Haneke’s film Funny Games is a reflection on the nature of pain and representation. I argue that the film closely follows Elaine Scarry’s arguments about the structure of torture. Further, by refusing to appeal to categories of generalization such as ‘sadism’ and ‘psychopathy’, Haneke undermines the process of finding meaning in violence. Haneke positions his audiences as more than just witnesses to torture, but active participants in cruelty.

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has (...) changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

Who was truly capable of experiencing pain? In this article, I explore ideas about the distribution of bodily sensitivity in patients from the early nineteenth century to 1965 in Anglo-American societies. While certain patients were regarded as “truly hurting,” other patients’ distress could be disparaged or not even registered as being “real pain.” Such judgments had major effects on regimes of pain-alleviation. Indeed, it took until the late twentieth century for the routine underestimation of the sufferings of certain groups of (...) people to be deemed scandalous. Often the categorizations were contradictory. For instance, the humble status of workers and immigrants meant that they were said to be insensitive to noxious stimuli; the profound inferiority of these same patients meant that they were especially likely to respond with “exaggerated” sensitivity. How did physicians hold such positions simultaneously? Pain-assignation claimed to be based on natural hierarchical schemas, but the great Chain of Feeling was more fluid than it seemed. (shrink)

Psychological trauma is a favoured trope of modernity. It has become commonplace to assume that all ‘bad events’ – and particularly those which involve violence – have a pathological effect on the sufferer’s psyche, as well as that of the perpetrators. This essay explores the ways victims of rape and sexual assault were understood in psychiatric, psychological, forensic, and legal texts in Britain and America from the 19th to the late 20th century. It argues that, unlike most other ‘bad events’, (...) which were incorporated within trauma narratives from the 1860s, the ascription of psychological trauma was only applied to rape victims a century later. Why and what were the consequences? (shrink)

The brutalities of the past century have taken place in the milieu of Enlightenment values. At present, even the ideals of human rights have been used to (at the very least) tolerate and (and at its worst) justify barbaric acts, such as torture. This article interrogates the diverse ways British, American, and Australian individuals engaged in extremes of violence during three major conflicts of the 20th century. Like servicemen and servicewomen today, these combatants struggled to find a language capable of (...) making sense of their violent deeds. Constraining their excesses of violence proved a formidable task. In particular, I examine the ways in which sexual violence was normalized. Finally, on returning home after the war, these individuals and civilian society more broadly struggled with the problem of ‘remembering’ wartime violence in the post-war world. The act of ‘framing’ extremes of violence was integral to the process of enabling perpetrators of violence to assimilate his or her acts into a peacetime self. (shrink)

From the earliest human cultures, nonhuman animals have been central to the sexual imaginary of humans. This article traces the modern history of bestiality from the nineteenth century, culminating...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response 4: The Summer of Our DiscontentCaroline EdwardsI write this response on the eve of another wave of industrial action in the UK in November 2022—the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) “UCU Rising” campaign, the latest in a series of regular disputes over pay and working conditions, the gender and ethnicities pay gap, and casualisation that has been ongoing since 2018. In 2022’s “summer of discontent,” we’ve seen our (...) rail, maritime and transport workers, airport staff, bus drivers, telecommunications workers, postal workers, nurses, refuse workers, and higher and further education staff engage in ongoing industrial disputes with intractable bosses. Even criminal barristers continue with an indefinite, uninterrupted strike after years of government cuts and chronic underinvestment. Everywhere you look, there is a palpable sense of a country on its knees. It’s nearly 100 years since the last General Strike of 1926 and in the UK it’s looking increasingly likely that we will have another General Strike on our hands soon. In “Two Cheers for Blueprints, or, Negative Reasons for Positive Utopianism” Antonis Balasopoulos contextualizes this within the longer economic durée of the shift from Fordist production to so-called flexible accumulation after 1972, writing in this issue that “the turn of capital to the faster and higher [End Page 554] profits involved in financialization rather than infrastructural and industrial investment, form much of the objective, structural ground for what can only be described as the rapid rise of a dystopian structure of feeling in western societies since the early 1970s.” Antonis’s brilliant summary reminds us of the monumental scale of the challenges facing utopian thought and praxis in our current moment. Make no mistake—the “crisis ordinariness” of everyday life under late capitalism that Lauren Berlant identified in Cruel Optimism (2011) has intensified in the years following the Global Financial Crisis (2007–8), the wave of Occupy protests in 2011, and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–). “For some time now,” as Antonis writes, the utopian goals of “happiness, fulfilment, [and] emancipation... have been out of the question altogether.”It’s hard not to agree with this assessment, given the current chaos of life in the UK. Adam Stock’s roundtable contribution “Funding Utopia: Utopian Studies and the Discourse of Academic Excellence” focuses on the academy’s complicity with the neoliberal financialization of what were previously protected as public goods (education, our health service, transport infrastructure, and so on) over the past three decades. As Adam notes, the rhetoric of “excellence” that has come to dominate all areas of university life—teaching, research, public engagement, and the quantifiable “impact” of university research beyond the academy—is really just another way of using competition to mask the market logic of scarcity. Swingeing cuts to publicly funded research have led to a scarcity of resources in scholarly knowledge production, which is legitimated through the discourse of “excellence” and “prestige.” Only a handful of elite research leaders are granted awards and the value of all research becomes judged by its proximity to this distribution (concentration) of wealth within a small number of institutions. Defending education as a public good has long given way to the desperate, existential struggle for survival at UK universities. Numerous institutions are on the brink of bankruptcy, which was the goal all along for the ideologically driven Office for Students (OfS). Market exit, as they euphemistically term it, proves market efficiency.At my own institution, Birkbeck, University of London, the challenge to utopian thinking is all too violently clear. Birkbeck has a special place in the UK higher education system—a university founded nearly 200 years ago in the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand (it was called the London Mechanics’ Institution back then) to offer education to working-class Londoners that [End Page 555] fitted around their busy working lives. As my colleague Joanna Bourke writes in Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (2022), life expectancy in the poorest parts of London was just twenty-nine years; cholera, typhoid, and typhus were major killers; and illiteracy was widespread. At Birkbeck, we are the only university to teach evening classes and offer the requisite support... (shrink)

