This article juxtaposes Anna Pawełczyńska’s writings with the works of Meir Dworzecki and Dov Levin. It will adopt a threefold analytical lens: first, using Pawełczyńska’s writings to reassess the conception of the early resistance that Dworzecki elaborated, second utilising Dworzecki’s viewpoint as a means to articulate Pawełczyńska’s perspective of Amidah, and then looking at Levin’s perspective on Pawełczyńska’s use of partisan testimony as a historical source. The main aims are to contribute to today’s debates on the Jewish resistance (...) and the relevance of partisanship in Holocaust historiography. The article also highlights some debates on the relationship between history and memory, as well as the necessity of rethinking Catholic-Jewish relations in Poland before and after the war. It presses for a new discussion of Dan Michman’s discourse of Jewish resistance, or Yehuda Bauer’s conceptualisation of it, and underscores the originality of Levin’s thought on memory as an essential tool for history. By way of a conclusion, the reader is invited to rethink the Polish World War II historiography and to read Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s contribution about the blessings of the Amidah. (shrink)

"The choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and an unreasonable utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed, it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on utopian dreaming."--Russell Jacoby, _Picture Imperfect_ Utopianism suffers from an image problem: A recent exhibition on utopias in Paris and New York included photographs of Hitler's _Mein Kampf_ and a Nazi concentration camp. Many observers judge utopians and their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst. (...) However, as noted social critic and historian Russell Jacoby argues in this salient, polemical, and innovative work, not only has utopianism been unfairly characterized, a return to an iconoclastic utopian spirit is vital for today's society. Shaped by the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, and other predominantly Jewish thinkers, iconoclastic utopianism revives society's dormant political imagination and offers hope for a better future. Writing against the grain of history, Jacoby reexamines the anti-utopian mindset and identifies how utopian thought came to be regarded with such suspicion. He challenges standard readings of such anti-utopian classics as _1984_ and _Brave New World_ and offers stinging critiques of the influential liberal and anti-utopian theorists Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper. He argues that these thinkers mistakenly equate utopianism with totalitarianism. The reputation of utopian thought has also suffered from the failures of, what Jacoby terms, the blueprint utopian tradition and its oppressive emphasis on detailing all aspects of society and providing fantastic images of the future. In contrast, the iconoclastic utopians, like those who follow God's prohibition against graven images, resist both the blueprinters' obsession with detail and the modern seduction of images. Jacoby suggests that by learning from the hopeful spirit of iconoclastic utopians and their willingness to accept new possibilities for society, we open ourselves to new and more imaginative ideas of the future. (shrink)

The concept of totalitarianism was particularly prevalent in intellectual and political debate in Germany in the 1970s, and was motivated largely by anti-totalitarian convictions. Although it did not enter everyday language, it persists in political rhetoric, where it is used today as a political football in speeches and constitutional reports. In response to historical approaches to the concept of totalitarianism, which generally contextualise the term and put forward alternative terms, this article probes the meaning of this term as (...) it is actually used and misused in political and educational contexts in contemporary Germany. It concludes by highlighting the fictitious (figurative, semantic and epistemological) dimensions of the rhetoric of anti-totalitarianism, and calls for a more genuinely liberal, non-totalitarian, posture. (shrink)

"The choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and an unreasonable utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed, it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on utopian dreaming."--Russell Jacoby, _Picture Imperfect_ Utopianism suffers from an image problem: A recent exhibition on utopias in Paris and New York included photographs of Hitler's _Mein Kampf_ and a Nazi concentration camp. Many observers judge utopians and their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst. (...) However, as noted social critic and historian Russell Jacoby argues in this salient, polemical, and innovative work, not only has utopianism been unfairly characterized, a return to an iconoclastic utopian spirit is vital for today's society. Shaped by the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, and other predominantly Jewish thinkers, iconoclastic utopianism revives society's dormant political imagination and offers hope for a better future. Writing against the grain of history, Jacoby reexamines the anti-utopian mindset and identifies how utopian thought came to be regarded with such suspicion. He challenges standard readings of such anti-utopian classics as _1984_ and _Brave New World_ and offers stinging critiques of the influential liberal and anti-utopian theorists Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper. He argues that these thinkers mistakenly equate utopianism with totalitarianism. The reputation of utopian thought has also suffered from the failures of, what Jacoby terms, the blueprint utopian tradition and its oppressive emphasis on detailing all aspects of society and providing fantastic images of the future. In contrast, the iconoclastic utopians, like those who follow God's prohibition against graven images, resist both the blueprinters' obsession with detail and the modern seduction of images. Jacoby suggests that by learning from the hopeful spirit of iconoclastic utopians and their willingness to accept new possibilities for society, we open ourselves to new and more imaginative ideas of the future. (shrink)

