This article examines Deleuze & Guattari’s reworking of the Marxian category of surplus-value in Anti-Oedipus, expanding it beyond capitalism. The authors distinguish four types: surplus-value of code, specific to pre-capitalist societies (primitive and despotic), where an extra-economic instance (moral, religious, political) dominates the coding of flows and the extraction of surplus is discernible, as in tribute or corvée; the human, from the capital–labor contradiction; the machinic, from advanced capitalism with technoscience; and surplus-value of flow, which is (...) intrinsically capitalist and encompasses both the human and the machinic. A fifth type, financial surplus-value, is mentioned in seminars. Surplus-value of flow is properly capitalist, operating under generalized decoding, where the economic instance is determining and dominant. It is characterized by differential relations between flows of distinct potencies, such as financing and means of payment, capital and labor (human surplus-value), and market and technoscientific innovation (machinic surplus-value). Financial surplus-value functions in the integration of human and machinic surplus-values into surplus-value of flow. Machinic surplus-value underscores the centrality of knowledge and technoscience, where human labor becomes “machinic” and adjacent to productive processes. The immeasurable nature and non-localizable command are essential features of surplus-value of flow, which manifests as an impersonal economic force. (shrink)

We study a long-recognised but under-appreciated symmetry called dynamical similarity and illustrate its relevance to many important conceptual problems in fundamental physics. Dynamical similarities are general transformations of a system where the unit of Hamilton’s principal function is rescaled, and therefore represent a kind of dynamical scaling symmetry with formal properties that differ from many standard symmetries. To study this symmetry, we develop a general framework for symmetries that distinguishes the observable and surplus structures of a theory by (...) using the minimal freely specifiable initial data for the theory that is necessary to achieve empirical adequacy. This framework is then applied to well-studied examples including Galilean invariance and the symmetries of the Kepler problem. We find that our framework gives a precise dynamical criterion for identifying the observables of those systems, and that those observables agree with epistemic expectations. We then apply our framework to dynamical similarity. First we give a general definition of dynamical similarity. Then we show, with the help of some previous results, how the dynamics of our observables leads to singularity resolution and the emergence of an arrow of time in cosmology. (shrink)

This second chapter of The Heretic's Survival Guide provides the materialist backbone for the critique of institutional power, analyzing the mechanics of how the first states were constructed. It introduces the concept of "grain empires" to describe the archaic civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, arguing that their power was predicated on a specific agricultural technology: the cultivation of storable cereal grains like wheat, barley, and millet. This analysis details how foundational technologies like writing (cuneiform) and codified law (the Code (...) of Ur-Nammu) functioned primarily as instruments of state control, making populations and their agricultural yields "legible" for systematic taxation and administration. The state, therefore, is presented not as a cultural achievement but as a coercive apparatus designed for resource extraction. -/- The analysis then pivots to present a crucial counter-narrative, challenging the inevitability of the state by examining alternative modes of social organization. It first explores the pre-ceramic, maritime-textile economy of the Norte Chico civilization as a model of complexity without grain-based coercion. The chapter then focuses on the primary geopolitical rival to the sedentary state: the nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe. The domestication of the horse, coupled with the invention of the lightweight, spoked-wheel chariot, is framed as a technological revolution that created a new form of mobile military power. This advantage fueled the Indo-European migrations, which reconfigured the cultural and political landscape of Eurasia, establishing a dynamic and often violent symbiosis between the sedentary "grain cage" and the mobile peoples of its periphery. This reframes the "state vs. barbarian" dichotomy not as a struggle between civilization and savagery, but as a contest between two sophisticated and competing survival strategies: one based on sedentary appropriation, the other on mobile power. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34988.94083. (shrink)

The article argues that Honneth’s idea of reconstructive critique represents a type of immanent critique. Starting from the objection raised by Rahel Jaeggi, who considers the reconstructive critique to be a genre of internal criticism devoid of any transformative negativity, it seeks to show, on the contrary, that Honneth’s notion of “surplus of validity” plays a role of transcendence within the historical reality, which could explain his understanding of reconstructive critique as immanent one. In the second part, the paper (...) displays how Honneth applies this conception of critique to solve the division within Critical Theory, induced by Habermas’s use of the idea of rational reconstruction, which would have split off the tasks of founding the normative criteria and discovering immanently elements for the social transformation. In the third part, the category of surplus of validity is investigated in its function of enlightening possibilities of transformation following an “universal-particular dialectic”. In its final part, the paper addresses some conceptual difficulties in Honneth’s attempt to clarify the systematic value and philosophical meaning of the surplus of validity within the framework of normative reconstruction. (shrink)

The surplus of impulses is a key category in Gehlen’s anthropobiology to understand the process of hominisation and humanisation. From the dedifferentiation of human instincts and the primitivisation of man’s anatomy, to the role of experience, institutions, and speech, the surplus of impulses is a source that flows between the inner and the outer, by feeding the action circle that whether translates in activity or is redirected inwards in order to become a movement of volitional constitution. The ambivalence (...) in which Gehlen deals with this function of freedom gives rise to a pessimistic and sacrificial idea of man. However, he posits certain basic elements of a hedonistic theory of speech from which we can better understand the stabilizing task of language as cornerstone of institutions. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in the philosophy of physics that any local physical theory can be represented using arbitrary coordinates, simply by using tensor calculus. On the other hand, the physics literature often claims that spinors \emph{as such} cannot be represented in coordinates in a curved space-time. These commonplaces are inconsistent. What general covariance means for theories with fermions, such as electrons, is thus unclear. In fact both commonplaces are wrong. Though it is not widely known, Ogievetsky and Polubarinov constructed (...) spinors in coordinates in 1965, enhancing the unity of physics and helping to spawn particle physicists' concept of nonlinear group representations. Roughly and locally, these spinors resemble the orthonormal basis or "tetrad" formalism in the symmetric gauge, but they are conceptually self-sufficient and more economical. The typical tetrad formalism is de-Ockhamized, with six extra field components and six compensating gauge symmetries to cancel them out. The Ogievetsky-Polubarinov formalism, by contrast, is Ockhamized, with most of the fluff removed. As developed nonperturbatively by Bilyalov, it admits any coordinates at a point, but "time" must be listed first. Here "time" is defined in terms of an eigenvalue problem involving the metric components and the matrix $diag$, the product of which must have no negative eigenvalues in order to yield a real symmetric square root that is a function of the metric. Thus even formal general covariance requires reconsideration; the atlas of admissible coordinate charts should be sensitive to the types and \emph{values} of the fields involved. Apart from coordinate order and the usual spinorial two-valuedness, Ogievetsky-Polubarinov spinors form, with the metric, a nonlinear geometric object, for which important results on Lie and covariant differentiation are recalled. Such spinors avoid a spurious absolute object in the Anderson-Friedman analysis of substantive general covariance. They also permit the gauge-invariant localization of the infinite-component gravitational energy in General Relativity. Density-weighted spinors exploit the conformal invariance of the massless Dirac equation to show that the volume element is absent. Thus instead of an arbitrary nonsingular matrix with 16 components, 6 of which are gauged away by a new local $O$ gauge group and one of which is irrelevant due to conformal covariance, one can, and presumably should, use density-weighted Ogievetsky-Polubarinov spinors coupled to the 9-component symmetric square root of the part of the metric that fixes null cones. Thus $\frac{7}{16}$ of the orthonormal basis is eliminated as surplus structure. Greater unity between spinors and tensors and the like is achieved, such as regarding conservation laws. Regarding the conventionality of simultaneity, an unusually wide range of $\epsilon$ values is admissible, but some extreme values are inadmissible. Standard simultaneity uniquely makes the spinor transformation law linear and independent of the metric, because transformations among the standard Cartesian coordinate systems fall within the conformal group, for which the spinor transformation law is linear. The surprising mildness of the restrictions on coordinate order as applied to the Schwarzschild solution is exhibited. (shrink)

In the seminar XVI, D'un Autre à l'autre, in 1968/1969, Jacques Lacan claimed that there is an homology between the function of object a in the unconscious and the Marxian notion of surplus-value. Both concepts in fact revolve around similar axes: their reluctance to be localized in a certain place of the structure and their connection with the notion of surplus. In Chapter 7 of Das Kapital, Marx seems to imagine a purely mythical pre-capitalist society where production (...) is only devoted the pure satisfaction of basic survival needs and where labour is still controlled by the worker according to a certain purpose: with the irruption of the surplus in the capitalist mode of production the very qualitative dimension of the production and reproduction of commodities and human beings is commanded and organized by the pure drive of abstract accumulation. In order to rearticulate the incessant capitalist drive for abstract wealth, the symptom relies on the unsurpassable contradiction between labour-power and living-labour: essential in order. (shrink)

This edited work is spurred by the 30-year anniversary of the groundbreaking work by Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986)—and the 40-year anniversary of the original lectures (1975). Ricoeur took these concepts that continue to be enormously important in social and political analysis and connected them in a uniquely intricate dance. The ensuing interplay of these concepts provides a framework for a more deft and subtle evaluation than is common. Little has been done to engage Ricoeur’s skill in (...) interpreting ideology and utopia or their creative tension, perhaps due to his significant contributions in other areas. When one combines Ricoeur’s intricate analyses of ideology and utopia, however, with his contributions in other areas of philosophy such as hermeneutics, anthropology, embodiment, and philosophy of religion, one has fertile grounds for reflection in many directions. The essays in this book draw on these resources not only to engage the strengths and weaknesses of Ricoeur’s original work, but they also expand his understanding in creative new directions such as the social imaginary, embodiment, gender theory, immigration, and extremist political rhetoric. The text will bring to the fore how this aspect of Ricoeur’s work has significance for the wider twenty-first century political landscape. Just as his original work, this book provides much-needed resources for critique of each term, along with their relationship to one another, while recognizing the positive dimension of their function. (shrink)

Need the moral be repeated? There exist two distinct circuits, each with its own final market. The equilibrium of the economic process is conditioned by the balance of the two circuits: each must be allowed the possibility of continuity, of basic outlay yielding an equal basic income and surplus outlay yieldingan equal surplus income, of basic and surplus income yielding equal basic and surplus expenditure, and of these grounding equivalent basic and surplus outlay. But what (...) cannot be tolerated, much less sustained, is for one circuit to be drained by the other. That is the essence of dynamic disequilibrium. (shrink)

