The maneuvre carried out by the Israeli army at Nablus in April of 2002 consisted of interpreting the private house as an open passageway, and « walking through walls. » It involved a conception of the city as not just the site, but as the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid matter that is forever contingent and in flux. Who makes such interpretations ? Since the end of the cold war a vast intellectual field has been established (...) in order to rethink military operations on urban terrain. Soldiers take crash courses to master topics such as urban infrastructure or complex system analysis, and appeal as well to a variety of theories developed within contemporary civilian academia. The military appropriation of these theories is studied here by way of interviews with officers, in order to turn our attention to the possibility that, as Herbert Marcuse suggested, with the growing integration between the various aspects of society, « contradiction and criticism » could be equally subsumed and made operative as an instrumental tool by the hegemony of power. The subversion of the wall becomes the prerogative of the Israeli military in the Palestinian refugee camps. (shrink)

Israel’s 22-day attack on Gaza in December 2008—January 2009 exposed a paradox: the attack was not only one of the most violent and destructive of Israel’s recent wars on the Palestinians and the one most strongly opposed by its critics, but also the one in which Israeli experts in international humanitarian law — the area of the law that regulates the conduct of war — were most closely involved. The article demonstrates how these facts are connected.

This paper studies dialogicity in posts and their comments. Focusing on political slogans in the Facebook page of Israel PM Binyamin Netanyahu, we examine the ways comments meta-represent the posts in various degrees of resemblance. Starting with the premise that comments/post interactions are dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense, we argue that comments are dialogic in yet another way, which is related to the form and degree of resemblance between them. The conceptualization draws on the notion of meta-representation supplemented by insights (...) gained from accommodation theory and Bakhtin’s dialogism. We argue that through resemblance, the propositional content, ideology and viewpoint conveyed by the initiating slogan are incorporated in the comment, and a tacit dialogue is constructed between them. An additional layer of polyphony is added to the multiplicity of ratified voices otherwise manifest in the interaction between separate posts and comments. (shrink)

The principle of the lesser evil--the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice--has long been a cornerstone of Western ethical philosophy. From its roots in classical ethics and Christian theology, to Hannah Arendt's exploration of the work of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi regime, the author explores its development in three key transformations of the problem: the defining intervention of Medecins Sans Frontisres in mid-1980s in Ethiopia; the separation wall in Israel-Palestine; (...) and international and human rights law in Bosnia, Gaza and Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of new research, the author charts the latest manifestation of this age-old idea. In doing so he shows how military and political intervention acquired a new humanitarian acceptability and legality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.--Publisher description. (shrink)

Les investigations esthétiques ont un double objectif : elles sont à la fois des investigations sur le monde et des enquêtes sur les moyens de le connaître. Cela signifie qu’elles cherchent à être redevables à la fois des événements et des dispositifs avec lesquels nous les percevons. Elles cherchent à établir des prétentions à la vérité tout en critiquant les institutions du pouvoir et du savoir qui revendiquent le monopole des mécanismes de production de la vérité.

The article contributes to creating an outline of the significant postwar theoretical approaches that examine the role, purpose, and significance of architecture in war and war crimes. Starting from the Clausewitz thesis that?war is not autonomous?, this paper attempts to reveal?the blood that has dried in the codes?, politics hidden behind the four walls of architecture. From the concepts of Brutality in Stone, Warchitecture or Forensic Architecture, through the lenses of architecture, the article exposes war, politics, and ideologies that shape (...) and drive architecture by reimagining and repurposing it both in its primary, functional and cultural, representative sense. A shift from?the era of the witness? to the decade of evidence promotes architecture and its remains to the level of science, global governing, and law. The connection of timely-distanced emancipatory practices influenced by Holocaust studies establishes a discursive field for architecture as a performative rather than representative practice. The theoretical frame of the postwar landscape as second nature is crucial for discussing the role of architecture in the Holocaust. Furthermore, it stresses the work of Herscher and Weizman as a contribution to the critique of the depoliticized processes of resolution of the contemporary war crimes and post-conflict reconciliation. Architecture as a societal practice could potentially have a central position in memory and knowledge production, as well as the production of a counter-public sphere. (shrink)