Jacob Talmon and Michael Oakeshott represent two opposite tendencies in the anti-totalitarian world view. Both thinkers share many central features of this broad intellectual trend, such as the equation between the Soviet and Nazi regimes, Anglophilia and the rejection of the utopian quest. Yet this basic agreement should not distract us from significant differences in attitude and temperament. Talmon, like most other critics of totalitarianism, was strongly affected by the atmosphere of a profound intellectual and political crisis in (...) Europe, and he regarded the danger of totalitarianism to be an inherent aspect of modernity itself. His liberalism was that of ‘fear’. By contrast, for Oakeshott, who believed in the strength of liberal, and specifically British, civilisation, totalitarianism was merely a child of resentment, a parasitic force with no positive message of its own. He thus displayed a greater measure of confidence in the fortunes of liberal modernity. (shrink)

After asking whether the concept of totalitarianism still has a meaning in today’s world, and whether its critique makes political sense, the author turns to the model provided by the two phases of Claude Lefort’s attempts to understand totalitarianism over the past 60 years. He distinguishes two distinct phases; the first is framed by critical Marxism, the second influenced by the phenomenology of the late Merleau-Ponty. The author stresses Lefort’s major works, including the role of his pathbreaking work on Machiavelli, (...) ‘ La critique du totalitarisme et l’invention de la démocratie’, ‘ Un homme en trop’ (on Solzenhitsyn and the Goulag), and ‘ La complication’ (which rejects the oversimplified interpretation of totalitarianism as simply an ideology). (shrink)

a new era of public protest began in 1999 with the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations, and continued through the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and the 2013 Gezi Park insurrection in Istanbul. This new era of demonstrations differed from movements that had come before in the understanding of politics employed by the protesters, reconstructing popular imaginations about the future, bringing about a reconsideration of politics, its domain, and time itself. This article investigates the Occupy Gezi movement that began (...) in Gezi Park and led to the occupation of Istanbul’s Taksim Square. I examine the events through Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Hungarian Revolution. Arendt’s five criteria for evaluating the status of the Hungarian Revolution as a “true event” help shed light on the politics of Occupy Gezi (Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism” 5). In spite of the two movements’ similarly unprecedented, spontaneous, non-ideological, and un-hierarchical characters, the Gezi Park protests differed from the Hungarian Revolution in important ways. This is particularly true of the reaction of the protesters to the violence to which they were exposed. In refusing to react in kind to the state’s violence, the Gezi Park protesters created a new public domain for confronting the state. It is possible to consider this movement to have been an anti-violent rather than a non- or counter-violent resistance. Important political conclusions follow from this distinction. (shrink)

The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance, highlighting the extent to which everyday communication is integrated into an extensive regime of control that relies on the ‘datafication’ of social life. Whilst such data-driven forms of governance have significant implications for citizenship and society, resistance to surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks has predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and policy advocacy (...) around privacy and data protection. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of social justice activists, we argue that there is a significant level of ambiguity around this kind of anti-surveillance resistance in relation to broader activist practices, and critical responses to the Snowden leaks have been confined within particular expert communities. Introducing the notion of ‘data justice’, we therefore go on to make the case that resistance to surveillance needs to be conceptualized on terms that can address the implications of this data-driven form of governance in relation to broader social justice agendas. Such an approach is needed, we suggest, in light of a shift to surveillance capitalism in which the collection, use and analysis of our data increasingly comes to shape the opportunities and possibilities available to us and the kind of society we live in. (shrink)