Libertarian paternalism is a concept derived from cognitive psychology and behavioural science. It is behind policies that frame information in such a way as to encourage individuals to make choices which are in their best interests, while maintaining their freedom of choice. Clinicians may view their clinical consultations as far removed from the realms of cognitive psychology but on closer examination there are a number of striking similarities.

An organization emits carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) through its daily operations, such as the electricity used to power its offices, manufacture products, and then fossil fuels used in vehicles to distribute them. This is referred to as an organization’s carbon footprint, and there is increasing stakeholder and regulatory pressure on management teams globally to reduce them. On other words, it is increasingly critical that the quantity of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that a company is (...) releasing into the atmosphere can be accurately measured in order to ensure that is being reduced accordingly. The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is the most crucial tool for decarbonizing Europe, but it has also become a money-making machine. States and financial investors earn; for the power industry, which pays for it, the worst thing is not the system’s presence but its instability. Huge price jumps make it impossible to plan budgets and investments sensibly. This paper provides an introduction to the EU’s Emissions Trading System. As such it provides a discussion of the historical and legal context in which the EU ETS developed and now operates. This article covers the various ways in which these market dynamics, regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations have converged to make European carbon markets a critical topic for today’s analyst. (shrink)

This introduction highlights the themes that arise from The Missed: the productivity and negativity of unrealized potential and missed opportunity.

In recent years, countries have begun to establish ministries of transitional justice as part of political transitions from authoritarianism to democracy or from conflict to peace. This may reflect a broader historical trend in the administration of TJ, which has evolved from isolated offices within a particular ministry to ad hoc cross-ministry coordinating bodies to the establishment of dedicated ministries. The reasons for the establishment of specific ministries to pursue TJ, what we call ministerialization, have not attracted scholarly attention. This (...) article explores the causes and likely consequences of this development. In particular, it applies international relations, comparative politics, and public policy theories to explain the phenomenon. Contrary to some TJ literature that is concerned about hegemonic transnational discourse, international actors have played little to no role in shaping how TJ is bureaucratically managed. Rather, based upon fieldwork in Solomon Islands and Tunisia, the article concludes that ministerialization has been the result of domestic policy entrepreneurship. For TJ ministries to become a norm, however, more transnational actors will need to be convinced of the benefits of such an institutional arrangement. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is a presentation of the H. Elzenberg's philosophical theory of the ethical ideal. I pay special attention to the most interesting, from the ethical point of view, parts of his concept. Elzen-berg proposed the ethical ideal, the so called ‘homo ethicus’. I present two ways of its realisation: melioristic and soteristic. My aim is also to prove that Elzenberg’s theory demonstrates that some features of ethical activity distinguish a human being from the background of (...) the natural world and make them exceptional. These attributes include: the realisation of the perfect values such as the good and the beauty, having an ethical will, self-sacrifice, aspiring to perfection and moral salvation. (shrink)

In this response to David Bradnick's and Bradford McCall's defense of Amos Yong's usage of emergence theory, we defend our previous argument regarding the tension between Yong's Pentecostal commitments and the philosophical entailments of emergence theory. We clarify and extend our previous concerns in three ways. First, we explore the difficulties of construing divine action naturalistically. Second, we clarify the problems of employing supervenience in theology. Third, we show why Bradnick's and McCall's advice to Yong to adopt weak emergence is (...) theologically costly. In conclusion, it is suggested that theologians within the science and religion dialogue should not fear, but recover, the language of supernaturalism and dualism. (shrink)