The recent debate on pragmatics and the law has found ways to circumvent an important distinction, originally drawn by Dascal and Wróblewski (1991), between the historical law-maker, the current law-maker, and the ideal/rational law-maker.1 By insisting on the relationship between the rational law-maker and contextualism and textualism (see Manning 2005, 2006), I want to redress this fault in current discussions. In this paper, I start with general considerations on pragmatics, intentionality in ordinary conversation, and intentionality in the context of judiciary (...) proceedings and legal texts. I then move on to considerations on rationality as a prerequisite for understanding the law and on the rational law-maker, an ideal construct proposed by Dascal and Wróblewski (1991). I argue that contextualism (of the moderate kind) is the best way to carry out the program by Dascal and Wróblewski on interpretation and the rational law-maker (also see considerations by Fish 2005); (on contextualism see Dascal and Weizman 1987). I argue that bearing in mind the rational law-maker postulated by Dascal and Wróblewski is a guidance to interpretation of statutes whose texts create interpretative difficulties. I conclude by saying that the considerations on the rational law-maker constitute a compromise between Scalia’s (1997) textualism and contextualism (see Manning 2005, 2006 on the divide between textualism and contextualism). (shrink)

In his influential history of the post-1967 history of the Palestinian Occupation, radical Israeli architect Eyal Weizman show how even well-meaning decolonial efforts from privileged allies can be coopted by the colonizers, in what I call “de-decolonizing.” Here I focus on one of his examples, namely IDF (Israeli Defense Force) military professors repurposing the anarcho-communist philosophy of French postmodernist Gilles Deleuze into a weapon against Palestinian guerrilla resistance. My conclusion is that attempted decolonizing via (inevitably complicit) privileged allies must (...) include what Weizman calls “co-resistance,” and I call “reconstruction.” In other words, when a Deleuzian “line of flight” to “escape” is impossible, as arguably for Palestinians today, then one should follow the heroic example of the Bedouins, who (as Weizman acknowledges) are the only Arabs who have never stopped rebuilding their Palestine. (shrink)

Why does the air-target and its associated practices matter? This special section is about the politics, practices and ethics surrounding the target and efforts to subvert or circumvent them. Since Eyal Weizman’s groundbreaking essay on the ‘politics of verticality’ in 2002, there have been numerous attempts to critically open up the aerial gaze, but rarely have they come together for sustained analysis and critique, to explore the implications of the air-target’s techniques, processes, visual cultures and aesthetics for politics and (...) life itself. This special section brings together leading international experts in order to open out a fuller and more complete analysis of the kinds of tensions of verticality that lie at the heart of today’s warfare, security and politics. This introduction outlines three dominant problematics of the air-target, which the articles in the section will go on to explore in more detail. (shrink)

L’engouement actuel que suscitent les pratiques OSINT doit beaucoup à leur fonction politique de vérification des discours d’autorité. Mais cette posture contre-discursive à partir des sources ne suffit pas à garantir la légitimité d’une enquête et moins encore la justesse de ses conclusions : une difficulté se pose en ce que les moyens de l’enquête open source peuvent également être utilisés à des fins de propagande ou produire – de manière intentionnelle ou non – de la désinformation. Cet article interroge (...) ainsi les implications méthodologiques des contre-enquêtes OSINT par comparaison avec ce qu’Eyal Weizman nomme le « positivisme négatif ». (shrink)

Bashir Makhoul’s Beijing installation Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost is a maze made out of lenticular images of a Palestinian village that leads to a stack of cardboard boxes that could be a town, a military training camp, or just a heap of damaged packing containers. This article reads the installation through an initial misrecognition, seeing the boxes as a version of ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings. This displacement, where one place recalls somewhere else, is pursued through a discussion of W.J.T. Mitchell’s (...) reflections on comparative ‘promised lands’, Israeli artist Larry Abramson’s notion of abstraction as camouflage, Eyal Weizman’s analysis of simulated battle-spaces, and Mark Twain’s critical reading of desert spaces in the western US and Palestine. The article argues that Makhoul’s work calls up a series of associations between times and places that speaks not only to the specific but to a broader global hermeneutics of empire based on symbolic overdetermination and strategic concealment and erasure. (shrink)

A revision of George Kennedy's translation of, introdution to, and commentary on Aristotle's On Rhetoric. His translation is most accurate, his general introduction is the most thorough and insightful, and his brief introductions to sections of the work, along with his explanatory footnotes, are the most useful available.