Amid the ongoing political turmoil, symbolized by the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, books and articles abound today to encourage us to re-read anti-totalitarian classics ‘for our times’. But what do we find in this body of work originally written in response to Nazism and Stalinism? Do we find a democratic consensus forged by a shared anti-totalitarian commitment? I doubt it. Considering the cases of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, this article highlights discord beneath what may (...) today appear like a post-war democratic consensus. I argue that the anti-totalitarian literature of the last century encompassed multiple political philosophies, which sometimes differed irreconcilably from each other. (shrink)

In the mid-1970s, the fascist-leaning dictatorships in Spain (1939–1977) and Portugal (1933–1974) fell. Closely linked to the 1973 oil crisis, debates over energy and technology policies became very prominent during the ensuing political redefinition of both countries. Two decades after the first international agreements between the Iberian regimes and the United States for the development of nuclear programs, a myriad of movements of social resistance to nuclear technology emerged in dialogue with anti-nuclear organizations in other European countries. Fun (...) and playfulness have been used for top–down popularization and banalization of nuclear technologies since the 1950s, but here pleasant forms of resistance also played a central role in contesting national energy plans, expert discourses, and vested interests. This article explores what we call “anti-nuclear fun,” the use of amusement, play, and humor as political and epistemic tools to familiarize society with the exceptional and daily risks of the “peaceful atom.”. (shrink)

Using the concept of postmemory—coined by Mariane Hirsch—this paper explores the role of photographs in recalling past trauma in two families who participated in the anticommunist armed resistance in Romania. Members of these families were executed and the survivors had to endure further persecution. The interviews revealed that some pictures offer the frame for remembering suppressed memories. The images have peculiar meanings for different generations of the same family. For the participants in this study, seeing the photographs equates to (...) reliving a past trauma and giving a new meaning to it. Pictures function as realms of encounter and reconciliation between present and past generations of the same family. The first outcome of the process is memory recovery; in this, people also recover their identity and the result is transgenerational healing. Some of the interviews discussed in this paper were done with members of my family. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sacred and the Myth: Havel's Greengrocer and the Transformation of Ideology in Communist Czechoslovakia Marci Shore University ofToronto There is nothing a free man is so anxious to do as to find something to worship. But it must be something unquestionable, that all men can agree to worship communally. For the great concern ofthese miserable creatures is not that every individual should find something to worship that he (...) personally considers worthy ofworship, but that they should find someming in which they can all believe and which they can all worship in common; it is essential that it should be in common. And it is precisely that requirement ofshared worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual man and the human race since the beginning of history. In their efforts to impose universal worship, men have unsheathed their swords and killed one another.Fyodor Dostoevsky (306) Thus the conflict between the aims of life and the aims of the system is not a conflict between two socially defined and separate communities; and only a very generalized view (and even that only approximative) permits us to divide society into the rulers and the ruled. Here, by the way, is one of the most important differences between the post-totalitarian system and classical dictatorships, in which this line of conflict can still be drawn according to social class. In the post-totalitarian system, 1 64Marci Shore this line runs defacto through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter ofthe system. Vaclav Havel (37) The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia arrived as a symbolically gentle conclusion to a half-century long era ofharrowing violence and totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. It was an era that saw the emergence ofNazism, Stalinism, and various indigenous fascisms, effecting a startling demonstration of the potency of ideology to co-opt minds and to wreak violence. The existence of communist ideology as a myth cohering communist totalitarian societies has been widely enough asserted. Yet this analysis can be taken to a further level through the aid oftwo paradigms. The first is a theory of human relationships developed by René Girard, which blends the disciplines ofliterary criticism, anthropology, philosophy, and political science. The second is a model arising from Vaclav Havel's parable of the greengrocer, told in "The Power ofthe Powerless" (1979). Girard's model posits the existence ofthe sacred, that locus of power that was once the pole of primitive religions. The core of the sacred is transfigured human violence. Girardian scholar Robert Hamerton-Kelly explains the process by which the sacred comes into being: Girard tells us that [the sacred] is a mendacious representation of human violence; "it is the sum ofhuman assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis." The element of "the overwhelming" defines the Sacred...but its primary content is violence understood as being...outside ofnormal human control. (142) The sacred is established as the result of a crisis, one which finds resolution in the purging ofa relatively arbitrary scapegoat. Following this catharsis, three expressions sustain the sacred: myth, ritual, and prohibition. An examination ofthe evolution ofthese expressions in Czechoslovakia from the Stalinist period through normalization (the so-termed "posttotalitarian " period described by Havel in his essay) reveals much about the paradoxical dynamics ofideologically-based totalitarianism—which Havel defines most poignantly by suggesting that at the essence of ideological totalitarianism is the collapsing of the traditional dichotomy between victim and oppressor. The Sacred and the Myth: Havel's Greengrocer165 A Girardian deconstruction of Stalinism A political space for Stalinism developed in Czechoslovakia through the tumultuous period of Nazi occupation and the communist nature of anti-Nazi resistance. By the eve ofthe 1948 communist coup, the communists had claimed thirty-eight percent ofthe popular vote in free elections. Milan Kundera describes the coup as a usurpation of power "not in bloodshed and violence, but to the cheers of about half the population" (1986, 8). Defining this initial fanaticism was its honesty, especially among the younger generation. A young Stalinist later to become a reformist, and still later a dissident, Zdenek Mlynár, explains... (shrink)