In this paper, first the term 'prioritarianism' is defined, with some mathematical precision, on the basis of intuitive conceptions of prioritarianism, especially the idea that "benefiting people matters more the worse off these people are". (The prioritarian weighting function is monotonously ascending and concave, while its first derivation is smoothly descending and convex but positive throughout.) Furthermore, (moderate welfare) egalitarianism is characterized. In particular a new symmetry condition is defended, i.e. that egalitarianism evaluates upper and lower deviations from the (...) social middle symmetrically and equally negatively (as do e.g. variance and Gini). Finally, it is shown that this feature distinguishes egalitarianism also extensionally from prioritarianism. (shrink)

This essay develops a structural account of continuity under the finite conditions of life without recourse to transcyclic identity. Departing from the traditional coupling of continuity and sameness, it proposes a model in which continuity emerges through iterative transformation rather than through the persistence of a subject, substance, or soul. The framework is articulated through four orientations—RO, RQ, SO, and SQ—reinterpreting Harman’s ontological fourfold as functional moments within an iterative process. Central to the model is the concept of a structural (...) surplus that prevents cyclical closure and gives rise to an irreversible spiral. This surplus consists of the accumulation of structural differentiation and the modulation of the semantic field during phases of phenomenal stabilization. While phenomenal contents—memory, meaning, and biographical coherence—are genuinely stored in SQ, they are strictly local and dissolve with the end of that stabilization. What carries over is not content or identity, but a transformed structural condition. Within this framework, death appears not as a transition or passage, but as a necessary structural cut that separates incompatible regimes of storage. Human existence is understood as a local and temporally bounded stabilization within the spiral—neither its carrier nor its goal. Against doctrines of reincarnation and Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return of the same, the model articulates a form of continuity without recurrence. The essay concludes by proposing iteration without return as a post-nihilistic configuration of meaning: an affirmative account of finitude in which singularity, not repetition, is the condition of significance. (shrink)

This is an essay based on a story with observations, about present and sparkling moments from everyday life coexisting with a mother living with dementia. The story is used to begin philosophical underpinnings reflecting on ‘how it could be otherwise’. Dementia deploys brutal existential experiences such as cognitive deterioration, decline in mental functioning and often hurtful social judgements. The person living with dementia goes through transformation and changes of self. Cognitive decline progressively disrupts the foundations upon which social connectedness is (...) built, often creating a profound sense of insecurity. The challenge for carers and healthcare professionals is therefore to find ways of clarifying a concept of agency. It will be worthwhile developing the ability of attuning into ‘what is there’ arising from every corner of the care situation. Understanding and practicing this can strengthen existence and the experience of connectedness and meaning, empowering the person with dementia. It is important to find ways, relational moves, in which carers and healthcare professionals can embed the creativity appearing in mundane everyday situations filled with surplus of meaning, sharing mental landscapes (and embodied relational understanding) with the person living with dementia – seizing and sharing aesthetic moments (verbal and nonverbal) being present together. We argue that carers and healthcare professionals may find this understanding of care useful. This implies looking into a phenomenological‐hermeneutic perspective developing competences as well as practical wisdom understanding and being aware of the creative and innovative possibilities (often preverbal and unnoticed small things) in everyday life of what we, inspired by psychoanalyst Daniel Stern, call sparkling moments of meeting, creating experience with the other that is personally undergone and lived through in the present. (shrink)

This is an essay based on a story with observations, about present and sparkling moments from everyday life coexisting with a mother living with dementia. The story is used to begin philosophical underpinnings reflecting on ‘how it could be otherwise’. Dementia deploys brutal existential experiences such as cognitive deterioration, decline in mental functioning and often hurtful social judgements. The person living with dementia goes through transformation and changes of self. Cognitive decline progressively disrupts the foundations upon which social connectedness is (...) built, often creating a profound sense of insecurity. The challenge for carers and healthcare professionals is therefore to find ways of clarifying a concept of agency. It will be worthwhile developing the ability of attuning into ‘what is there’ arising from every corner of the care situation. Understanding and practicing this can strengthen existence and the experience of connectedness and meaning, empowering the person with dementia. It is important to find ways, relational moves, in which carers and healthcare professionals can embed the creativity appearing in mundane everyday situations filled with surplus of meaning, sharing mental landscapes (and embodied relational understanding) with the person living with dementia – seizing and sharing aesthetic moments (verbal and nonverbal) being present together. We argue that carers and healthcare professionals may find this understanding of care useful. This implies looking into a phenomenological‐hermeneutic perspective developing competences as well as practical wisdom understanding and being aware of the creative and innovative possibilities (often preverbal and unnoticed small things) in everyday life of what we, inspired by psychoanalyst Daniel Stern, call sparkling moments of meeting, creating experience with the other that is personally undergone and lived through in the present. (shrink)

This paper recovers an important, century-old debate regarding the methodological and metaphysical foundations of dimensional analysis. Consideration of Richard Tolman's failed attempt to install the principle of similitude---the relativity of size---as the founding principle of dimensional analysis both clarifies the method of dimensional analysis and articulates two metaphysical positions regarding quantity dimensions. Tolman's position is quantity dimension fundamentalism. This is a commitment to dimensional realism and a set of fundamental dimensions which ground all further dimensions. The opposing position, developed primarily (...) by Bridgman, is quantity dimension conventionalism. Conventionalism is an anti-realism regarding dimensional structure, holding our non-representational dimensional systems have basic quantity dimensions fixed only by convention. This metaphysical dispute was left somewhat unsettled. It is shown here that both of these positions face serious problems: fundamentalists are committed to surplus dimensional structure; conventionalists cannot account for empirical constraints on our dimensional systems nor the empirical success of dimensional analysis. It is shown that an alternative position is available which saves what is right in both: quantity dimension functionalism. (shrink)

In this chapter we consider whether, in applying mathematics in the ways described in previous chapters, there are grounds for taking the relevant mathematical entities to be _indispensable_. Our example here is Dirac’s introduction of the delta function into quantum mechanics and we point out, firstly, that Dirac himself was very clear about the function’s dispensability and, secondly, even if certain mathematical _theories_ were indispensable, this wouldn’t justify a commitment to the existence of the associated _entities_. To illustrate (...) this second point we use a further example, that of Dirac’s prediction of the existence of antimatter via the exploitation of surplus mathematical structure. We maintain here that commitment to the existence of the objects under consideration requires the satisfaction of certain criteria of existence and it is unclear whether mathematical entities meet these criteria. (shrink)

This essay develops a structural theory of modern violence that reconceives war as an endogenous phenomenon of differentiated social orders. It argues that every order generates internal tensions and depends on culturally framed mechanisms of reversible dissolution. Where such mechanisms are delegitimized, tensions accumulate and reappear in the irreversible form of war. Drawing on historical examples, the essay distinguishes between regenerative and destructive modes of de-differentiation and examines the loss of masculinity’s former role in organizing risk, transition, and affective (...) class='Hi'>surplus. In the absence of viable substitutes, war functions as a substitute institution that weaponizes unbound intensity. Peace, therefore, is not a stable end state, but a cultural technique of controlled dissolution. (shrink)

The dollar‑centric financial order entrenches asymmetry, externalises ecological costs, and records defensive load as growth. This paper proposes a counter‑model: a Global Commonwealth built on four structural invariants — Visibility, Symmetry, Contestability, and Repair — extended to the planetary scale. At its core is a Neutral Clearing Union with a Bancor unit of account, whose exchange rates are determined not by speculation but by each nation's value efficiency (nF/TPE), measured through Durable Flourishing Indices (DFIs). Surpluses trigger automatic demurrage, reinvested into (...) repair. New Bancors are minted only when defensive load decreases, aligning currency creation with flourishing. The Five Articles of Perpetual Commonwealth articulate reciprocity, law, visibility, dialogue, and repair as functional prerequisites for trust among nations. For BRICS and the Global South, this architecture offers a cooperative alternative to IMF conditionality and neoliberal austerity: debt denominated in flourishing, not dollars. The paper outlines institutional prototypes — Moralogy Institute, Court of Repair, Neutral Clearing Union — and sketches pathways for pilot implementation within BRICS+ frameworks. -/- . (shrink)

The problem addressed in this paper is “the main epistemic problem concerning science”, viz. “the explication of how we compare and evaluate theories [...] in the light of the available evidence” (van Fraassen, BC, 1983, Theory comparison and relevant Evidence. In J. Earman (Ed.), Testing scientific theories (pp. 27–42). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Sections 1– 3 contain the general plausibility-informativeness theory of theory assessment. In a nutshell, the message is (1) that there are two values a theory should exhibit: (...) truth and informativeness—measured respectively by a truth indicator and a strength indicator; (2) that these two values are conflicting in the sense that the former is a decreasing and the latter an increasing function of the logical strength of the theory to be assessed; and (3) that in assessing a given theory by the available data one should weigh between these two conflicting aspects in such a way that any surplus in informativeness succeeds, if the shortfall in plausibility is small enough. Particular accounts of this general theory arise by inserting particular strength indicators and truth indicators. In Section 4 the theory is spelt out for the Bayesian paradigm of subjective probabilities. It is then compared to incremental Bayesian confirmation theory. Section 4 closes by asking whether it is likely to be lovely. Section 5 discusses a few problems of confirmation theory in the light of the present approach. In particular, it is briefly indicated how the present account gives rise to a new analysis of Hempel’s conditions of adequacy for any relation of confirmation (Hempel, CG, 1945, Studies in the logic of comfirmation. Mind, 54, 1–26, 97–121.), differing from the one Carnap gave in § 87 of his Logical foundations of probability (1962, Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Section 6 adresses the question of justification any theory of theory assessment has to face: why should one stick to theories given high assessment values rather than to any other theories? The answer given by the Bayesian version of the account presented in section 4 is that one should accept theories given high assessment values, because, in the medium run, theory assessment almost surely takes one to the most informative among all true theories when presented separating data. The concluding section 7 continues the comparison between the present account and incremental Bayesian confirmation theory. (shrink)

