Este trabalho pretende investigar como uma série de metamorfoses em nossos regimes de visibilidade constituem o que chamamos de populismo algorítmico e subjetivação ptolomaica. Recorremos, inicialmente, aos conceitos de disciplina, espetáculo e transparência – trabalhados respectivamente por Foucault, Debord e Han – para melhor compreendermos a formação de certos regimes de visibilidade e sua conexão com o modo de produção capitalista. Em seguida, trazemos o campo da tecnopolítica como superfície de inscrição privilegiada das novas formas de visibilidade e lançamos atenção (...) aos efeitos da filtragem algorítmica que produzem o que Pariser chamou de bolha-dos-filtros: a progressiva personalização dos conteúdos políticos, imagens e propagandas na internet. Argumentamos que esta ação de filtragem algorítmica está na base dos novos populismos, conforme as análises de Mouffe e Laclau. A partir de um sistema de equivalência de demandas insatisfeitas, as formas de laço social postas pelo atual populismo algorítmico se dão muito mais por uma frustração ou por um inimigo em comum do que por formas de idealização, tal qual nos mostravam a psicologia das massas analisada por Le Bon e Freud. Por fim, com o conceito de subjetivação ptolomaica, que consiste na produção tecnopolítica de um sujeito autocentrado e intolerante a tudo o que destoe do universo único a que o algoritmo deu exclusiva visibilidade, reencontramos os importantes temas do dogmatismo e do egocentrismo, trabalhados respectivamente por Kant e Piaget – o que, por sua vez, conecta o campo da Tecnopolítica ao campo da Filosofia da Educação no importante e atual tema das metamorfoses da visibilidade. (shrink)

In this article, we aim at presenting a thorough and comprehensive explanation of the mathematical and theoretical relation between all the aspects of Ptolemaic planetary models and their counterparts which are built according to Kepler’s first two laws. Our article also analyzes the predictive differences which arise from comparing Ptolemaic and these ideal Keplerian models, making clear distinctions between those differences which must be attributed to the structural variations between the models, and those which are due to the (...) specific parameters Ptolemy determined in the Almagest. We expect that our work will be a contribution for a better understanding not only of the Ptolemaic theories for planetary longitudes through a clearer perception of the way in which Keplerian features are present—or absent—in Ptolemy’s models, but also for a more balanced judgement of different aspects of the contribution of the first two laws of Kepler to the modern astronomical revolution. (shrink)

The recently rising field of Critical Data Studies is still facing fundamental questions. Among these is the enigma of digital subjectivation. Who are the subjects of Big Data? A field where this question is particularly pressing is finance. Since the 1990s traders have been steadily integrated into computerized data assemblages, which calls for an ontology that eliminates the distinction between human sovereign subjects and non-human instrumental objects. The latter subjectivize traders in pre-conscious ways, because human consciousness runs too slow (...) to follow the volatility of the market. In response to this conundrum Social Studies of Finance has drawn on Actor-Network Theory to interpret financial markets as technically constructed networks of human and non-human actors. I argue that in order to develop an explicitly critical data study it might be advantageous to refer to Maurizio Lazzarato’s theory of machinic subjugation instead. Although both accounts describe financial digital subjectivation similarly, Lazzarato has the advantage of coupling his description to a clear critique of and resistance to finance. (shrink)

Starting from a Foucaultian perspective, the article draws attention to current developments that neutralise democracy through the 'governmentalisation of democracy' and processes of 'governmental subjectivation'. Here, ideas of Rancière are introduced in order to clarify how democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of 'political subjectivation', that is, a disengagement with governmental subjectivation through the verification of one's equality in demonstrating a wrong. We will argue that democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of political subjectivation, (...) and that today's consensus society tends to depoliticize all processes of subjectivation. A final step in the argumentation is to introduce the concept of 'pedagogic subjectivation'—to be understood as the experience of potentiality—that is to be distinguished from governmental subjectivation and also from political subjectivation. The concept 'pedagogic subjectivation' is proposed as a way of thinking of the school as a public place. (shrink)