A growing body of research is exploring corporate communication in relation to corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on social media (SM). Nonetheless, while these studies have shown that SM communication may be an effective tool for reaching and engaging various stakeholders, how the design of corporate CSR communication engenders trustworthiness has yet to be examined. To address this gap, we suggest that SM communication may include important signals related to trust; thus, we investigate whether companies use sources of trustworthiness (reputation, (...) performance, and appearance) while communicating with stakeholders and the response of the latter to such communication. Our empirical analysis is based on a database containing over 66,000 CSR-related messages from eight companies focusing on communication extracted from Twitter. These data are coded according to three sources of trustworthiness and two dimensions of CSR communication (social and environmental). Our findings indicate that all three attributes of trustworthiness are used by companies in their CSR social media communication. We also document how corporate efforts to use CSR communication that engenders trustworthiness influence stakeholder engagement. Our study therefore contributes to the literature on trust in relation to CSR by illustrating the importance of signaling that includes different sources of trustworthiness or their combination in corporate communication. By analyzing how the various trust attributes included in CSR communication affect SM reactions, we also identify which attributes lead to greater stakeholder engagement overall, particularly for the two analyzed dimensions of CSR communication. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediational role of relational psychological contract in social beliefs and work input attitude dependency. We analyzed data taken from employees in four different organizations operating in the Pomeranian market. A mediation analysis showed a strongly mediating role of psychological contract in the negative relationship between perception of life as a zero-sum game and work input. The motivational effect of the relational psychological contract, that is the role of job security, interesting work, (...) a career in the company, opportunities for promotion and other HRM practices prevail over the significance of personal beliefs, especially when these are negative. If the company lacks the appropriate HRM systems then day-to-day social exchanges can be crucial in modifying the social beliefs of the employee. (shrink)

The author analyzes the successful strategy of overcoming financial breakdown in the case study of Iceland. The aim of the article is to verify a hypothesis that the Icelandic model could become a panacea for future crises? A document analysis method is applied to present essential indicators such as GDP and trade balance. With the use of a source analysis method, the collapse of the financial sector is determined as the main cause of the slump. The systematization of crisis events (...) is introduced and deepened by the social and political situation. Changes in the state’s condition after the crash are provided and future forecasts about economic development are discussed. As a summing up, the author disapproves of the hypothesis that the Icelandic model of overcoming the financial breakdown as a panacea for future crises, pointing out that it is only applicable for specific cases and cannot be seen as a magical remedy for every kind of crisis. (shrink)

The use of assisted reproductive technology is becoming more and more common nowadays and the procedures that a few years ago would be seen as experimental have now become basic benefits. The present text covers the issues of risks and conflicts faced by family members and related with the use of technology in the process of conceiving and giving birth to a child. The authors pay special attention to the possible use of foreign germ cells in the conception of a (...) child. The article aims to demonstrate that the use of modern and advanced medical technology in health care in the field of medically assisted procreation may be seen as a benefit for the family, which satisfies the desire to have a child, but in the long run it may give rise to legal or psychological problems as well. The authors examine the draft on the infertility treatment. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine whether relational mobility on a country level related to individuals’ tendencies to restrict their movement following the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic and following the issuance of stay-at-home orders in their country. We use data on geographic mobility, composed of records of geolocation information provided via mobile phones, to examine changes in geographic mobility at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that individuals in countries with higher RM tended to decrease their geographic (...) mobility more than those in countries with lower RM following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar results were found for wealth gross domestic product, but were independent of RM. These results suggest that individuals in countries with higher RM were more responsive to calls to reduce geographic mobility. (shrink)

Our contributors invite new ways of thinking Hegel's ideas through contemporary art and theories that arise from current perspectives; and of thinking through such art and perspectives via Hegelianism.

This introduction highlights the themes that arise from The Missed: the productivity and negativity of unrealized potential and missed opportunity.

Because of its elegant simplicity, the Arabidopsis root has become a model for studying plant organogenesis. In this review we focus on recent results indicating the importance of signaling in root development. A role for positional information in root cell specification has been demonstrated by ablation analyses. Through mutational analysis, genes have been identified that play a role in radial pattern formation. The embryonic phenotypes of these mutants raised the possibility that division patterns in post‐embryonic roots are dependent on signaling (...) that originates during embryonic development. Analysis of expression of the SCARECROW gene indicates that it may play a role in this ‘top‐down’ signaling process. Characterization of root epidermis development has led to the identification of negative regulators of root‐hair formation. These appear to set up a prepattern which is reinforced by signaling by plant hormones. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest deskrypcja sytuacji dziecka żydowskiego w Holokauście. Materiał badawczy stanowiły dla mnie słuchowiska i reportaże radiowe z lat 1950–2021 odnalezione w archiwach trzech rozgłośni radiowych: Polskie Radio w Warszawie (tu: Studio Reportażu i Dokumentu PR oraz Teatr Polskiego Radia), Polskie Radio Lublin i Polskie Radio Łódź. Do jego opracowania została wykorzystana metoda jakościowej analizy zawartości.