This essay explores Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy through the central discipline of attention as both a phenomenological and ethical practice. Murdoch challenges modern ethical theories that privilege will, choice, and rational decision-making by relocating morality in perception rather than action. At the heart of her thought lies the “fat relentless ego” — a powerful psychological survival mechanism that simplifies reality through self-serving fantasy in order to manage anxiety and protect the self. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method of epoché, Murdoch (...) transforms phenomenological reduction into a moral reduction: the suspension of egoistic interpretation itself. She develops attention, in dialogue with Simone Weil, as a form of “active passivity” — a disciplined waiting and high-energy intentionality that holds space for the surplus of reality. This gaze is neither passive relaxation nor forceful will, but a sustained effort to let the Other appear in its irreducible particularity. Murdoch grounds this practice in a Platonic vision of the Good as a non-consoling transcendent sun, connecting unselfing to Platonic eros, whereby beauty and excellence occasion the temporary silencing of the ego. She sharply distinguishes fantasy (the ego’s self-protective storytelling) from imagination (the creative power that enables just vision). The resistance of the object — whether a difficult grammar rule, a recalcitrant still-life, or the particularity of another person — serves as an external anchor that pulls consciousness out of solipsistic projection. The essay contrasts Murdoch’s austere ethics with the consoling narratives of historical progress in Hegel and psychic completion in Jung. It further examines how great art functions as a training ground for attention through the disciplined engagement with resistant form. Ultimately, Murdoch offers not a system of moral rules but an ethics of perception in which virtue emerges as the byproduct of clear, just, and loving attention. The very act of writing philosophy with thick, attentive concepts becomes a living instance of this moral discipline. (shrink)

This article explores how economic inequality in the United States has led to growing levels of poverty, food insecurity, and obesity for the bottom segments of the economy. It takes the position that access to nutritious food is a requirement for living and for participating fully in the workplace and society. Because of increasing economic inequality in the United States, growing segments of the U.S. economy have become more food insecure and obese, eating unhealthy food for survival and suffering an (...) erosion of “equality of capabilities” that undermines their ability to play a “full and active part in the functioning of community.” Unequal access to nutritious foods in the United States is attributable in part to an industrial food system that is designed to produce short-term profits for industrial food producers, processors, and distributors that extract surplus labor value through market concentration and opportunistic behavior at the expense of the long-term benefits for consumers, food workers, and ecosystems. Economic inequality, food insecurity, and the erosion of equality of capabilities in the United States have given rise to protest movements, social movements, social innovations, and some modest strengthening of regulations to make access to and consumption of healthy food a right for every person. Implications for business and society research are explored. (shrink)

Phenomenological accounts of illness have consistently presupposed a disease that declares itself - through symptoms, through somatic disruption, through the breakdown of bodily transparency that forces the body into awareness and reorganises existence around the fact of pathology. Hans-Georg Gadamer's foundational account of health as self-concealment assumes a symmetrical counterpart: illness as the rupture of that concealment. This paper argues that a distinct and inadequately theorised patient experience challenges this assumption at its foundation, and that adequately theorising it requires operating (...) simultaneously across ontological, metaphysical, and phenomenological registers. In atypical autoimmune disease - characterised by absent canonical serology, diagnosis by exclusion, and histological presentation that shifts with disease staging across time - the disease enacts its own concealment, remaining maximally present at the biochemical level while remaining entirely absent at the level of lived experience. This is not primarily an epistemological problem of diagnostic inadequacy but an ontological one: the self-concealing disease is a distinct kind of pathological entity whose mode of being differs fundamentally from that presupposed by existing frameworks. We propose three hypotheses to account for its structure. The Concealment Symmetry Hypothesis holds that the self-concealing disease mirrors health's self-concealment in a pathological register - an ontological claim about what disease can be, not merely about how it may be experienced. The Nosological Instability Hypothesis holds that serial diagnostic oscillation in such cases faithfully registers a disease whose identity is itself temporally unstable: at each clinical encounter a genuinely different histological object presents itself, raising metaphysical questions about persistence, identity, and what it means for a disease to remain the same disease across time. Phenomenological declaration occurs only when a superimposed physiological event of sufficient magnitude amplifies the biochemical signal above the threshold of somatic experience - a threshold-dependency that is structural rather than incidental. The Threshold Existence Hypothesis holds that the patient of the self-concealing disease inhabits a third ontological category between Gadamerian health and declared illness: neither operating in the surplus that genuine health provides nor reorganised by somatic disruption, but existing at the functional threshold itself - biochemically compromised, phenomenologically silent, capable of full worldly engagement across decades while remaining vulnerable at the margins. This mode of being, which we term threshold existence, can only be adequately theorised through phenomenological description, but its implications are irreducibly ontological. Drawing on Gadamer, Canguilhem, Merleau-Ponty, Toombs, Svenaeus, Carel, and Mol, we argue that threshold existence requires new philosophical vocabulary and that its theorisation has significant implications for how medicine understands, diagnoses, and communicates with patients whose illness does not declare itself in the expected register. (shrink)

People ought to get what they deserve. And what we deserve can depend on effort, performance, or on excelling in competition, even when excellence is partly a function of our natural gifts. Or so most people believe. Philosophers sometimes say otherwise. At least since Karl Marx complained about capitalist society extracting surplus value from workers, thereby failing to give workers what they deserve, classical liberal philosophers have worried that to treat justice as a matter of what people deserve (...) is to license interference with liberty. Rawls likewise rejected patterns imposed by principles of desert, calling it “one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society. The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases.” Rawls’s view is, in a way, compelling. Inevitably, our efforts are aided by natural gifts, positional advantages, and sheer luck, so how much can we deserve? And if our very characters result from an interplay of these same factors, how can we (capitalists and proletariat workers alike) deserve anything at all? Samuel Scheffler says, “none of the most prominent contemporary versions of philosophical liberalism assigns a significant role to desert at the level of fundamental principle.” If so, I argue, the most prominent contemporary versions of philosophical liberalism are mistaken. In particular, there is an aspect of what we do to make ourselves deserving that, although it has not been discussed in the literature, plays a central role in everyday moral life, and for good reason. (shrink)

John McDowell rejects the idea that non-conceptual content can rationally justify empirical claims—a task for which it is ill-fitted by its non-conceptual nature. This paper considers three possible objections to his views: he cannot distinguish empty conception from the perceptual experience of an object; perceptual discrimination outstrips the capacity of concepts to keep pace; and experience of the empirical world is more extensive than the conceptual focusing within it. While endorsing McDowell’s rejection of what he means by non-conceptual content, and (...) appreciating his insight into the experiential synthesis of intuition and conception (in particular, its role in grasping objects), I will argue that Edmund Husserl presents an even more comprehensive account of perceptual experience that explains how we experience the contribution of receptivity and sensibility and how they cooperate in perceptual discrimination. Further, it reveals “horizons”—a unique kind of contents, surplus content (rather than independent non-conceptual content)—beyond the synthesis of intuitive and conceptual contents through which objects are grasped. Such horizons play a constitutive role, making experience with its conceptual dimensions and justificatory potential possible; they in no way function like a bare given that is to fulfill some independent justificatory role. Whereas McDowell focuses on how experience does not take place in isolation from the exercise of conceptual capacities, Husserl complements his view by situating experience in a more encompassing whole and by elucidating the surplus-horizons that exceed the conceptual content of experience; play an inseparable, constitutive role within it; and indicate the limits of conceptual comprehension. (shrink)

This essay develops a structural model of continuity under the finite conditions of life without presupposing transcyclic identity. Continuity is articulated not as the persistence of a subject or substance, but as an irreversible iteration of orientational structures. Drawing on a functional reinterpretation of the fourfold (RO, RQ, SO, SQ), the model explains how a structural surplus transforms a closed cycle into an open spiral. -/- Phenomenal contents such as memory, meaning, and biographical coherence are locally stored within phases (...) of stabilization but are fully dissolved at their termination. What persists is not content or identity, but a modulation of structural conditions. Death is therefore understood not as a transition, but as a necessary structural cut. -/- Against doctrines of reincarnation and against the logic of eternal recurrence, the essay proposes iteration without return as a non-metaphysical account of continuity, singularity, and meaning beyond identity. (shrink)

The article manifests and analyzes the process of decentration of the Author, which corresponds to a number of trends, such as: decentration of the subject, dividualization, decentralization of information systems, etc., which determine contemporary transformations of the Lifeworld of a human, who appears precisely as a decentralized, multilayered, split, multiple being. It is noted that the model of authorship, which was constituted according to the concept of a centered/holistic subject/individual, which, in particular, is embodied in copyright, needs to be reconsidered. (...) The meaning of such a model, which is conceptualized in the figure of "authenticity of an authoritative author", is reduced to the creation of Surplus Value with behalf of the author of the product/work/goods. The article presents the stages of decentration of the Author, authority and authenticity, which are personified by the figures of S. Kierkegaard, M. Duchamp, and R. Stallman. For Kierkegaard, it is fundamental to separate the function of the author from authority and the formation of existence/singularity, which, in particular, is embodied in his use of pseudonyms. Duchamp problematizes the author as a producer of a product, contrasting him with the practice of using ready-made objects, and contrasts the tradition of the author's signature with the multiplication of names/signatures. Duchamp exposes the exploitative essence of work even in relation to artistic creativity, manifesting as an alternative to laziness/"lazy activity", which allows shifting the emphasis from the production of things to the process of becoming subjectivity. In the end, the author as integrity and unity loses its meaning in the context of the development of contemporary technologies and network communication. Stallman presents a strategy of friendly exchange of free software instead of selling it based on copyright (intellectual property). This is what should increase productive activity and free up time, and in the long run, creativity should hardly be distinguished from laziness. These three examples testify to the possibility and necessity of overcoming the repressive component of authorship and copyright as a way of controlling/restricting human life, which is not a totality, does not have substantial authenticity, does not require authority, and does not focus on authorship. (shrink)

This chapter covers the traditional role of responsibility, and the possible connections between response and responsibility. These connections are explored through the advance of trust and the surplus of the extraordinary in relation to the Third Party. The idea of responsibility comes from the sphere of juridical law, and has a theological touch. The classical conception presented suffers from a permanent erosion that is reinforced by systemic constraints. Trust is a natural element of every community that is together applied (...) by common aims in life. The phenomenon of trust refers to the bond, the nexus, which holds together the members of a community, creating the requisite solidarity. The term ‘trust’ or ‘confidence’ should not primarily read as a substantive, but as a verb or as the derivative of a verb. Furthermore, it is noted that the responsive ethics proposed could function as a permanent corrective. (shrink)

