the whole exists absolutely, invincibly, with no other cause, with no other end beyond itself, with no laws but those of its nature, with no other product than its permanence…. The beautiful, the true, the just, evil, and disorder exist only for the weakness of mortals…. The same earth contains happy orchards and ruinous volcanoes. The villain triumphs, the hero dies; the orchard withers, the volcano is snuffed out; one and the same destruction devours both the animate and the inanimate, shrouded in the same oblivion; and in a world reborn, there remains not a trace of what was abhorred or deified in a bygone world. (shrink)

Spectatrice – Je voudrais dire que ce qu’on voit à la fin, le sous-bois, les gens pourraient croire que c’est le Jura. Jean-Marie Straub – Non, là c’est un plan qu’on a tourné 10 ou 15 fois et qui introduit Ouvriers et paysans. Ce n’est pas le même opérateur et ça a été tourné un an ou deux avant, par un autre opérateur qui s’appelle Renato Berta. Il y a une cascade. Il y a un certain Henri Alekan qui (...) faisait le travail dans le Cézanne. On ne peut pas faire mieux, il est insurpassable. Ensui... (shrink)

This paper presents the result of researching the mythical conceptions of history in the West, which shed light on numerous cultural and political data that entered the sphere of the imaginary reflected in religions, utopias, and finally, in art. The study is structured in three parts, namely: the three scenarios of universal history; the significant myths of great narratives; the problems of the myth of unique time. These aspects bring into question and demonstrate the importance of the imaginary for the (...) understanding of cosmological and anthropological time. (shrink)