Overall this book is very good at doing what it claims to do, namely, providing an effective guidebook to Descartes and his Meditations. It should prove quite useful for both graduate and undergraduate students who are reading Descartes and for their teachers. The strengths of the book include a good overview of Descartes and his context, a well developed focus on the main arguments, clear examples highlighting important claims, and good referrals to secondary literature of the type a student or (...) faculty member is likely to find in an adequate academic library. The book is broken into three parts, with part 2 being the most substantive. (shrink)

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) has commonly been seen as Europe’s leading philosopher since Kant. His influence extended across the globe down to the Second World War – not least through his dissident disciple, Karl Marx. Since then, despite intermittent revivals, his importance has tended to be eclipsed by a rising tide of anti-modernist polemic, extending from Heidegger to postmodernism. Central to Hegel’s political thought was his view of the French Revolution. But notwithstanding its pivotal role in the development of (...) his ideas, his reaction to that event has been systematically misconstrued. In presenting a more faithful account of Hegel’s interpretation of his own era, the argument presented here places his response to contemporary developments in the context of a series of World Revolutions which framed the meaning of his age. This approach serves to illustrate the unique combination of historical and philosophical reasoning on which Hegel’s thought depended. In the process, reconstructing his arguments raises challenging questions about the applicability of bygone political ideas to later historical periods. (shrink)

The concept of ‘Ethnicity’ still enjoys some currency in the historical and social science literature. However, the cogency of the idea remains disputed. First coming to prominence in the 1980s, the word is often used to depict the character of social relations in the context of conflicts over sovereignty. The case of Northern Ireland presents a paradigmatic example. This article is a rejoinder to Ian McBride’s contention that my scepticism about the notion lacks justification. With reference to disputes over the (...) state, I show in response that ‘ethnicity’ in effect means nationality. I further claim that the nation state is a successor to the dynastic state. In clarifying the meaning of this arrangement, the article brings out how the nation is a juridical rather than empirical category. More specifically, it derives from the notion of corporate personality in law. For this reason, its retrospective integrity is a matter of fabrication, depending on the fiction of ancestral continuity. At the same time, its future-oriented cohesiveness means that it must be invested with a unifying will. I conclude that the legitimacy of a nation state rests on its democratic will, whose coherence is expressed in the action of its government. (shrink)

Is there a political philosophy of conservatism? A history of the phenomenon written along sceptical lines casts doubt on the existence of a transhistorical doctrine, or even an enduring conservative outlook. The main typologies of conservatism uniformly trace its origins to opposition to the French Revolution. Accordingly, Edmund Burke is standardly singled out as the ‘father’ of this style of politics. Yet Burke was de facto an opposition Whig who devoted his career to assorted programmes of reform. In restoring Burke (...) to his original milieu, the argument presented here takes issue with 20th-century accounts of conservative ideology developed by such figures as Karl Mannheim, Klaus Epstein and Samuel Huntington. It argues that the idea of a conservative tradition is best seen as a belated construction, and that the notion of a univocal philosophy of conservatism is basically misconceived. (shrink)

Suele considerarse a Hegel (1770-1831) el filósofo europeo más importante desde Kant. Su influencia se extendió por todo el mundo hasta la Segunda Guerra Mundial, sobre todo a través de su discípulo díscolo, Karl Marx. Desde entonces, su importancia ha tendido a verse eclipsada por una marea creciente de polémica antimodernista, que ha ido de Heidegger al postmodernismo (aunque de forma ocasional e intermitente haya vuelto a prestársele atención). La visión que Hegel tenía de la Revolución Francesa fue fundamental en (...) la forja de su pensamiento político. Sin embargo, a pesar del papel decisivo que desempeñó en el desarrollo de sus ideas, su reacción ante este acontecimiento ha sido sistemáticamente malinterpretada. Mediante la presentación de un relato más fiel de la interpretación que Hegel hizo de su propia época, el argumento que aquí se expone sitúa su respuesta a los acontecimientos contemporáneos en el contexto de una serie de Revoluciones Mundiales que determinaron el significado de su época. Esta manera de aproximarse al problema sirve para ilustrar la singular combinación de razonamiento histórico y filosófico de la que dependía el pensamiento de Hegel. Cuando procedemos de ese modo, la reconstrucción de sus argumentos nos lleva a poner en cuestión la aplicabilidad de las ideas políticas del pasado a los periodos históricos posteriores. (shrink)