I argue that Gilles-Gaston Granger (1920–2016) broadly incorporates the central affirmations of Jean Cavaillès’s (1903–44) philosophy of the concept into his own epistemological program. Cavaillès and Granger share three interrelated epistemological commitments: they claim (1) that mathematics has its own content and is therefore autonomous from and irreducible to logic, (2) that conceptual transformations in the history of mathematics can only be explained by an internal dialectic of concepts, and (3) that the objectivity of mathematics is an effect of the (...) productive form of its rationality—that is, they claim that mathematical objectivity is the result of a generative process internal to mathematics. Mathematical objectivity, as I demonstrate, requires Cavaillès and Granger to modify the limits of epistemological critique as envisioned by Kant. For Cavaillès, this modification requires the elimination of the transcendental in favor of a dialectic of concepts. For Granger, the philosophy of the concept remains a genre of transcendental critique, but in a radically revised “Ptolemaic” style. I initially demonstrate how Granger extracts each of these claims from Cavaillès. I then follow Granger as he develops these claims in the service of a novel description of the content and structure of mathematical objectivity. (shrink)

La pleine reconnaissance de l’existence du problème de la subjectivation sexuée ou colonisée conduit nécessairement à rendre relatif celui de la subjectivation dite « neutre ». Pourtant, le propre de la conscience dominante est de masquer son propre caractère de domination. Comment forcer la subjectivité dominante à se dévoiler? Nous proposons d’associer la description phénoménologique à une méthode de traduction depuis les expériences des dominé-e-s vers la reconstruction des expériences des dominant-e-s en tant que tel-les. Pour cela, nous (...) partirons, dans une perspective intersectionnelle, des travaux phénoménologiques de Simone de Beauvoir et de Frantz Fanon.The full recognition of the problem of sexual or colonized subjectivation necessarily leads to question the neutrality of “normal subjectivity.” Yet the dominant consciousness tends to mask its own character of domination. How to force dominant subjectivity to reveal itself? We propose to associate the phenomenological description with a method of translation from the experiences of the dominated-ones to the reconstruction of the experiences of the dominants as such. For that, we will rely, in an intersectional perspective, on the phenomenological work of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. (shrink)

On the basis of a reconstruction of legal theory in the tradition of Marx - a current that has been more or less silenced since the end of the 1970s - Subjectivation and Cohesion develops a critical counter-pole to the theories of law that predominate in social theory today. To this end, the works of Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Evgeny Pashukanis, Oskar Negt, Isaac D. Balbus, the so-called 'State-derivation School', Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas and Michel Foucault are first analysed (...) for their strengths and weaknesses, and then combined to form a new construction: a materialist legal theory that is up to date and can avoid the shortcomings of existing theories - above all their disregard for gender relations and the reductive consequences of functionalist, economic or politicist approaches to law. (shrink)

In this article, I take up one strand – arguably the central one – of the Foucault/Habermas debate: their respective accounts of subjectivation. Against those who hold that Foucault and Habermas occupy such drastically different theoretical perspectives as to preclude the integration of their views into a common framework, I begin to lay the groundwork for an account of subjectivation that draws on the conceptual insights to be found on each side of the debate. While both Foucault and (...) Habermas offer a one-sided analysis of subjectivation – Foucault emphasizes its power-ladenness, and Habermas its communicative, rational, intersubjective aspects – I argue that subjectivation necessarily entails both communicative rationality and power relationships. I then consider the implications of my comparative argument for both Foucault and Habermas’s broader philosophical projects. (shrink)

RESUMEN A pesar de la declaración de la muerte del Sujeto en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, tanto Marion como Badiou mantienen esta categoría en el centro de sus filosofías. Sin embargo, para poder hacerlo abandonan sus determinaciones metafísicas de principio y fundamento con el fin de desplazarlo dentro de una posición secundaria de Sujeto de un acontecimiento. Así, el Sujeto, en tanto que substancia, da lugar a un proceso de subjetivación que responde a un acontecimiento que, desde siempre, (...) lo llama. En este texto se muestra que esta estructura apostólica del Sujeto contemporáneo también tiene sus raíces en cierta lectura disidente de Descartes, con la condición de que aceptemos, en una lógica derridiana, escuchar la polifonía de sus textos filosóficos. ABSTRACT Despite the death of the Subject during the second half of the 20th century, both Marion and Badiou maintain this category at the centre of their philosophies. However, in order to do so, they abandon its metaphysical determinations of principle and foundation to displace it within a secondary position of Subject of an event. Thus, the Subject as a substance is replaced by a process of subjectivation that responds to an event that since ever calls it. We show in this text that this apostolic structure of the contemporary Subject has its deep roots in a dissenting reading of Descartes, if we accept to listen, with Derrida, all the polyphonic richness of philosophical texts. (shrink)