Despite three decades of research and development of anti-bullying intervention, this form of systematic aggression continues to be common in schools. The present study investigated if a contributing factor might be that some pupils are unreceptive to teachers? anti-bullying lessons. It invited 8?11?-year-old junior school pupils (N?=?227) to indicate if this was the case, and if so, to give their reasons. Many did indicate being unreceptive (81.9%). The most common reason was ?It is not for me because I (...) don?t bully anyone? (81.9%), followed by ?I know enough about bullying already? (22.9%), ?It is boring or I have heard it all before? (19.4%) and ?Teachers have to do it but they are not really interested in stopping bullying? (14.5%). Some significant age differences emerged. Results are discussed in terms of implications for anti-bullying work in schools. (shrink)

This paper explores abuse received by a Chilean right-wing female politician in tweets produced with the #CamilaPeluche hashtag, which aimed to shame her sexually. The data considers the period of 22 days since the creation and spread of the hashtag, which took place 5 days into the 2019 uprising in Chile. This paper follows a corpus-based critical discourse analysis that examines the most frequently used adjectives, that is, predication strategies, that characterise the politician, as well as their legitimating function through (...) the identification of van Leeuwen’s legitimation strategies. Results showed that what started as gendered aggression evolved towards a focus on social class and political stance due to the politician’s characteristics and those of the sociohistorical context where the aggressions originated. Furthermore, it was found that the politician’s anti-democratic values were used to justify abuse against her, presenting it as reasonable. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans Gabriel Rockhill et Pierre-Antoine Chardel, Technologies de contrôle dans la mondialisation : enjeux politiques, éthiques et esthétiques, Paris, Kimé, 2009, p. 165-182. Nous remercions Yves Citton de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Lorsqu'il s'agit de théoriser les sociétés de contrôle, les techniques par lesquelles elles opèrent et les résistances qu'on peut opposer à leurs nuisances, c'est généralement chez Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Toni Negri ou Paul - Comment penser le pouvoir dans le (...) monde contemporain? – Nouvel article. (shrink)

During India’s Emergency, anti-state poetry of a decidedly amateurish quality proliferated. Anti-Emergency poetry did little to bring about the restoration of democracy, nor could it have reasonably been mistaken for great art. So what was the purpose of writing resistance poetry if it was not meant to directly influence politics nor to be great art? Poetry as politics has a long history in the Islamicate world, dating back to the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. While until the 19th century (...) Islamicate poetry was tied to the Caliphates who employed poets to extol the virtues of the ruling classes, after the so-called ‘Rise of the West’ Islamicate poetry became associated instead with anti-colonial and anti-state movements across the Islamicate world from Morocco to Indonesia and from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. In this essay, I argue that the utility of resistance poetry in anti-state movements in South Asia has been to build solidarity among social movement participants. The sociology of social movements has long placed emphasis on the role of affective bonds and solidarity building for predicting social movement success, and poetry, in the Islamicate context especially, I argue, does exactly that. By circulating poems, social movement participants inform the reader that resistance and opposition exist, they inspire participants and would-be participants and calm fears that participants might have, especially in moments of political repression. These poems generate emotional and cultural bonds among social movement participants by linking anti-state movements to the centuries-old tradition of Islamicate poetry, thereby fostering solidarity and providing a firm basis for collective action. (shrink)

