Biometrics is the science of establishing the identity of an individual based on their physical attributes. Ethical concerns surrounding the appropriate use of biometrics have been raised, especial...

Health care reform in the United States and United Kingdom has resulted in the cross-fertilization of policy. The “new” health care models adopted by the two jurisdictions utilize free market principles for reasons of quality, efficiency, and cost, but also feature characteristics of a state-run model, through the provision of a safety net for citizens and a buffer against the commodification of health. In this sense, the health care systems of the US and UK are more congruent than they were. (...) Here we identify two distinct narratives that emerge from health care reform undertaken in these jurisdictions. The “revolutionary” narrative views the reforms as fundamental change whilst the “evolutionary” narrative accepts them as natural development. We argue that neither the revolutionary nor the evolutionary narrative adequately characterizes the reforms undertaken in health care because neither takes sufficient account of the broader setting in which reform has occurred. In seeking to examine and explain the jurisdictions' apparent drive to the middle, we propose a distinctive evolutionary narrative, that of “convergence,” which, as well as adopting a less parochial perspective on developments in health care policy and provision, also situates the reforms politically, constitutionally, and comparatively. (shrink)

Two narratives have emerged to describe recent health care reforms in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. One narrative speaks of revolution, that the adoptions of the Affordable Care Act 2010 in the US, and the Health and Social Care Act 2012 in the UK, have resulted in fundamental, large-scale philosophical, political and legal change in the jurisdictions’ respective health care systems. The other narrative evokes evolution, identifying each new legislative scheme as a natural development of existing (...) governance structures. Policymakers in both the US and UK face the problem of a health care system which, as traditionally envisaged, cannot offer universal access to health care at a reasonable, or politically acceptable, price. (shrink)

This essay suggests that to read black art the viewer is obliged to read what is not there. What does this paradoxical statement imply? First, it implies that every black image is a caricature—a refusal—of the blackness of its concept; and to that extent what we see as black is no longer readable or seeable as image (or Dasein). Secondly, taking as my example the singular relation between pain and image in the artwork of Donald Rodney, and in particular the (...) notion of a corpus exanime, I examine the implications of this notion for the traditions of art, philosophy, and aesthetics more generally. (shrink)

A close analysis of contemporary and historical extraction of Caspian oil and its transportation, via pipeline and tanker, to central Europe, frames an investigation into interrelationships between the organization and conditioning of European societies and their fuel mobility systems. For the fuel used for contemporary mobility systems relies on the mobility systems of fuel. The article examines the governmental and capital structures that have driven oil consumption growth since the 1870s, enabled the powering of geopolitics and determined the spatiality of (...) carbonized sociotechnical systems. It unpacks the current forces that resist any shift away from this petroculture, any ‘powering down’ of society. (shrink)

In this essay I reconsider Lacan’s theory of the signifier in relation to the late concept lalangue and blackness. The article is intended as a summary of the arguments put forward in the author’s Lacan Noir (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

In Of Effacement, David Marriott endeavors to demolish established opinion about what Blackness is and reorient our understanding of what it is not in art, philosophy, autobiography, literary theory, political theory, and psychoanalysis. With the critical rigor and polemical bravura which he displayed in Whither Fanon? Marriott here considers the relationships between language, judgement and effacement, and shows how effacement has become the dominant force in anti-Blackness. Both skeptically and emphatically, Marriott presents a series of radical philosophical (...) engagements with Fanon's "is not" (n'est pas) and its "Black" political truth. How does one speak - let alone represent - that which is without existence? Is Blackness n'est pas because it has yet to be thought as Blackness? And if so, when Fanon writes of Blackness, that it is n'est pas (is not), where should one look to make sense of this n'est pas? In Of Effacement, Marriott anchors these questions by addressing the most fundamental perennial questions concerning the nature of freedom, resistance, mastery, life and liberation, via a series of analyses of such key figures as Huey Newton, Nietzsche, Malcolm X, Edward Said, Georges Bataille, Stuart Hall, and Lacan. He thus develops the basis for a reading of Blackness by recasting its effacement as an identity, while insisting on it as a fundamental question for philosophy. (shrink)

