Small things loom large as a distinct category in social and cultural analysis. However, the social construction and effects of this idiom of scale commonly remain vague and underexplored. Bringing the literature on quantification in conversation with the literature on scale-making, this article offers a theoretically-informed analysis of how smallness consolidates as a publicly salient social attribute, and how it feeds collective narratives. The empirical focus is on American Jewry – an ethnoreligious minority group whose leaders and experts have invested (...) in its quantification, including its representation as a small population. Drawing on a variety of texts and images, as well as on interviews and fieldwork, I show that American Jewish research bodies and public figures engage in a myriad of comparative arithmetic exercises and spectacles of scale to assert the smallness of the population. Deploying smallness as a generative narrative tool allows them to engage with the ambivalences implicated in the American-Jewish post-Holocaust, minority, and diasporic experience. In particular, exercises around notions of numerical negligibility, disproportional success, and numerical inferiority elicit protean narratives around endangerment, power, and a questioned diasporic future. The broader theoretical intervention of this article is to offer scalemaking as a valuable prism for understanding the narrative potency and poignancy of arithmetically-based constructs such as smallness. Instead of emphasizing the assumed epistemological strengths of numbers, this article considers the narrative work that statistics do when they lend themselves to multimodal scaling. It argues that through scaling, statistics are infused with perspective, relevance and meaning, descriptively and prescriptively. (shrink)

Les Lais de Marie de France présentent un jeu subtil entre l’impossibilité de décrire l’acte charnel et l’utilisation d’un langage travaillé qui y fait allusion suivant les codes de la courtoisie. S’allonger l’un près de l’autre dans un lit, rire, jouer et parler, le pinceau de Marie de France n’ira pas plus loin. Mais l’intensité du désir sexuel sera dénotée par d’autres éléments symboliques appartenant au monde naturel (arbres, plantes, oiseaux). Les amants, captifs d’amours interdites et abandonnés à leurs plaisirs (...) sensuels, risquent parfois la mort mais, dans une dialectique entre l’amour et la mort, leurs lits funéraires, posés l’un à côté de l’autre, rétablissent mythiquement l’amour par la promesse d’une fusion éternelle. (shrink)

Wilhem von Humboldt -- Karl Jaspers -- Odo Marquand -- Karl Mannheim -- Lucien Goldmann -- Terry Eagleton.

Marxistická filozofie ve dvacátých a třicátých letech překonala tradiční českou nechuť k abstraktnímu myšlení. Ačkoliv úzce souvisí se založením KSČ, přece se do značné míry vyvíjela samostatně. Monografie se hlavně soustřeďuje na vztah teorie a praxe. Zpočátku charakterizuje světovou buržoazní filozofii, propadající stále více iracionalismu a nakonec fašizující. Poté sleduje leninskou etapu marxistické filozofie a shrnuje její přínos. Posléze probírá ustavováni marxisticko-leninské filozofie v ČSR, její buržoazní a reformistické protějšky, její vývoj a boj za jednotu teorie a praxe.