This article argues that Frank B. Wilderson's political ontology can be read as both a critique and a radicalization of Giorgio Agamben's formal political-ontological framework constructed around the two extreme poles of sovereignty and bare life. Wilderson critiques and expands Agamben's framework by locating the zero point of political abjection not within bare life, which is still implicated within the ontological zone of Human being by way of an included exclusion, but within Black social death, which is cut off absolutely (...) from Human being. While such a political ontological framework provides an extremely powerful optic for the absolute ontological abjection of Black existence in relation to all other racial positions in the modern West, its absolute prioritization limits the scope of an analysis of power relations that might offer an account of racial positioning that is both broader than and resistant to the political ontology of Western race relations. In conclusion, turning to Fred Moten's Black optimism and Deleuze's and Guattari's account of micropolitics and lines of flight, the article argues for a pragmatics of resistance that finds its practical condition of possibility within the micropolitical field of power relations that marks an excess to the anti-Black macropolitics of political ontology. (shrink)

This article discusses the debate about vaccination as a case of public scientific technological controversy. In the vaccination controversy there is a scientific question, the effectiveness of vaccines in the elimination of diseases; a question of risk assessment, possible adverse effects and the possibility that immunization causes idiopathic diseases; an ethical question, the balance of rights between the two groups and the limits of the freedom of choice of treatment; and a political issue, who must take decisions about immunization and (...) whether immunization should be mandatory. The results of the analysis of the controversy suggest that the attitudes of the anti-vaccination groups towards vaccination are largely explained by their worldview which comes majorly from New Age beliefs. This worldview causes differences in the interpretation of evidence, law, risk and science. (shrink)

This article discusses the debate about vaccination as a case of public scientific technological controversy. In the vaccination controversy there is a scientific question, the effectiveness of vaccines in the elimination of diseases; a question of risk assessment, possible adverse effects and the possibility that immunization causes idiopathic diseases; an ethical question, the balance of rights between the two groups and the limits of the freedom of choice of treatment; and a political issue, who must take decisions about immunization and (...) whether immunization should be mandatory. The results of the analysis of the controversy suggest that the attitudes of the anti-vaccination groups towards vaccination are largely explained by their worldview which comes majorly from New Age beliefs. This worldview causes differences in the interpretation of evidence, law, risk and science. (shrink)

We live today within a system in which state and corporate power aim to render space flat, transparent, and uniform, for only then can it be truly controlled. The gaze of power and the commodity form are capable of infiltrating even the darkest of corners, and often, we invite them into our most private spaces. We do so as a matter of convenience, but also to placate ourselves and cope with the alienation inherent in our everyday lives. The resulting dominant (...) space can best be termed totalitarian. It is space stripped of uniqueness, deprived of the “spatial aura” necessary for authentic experience. In Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura, Saladdin Ahmed sets out to help us grasp what has been lost before no trace remains. He draws attention to that which we might prefer not to see, but despite the bleakness of this indictment of reality, the book also offers a message of hope. Namely, it is only once we comprehend the magnitude of the threat to our spatial experience and our own complicity in sustaining this system that we can begin to resist the totalizing forces at work. (shrink)

Can anti-deportation resistance be justified, and if so how and by whom may, or perhaps should, unjust deportations be resisted? In this paper, I seek to provide an answer to these questions. The paper starts by describing the main forms and agents of anti-deportation action in the contemporary context. Subsequently, I examine how different justifications for principled resistance and disobedience may each be invoked in the case of deportation resistance. I then explore how worries about (...) the resister’s motivation for engaging in the action and their epistemic position apply in the specific context of anti-deportation action and consider in what circumstances there is not merely a right but a duty to resist deportation. The upshot of this argument, I conclude, is that the liberal state ought to respond to anti-deportation action not by criminalising disobedience and resistance in this field, but rather by creating legal avenues for such actors to influence deportation decision-making. DOI 10.17879/95189423213. (shrink)