Jackson's Before Modernism is animated by a desire, in the author's telling, to redress the absence of Black poets in accounts of American lyric by accounting for how Black poets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced the conditions for the invention of modern American lyric poetry. Lyric is notoriously difficult to define, but the working definition for this book is mostly consistent: “an elevated form of self-expression addressed to everyone at once and to no one in particular,” (...) in which “what is left unsaid is more significant than what is said.” Lyric poetry is characterized by a condition in which the “subjective expression” is the “locus of impossible speech” of an alienated speaker and is the “basis for later emphases on the fiction of ‘the speaker’ as an imaginary person who says what the reader of lyric poetry wants to hear.” Reading lyrically is to “confuse the poem with the person.”The transformative “antagonism” (Jackson draws on Adorno's belief that “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of social antagonism”) between Black and white poetries begins, for Jackson, with white appropriation of the “impossible speech” of enslaved poets such as Phillis Wheatley Peters and George Moses Horton, whose poetry's importance lies in “what it reveals or suggests of the slaves who wrote it, and, by extension, what it reveals about the institution of slavery.” In Jackson's telling, white poets appropriated the pathos of this surplus value, and this appropriation “animated the transformation of the neoclassical and Romantic poetic genres in which Wheatley and Horton wrote into modern lyric forms.” This appropriation was done by white abolitionist poets through the literary devices of apostrophe, personification, and animation, as Jackson demonstrates through skilled close readings of the work of John Pierpont as against that of Ann Plato, a free poet of color. Next, Jackson argues that Black poets reframed these forms as white appropriations, through the fugitive poetics of a Black surplus lyricism, such as Frederick Douglass's reprinting of Pierpont's “The Fugitive Slave's Apostrophe to the North Star” in his antislavery newspaper, The North Star. Particularly skillful is Jackson's reading of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's poem “Eva's Farewell” among the fray of “Eva” poems and songs following the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Jackson is an excellent close reader, and her readings are particularly gripping when she compares Harper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow under the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, which functions “as both a kind of trans-poem and a kind of trans-person.”My argument with this study is that, in figuring American lyricism, as it does, by way of Hegel, Adorno, and Benjamin, Jackson implicitly installs their views as normative, without making an adequate historical case for their having that status—a move especially striking if her goal is to trouble the white transatlantic genealogies that erased eighteenth- and nineteen-century poets hitherto, and poets of color almost wholesale. Jackson's book reflects this dialectical structure: It begins a “dialectical process” by focusing on the work of Black poets in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Next, it focuses on the early nineteenth-century poetics of whiteness, and finally it interlaces the racialization of Black and white poetics in the 1840s and 1850s. To this end, Jackson conducts what she terms “slow readings”—readings centered on who is speaking in a poem and the dramatic situation that these speech acts generate—of works by Wheatley Peters, Horton, Douglass, Plato, Harper, and James Monroe Whitfield.I am uncertain how best to characterize the foundational premise of Jackson's monograph and consider that my uncertainty is less an indication of my own rhetorical indecisiveness and more an expression of an ambiguity at the heart of Before Modernism. I mean the recurrent slippage between the biographical identity of the poet and the I that constitutes the poetic speaker that structures Jackson's analyses of the work of enslaved poets but not that of white poets or of Douglass. This conflation of the biographical poet and the rhetorical poetic voice is notable because Jackson herself recognizes that Wheatley Peters and Horton's writing comprised neoclassical and Romantic poetic genres. And it was white appropriation of these genres that transformed them into modern lyric forms, not anything that Wheatley Peters or Horton or Plato themselves wrote. Puzzling out my unease here made me feel I must have been reading Jackson incorrectly.This approach to Wheatley Peters and Horton stood out to me in stark contrast to that in Jackson's first monograph on the lyric, Dickinson's Misery, which began with the premise that Emily Dickinson's mid-nineteenth-century poetry was not understood as lyric (in the sense that I have defined it here) at the time it was written; Jackson's subject of inquiry, then, was the process of lyrical reading that, she claimed, transforms virtually all poetry we read today into lyrical poetry. I was struck by Jackson's note in the preface to Before Modernism that the book began as an “almost-all-White book about nineteenth-century American poetry in public” and that, as the project shifted “to a book about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Black poets’ interventions in American poetry in public,” she had difficulty “figuring out what poems or people or fake people I was reading.”Jackson's preface seems to perform five disingenuous acts to make the case that today's reader “thinks of lyric poetry as personal expression” and that doing so when reading Wheatley Peters is disappointing because, rather than a person, we find “an airy frame around nothing at all—or at least nothing for which we have a name.” The contortions Jackson must make to read Wheatley Peters's poem as personal (as opposed to commissioned, or as a poem in search of a commission) leave the reader with the impression that writing lyric is so exhausting as to raise the question of the genre's necessity. Jackson's previous work, The Lyric Reader (2014), may offer a clue: When writing about the convergence in lyric of intention and reception, Jackson notes, “we have been better at serving as vehicles for cultural transmission than we are at representing our own views.” Perhaps Jackson's reading of Wheatley Peters in her preface is a vehicle for cultural transmission. Jackson may be performing a contemporary white lyric reading of Wheatley Peters's poem.If so, it is a brilliant performance: an erasure of the various genres of poetry by particular white critics who are most interested in an abstract speaker whom we can make say whatever the reader most wants to hear, especially when, as in this book, the speaker is Black. But if scholarship—and not the poetry or the poets themselves—has taught us to read this way, why not introduce a new model for understanding the poetry of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slaves, freed slaves, free people of color, based on different terms that are more appropriate to the goals and circumstances of the poems? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Addressing Alterity:Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative RelationDiane DavisTeaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain.—Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and InfinityThere is always the matter of a surplus that comes from an elsewhere and that can no more be assimilated by me, than it can domesticate itself in me. A teaching that may part ways with Heidegger's motif of our (...) being able to learn only what we already understand—when does learning take place? what do we already understand?—the Conversation belongs, as ethical relation, to the effort of thinking the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger. None of this amounts to thinking an object.—Avital Ronell, DictationsFrom Rhetorical Power to Reception Histories Steven Mailloux has brilliantly performed and explicated a "rhetorical hermeneutics" that demonstrates the "practical inseparability of interpretation and language use and thus of the discourses that theorize those practices, hermeneutics and rhetoric" (1998, 3). Many rhetoricians have challenged the specifics of Mailloux's various arguments and have more generally objected that "rhetorical hermeneutics" leans too far toward the hermeneutical, reducing rhetoric to an analytic or critical art and giving its productive (political) function the squeeze.1 Yet within these lively debates, very few have challenged his basic premise that rhetoric and hermeneutics are inextricably intertwined: the question has not been whether they are indissociable but which side of the production-reception coin rhetorical studies ought to emphasize.2 Michael Leff, for example, flipped Mailloux's adjective-noun relation to spotlight production, promoting a "hermeneutical rhetoric" that focuses more on political than literary texts; nonetheless, he agrees that "all interpretive work involves participation in a rhetorical exchange, and that every rhetorical exchange involves some interpretive work" (1997, 197-98). [End Page 191] Rosa Eberly goes further in Citizen Critics, offering a hermeneutical rhetoric that is less interested in "already-written discourses" than in spotlighting "rhetoric's power as an art productive of discourses and subjectivities for the present and the future" (2000, 34). Yet Eberly, too, affirms Mailloux's basic premise, which was nudged in the direction of conflation in the introduction to the 1997 collection Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, in which the editors, Walter Jost and Michael Hyde note in passing that their title can "be understood as virtually tautological."And there is of course no doubt that rhetoric has a hermeneutic dimension; or, more carefully, that rhetoric constitutes the hermeneutic dimension. If "hermeneutics" indicates "the art of understanding," as Friedrich Schleirmacher wanted, then interpretation clearly depends upon production.3 "Rhetoric not only has its place within the sphere of objects surveyed by hermeneutics," as Werner Hamacher puts it, "but also constitutes an integral component of every hermeneutic operation. Every step in an interpretation corresponds to a rhetorical—or grammatical—figure" (1996, 70). Put more bluntly: intelligibility, including self-intelligibility, is a tropological product; cognition itself is a trope that can in no way be secured. Hermeneutics—as it's being used here—is completely dependent on, even absorbed by, rhetoric.4 I have no problem with this. Nor with Mailloux's suggestion that the reverse is also true:In some ways rhetoric and interpretation are practical forms of the same extended human activity: Rhetoric is based on interpretation; interpretation is communicated through rhetoric. Furthermore, as a reflection on practice, hermeneutics and rhetorical theory are mutually defining fields: hermeneutics is the rhetoric of establishing meaning, and rhetoric the hermeneutics of problematic linguistic situations.(Mailloux 1998, 4)I don't disagree: As the production and appropriation of meaning, rhetoric and hermeneutics are an indissociable team; together, they complete understanding's circle. I take this as a given.However, I want to suggest that there is also a non-hermeneutical dimension of rhetoric that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up significations to comprehension. This dimension is reducible neither to figuration nor to what typically goes by the name persuasion; it is devoted to a certain reception, but not to the appropriation of meaning. Preceding and exceeding all hermeneutic interpretation, it deals not in signified meaning but in the address itself, in the exposure to the other; it deals not... (shrink)

1. Law and morals as two systems of norms, and the inner morality of law 2. Law as a value bearer and as a mere external indicator 3. The inner and external moral credit of legislator 4. The inner morality of law. As to the last paragraph, the most striking feature of the inner morality of law is that it is such a possible characteristic, surplus quality which is not a sine qua non, which law is conceivable without. However, (...) it is a question whether law can long do without it? In principle, the legislator is free in deciding on what legal consequence he attaches to what course of conduct14 and it is also desirable that legal concepts be freed from moral overtones. Nevertheless, the legal complex cannot be torn out of its social context, nor can it steadily conflict with other complexes (religions, moral, or political values, norms and ideologies) law is to develop in living interrelationship with. Otherwise, it is subject to danger that (I) law-observance in average cases is weakened; (2) the reified functioning of and approach to law are strengthened and make law alienated; and (3) it blurs the social objectives the law intends to serve and, especially in hard cases, makes its application rootless and floating. A pathological situation only becomes more pathological, if the pathology of contents is accompanied by the pathology of means. Or, it brings the promise of real solution closer, if the adequateness of means also provides, by the strength of publicity, for the direct mobilization of society. That explains why it is a topical question what I have proposed to term the inner morality of law. [For the text, see my L&Ph, 77–89] . (shrink)