The aim of the present text is to offer an interpretation of Eyal Weizman’s_concept of forensic aesthetics, demonstrating how this approach reveals the ways in which the aesthetic perception of violence, trauma, and decomposition of human dwelling can be transformed in the current digital optical war regime. Forensic aesthetics tries to grasp a_forensic sensibility as both an aesthetic and political practice, requiring individuals to become sensitive to violence and be able to comprehend and experience the affects of disintegration, trauma, (...) and despair that are characteristic of the experience of the survivor. The environment, dwelling, and architecture are not only inert observers, but rather have become material witnesses of crimes, violence, and destruction of various dwellings inhabited by various species. The application of digital technologies in forensic aesthetics carries a strong ethical appeal to avoid injustice. Traces and fragments of evidence, as well as multiple videos and images, are synchronized and recomposed within digital architectural environments and dwellings, as an optical and interpretative tool that shapes a new type of aesthetics. (shrink)

The aim of the present text is to offer an interpretation of Eyal Weizman’s_concept of forensic aesthetics, demonstrating how this approach reveals the ways in which the aesthetic perception of violence, trauma, and decomposition of human dwelling can be transformed in the current digital optical war regime. Forensic aesthetics tries to grasp a_forensic sensibility as both an aesthetic and political practice, requiring individuals to become sensitive to violence and be able to comprehend and experience the affects of disintegration, trauma, (...) and despair that are characteristic of the experience of the survivor. The environment, dwelling, and architecture are not only inert observers, but rather have become material witnesses of crimes, violence, and destruction of various dwellings inhabited by various species. The application of digital technologies in forensic aesthetics carries a strong ethical appeal to avoid injustice. Traces and fragments of evidence, as well as multiple videos and images, are synchronized and recomposed within digital architectural environments and dwellings, as an optical and interpretative tool that shapes a new type of aesthetics. (shrink)

Recent research on algebraic models of _quasi-Nelson logic_ has brought new attention to a number of classes of algebras which result from enriching (subreducts of) Heyting algebras with a special modal operator, known in the literature as a _nucleus_. Among these various algebraic structures, for which we employ the umbrella term _intuitionistic modal algebras_, some have been studied since at least the 1970s, usually within the framework of topology and sheaf theory. Others may seem more exotic, for their primitive operations (...) arise from algebraic terms of the intuitionistic modal language which have not been previously considered. We shall for instance investigate the variety of _weak implicative semilattices_, whose members are (non-necessarily distributive) meet semilattices endowed with a nucleus and an implication operation which is not a relative pseudo-complement but satisfies the postulates of Celani and Jansana’s strict implication. For each of these new classes of algebras we establish a representation and a topological duality which generalize the known ones for Heyting algebras enriched with a nucleus. (shrink)

Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

Classical text on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika philosophy; with Āloka Sanskrit commentary.

Classical work on Vedanta; includes Bhāṣyaratnaprabhā of Govindānanda and Śārīrakamīmāṃsābhāṣya of Śaṅkarācārya.

Classical work on Vedanta by Bādarāyaṇa; includes Śārīraka vijñānam bhāṣya of Śrī Madhusūdana Ojhā.