This article highlights the impasses of anti-racist struggles that understand racism as an opinion or a prejudice and use education as their only means for addressing it. Racism should rather be understood as a socio-historical subjective structure rooted in the process of constitution of the division of labour on a global scale through colonialism, a process that was crucial to the institution of capitalism. This is why we will put forth the importance of rejecting the narrations that camouflage colonization with (...) the idea of civilization, and the necessity to produce decolonial counter-histories. We will thus claim that such an endeavor should start from the struggles of racialized peoples against the different forms of coloniality—that is, from the refusal by racialized peoples of the representations that are imposed on them, and from their repositioning on the basis of their alterity. Only the position of a powerful alterity can in fact make possible a real equality.Cet article met en évidence les impasses des luttes antiracistes qui conçoivent le racisme comme une opinion ou un préjugé et utilisent l’éducation comme le seul moyen d’y remédier. Le racisme devrait plutôt être compris comme une structure socio-historique subjective qui s’enracine dans le procès de constitution de la division mondiale du travail par le colonialisme, un procès qui a été décisif pour l’institution du capitalisme. C’est pourquoi nous mettrons en avant le caractère problématique des récits qui recouvrent la colonisation de l’idée de civilisation et la nécessité de produire des contre-histoires décoloniales. Il s’agira alors de montrer que, pour ce faire, il faut partir des luttes des racisés contre les différentes formes de colonialité—c’est-à-dire du refus par les racisés des représentations qui leur sont adressées et de leur repositionnement à partir de leur altérité. Seule la position d’une altérité puissante peut, en effet, rendre possible une égalité réelle. (shrink)

This article defends the theoretical centrality of Michel Foucault’s account of subjectivation for critical responses to neoliberalism against those Marxist critics who claim that his focus on the subject pushed the Left into the fraught terrain of identity politics. A key contention is that a theoretically sophisticated account of subjectivation is a requisite for any philosophically coherent and politically effective theorization of resistance against neoliberalism. Critical accounts of neoliberal subjectivation must be recognized as indispensable for understanding the (...) conditions of possibility for class struggle and not as an alternative theoretical frame to it. The article also relates Foucault’s and Karl Marx’s thought on the question of power and its relationship to the subject. It presents a reading of Foucault as a post-Marxist who modified, rejuvenated, and extended Marx’s views on power and subjectivation. While Foucault developed his understanding of subjectivation as a critical response to the problems he identified in the French Marxist accounts of his time—particularly in the work of Louis Althusser—his appropriation of Marx should be recognized as decisive for the development of his account of productive power and the concomitant understanding of the subject. (shrink)

Dans cet article l’auteur a souhaité étudier le travail de subjectivation des liens familiaux chez un auteur de violence sexuelle dans le cadre du dispositif pénal qu’est l’injonction de soins. À partir d’une recherche clinique menée sur un mode longitudinal, il propose de montrer comment le génogramme (en test, re-test) peut être un révélateur de la mise en œuvre du processus de subjectivation. Ce procédé permet de relever deux différences notables entre les deux génogrammes : dans le passage (...) d’une place fantasmatique dans les liens (celle d’un « enfant ») à celle d’une position instituée concomitante avec une affiliation intersubjective ; la présence ou l’absence de nom sur les icônes parentales. Des différences favorisées, selon nous, par le dispositif d’injonction de soins. (shrink)

La clinique des femmes en situation précaire nous confronte aux effets abrupts de la forclusion de l’être sexué femme et à ses conséquences, les difficultés de subjectivation. Cette forclusion repose sur l’impensé d’une réalité : il y a deux sexes. Cela se traduit depuis des lustres par un contrôle de la potentialité créatrice qu’est la maternité au sein du matrimonial, qui mène les femmes vers des impasses quant à leur autonomie psychique en tant que sujets femmes. S’affranchir de cette (...) condition consiste à reconnaître cette part de leur être non symbolisé que représente le matriciel. (shrink)