In all the arts a war is being waged between modernists and postmodernists. Radicals have tended to side with the modernists against the forces of conservatism. Postmodern Culture is a break with this tendency. Its contributors propose a postmodernism of resistance - an aesthetic that rejects hierarchy and celebrates diversity. Ranging from architecture, sculpture and painting to music, photography and film, this collection is now recognised as a seminal text on the postmodernism debate.The essays are by Hal Foster, Jürgen (...) Habermas, Kenneth Frampton, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Gregory L. Ulmer, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Edward W. Said. (shrink)

Les opérations actuelles que mène Total en Afrique suivent un schéma ancien : l’exploitation, tournée vers les énergies fossiles, et la corruption des économies, des gouvernements, des sociétés et des environnements des pays en développement, le tout soutenu par la puissance étatique française. Emmanuel Macron rendit la chose tout à fait manifeste en 2021, lorsqu’il insista pour défendre le gaz possédé par Total au Mozambique (20 milliards de dollars) par une intervention militaire, menée par des soldats rwandais et sud-africains. Le (...) rôle sous-impérialiste de Pretoria explique son soutien désespéré aux nouveaux magnats du pétrole avec lesquels Total a fait alliance depuis la moitié des années 2010 pour exploiter d’importantes réserves de gaz et chercher de nouveaux gisements par dynamitage sismique. Mais depuis 2021, deux formes de résistance ont fait vaciller Total : les guérillas islamiques au Mozambique et les mobilisations écologistes et sociales déclenchées le long des côtes sud-africaines, tant du côté de l’océan Atlantique que de l’océan Indien. Mais il faudra dans les mois et les années à venir, organiser une campagne globale contre le renouveau de l’impérialisme – et du sous-impérialisme – fossile. (shrink)

Cancers have a formidable capacity to develop resistance to a large and diverse array of chemical, biologic, and physical anti‐neoplastic agents. This can be largely traced to the instability of the tumor cell genome, and the resultant ability of tumor cell populations to generate phenotypic variants rapidly. It is therefore argued that anti‐cancer strategies should be directed at eliminating those genetically stable normal diploid cells that are required for the progressive growth of tumors. Micro‐vascular endothelial cells comprising (...) the tumor vasculature represent such a normal cell target. Moreover, specificity for tumor associated vasculature by anti‐cancer agents may be achieved by virtue of the fact that many of the endothelial cells that comprise these blood vessels are in an immature, cycling, and ‘activated’ state, in contrast to the endothelial cells associated with normal tissue and organ blood vessels. (shrink)

Mutations in DNA topoisomerase II are often correlated with drug‐resistance in tumor cell lines. Studies of topoisomerase II‐mediated drug‐resistance in various model systems, as well as the sequencing of such mutations from drug‐resistant tumors, have shed light on the functional domains of topoisomerase II, on how it interacts with inhibitors, and on the different mechanisms by which cells avoid the toxic effects of many clinically important anti‐tumor drugs.

While many have celebrated Black Panther, some have also criticized it – such as contemporary philosopher Christopher Lebron, who argues that Black Panther 's plot is centrally driven by anti‐Black stereotypes about Black Americans, and particularly about Black American men. Anti‐colonial theory emerges in situations of colonial domination. But there are different kinds of colonialism, and there are different manifestations of anti‐colonial resistance. The image of colonialism that Black Panther most directly invokes – stopping short, however, (...) of openly recognizing it – is really just one species of colonizatism. As previously noted, Black Panther rarely invokes the concepts of slavery and colonialism. In Black Panther, Killmonger is the very site at which the terror of colonial history is sutured – the anti‐heroic figure who must be depicted as a genocidal and misogynistic monster in order to dissipate the shame and the guilt he would otherwise elicit. (shrink)

Taking its direction from references to Black and Indigenous struggles present in Leonard Harris’ oeuvre, this chapter turns to politicized acts of resistance among Black and Indigenous communities. More specifically, the essay traces the functions of cultural pluralism, value relativism, and representative heuristics within solidarity work that enact logics of resistance to settler colonization and anti-Black racism, among other forms of oppression. Through this analysis, we see that Harris’ views about insurrection and normativity entail that both oppression (...) and resistance are the result of multiplicitous forms of agency. (shrink)