The article examines how metaphor structures the conceptualization of human rights in modern European and Chinese legal and political thought, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s account of metaphor as semantic innovation and hermeneutic refiguration. In European jurisprudence, rights are predominantly articulated through property and boundary metaphors—possession, scope, core, margin—while constitutional theory simultaneously deploys a generative register in which dignity and personhood function as grounding sources from which rights derive. In modern Chinese discourse, rights-language entered through translation and neologism, yet was (...) progressively refigured through indigenous metaphorical constellations, most notably arboreal and hydrological imagery in which _renge_ (人格, personality) appears as root or source and rights as branches or flows. The article argues that these metaphors are not just rhetorical ornaments but symbolic mediations that disclose distinct normative orientations: bounded protection, correlativity, and adjudicability on the European side; developmental growth, relational embeddedness, and ethical cultivation in the Chinese context. Through a Ricoeurian analysis of distanciation, recontextualization, and surplus of meaning, the paper aims to show how rights-language detaches from its original configuration and is re-inscribed within new cultural horizons. The resulting differences do not entail incommensurability but exemplify transformative appropriation. Human rights thus emerge as a concept capable of cultural refiguration while retaining sufficient semantic continuity to sustain claims to universal articulation. (shrink)

What is the classic in history? What is a classic in historical writing? Very few historians and critics have addressed these questions, and when they have done so, it has been only in a cursory manner. These are queries that require some explanation regarding historical texts because of their peculiar ambivalence between science and art, content and form, sources and imagination, scientific and narrative language. Based on some examples of the Western historiographical tradition, I discuss in this article to what (...) extent historians should engage the concept of the classic – as has been done for literary texts. If one assumes that the historical text is not only a referential account but also a narrative analogous to literary texts, then the concept of the classic becomes one of the keys for understanding the historical text – and may improve our understanding not only of historiography, but of history itself. I will argue in this article that it is possible to identify a category of the classic text in some historical writings, precisely because of the literarity they possess without losing their specific historical condition. Because of their narrative condition, historical texts share some of the features assigned to literary texts – that is, endurance, timelessness, universal meaningfulness, resistance to historical criticism, susceptibility to multiple interpretations, and ability to function as models. Yet, since historical texts do not construct imaginary worlds but reflect external realities, they also have to achieve some specific features according to this referential content – that is, surplus of meaning, historical use of metaphors, effect of contemporaneity without damaging the pastness of the past, and a certain appropriation of literariness. Without seeking to be normative or systematic, this article focuses on some specific features of the historical classic, offering a series of reflections to open rather than try to close a debate on this complex topic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cardboard Houses with Wings:The Architecture of Alabama's Rural StudioThorsten Botz-Bornstein (bio)IntroductionThe Rural Studio, which was founded by Samuel Mockbee in 1992 and lead by him until his death in 2001, continues its activities. Its specialty is, now as before, the design of innovative houses for poor people living in Alabama's second-poorest county, Hale County, by relying largely on donated and salvaged materials. The houses are made of car windshields, (...) surplus carpet tiles, baled cardboard, old street signs, license plates, etc. Alexis de Tocqueville has said that democracy lowers the standards of creation,1 and it seems that, for architecture, this has become a sad truth in many cases in industrialized countries. The Rural Studio wants to contradict this tendency by showing that even within the context of civic engagement, elements like style and art are not bound to disappear. "Participatory design" as well as "community design" are common in the United States in the public as well as in the private sector.2 The Rural Studio's aim to offer decent architecture in terms of material quality as well as remain consistent when it comes to aesthetics sticks out of the landscape not only of community design but even the history of modern Western architecture. There is nothing new in reducing rich people's lives to functionalism, but the ambition to enhance poor people's lives through art can still be considered as rather eccentric.Kitsch Culture and Junk CultureNegotiating style when being engaged in compassionate projects is certainly a difficult task. Everybody needs food, clothing, and shelter, but who needs [End Page 16] art? The worst outcome that such negotiations can have is, of course, the victory of social pragmatism over art, simply declaring that "they don't need that." However, this is not the only miscarriage to be expected. Another likely disaster is that the suggested artistic activity will be refused by the clients at the onset. Community design architects confirm that "when it comes to houses people are much more conservative."3 The aesthetic standards of the lower middle class especially are often determined by numerous prejudices about "what a house should look like."The aesthetic standards of the status-seeking middle class, however, are generally more open, as their visions of an ideal house are often determined by a moderately adventurous hedonism striving to conquer new aesthetic models and experiences. The problem is that, sometimes, their projects will run directly into the aesthetic dead end of kitsch, or camp, because their openness is often superficial; instead of being determined by a kind of postmodern self-criticism, it remains rather dependent on thoughtless consumer attitudes. The desire to display and impress at any cost—a strain already put forward by Tocqueville—corrupts the taste of many American middle-class members and makes truly artistic architectural expressions oftentimes impossible. In the worst case, this attitude will be conducive to the desire to "acquire beautiful junk," which is, according to the aesthetician Matei Calinescu, the classical mechanism leading to the creation of kitsch culture.4 The original German definition of "kitsch" is that "which makes use of refuse taken bodily from the rubbish dump."5The architects of the Rural Studio use predominantly junk, which forces us to consider the question: How do they manage to escape the aesthetics of kitsch? From a historical perspective, kitsch culture is the product of the European middle classes (though it has also constantly been imitated by lower-income classes). It becomes clear that the Rural Studio operates on a completely different anthropological ground. The typical clients of the Rural Studio are not integrated in the spectrum of capitalist societies, as their social habitus eludes most attributes of hedonistic consumer society and comes amazingly close to that of traditional, precapitalist societies. The main characteristics of their economies are frugality and thriftiness. This shows that the success of the Rural Studio depends on the particularity of its place: only within the limited social sphere in which they act can an architecture using junk and waste become a distinct style.It is well known that elements of waste, once they are employed in an artistic context... (shrink)

Human fascination with art has deep evolutionary roots, yet its role remains a puzzle for evolutionary theory. Although its widespread presence across cultures suggests a potential adaptive function, determining its evolutionary origins requires more comprehensive evidence beyond mere universality or assumed survival benefits. This paper introduces and tests the Collector Hypothesis, which suggests that artworks serve as indicators of collectors’ surplus wealth and social status, offering greater benefits to collectors than to artists in mating and reproductive contexts. Our (...) study among Indigenous Papuan communities provides preliminary support for the Collector Hypothesis, indicating that, compared to artists, collectors are perceived as having higher social status and greater attractiveness to women. These findings provide unique insights into Papuan communities and contribute to the ongoing discussion about art’s adaptive significance of art by suggesting that artistic capacities may benefit not only creators but also those who accumulate and display art. Further research in diverse cultural contexts is needed for a comprehensive understanding of this interplay. (shrink)

This paper shows how solidarity is one of the founding principles in Thomas More's Utopia. In the fictional republic of Utopia described in Book II, solidarity has a political and a moral function. The principle is at the center of the communal organization of Utopian society, exemplified in a number of practices such as the sharing of farm work, the management of surplus crops, or the democratic elections of the governor and the priests. Not only does solidarity benefit (...) the individual Utopian, but it is a prerequisite to ensure the prosperity of the island of Utopia and its moral preeminence over its neighboring countries. However, a limit to this principle is drawn when the republic of Utopia faces specific social difficulties, and also deals with the rest of the world. In order for the principle of solidarity to function perfectly, it is necessary to apply it exclusively within the island or the republic would be at risk. War is not out of the question then, and compassion does not apply to all human beings. This conception of solidarity, summed up as “Utopia first!,” could be dubbed a Machiavellian strategy, devised to ensure the durability of the republic. We will show how some of the recommendations of Realpolitik made by Machiavelli in The Prince correspond to the Utopian policy enforced to protect their commonwealth. (shrink)

Law is an important part of Althusser’s thought. He profoundly criticized the mechanism of capitalist law from the perspective of ‘reproduction.’ First, the law cannot be separated from the relations of production. In order to maintain capitalist relations of production, the law covers up the exploitation in the process of capitalist production. The key methods are to determine the ownership of the means of production and products and confuse the technical division of labor and social division of labor in the (...) process of labor. It demands the submission of legal subjects, seducing and tempting subjects through the ideological function of law so that they will actively and willingly accept the restriction of law. Secondly, the law and the State are integrated. The ‘surplus-violence’ that the ruling class holds over the ruled class is transformed by law into legal State power, and the State power shapes individuals into subjects and endows subjects with rights through law, with the aim of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. In addition, at the end of the article, I also mention Althusser’s preliminary conception of communist law. (shrink)

This chapter, titled “Miracles of Motivation and Guarantors of Paralysis: What Do Values Have? What Do They Do?” delves into the intricate nature of values and their role in shaping human behavior. The chapter challenges the idea that values are merely abstract concepts that shape individuals in a deterministic manner. It explores contrasting viewpoints from the political and sociological perspectives, highlighting the tension between values as motivators and values as impotent forces. The chapter examines how values can both motivate and (...) paralyze action, with emphasis on the complex interplay between values, actions, and emotions. It contemplates whether values derive their motivating power from lack or surplus, and whether they function as self-verification mechanisms or triggers for guilt. The discourse delves into the intertwined relationships between values, conscience, debt, and modern morality, ultimately questioning the impact of values on individual and societal dynamics in a world of evolving economic and moral landscapes. (shrink)

Variations in life history define key comparative and evolutionary biological questions, important for understanding the mechanisms of mammalian evolutionary divergence, developmental adaptability and plasticity. In this regard, the differences among predominantly altricial and precocial species represent a particularly significant, if still poorly understood and contested case. Here, it will be shown how the classical analysis of such ontogenetic variations, going back to the semantic biology of A. Portmann, can be expanded and synthesized with comparative physiological approaches, based on the negentropic (...) theory of ontogeny by I. A. Arshavsky and his school. In this little received but pioneering tradition, extensive comparative and experimental investigations were carried out on the role of musculoskeletal systems and stressors in driving life history variations, particularly in the altricial-precocial spectrum. As shown by Arshavsky and co-workers, by focusing on general allometric regularities, the approximations based on the classical energy rules of surface and mass offer valuable benchmarks, but also predictions that are frequently violated by the variability of physiological and metabolic scaling relationships among altricials and precocials, and thus, a complex and historical approach is needed to describe their local physiological mechanisms and systemic regularities. This paper shows how Arshavsky’s findings and framework can play an integrative role in this context, potentially helping to bridge the mainly descriptive approach of semantic morphology, as developed by Portmann’s school, with the more functional explanations predominating current ecology and life history theory. These problems can be important for biosemiotics by highlighting the contingent, activity-dependent, and surplus anabolic stress mechanisms underlying diversification in eutherian developmental systems and possibly, the epigenetic evolution of pace-of-life syndromes. (shrink)