Engaging with the account of pathic subjectivation developed by Félix Guattari, this article explores the ways in which his thinking about the production of subjectivity takes up and transforms the concept of the pathic dimension of experience that emerges from the rich tradition of existential-phenomenological psychiatry and the thematisation of contact it entails. Explicitly foregrounding the link made within that tradition between aesthetics and existence, this article considers the origins of Guattari’s conception of pathic subjectivation in his work (...) on Proust, the experimental understanding of the semiotic transformations of sensory experience it entails and the practical role it plays in catalysing the creative emergence of new modes of existence. (shrink)

When posing the political as first, we imply an order. Such civilisational choice distinguishes the political and installs the subject within a sovereignist hierarchy. It forbids the political to those who are constructed as "others" in time, in space or in culture etc. The production of knowledges and (cognitive) inequality are constructed together. Translation is a politics and a technique of resolving that inequality (though it can produce some too). We attribute "ourselves" the political and concede the "pre-political" or the (...) "non-political" to others. Translation, together with some other instruments should allow to target cognitive justice necessary to a future epistemological revolution. It has its politics. The author's idea is, then, to start from intersecting etymologies as well as from the "untranslatables" which, thanks to the context, never make the whole "un-expressible". She gives some examples from "Asian" and "European" philosophies. The difference between the latter is striking when it comes to the fact that "European" philosophies value the subject/agency, while the "Asian" ones do not value it and do not even construct it. (shrink)

As early as the ninth century, Muslim astronomers started refining the Ptolemaic astronomy which, by this time, had been fully adopted as the framework of their research. Already, in the early part of this century, refinements were based on improved observational techniques, and included a variety of phenomena such as the length of the seasons, the solar equation, mean motion parameters, and many others.

This article focuses on tracing and extending Michel Foucault’s contributions to the philosophy of technology. At first sight his work on power seems the most relevant. In his later work on subjectivation and ethics technology is absent. However, notably by recombining Foucault’s work on power with his work on subjectivation, does his work contribute to solving pertinent problems in current approaches to the ethics of technology. First, Foucault’s position is compared to critical theory and Heidegger, and associated with (...) the approach of “technical mediation” (Latour, Ihde, Verbeek). Next, a detailed study of Discipline and Punish , results in the identification of two distinct “figures of technical mediation”. Finally, Foucault’s later work on ethics and subjectivation is employed to elaborate an ethics of technology that focuses on care for the quality of the interactions and fusions with technology. Hybridization is central in the approach: it is not to be rejected, neither is it the greatest danger, but it does deserve the greatest care. (shrink)

This book explores, discusses, and assesses the actual and potential sense of subjectivation in a variety of contexts. In particular, it reflects the genealogies, connections, variations, and practical implications of various theories of subjectivity and subjection while providing an up-to-date and authoritative account of how to engage with the 'subject'. Rather than addressing the 'subject' merely in theoretical terms, this book explores subjectivation as a seminal expression of subjective practices in the plural. To the extent that subjectivity and (...) subjection are key terms in a plurality of discourses and for a number of disciplines, Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices advances a trans-disciplinary reading by taking into account relevant debates that stretch from poststructuralism via postfordism to postdemocracy. In this sense, the book introduces readers to current approaches to subjectivation by displacing conventional understandings and suggesting unexpected reformulations. (shrink)

Starting from a Foucaultian perspective, the article draws attention to current developments that neutralise democracy through the ‘governmentalisation of democracy’ and processes of ‘governmental subjectivation’. Here, ideas of Rancière are introduced in order to clarify how democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of ‘political subjectivation’, that is, a disengagement with governmental subjectivation through the verification of one's equality in demonstrating a wrong. We will argue that democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of political subjectivation, (...) and that today's consensus society tends to depoliticize all processes of subjectivation. A final step in the argumentation is to introduce the concept of ‘pedagogic subjectivation’—to be understood as the experience of potentiality—that is to be distinguished from governmental subjectivation and also from political subjectivation. The concept ‘pedagogic subjectivation’ is proposed as a way of thinking of the school as a public place. (shrink)

Critique and subjectivation. Foucault and Butler on the subject In her paper “What is Critique ? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, Judith Butler reads Foucault’s “What is Critique ?” According to Foucault, critique is a practice of desubjugation of the subject, which would provide for it a certain form of autonomy. But what kind of autonomy is really possible for the subject, when Foucault rejects the notion of the sovereign subject ? Butler’s reading wants to solve that difficulty in (...) Foucault’s position with the notions of virtue and of speech acts. But Foucault tends more to consider the courage of the truth as a critical mode of philosophical intervention in politics, and he thinks of it as a virtue or as an êthos. Butler’s conception of the subject refuses the whole notion of an originary freedom and she prefers to think an agency which would take place in the context of the subjectivation itself, where being produced as a subject is originally being subjected to different modes of interpellation by the norms. In reading Althusser’s conception of ideology with Foucault’s desubjugation, she considers the critique as the critique of norms of recognition and the subject as vulnerable. (shrink)