Purpose. The article is aimed to substantiate the view on the phenomenon of laughter as a subject of semiotic analysis, which leads to the following tasks: to reveal the possibilities of semiotics application in the study of laughter nature; to analyze the phenomenon of laughter as a cultural and natural phenomenon, as a sign and as an attribute; to consider the place of laughter in culture, which is understood as a sign system. Theoretical basis. The semiotic approach proceeds from the (...) fact that human lives in the world of signs, all the surrounding reality can be interpreted as a sign system. The basic concept of semiotics is the concept of a sign. The theoretical basis of the article is understanding the culture as a sign-symbolic system. Laughter is considered as a phenomenon ontologically rooted in human culture. At the same time, laughter is on the edge of culture. The research is based on the work of semiotic authors, cultural researchers, and the researchers of laughter. Originality. The originality lies in the application of the semiotic method to the research of laughter phenomenon, consideration of the dialectics of natural and cultural, signedness and non-signedness, manifested in the phenomenon of laughter. Conclusions. Laughter is considered as a psychophysiological phenomenon and as a cultural phenomenon. Laughter acts as an emotional manifestation, a physiological reaction, but socially and culturally mediated. In any case, laughter indicates an emotional or cognitive state of a human. Laughter acts as a process and result of the interpretation of a sign, a reaction to a sign. Laughter is a form and a means of communication. Being a natural phenomenon, in the process of social evolution, laughter acquires signedness, is integrated by culture as a sign system, and, at the same time, maintains a connection with nature. Thus, laughter occupies an ambivalent position between nature and culture. In the phenomenon of laughter, the dual state of human is revealed. In laughter, boundaries are blurred, the unity and opposition of natural and cultural, biological and social, soul and body, thought and feeling, sign and attribute are manifested. (shrink)

Eco-labels emphasize information disclosure as a tool to induce environmentally friendly behaviors by both firms and consumers. The goal of eco-labels is to reduce information asymmetry between producers and consumers over the environmental attributes of a product or service. However, by focusing on this information asymmetry, rather than on how the label meets consumer needs, eco-labels may send irrelevant, confusing, or even detrimental messages to consumers. In this article, the authors investigate how the environmental signal of eco-labels interacts with product (...) characteristics such as brand, quality, and price. In a discrete choice experiment, the authors examine consumer response to two similar eco-labels for wine, one associated with a quality reduction and the other not. The results show that respondents preferred both eco-labeled wines over otherwise identical conventional counterparts when the price was lower and the wine was from a lower quality region. However, they preferred conventional, more expensive wine from a high-quality region. This preference indicates that respondents not only obtain some warm glow value from eco-labeled wine but also possibly interpret eco-labeling as a signal of lower quality. This relationship held across both types of eco-labels, meaning that consumers did not understand the difference between them. This research contributes to the literature on information disclosure policies by highlighting important elements for effective eco-labels. These elements include consumer awareness and understanding of the eco-label, and consumer willingness to pay for an eco-labeled product. The results emphasize the need to create eco-labels that communicate clearly both the environmental attributes and the private benefits associated with them. (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

This book completes medical care by adding the comprehensive humanistic perspectives and philosophy of medicine.

Purpose. To consider the uniqueness of Descartes’ way of interpreting poetry as a type of philosophizing that makes it possible to comprehend the metaphysical nature of man. Its implementation involves the consistent solution of the following tasks: a) understanding methodological changes in the philosophy of the 20th century in the process of actualization of anthropological interest; b) argumentation of the importance of poetic thinking for early Descartes in the process of addressing modern historians of philosophy and the thinker’s texts. Theoretical (...) basis. I rely on the conceptual positions of phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics. Originality. Finding of the study is that poetic thinking is the most authentic way of meaningful comprehension of the metaphysicity of man. The paper outlines the nature of the expression of this correlation in the philosophizing of the 20th-21th centuries and substantiates the thesis about the importance of the poetic principle for understanding the phenomenon of man in early works by Descartes. Conclusions. The paper examined the methodological shifts in anthropologically oriented philosophizing of the 20th-21th centuries and focused on the manifestations of related moments in the philosophical legacy of Descartes. The latter demonstrates the existence of a still underestimated version of interpreting the metaphysical foundations of human existence, the form of understanding of which is poetic thinking. It is a form of caring for the humane in man. (shrink)

Basic work on Vedanta philosophy; with Sanskrit commentary with Hindi translation.