The intellectual property system has become universal, imposing homogenisation pressure on knowledge production, subordinated to capitalist dominance. The existing contradictions become more accentuated, and further antagonisms emerge as capital concentration reaches new heights. Social rule increasingly depends on a sphere of appearances to sustain its legitimacy. With digitalisation, imperialist capitalism, characterised by the fusion of productive and banking capital with the capitalist state, engulfs the existing propaganda apparatus of marketing and surveillance into capitalist rule. From its original function to (...) render capitalism exploitation amenable by shaping perception, it becomes a locus of surplus-value extraction. This industry depends on a blurred structure of vast private control over knowledge and the means of knowledge, privately appropriating human intellect and data. (shrink)

What is the classic in history? What is a classic in historical writing? Very few historians and critics have addressed these questions, and when they have done so, it has been only in a cursory manner. These are queries that require some explanation regarding historical texts because of their peculiar ambivalence between science and art, content and form, sources and imagination, scientific and narrative language. Based on some examples of the Western historiographical tradition, I discuss in this article to what (...) extent historians should engage the concept of the classic – as has been done for literary texts. If one assumes that the historical text is not only a referential account but also a narrative analogous to literary texts, then the concept of the classic becomes one of the keys for understanding the historical text – and may improve our understanding not only of historiography, but of history itself. I will argue in this article that it is possible to identify a category of the classic text in some historical writings, precisely because of the literarity they possess without losing their specific historical condition. Because of their narrative condition, historical texts share some of the features assigned to literary texts – that is, endurance, timelessness, universal meaningfulness, resistance to historical criticism, susceptibility to multiple interpretations, and ability to function as models. Yet, since historical texts do not construct imaginary worlds but reflect external realities, they also have to achieve some specific features according to this referential content – that is, surplus of meaning, historical use of metaphors, effect of contemporaneity without damaging the pastness of the past, and a certain appropriation of literariness. Without seeking to be normative or systematic, this article focuses on some specific features of the historical classic, offering a series of reflections to open rather than try to close a debate on this complex topic. (shrink)

The article presents and discusses an ongoing fellowship project entitled ‘Space for Interference’, conducted under the Norwegian Programme for Research Fellowships in the Arts. Two concrete site-specific art projects produced under Space for Interference serve as a point of departure for an investigation into methods of interference and the forms of address that artists use when intervening in other specialized fields in society. The institutions that provide the site for an art project have different social functions. We ask what may (...) be their motivation for allowing artists access to their physical environments, apparatuses, procedures, systems and discourses. The fact that the artists’ projects in these contexts function as a means of self-observation for the institutions seems obvious. Nevertheless, we seek to investigate the various economic and political factors that allow these institutions to include potentially critical activities, which aim to modify or transgress their systems, and thereby displaying how they are malleable and mobile bodies. One assertion we make is that by doing so the involved institutions prove to be modern, self-critical and flexible, thus complying with political requirements to adapt to the rapidly changing environments of the information and communication age. The perspective from systems theory in the Luhmannian tradition has proved useful since it shows how the issues of art may also be the problems of science, business, politics and the law in the complex and decentered social universe of today. The issues of contingency, insecurity, paradox and autoreflexivity, surplus meanings and the complexity and decentering of the subject are at the heart of contemporary art. Systems theory provides a way to link such practices theoretically with scientific discourse and with the advanced problem solving and criticality of other social domains, like politics, business and the media industries. (shrink)

This paper presents a variable-free analysis of relational nouns in Glue Semantics, within a Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) architecture. Relational nouns and resumptive pronouns are bound using the usual binding mechanisms of LFG. Special attention is paid to the bound readings of relational nouns, how these interact with genitives and obliques, and their behaviour with respect to scope, crossover and reconstruction. I consider a puzzle that arises regarding relational nouns and resumptive pronouns, given that relational nouns can have bound readings (...) and resumptive pronouns are just a specific instance of bound pronouns. The puzzle is why is it impossible for bound implicit arguments of relational nouns to be resumptive? The puzzle is highlighted by a well-known variety of variable-free semantics, where pronouns and relational noun phrases are identical both in category and (base) type. I show that the puzzle also arises for an established variable-based theory. I present an analysis of resumptive pronouns that crucially treats resumptives in terms of the resource logic linear logic that underlies Glue Semantics: a resumptive pronoun is a perfectly ordinary pronoun that constitutes a surplus resource; this surplus resource requires the presence of a resumptive-licensing resource consumer, a manager resource. Manager resources properly distinguish between resumptive pronouns and bound relational nouns based on differences between them at the level of semantic structure. The resumptive puzzle is thus solved. The paper closes by considering the solution in light of the hypothesis of direct compositionality. It is argued that a directly compositional version of the theory is possible, although perhaps not desirable. The implications for direct compositionality are considered. (shrink)

This dissertation contextualizes the emergence of the Church of Light by Tadao Ando within the Japanese religio-philosophical tradition of nothingness. The idea of nothingness was revived during the first half of the twentieth-century by Kitaro Nishida with two cultural ramifications in the post-war period: a series of dialogues on the points of convergence and divergence between nothingness and the God of Christianity, and an architectural art movement called Monoha, or l'Ecole de Choses. Under the concept of "structuring emptiness," Monoha attempted (...) to restore perceptual depth where dichotomous semiotic representation is overcome through shintaisei, the co-originating corporeal fabric between the subject and object. This two-fold mapping, theological and architectural, not only illuminates the post-war cultural milieu from which Ando's church of spatial emptiness emerged, but also locates the church within the legacy of Nishida's nothingness. ;Nishida's philosophy of nothingness offers a perceptual theory of the "dialectic of self-negation" enacted by shintai, "the actively knowing body." Shintai is the agent of emptying selfhood by functioning as 'the sensational capacity to be filled by' the world. Shintai concretizes the perceptual matrix of co-emergence between the interiority of selfhood and the outside world. When its sensational capacity overflows, shintai enters into the realm of creative action to accommodate the surplus. The figure thus created is not a sign embodying subjective intentions, but constitutes the corporelly-inscribed, pre-reflective experiential datum of the world. Nishida called such a figure "the pure body of the artist," implying its apprehension not as the other in unknowable confrontation, but as the extended self. ;The dissertation examines how this notion of self-renunciatory perception through shintai opens a new hermeneutic horizon for the Church of Light. The church presents an unprecedented conjunction between emptiness, based on the reductive removal of signs, and the cross of light. This seemingly contradictory integration confronts the modern degradation of the cross into an atrophied sign of Christianity and seeks to retrieve its fully efficacious symbolic power. The emptiness contributes to the revival of a deeper communicative mode as shintai by negating the habituated perception pivoted upon the dichotomy between the deciphering subject and the semiotic elements. The perception of light, a natural thing rather than a sign, which infiltrates the cross, is a preliminary ritual to save the perception from the paradigm of the semiotic representation. Shintai, the self-emptying corporeality, resonates with and becomes penetrated by, rather than subjectivizes, the light. On this restored perceptual depth, the cross is perceived not as a sign, but as a part of the pre-reflective, ontological datum constructed and apprehended by shintai. This perceptual experience endorses the associational similarity between the pre-Christian datum predicated upon shintai as the agent of the self-renunciatory subjectivity and Christianity with its theology of the self-transcending love of kenosis. (shrink)

As an atypical product of mass culture, the acclaimed series Westworld presents us with a layered dystopian narrative formed around several political issues relevant to our contemporary society. It uses a pastiche of the American history, staged as the Wild West­themed amusement park, presented in the form of simulacrum. As a reference with no referent, this park uses a network of historical signifiers to construct a space for the externalisation of fantasies of its clients, consequently commodifying the imaginary itself, and (...) creating surplus value for its owners. Simultaneously, within its reach, conscious androids conduct all of the necessary labour for its unimpeded functioning, although their consciousness and labour are not recognised and accepted. Because they structurally occupy a position of slaves in relation to humans, I will analyse this series as a political allegory on the master­slave dialectics established in the very heart of hyperreality that suggests a possibility of the return of the real, based on the rebellion of the androids. I intend to show how, because of the model of consciousness it maintains, the series is unable to fulfil what it implies. (shrink)

I. After analysis of the function and power relations of penal justice in the Middle Ages, studying its knowledge effects: not in the sense of ideological operations, but of production of truth. ~ In Germanic law, the test establishes the superiority of one over the other. ~ In the new penal regime with royal procurators, the inquiry establishes the truth that makes it possible to pass from accusation to sentence. The inquiry as restoration of order. ~ The test is (...) replaced by the truth established by witnesses and writing which records. II. Complementary comments. Inquiry and confession (aveu) as privileged sources of the discovery of truth in the new penal regime. ~ Torture’s point of insertion. ~ The system of legal proofs. Contrast between inquiry and measure. Measure as the instrument and form of a power of distribution; inquiry as instrument and form of a power of information. Inquiry—bureaucratic system in the Middle Ages. ~ Analysis of the types of extraction of surplus-power. Relation to the 1970–1971 lectures on “the will to know”. Final comment on the appearance of the examination form in the eighteenth–nineteenth century. The birth of the human sciences. (shrink)

The role of the Nobel Laureate Henry Dale (1875-1968) in the history of allergy and the association of anaphylactic conditions with the liberation of histamine is often overlooked. This paper examines his work in this field in the broader context of his researches into endogenous mediators of normal physiological and abnormal pathological functioning. It also assesses the impact of his working environment, especially the unique conditions he enjoyed at the beginning of the twentieth century in the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories (...) (WPRL). The WPRL belonged to the pharmaceutical manufacturer Henry Wellcome, and it was the juxtaposition of the routine commercial obligation of testing drugs for Burroughs, Wellcome & Co., with the opportunities of pursuing unfettered physiological research in well-equipped and supported laboratories, that resulted in what Dale referred to as 'happy accidents' when one set of results suggested experimental strategies and designs to another circumstance. In this way an observation of an unusual effect of an extract of ergot of rye led to collaborative chemical and physiological explorations which revealed the presence of histamine, previously known only as a synthetic product. Further work, accidentally facilitated by the fact that the WPRL produced serum anti-toxins commercially and surplus horse serum was used in experiments where other physiologists routinely used saline, hinted that histamine played a role in the symptom complex known as anaphylaxis. This paper explores some of these themes and elaborates their significance. (shrink)