Summary Among the whole burden of the written sources dealing with the urban appearance of Ptolemaic and Roman Alexandria, five or six ancient authors give us precious information which could finally offer a lead to the reconstruction of the monumental center of Alexandria: 1) Strabo, 2) Diodorus, 3) Zenobius, 4) Achilles Tatius, 5) Pseudo-Libanius and 6) Pseudo-Callisthenes. Nowadays, the written testimonia concerning the historical topography of Alexandria are severely withstanding to a hypercritical treatment, to a disapproval instead of a (...) reappraisal.Tkazcow 2013, 687: The reconstruction of the topography of the city in the Ptolemaic and Early Roman Periods was, for a long time, based exclusively on Strabo's description ; the critic is moved against Adriani 1966 and Fraser 1972, 13–34; McKenzie 2007. Yet, there is no other way to solve the puzzle of the monumental center of Ptolemaic Alexandria, but to explain the thinking behind what the ancient authors, principally Strabo, may have seen in Alexandria as eyewitnesses. (shrink)

Michel Tournier had a Sartrean youth. But his radicalization of existentialism pushed him to return to a Cartesian cogito. He thus compromised the transparency of our relation to things that phenomenology intended to guarantee. In this respect, the consciousness without thickness put forward by his friend Gilles Deleuze seems more satisfactory. However, the latter was particularly interested in the movements of subjectivation, belatedly following the path that Tournier had opened before him.

Nietzsche est souvent perçu comme un philosophe de la critique du " moi ", qui entreprend d'évacuer le sujet souverain pour en faire un simple effet des rapports entre les volontés de puissance. L'ambition de ce livre est de montrer qu'une telle vision est incomplète. Il y a dans l'œuvre de Nietzsche, et particulièrement dans son dernier livre, Ecce Homo, une forte pensée de l'individu et du rapport à soi qui, loin d'éliminer le problème de la subjectivité, le pose à (...) nouveaux frais. Ce livre procède en deux temps. Tout d'abord, il revient sur l'ensemble du corpus nietzschéen afin de distinguer les différentes critiques que Nietzsche adresse aux notions de " moi ", d'individu, de sujet, et fait apparaître les perspectives ainsi ouvertes. Il s'intéresse ensuite plus particulièrement à Ecce Homo. En convoquant les pensées d'auteurs comme Foucault, Deleuze ou Simondon, il interprète ce dernier ouvrage comme l'effectuation d'un mode de subjectivation inédit : une nouvelle manière de se rapporter à soi et d'en faire le récit. Il tente alors d'analyser ce " moi " spécifiquement nietzschéen, et d'en repérer tant le mode d'apparition que le régime d'action et d'existence. (shrink)

Western culture has assigned an essential role to productive activity in defining our lives. In Locke’s and Hegel’s thought, we see the model that became dominant in modern political philosophy: that of conceiving the subject as a result of, and only possible within, the triad of work–property–subject. Nowadays, this has reached the level of shaping the meaning of living, and our entire existences seem to be subjected to a concept of lives-as-work. Combining anthropology and philosophy, this article seeks to rethink (...) subjectivation beyond the process of work and appropriation, delving into worldviews different from those of the West. Specifically, we will focus on the Yanomami form of life, a non-stratified indigenous people living in the Brazilian Amazon. We will analyze how the Yanomami prevent the process of subjectification by the objectification of one’s own work through a sort of anti-work and anti-property apparatus. This is achieved through specific techniques of underproduction, which constitute another approach to work, as well as through a completely different way of conceiving subjectivity. Furthermore, the Yanomami’s view of all entities as subjects endowed with intentionality appears as de-ontologizing the subject position and deactivating the dyads of subject/object and own/common. The result is a worldview where, with everyone being subjects—humans and non-humans, living and dead, entities and things of nature—no one can be dominus of anyone. (shrink)