The four essays collected in this dossier are directed upon the contemporary understandings of blackness, as an ontology, a phenomenology, or a historicity. In the order of their presentation they encompass and situate what seems first to limit black being or overflow it, but which, when questioned, that is, disclosed, or unconcealed, does not fit into this logos, nor is ordered by it, even making what is most discernable about blackness in its past, future, or present, seem imaginary, moored in (...) a non-present,and presence, but in ways which make the non-being that marks blackness as sign, affect, or speaking being, unthinkable except as an appearing, a manifestation, an identity.As a dossier directed upon the present philosophical understanding of blackness, each paper seeks to unanchor blackness from the meanings and presuppositions that it normally calls forth. Beyond what is discernable, or ready-made, each paper addresses structures that make (and have made) blackness discernable as the always given to be seen, as meaningless speech, as pathology, as a concept beyond reason.The dossier opens with a question: what kind of disturbance does blackness present to being? Why does it seem to madden reason, or call forth frenzy? In Calvin Warren’s essay, “The Karen Call,” what comes into correlation with blackness are various kinds of emergency that structure white thought and presence but that belie witnessing and intelligibility, and in whose chain of significations can be discerned an ontological privilege that constitutes the world. To appear emergent, it seems, all blackness has to do is become one with the myth that bans or compromises it; a manifestation in which subject-object relations are already polarized by the dangers that deploy it in dramas of emergency. Once blackness becomes emergent, there is no escape, for it comes up against what Warren, reading Heidegger against the grain, suggests is a racial destiny of Being. To appear black is forthwith to resemble an es gibt that is indissociable from threat, falsehood, fantasy, and obliteration. To that extent, blackness attests to a kind of ontological emergency without surcease or hope, and one whose trace remains in every moment or glimpse; whose technical modality and structure always returns us to the call that is neither speech nor gaze, word nor symbol, but represents an extimacy that is undeconstructable, beyond utterance, meaning, or reparation.Such extimacy seems to induce a crisis in the philosophical notion of being itself. In Axelle Karera’s essay, “Paraontology,” the question asked is why blackness cannot be contained or fitted into ontology itself; or, if philosophy is ontology, why does blackness seem to signify an irreducible resistance to it?How does such resistance occur? If blackness can only be presented as “paraontology,” a word that seems to shelter ontology at the same time as it presents the search for a new order of being, what does the para teach us about blackness as disorder, resistance, or identity? What is its philosophical genealogy and affiliation, and why does the para itself seem to never get beyond its own conciliation, or filiation to philosophy, whose ordering and racist historicity thereby remains the seme and mark of the para as interval, trope, and index? Or, put more simply, can blackness ever resist its own resistance as trope, conjuncture, or representation? Retracing that genealogy through the work of Oskar Becker, Karera uncovers a surreptitious repetition in black uses of the word, in whose weave can be discerned a fascist interference that not only undermines the fugitivity of the resistance so claimed, but one that unwittingly repeats a fascist ontology of world, history, and being.1 It’s a startling, deeply disturbing claim. But the apparent echoing of the Heideggerian bell in black significations of ontology suggests that what is being reabsorbed here is not so much a radical difference but a concept that remains justified and in fee to, pardoned and annulled by, a white notion of being. What, then, can it mean to think blackness as para? Nothing more than a philosophical confusion that confuses l’être