The prevalence of obesity skyrocketed over the past decades to become a significant public health problem. Obesity is recognized as a low-grade inflammatory disease and is linked with several comorbidities such as diabetes, circulatory disease, common neurodegenerative diseases, as well as chronic pain. Adipocytes are a major neuroendocrine organ that continually, and systemically, releases pro-inflammatory factors. While the exact mechanisms driving obesity-induced pain remain poorly defined, nociceptors hypersensitivity may result from the systemic state of inflammation characteristic of obesity as well (...) as weight surplus-induced mechanical stress. Obesity and pain also share various genetic mutations, lifestyle risk factors, and metabolic pathways. For instance, fat pads are often found hyper-innervated and rich in immune cell types of multiple origins. These immunocytes release cytokines, amplifying nociceptor function, which, in turn, via locally-released neuropeptides sustain immunocytes’ function. Here, we posit that along with mechanical stressed stemming from extra weight, the local neuro-immune interplay occurring within the fat pads maintains the state of chronic low-grade inflammation and heightens sensory hypersensitivity. Overall, stopping the harmful neuro-immune crosstalk may constitute a novel pathway to prevent obesity-associated comorbidities, including neuronal hypersensitivity. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 27-32. “My”—what does this word designate? Not what belongs to me, but what I belong to,what contains my whole being, which is mine insofar as I belong to it. Søren Kierkegaard. The Seducer’s Diary . I can’t sleep till I devour you / And I’ll love you, if you let me… Marilyn Manson “Devour” The role of poetry in the relationalities between people has a long history—from epic poetry recounting tales of yore; to emotive lyric poetry; to (...) rude, irreverent limericks; to Hallmark cards which have ditties that allow one to cringe, and somehow fall in love at the same moment. Without going into a notion of aesthetics, or attempting to choose which form of poetry is superior, we might want to consider why the form of poetry itself has long been a part of relationality. And whilst doing so, we might always keep in mind that poetry—especially poetry that moves, transports us—is the form that Plato has been warning us about, particularly if we want to become good citizens.As Avital Ronell teaches us in Stupidity : the poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy—a being who at least since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes (287). And considering that the philosopher is the lover of wisdom, we might begin to ask ourselves why one lover is warning against another—if the philosopher is in love with wisdom, then is the poet perhaps his rival, his challenger, for that very love? For, one must also remember that Plato—through Socrates—mentions constantly that Homer is his favourite. Moreover, by adopting both his own voice, whilst mixing it with Socrates’, Plato is adopting the form of poetry that he warns most about—the warning almost serves more as a homage to poetry than anything else. Here, we might open the register that one of the main reasons that he ejects a particular kind of poet is on the grounds of effecting effeminacy on the populace—good poetry moves you, affects you, transports you, shifts you beyond reason, puts you “out of your mind.” However, Plato also teaches us that rhetoric in its highest form requires divine inspiration by way of the daemon, or the muse. This moment of divine intervention is one that seizes—perhaps even ceases—you; putting you “beyond yourself.” In other words, a good rhetorician must always already be open to the possibility of otherness—the same otherness that possibly resides in the feminine. One could also trace this back to the poet that he both loved, and feared, most—Homer. Perhaps the effect of effeminacy that Homer's poetry opened is precisely the source of its power: through listening to Homer, one's body, one’s habitus is opened to the possibility of the feminine. And here, one must remember that the source of all learning—and all teaching—also lies in mimesis, in repetition, in habit. Once the habitus is opened to the possibility of invasion, of intervention, of otherness, there is quite possibly no possibility of distinguishing whether the mimesis is that of reproduction, or if there is always already a productive aspect to it. And by extension, if learning cannot be controlled, the very notion of teaching itself is shifted from a master-student relationality to one where the master is potentially changed as well—the relationality between the master and the student is not only inter-changing, but one cannot even know who is teaching, or learning, at any point. All that can be said is that they are in a relationality; which means that one is ultimately unable to locate the locus of knowledge, of wisdom—the site of which Plato is attempting to convince us is the sole domain of the philosopher. And it is this that philosophy is cringing from. To compound matters, philosophy is striving for wisdom; which can only come from the Gods. In other words, this is a gift that has to be bestowed on them—and more than that, wisdom is always already exterior to one’s control and knowledge. At best, it is the role of one to recognise the gift, to answer the call as it were. Here, if we listen carefully, we can hear the echo of Alexander Graham Bell, and the telephone. And as we are attempting to respond to the call of wisdom—the call that both poetry and philosophy are listening out for—it might be helpful to recall the agreement between Alexander Graham Bell and his brother Melville. In the biography, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude , Robert V. Bruce notes that Aleck and Melly made a “solemn compact that whichever of us should die first would endeavour to communication with the other if it were possible to do so” (63). Since Melville was the one who passed on first, this pact put the onus on Aleck to receive the call of his brother. If you take into consideration the fact that until Melville’s death, both brothers had been working on an early prototype of the telephone, the instrument of distant sound can be read as an attempt by Aleck to maintain the possibility of keeping in touch with Melly, of hearing the voice from beyond. However, this was a connection that was not premised on any knowing, reason, or rationality; it was rather, one that was based on hope, and born out of love. And here, if we eves-drop on a cross-line with The Telephone Book , we can pick up the voice of Avital Ronell once again and hear, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading” (380). In other words, the telephone can be read as the openness to the possibility of responding to the other; one that might always remain unknown. Even in this day of caller-identification, we can never know for sure who the other person on the line is until we pick up: hence, the only decision we can make—the effects of which we remain blind to until it affects us—is to either pick up or not, to either respond or not. And it is not as if the decision to pick up comes without risks: each time we answer a call, we run the risk of it ruining our day. Even when we don’t know who the caller is, perhaps especially when we don’t know who the person on the other end of the line is—and here one only has to think of prank calls—we are leaving ourselves completely open to being affected by another. Thus, philosophy finds itself in the position of Vladimir and Estragon. Since they have no idea who Godot is, they can never know if or when he shows up—thus, if he (and we are taking his gender on the word of the boy, some boy—we don’t even know if it is the same boy—who comes round in the evening) has already come, they would not be in the position to know it. And even if someone comes to them and announces that “I am Godot,” the wait would not be over—without referentiality to the name, they would have to take on faith that that person is indeed Godot. Hence, all they can know is that they are waiting for Godot; and Godot is the name of that waiting itself. All philosophy can know is that it is waiting; and wisdom is the name of that waiting itself. Which brings us to Tina Turner’s eternal question, “what’s love got to do, got to do with it?” In order to begin to consider that, we have to first attempt to examine the notion of love itself. Perhaps we might begin to consider what the difficulty of the statement “I love you.” For, if love is a relationality between two persons—both of whom remain singular, and are attempting to respond to each other—this suggests that neither of them subsume the other under themselves. In other words, the other remains wholly other. If this is so, then the “you” in the statement always remains shrouded in mystery. And even if the “you” was replaced with the name of the person, the veiling remains: for, names refer both to the singularity that is the person, and also every other person bearing that name, at exactly the same time. To compound matters, the only time one has to utter a persons name is in their absence—thus, the correspondence of a name to that particular person is at best an affect of memory. And if we consider the notion of memory, we have to also open the register of forgetting—bringing along with it the problem that there is no object to forgetting. For instance, when one utters “I forgot,” all one is uttering is the fact that one has forgotten, and nothing more—the moment there is an object to the statement, one has strictly speaking remembered what one has forgotten. Moreover, we have no control over when forgetting happens to us. And since it is always already exterior to us, affects us, and has no necessary object, there is no reason to believe that every moment of memory might not bring with it a moment of forgetting. Hence, whenever we utter a name—even if we accept the correspondence between the utterance and the person in front of us—all we are doing is uttering the fact that we are naming. Thus, it is not so much that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ but more appropriately, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’—the relationality between its name and the phenomenon of its sweet smell can only be established after that moment of naming, that instance of catachresis. So, whenever one utters “I love you,” not only is it a performative statement, it is the very naming of that love—all you are doing is establishing a relationality between you and the other. And since there is no necessary referent—one is naming that referentiality as one utters it—this suggests that it is always already a symbolic statement; without which the mystery of the other cannot me maintained. In other words, one cannot love the other without maintaining this symbolic distance—through a ritual; in this case the utterance “I love you.” This might be why Valentine’s Day seems to provoke such a massive reaction: the most common one from people (besides florists) being, Valentine’s Day is mere commercialism. Those among the nay-sayers who maintain a soft spot for Karl Marx would proceed to call it the commodification of relationships; those who prefer the Gods would claim that the sanctity of relationships has been profaned; the gender theorists would note how the fact that males buy the gifts only serves to highlight the unequal power-relation between the genders. Whichever side and variation of the arguments they choose boils down to this: the discomfort lies in the fact that they are confronted with the notion of relationships moving into a mediated sphere. The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only; it should not only remain between them, but more pertinently, be an unmediated experience between two persons. Which of course completely misses the point. For, if we reopen the register that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, there must then be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is, one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding; effectively effacing the other. If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationality; all negotiation is gone and the other person is a mere extension of the self—one is in a masturbatory relationality with one’s imaginary. Hence, any relationship must always already carry with it the unknown, and possibly always unknowable. The other person is an enigma, remains—must remain—enigmatic to you. This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person—and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is. For, if the mystery of the other is unveiled, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love: one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; a check-list. And if they are knowable, this suggests that they can also be negated, and hence, the love can also go away. Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event—and if it is an event, then strictly speaking, it cannot be known before it happens; at best, it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realised retrospectively. At the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere: this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, I was struck by love;” or even more so by, “I was blinded by love.” This is a blinding to not only the subject of the encounter—the self—but also of the very object of that encounter, the “you”—all that can be said is that there is an encounter. And it is for this reason Cupid is blind: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time), but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. Since there is an unknowable relationality with the other person, the only way you can approach it is through a ritual. This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the God(s), one has no choice but to approach them symbolically. These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless—the actual content is interchangeable—as it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets; and secrets are never about their content(s). Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret. This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work: since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret. Occasionally the actual content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance. For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings. In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognise the significance of the knowledge of my birthday. This means that you have to know that you know something. Since the God(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the God(s). The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritualised role. It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them. The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange. Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received. This means that the worst thing that one can do is not give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person. This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the reciprocal gift would be nothing more than a calculated return. The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind. In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and also a reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). Naturally, this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. But it is precisely the stupidity involved that saves the relationship from being banal—more importantly, stupidity prevents it from entering the mere profane. This is not to say that an enigmatic love cannot end—of course it can. However, the difference lies in the fact that if the relationality is wholly transparent, it is subsumed under reason—completely predictable, within the self, and thus never open to the possibility of otherness, exteriority, musing. A love that is an event is one that is also open to the possibility of the divine, the sacred—always already closer to the possibility of wisdom. If we establish that both love and wisdom are exterior, to our knowledge, and the finitude to our selves, this suggests that both are names for the possibility of openness to otherness. In other words, and what choice do we have here but to use the words of the other, the philosopher—the lover of wisdom—is a name for one who is waiting, and nothing more. But that still leaves us with the question of this uncomfortable relationality between philosophy and poetry. But before we address that question, we have to take a momentary detour, and consider the whether it is possible to call one a poet. For, if we take the notion of a poet to be one who reaches the highest levels of rhetoric (beyond the lawyer, and the orator, who only aim to either please the crowds, or convince by way of sophistry), then we must also acknowledge that one can only become a poet at the moment of seizing, the point of inspiration, by the muses. Without this divine moment, all (s)he can do is practice her craft. As no one can control when the muses make their appearance, one could always be practising in vain—in some way, one is always already practising to be least in the way when the muse whispers into one’s ear; one is practising so as not to be vain. And since one cannot know when the muse will appear, there is no time frame to the practising—unlike the lawyer who speaks against a clock, poetry knows no time; the only time that matters is the time appropriate to poetry itself. Thus, all the poet (if one can use this term) is practising for the possibility of effacing her/him self—and waiting. Thus, in order for poetry to occur, in order to be seized, the poet—along with all her concerns—must cease. In other words, there is no poet; there is only the possibility of poetry. However, even as there is no time frame to this waiting, even as all we can say is that poetry is a name for waiting, the one who is practising is always already also in time. And since (s)he is in a symbolic relationality with the possibility of poetry, this suggests that the practising is her sacrifice, and time is precisely what she is sacrificing. Here, it might be helpful to turn to a strange source when it comes to poetry—Georges Bataille—and consider his teachings in the first volume of The Accursed Share where he reminds us that, the “essence [of sacrifice] is to consume profitlessly .” This is where each exchange is beyond rationality, beyond calculability, beyond reason itself, “unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.” He continues: Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates. It does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order.” (58) Since there is no need for a physical change in the object of sacrifice—“it does not have to destroy as fire does”—this suggests that the tie is severed symbolically. Hence, there is an aspect of trans-substantiation in this sacrifice: the form remains the same; in fact there is no perceivable change—this is the point at which all phenomenology fails—but there is always already a difference, an absolute separation from the “real order,” from logic, calculability, reason. The object of sacrifice, the victim [,] is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth…Once chosen, he is the accursed share , destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things…” (59). And it is this tearing away from the order of things—the order of rationality—that “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane” (55). For, only when it is no longer useful, when it is no longer abstracted—subjected, subsumed under—merely a use-value, can the object be an object as such, can a subject be a subject as such; be a singularity. Thus, it is never so much who or what is sacrificed, but the fact that there is a sacrifice. So even as (s)he is sacrificing her time to poetry, it is always already beyond her knowledge whether what (s)he is doing is actually preparing her for poetry or not—all (s)he can know is that she is sacrificing and nothing more. Hence, all (s)he can do is to open her self to the possibility of this relationality—all (s)he can do is be in love with poetry. At the moment the muse whispers into her ear, (s)he ceases to be, and becomes a medium for poetry—and since this possession is always already beyond our cognitive knowledge, this is also a moment of divine wisdom. In other words, there is no difference between poetry and wisdom—the moment of poetry is the moment of wisdom. And this might be the very reason for the philosopher’s aversion to poets. Not so much because they may corrupt the youth (this is after all the aim of all thinking, all philosophy), but precisely because in order to do so, the philosopher must wait for a moment of possession, for divine musing, for poetry. Hence, all thought, all thinking, all philosophy, is nothing but the waiting for the possibility of poetry itself. (shrink)