Tibetan Buddhism, the Gelug school specifically, promotes a deep skepticism about the ability to know others’ minds. Its scripture is rife with cautionary tales allegorizing and extolling this skepticism in adherents, while claiming a buddha, by contrast, has eradicated this skepticism with their omniscience. I describe a buddha’s purported privileged epistemic access to others’ minds as “double-hiddenness.” On this skepticism, not just what a buddha knows, but if they know it is hidden, making their authority irreputable. I use critical theory (...) to investigate the ramifications of this double hiddenness, demonstrating that the resultant subjectivization brought about by this extreme skepticism—although the product of power—is not merely a type of subjugation, as suggested by Foucault, but also constitutes a robust agency. (shrink)

The word parousia was used in Ptolemaic Egypt as a technical term for royal visits. In the present paper the word is studied in connection with visits of high-ranking officials. First, an identification of the officials is proposed. Then, the logistic preparations related to the visits and the burdens they constituted for the inhabitants of the Egyptian chora are treated. Finally, the possible extortions and abuses resulting from the journeys of the officials are discussed. I conclude that not only (...) the terminology and the practical organisation of the visits of the monarchs and important officials were similar, but that the underlying purposes of their appearances in the chora also derived from the same monarchic ideology. (shrink)

With Foucault on subjectivation, seduction, and technology What does Confessions of the Flesh add to Foucault’s approach of subjectivation and its application for the ethics of technology? In his late work Foucault focusses on subjectivation following a fourfold framework, without explaining its development. There are good reasons to believe it relates to Aristotle’s four causes and also refers to Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. Foucault’s analysis of early Christian practices of the conduct of souls and of controlling evil (...) seductions is surprisingly relevant with regard to how today’s digital technologies infringe on thinking and willing. Employing the fourfold scheme to apply insights from Confessions of the Flesh to ethics and technology leads to an approach of ethical subjectivation and technology in which: [1] problematization of seduction and technology [2] prompts good use of technology [3] by technologies of the self [4] realizing a practice of freedom. (shrink)

The work of the Latvian phenomenologist Theodor Celms provides an interesting attempt to reinterpret Husserl’s phenomenological reduction in terms of Natorp’s subjectivation. This paper summarizes in broad outline some salient features of Celms’ theory of subjectivation and discusses some of its similarities and differences with Husserl’s and Natorp’s views. I focus on two more central points. First, Celms proposes to interpret Husserlian reduction as radicalizing or generalizing an operation of thought that is pervasive throughout all forms of cognition. (...) Secondly, he makes a distinction between epistemological and ontological subjectivation that leads him to adopt a critical stance toward both Husserl’s transcendental idealism and Natorp’s general psychology. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series (...) of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception. (shrink)

Ptolemaic Tradition and Islamic Innovation: The Astronomical Tables of Kūshyār ibn Labbān. By Benno Van Dalen. Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus, Texts, vol. 2. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2021. Pp. xviii + 595, 16 color pls. €120; https://ptolemaeus.badw.de/publications.

Neither Habermas nor his communitarian and poststructuralist critics sufficiently explore the non-linguistic, playful, and performative dimensions of contemporary public spheres. I argue that the approaches of Castoriadis and Touraine can inform a theoretical understanding of the history and current resonance of this public sphere of performance. Their concepts of the social imaginary, the autonomous society, and subjectivation highlight the role of fantasy, images, individualism, and other non-rational factors in late modern public life.

Une critique de la métaphysique du sujet, prise entre une théorisation substantialiste de l'individu ou au contraire une approche dynamique de la subjectivité. ©Electre 2017.

This is a general reading of Callimachus' work within the socio-political context of Ptolemaic Alexandria. "Alibis" refers to the constitutionally expatriate nature of the populace and culture established there, which in Callimachus gives rise to a poetics based on the principles of displacement and convergence. Close analysis of a wide variety of passages, drawn principally from the epigrams, Aetia, and Hymns, demonstrates how the "order of the alibi" informs all major aspects of the poet's work, from the lexical make-up (...) of his texts to their larger narrative and thematic structure. Certain poems in the corpus, such as the Lock of Berenice and the Hymn to Apollo, not only require detailed knowledge of Greek literature, history, and religious institutions, but also draw extensively on Egyptian mythography and cultural models, which do not so much replace the Hellenic matter as-characteristically-cohabit with it. In this respect, Callimachus served both as a key architect of the new, multi-ethnic culture that the Ptolemies institutionalized in Egypt and as its most penetrating critic. (shrink)