qui fuit, that is, the lack that Lacan says cannot be completed or resisted, for an appositional fantasy of displacement. Here everything that is deemed black has to be made meaningful in apposition to ontology, but everything that is black must also, it seems, always return apposition to the white para of ontology; to be black and appositional would, it seems, produce only the disavowal of the philosophical genealogy that always already determines it.One would be right to distrust such claims—the moralism of the refusal, and the scandal of the faux resistance by which the para hides behind its own whited-out screen.In the third contribution to the dossier, the question asked is what would it mean for blackness to repair itself, to let go or retrieve and so redeem its own historical conjuncture? How do we refer to an irreparable past, that is, a past that keeps on coming back, but one that has no sign or signified, no memory that can recapture or reveal it, or simply rejoin us to it without remainder? Rinaldo Walcott’s essay, “‘Retrospective Significance,’” revisits the reparations debate as a question of black being. Instead of repair, he finds desolation and emptiness, or what he calls a staggeringly incoherent rhetoric of coherency. It’s a paradox that addresses what it means to remember or to forget a nothing; if blackness is nothing, how does one reconnect with it, bond with it, compensate it in its historic devastation? What would it mean to receive meaning from such devastation, to express it if this nothingness is absolute, or absolutely valueless? If ontology is a structure, then blackness, Walcott suggests, expresses nothing less than a “slave-ness” that continues to confront and disturb us absolutely, irrevocably. As such slave-ness is the trace that remains as a sign of the irreparable. As a trace, and not a sign, slave-ness becomes the primordial signifier of being, nation, history, and diaspora. But it is what makes it irrecuperable that defines its value and difficulty for the very language of reparation. Walcott pursues this difficult, enigmatic thread through the work of black thinkers on diaspora and identity. He concludes: black being cannot be dissociated from the disturbance it offers value, conscience, and any thought of alterity.The final and fourth contribution returns to the question of blackness as the trace or thread (the monstration) of being. How does one follow the thread (montrer) of blackness if it is always already withdrawn from being? David Marriott’s essay, “Ontology and Lalangue,” evokes Lacan’s concept of lalangue in pursuit of this enigmatic equivocation between letter and signifier, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Showing how both discourses have sought to master this exorbitance as master and/or free it as slave, I show how blackness is extinguished by the very words used to precipitate it into being. The slavish audacity of this lalangue is then shown to disarticulate, or more exactly, withdraw from ontology, but only so that whiteness can be presented and proclaimed all the more as the un-representable truth and logic of Dasein. This way of excluding blackness while preserving whiteness is not only central to philosophical and psychoanalytic understandings of language, Marriott argues, but this way of manifesting itself without manifesting itself is also crucial to the racialization of the logos as such.What is essential here is the way a meaning that is beyond meaning or representation is inserted into a problematic of mastery and servitude that advances-conceals a racial genealogy but in ways that makes the being of blackness an enigma. As such, blackness becomes an exorbitance that is always effaced in its monstration. More, its revelation must necessarily be unrecognized as the very locus of knowledge and truth. In that sense, what would it mean to figure, or to speak, this n’est pas without the consolation of being, meaning, truth, or logic? What would it mean to represent it as situated or defined by the language of ontology? Is black speaking being always in a relationship to and simultaneously the manifestation of a lalangue of lalangue? (shrink)