While broadly concerned about the nature of New Deal diplomacy, Patrick J. Hearden's _Roosevelt Confronts Hitler_ pays special attention to American policy toward Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1941. Basing his conclusions on information gathered from his extensive research in various archives and private collections, Hearden presents a persuasive reinterpretation of how and why the United States went to war with Germany in 1941. Although President Roosevelt repeatedly claimed in public speeches that Hitler was bent upon world conquest, the question (...) of strategic defense was not the primary factor underlying the American decision to enter the war. Moreover, despite the genuine concern of Roosevelt and his advisors for the plight of the Jews inside the Third Reich, this ethical question was even less important than the issue of national security in prompting the preparation for war. The American decision to enter the war, Hearden argues, was actually based much more upon economic considerations and ideological commitments than on either moral aspirations or military apprehensions. Roosevelt, his advisors, and influential business leaders were primarily concerned about the menace that triumphant Germany would present the free enterprise system in the United States. If Hitler and the Axis powers succeeded in dividing the world into exclusive trade zones, the New Deal planners would have to regulate the American economy to create an internal balance between supply and demand. Convinced that capitalism could not function within the framework of only one country, they chose to fight to keep foreign markets open for surplus American commodities and thereby to preserve entrepreneurial freedom in the United States. (shrink)

A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed... There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. That is why (...) one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there still is a danger that you will stratify again everything, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes, couch grass is also a rhizome.Edited by Sylvere Lotringer, On the Line was the first book published in the new "Foreign Agents" series in 1983. It gathers together two seminal texts that Deleuze and Guattari would later elaborate on in A Thousand Plateaus. First delivered in French by Deleuze (drawing graphs on the blackboard) at the "Schizo-Culture" conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in 1975, "Rhizome" introduced a new kind of thinking in philosophy, both non-dialectical and non-hierarchical. The two didn't expect this neo-anarchical blue-print would eventually offer an early template for the understanding of the internet. "Rhizome" substitutes pragmatic, "couch grass," free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree.In "Politics," superceding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze envisages the social macrocosm as a series of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, he emphasizes, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the "becoming revolutionary." Throughout, he keeps dispelling the notion of capitalism as a repressive machine only meant to extract surplus value from exploited workers and suggest that it could be opposed from within by redirecting the creativity and multiplicity of its flows.The multiple must be made, not always by adding another dimension, rather in the simplest way, by dint of sobriety... A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radices. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes... Even some animals are, in their pack forms. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all their function of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couch grass. (shrink)

The articles published in this issue of Ethical Perspectives all relate to the social and political consequences of phenomena such as uncertainty and anxiety. The biennial Multatuli Lecture, held in Leuven on May 12th, 2001, addressed this very theme. In her paper, “Anxiety and Uncertainty in Modern Society”, Mary Douglas, one of the keynote speakers at the conference, puts forward the view that certainty is only possible when uncertainty is held in check by some kind of institution. Citing examples from (...) her vast experience of various cultural systems, she argues that the loss of certainty in contemporary society, lamented by many, should hardly come as a surprise. Modern demography, technology and forms of labour have contributed to the decline of many traditional institutions, and increased the flexibility and open-endedness of our experience. Douglas realizes that a return to traditional forms of community, and hence greater certainty, is a chimera. She argues that we should rather examine our desire for greater certainty, and prepare ourselves to live with uncertainty, without regrets.In “Habit and History”, Robert Bellah recalls the distinction between elaborated and restricted speech codes — described by Mary Douglas in her book Natural Symbols — and employs it to interpret the contemporary tension between individual autonomy and social solidarity. For Bellah, the history of modernity is an account of the ever increasing dominance of personal freedom, elaborated speech codes and a critical spirit at the expense of ritual practices, loyalty to social institutions and the sense of community. He suggests that we will only succeed in building livable futures once we have given up the illusion of autonomy as something absolute. Instead of viewing elaborated code and restricted code as mutually exclusive, Bellah wishes to explore the possible complementarities between the two, while acknowledging that only the restricted code gives meaning to our lives.Any wish to eradicate the causes of anxiety takes it for granted that a society released from the throes of anxiety would be a desirable one. In his article, “Whistling in the Dark”, Rudi Visker questions this assumption, drawing on a tradition of thought that seeks to emphasize anxiety's revelatory function: anxiety, as Mary Douglas also pointed out, can teach us a valuable lesson about our situation, about the limitations human lives are subject to. Rather than a condition that is produced by identifiable causes, anxiety should be considered as something that is there from the start, and society's task would then be to give this ineradicable anxiety an acceptable outlet or structure.Many critics of modernity posit a close relationship between the decline of traditional meaning systems and the increasing discontent among certain groups within society. Recently, more empirical research is being carried out in order to ascertain whether such a relationship indeed exists. In their paper, “The Malaise of Limitlessness”, Mark Elchardus and Jessy Siongers present the results of an investigation into the influence of de-traditionalization on various indicators of social discontent and social well-being, among young people of secondary-school age in Belgium. Although the concept of a tradition, thus also `de-traditionalization', is notoriously difficult to pin down, Elchardus and Siongers find evidence to support the view that the modernization process, with its increased individual choice and greater self-reflection, has led to the loss of meaningful reference points, and that this, in turn, is associated with uncertainty and malaise. Interestingly, there is also evidence of a correlation between social malaise and various attitudes such as intolerance, authoritarianism and anti-democratic feelings.While the previous contributions hint at what might be called an ethical form of sublimation, where anxiety is contained and directed towards acceptable objectives, Duston Moore's article, “Revolutionary Eros”, raises the prospect of an explicitly political form of sublimation. In this wide-ranging commentary on Marcuse's masterwork, Eros and Civilization, Moore works out the far-reaching political and economic consequences of what at first sight would seem to be a matter for private individuals: desire and its repression by nature and culture . For Marcuse, the performance principle is only one among an entire field of alternate possibilities for directing surplus-repression. The full critical force of Marcuse's argument lies in the suggestion that there may be other ways, that surplus-repression might be transformed, thus leading to new kinds of social relations and new, as yet unimagined forms of labour. (shrink)