Alors même que les Grecs, dans l’Égypte des Ptolémées (323-330 av. nè), se trouvaient globalement dans une situation de « minorité dominante », il est généralement admis que la condition des femmes grecques était inférieure à celle des femmes égyptiennes en raison de l’obligation qui leur était faite d’être assistées en certaines matières par un représentant légal, leur kurios. Dans la pratique néanmoins, le kurios n’est pas nécessairement le signe d’une incapacité juridique de la Grecque d’Égypte. Avoir un kurios pouvait (...) même être le moyen d’afficher une appartenance à l’élite de la société ptolémaïque. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criticism, Imagination, and the Subjectivization of AestheticsRoger W. H. SavageThe growing discontent with reductivist practices signals a new current in contemporary criticism's understanding of music, literature and art. George Levine's unease with critics who are unable or unwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with literary texts they expose as "imperialist, sexist, homophobic and racist" illumines the contradiction fueling the reduction of aesthetics to ideology.1 Cultural studies that deploy (...) literature as evidence of the aesthetics' socio-historical substance mask literature's capacity to break open new perspectives on reality by assuming that literary works are politically complicit with the aesthetics' strategic "mystification of the status quo" (A&I, p. 3). Criticism's indifference to its philosophical presuppositions exacerbates the paradox of denouncing a body of works that constitute criticism's aesthetic and intellectual heritage. According to Mario Valdés, literary studies' coming of age mandates that criticism take account of a tradition nurtured by a succession of philosophers including Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.2 For Valdés, the post-structuralist realization that literary texts are indeterminate and inexhaustible prohibits replacing the work of art with critical commentaries on it; criticism's collective and determining role belongs to a shared community of commentary whose history and thought is a record of the changing interpretations and understandings of literary texts' meanings. [End Page 164]Valdés's claim extends to the field of contemporary music criticism, where the fashion of denouncing aesthetics as socially pernicious turns against traditional musicology's institutional authority. By demystifying absolute music (instrumental music devoid of programmatic associations), a self-proclaimed critical musicology revolts against traditional musicology's perceived political and ideological agenda. Critical musicology militates against the aesthetic conceit that absolute music transcends its social construction. Yet, by overlooking the philosophical presuppositions that set music's autonomy against practical affairs, new musicology accedes to the schema it recoils against.The tradition nurtured by Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology represents a critical current whose significance has been overshadowed by postmodernist investments in decoding music's social and political content. Gadamer's critique of the subjectivization of aesthetics and Ricoeur's meditations on the imagination's capacity for invention offer an alternativeto contemporary music criticism's reaction against the principle of music's aesthetic autonomy. Gadamer and Ricoeur question art's formal separation from reality, which belongs to the history of Kant's radical subjectivization of aesthetics. Gadamer's critique of art's aesthetic differentiation prepares the ground for revealing how socially informed analyses conform to the schema Kant initiates by divorcing judgments of taste from their surrounding cultural ethos. Gadamer argues that, by discrediting theoretical knowledge that does not rely on the methodology of the natural sciences, the transcendental function Kant ascribes to aesthetic judgment lays the foundation for differentiating between art's aesthetic constitution and a concept of truth that accommodates the standard of the natural sciences. Through reducing the "sensus communis to a subjective principle," Kant legitimates his critique of aesthetic judgments by denying taste any importanceas a mode of knowledge.3Ricoeur's hermeneutical reflections on imagination complement Gadamer's critique of a differentiating consciousness that abstracts art works from their cultural worlds. For Ricoeur, imagination is productive when the fictions that works create affect our understanding of ourselves and our world by re-describing reality. Aesthetics' alignment with ideology encounters a limit in the power works evince by unfolding different ways of seeing or hearing reality. Ricoeur's reflections on imagination stand in stark contrast to the idea that individual works represent a form of cultural capital in the struggle for social position [End Page 165] and power. Contemporary critical practices' failure to account for the philosophical separation of judgments of taste from knowledge of reality precipitates the impasse criticism encounters when it identifies aesthetics with ideology at the expense of a work's capacity to affect reality in productive ways. The dispersal and potential disappearance of music's aesthetic character into the recesses of cultural and political analysis keeps step with the conceptual narrowing imposed by a restrictive sociological critique. Demystifying music's ideological representations of gender, race and identity purges romantic... (shrink)