Abstract:This essay takes up Huey Newton’s notion of revolutionary suicide. Against the objection that black suicide is merely reactive, Newton proposes that revolutionary suicide follows other principles and demonstrations. Revolutionary suicide is resistant but in ways that does not make it always possible to distinguish between resistance and reaction—in fact, Newton argues that black revolutionary suicide should be considered a life-affirmation, and that this affirmation reveals a will to power in a decidedly Nietzschean sense. This means—if we read suicide as (...) resistant in its reactions—that black affirmation cannot be read on the order of a sovereign decision (as a sacrificial relation to life and death); nor as will, representation, or as a refusal which always relates to an end (the end of oppression, or injustice). This is why, strictly speaking, Newton’s reading of revolutionary suicide is not to be confused with a classical notion of sovereignty (whether that of Bataille or Mbembe), nor with the political definition of self-murder as resistance (by Spivak, or Puar). At the end of this essay, the notion of revolutionary suicide is shown to be something else altogether. That is to say, revolutionary suicide serves not only to realize the form of the one and the multiple (according to a non-messianic and non-sacrificial economy), but also puts into question the presumed inescapable relation between blackness and state murder (due to the relentless nature of necropower and anti-blackness). (shrink)

Mental health clinicians treating youth in foster care face several ethical challenges, such as competence for treating youth in foster care, understanding who can provide informed consent, and confidentiality. However, few articles have addressed these ethical concerns or provided recommendations for clinicians on how to navigate these issues. This article presents a brief summary of the foster care system, an overview of the major ethical challenges clinicians may encounter when treating youth in foster care, areas of the American Psychological Association’s (...) Ethics Code, Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers, and American Counseling Association Code of Ethics most germane to the treatment of youth in foster care, and general recommendations for clinicians treating this population. (shrink)

Treatise on political power, statecraft, and the qualities of the ideal ruler.

Enjoy two classics of tactical and strategic thinking together in one volume! Despite being separated by 2000 years and half a world, these famous works of Niccol Machiavelli and Sun Tzu have much in common. Both books were produced during times of great unrest and both have altered the course of political and military thought and practice for generations. This book contains the acclaimed English translations of W.K. Marriott for The Prince and Lionel Giles for The Art of War.

This article presents an edition of, and commentary on, a fragment of papyrus preserved in the collection of the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. This well-preserved piece is a rare example of Arabic papyrus with lines of poetry. The text of the verses and their attribution in the papyrus will be studied in detail and traced through later sources, leading to a discussion on textual variation and authorship as well as on the value of papyrological (...) evidence vis-à-vis the corpus of classical Arabic literature. It will be shown that lineages of text and attribution can be highly complex and therefore do not lend themselves to linear representation, e.g., in book form or simple HTML format. The article outlines the requirements for alternative means of representation for textual layers and points to existing tools in Arabic studies and other disciplines. (shrink)

Assim como em outras partes do mundo, a situação midiática na Ásia sofre a influência dos poderes políticos, econômicos e culturais, refletidos em uma variedade de sistemas de funcionamento da mídia. Este artigo é trecho de tese de doutorado defendida em 2007 e analisa os discursos jornalísticos em três jornais (da Indonésia, da Malásia e de Cingapura) referentes aos atentados de Bali em 2002; contra o hotel JW Marriott em Jacarta em 2003; contra a embaixada da Austrália em Jacarta (...) em 2004 e ao atentado suicida em Bali em 2005. (shrink)

Press Release: Terrorism in Southeast Asia: An Interview with Abu Bakar Ba'asyir 10/03/2005 - In August, Dr. Scott Atran travelled to Southeast Asia and conducted extensive research on terrorist groups operating in the region. This interview with Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, alleged leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah organization, was conducted on August 13 and 15, 2005 from Cipinang Prison in Jakarta. Questions were formulated by Dr. Atran and posed for him in Behasa Indonesian by Taufiq Andrie. The interview took place in (...) a special visitor's room, where Ba'asyir had seven acolytes acting as his bodyguards, including Taufiq Halim, the perpetrator of the Atrium mall bombing in Jakarta, and Abdul Jabbar, who blew up the Philippines ambassador's house. Excerpts from the interview are below; click here to read the full interview. Q. In your personal view, what do you think of bombings in our homeland, namely the Bali, Marriott and Kuningan bombings? A. I call those who carried out these actions all mujahid. They all had a good intention, that is, Jihad in Allah's way, the aim of the jihad is to look for blessing from Allah. They are right that America is the proper target because America fights Islam. So in terms of their objectives, they are right, and the target of their attacks was right also. But their calculations are debatable. My view is that we should do bombings in conflict areas not in peaceful areas. We have to target the place of the enemy, not countries where many Muslims live. Q. What do you mean by “wrong calculation,” that the victims included Muslims? A. That was one them. In my calculation, if there are bombings in peaceful areas, this will cause fitnah [discord] and other parties will be involved. This is my opinion and I could be wrong. Yet I still consider them mujahid. If they made mistakes, they are only human beings who can be wrong. Moreover, their attacks could be considered as self-defense. (shrink)