One of the important—yet often underestimated—dimensions of the intellectual legacy of Isaiah Berlin is his contribution to the demystification of the totalitarian temptation in the twentieth century. This paper starts with an apparent paradox: Berlin is described as a major figure of the anti‐totalitarian camp, yet his writings nowhere touch explicitly on the totalitarian regimes of his time. Nonetheless, it is argued that Berlin's notion of “monism,” and his unique insight into the totalitarian mind, are (...) an indirect yet valuable contribution to the understanding of the appeal exercised by totalitarianism within the modern political imagination. Despite Berlin's highly contestable account of the origins of monism—which he situates in the Enlightenment movement—it is asserted that Berlin's denunciation of utopias remains very much pertinent in light of the emergence of new fundamentalist utopias in a post 9/11 world. Consequently, there are grounds from which to dismiss those claims according to which Berlin's work belongs to an age—that of the Cold War—unfamiliar to the present. (shrink)

Two common theses in contemporary epistemology are that ‘knowledge excludes luck’ and that knowledge depends on ‘purely epistemic’ factors. In this essay, I shall argue as follows: given some plausible assumptions, ‘anti-luck epistemology,’ which is committed to the fi rst thesis, implies the falsity of the second thesis. That is, I will argue that anti-luck epistemology leads to what has been called ‘pragmatic encroachment’ on knowledge. Anti-luck epistemologists hoping to resist encroachment must accept a controversial thesis about (...) true belief or a dubious claim about luck and value and interests. (shrink)

Across the world, corruption is endemic, a cause of growing inequality, and an impediment to economic growth. Many countries have attempted to curb corruption at the national level, with little success. Researchers have argued that, instead of initiate controlling corruption at national level, resisting corruption should be actively instigated within organisations. Specifically, Luo :119–154, 2005) suggests that corruption becomes entrenched in organisations through the task and institutional environments, and can therefore only be fought through changes in institutional architecture. Modification of (...) Luo’s model, by putting in place anti-corruption systems at the start, shows how anti-corruption behaviours become established and can be resisted. In this paper, we explore the successful management of organisational corruption by the Grameen Bank, a leading microfinance institute that operates in Bangladesh. For many years, this bank has stood out against the generally accepted culture of corruption in Bangladesh. Using the case study method, this research explores the impact of the anti-corruption structures and processes implemented by Grameen Bank, as a unique illustration within Bangladesh of the value of this modified version of the Luo’s model. The bank has actively introduced policies and processes that have made it difficult for corruption to become established. (shrink)

In this book K. Brad Wray provides a comprehensive survey of the arguments against scientific realism. In addition to presenting logical considerations that undermine the realists' inferences to the likely truth or approximate truth of our theories, he provides a thorough assessment of the evidence from the history of science. He also examines grounds for a defence of anti-realism, including an anti-realist explanation for the success of our current theories, an account of why false theories can be empirically (...) successful, and an explanation for why we should expect radical changes of theory in the future. His arguments are supported and illustrated by cases from the history of science, including a sustained study of the Copernican Revolution, and a study of the revolution in early twentieth century chemistry, when chemists came to classify elements by their atomic number rather than by their atomic weight. (shrink)

Kim’s causal exclusion argument purports to demonstrate that the non-reductive physicalist must treat mental properties (and macro-level properties in general) as causally inert. A number of authors have attempted to resist Kim’s conclusion by utilizing the conceptual resources of Woodward’s interventionist conception of causation. The viability of these responses has been challenged by Gebharter, who argues that the causal exclusion argument is vindicated by the theory of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). Since the interventionist conception of causation relies crucially on CBNs (...) for its foundations, Gebharter’s argument appears to cast significant doubt on interventionism’s anti-reductionist credentials. In the present article, we both (1) demonstrate that Gebharter’s CBN-theoretic formulation of the exclusion argument relies on some unmotivated and philosophically significant assumptions (especially regarding the relationship between CBNs and the metaphysics of causal relevance), and (2) use Bayesian networks to develop a general theory of causal inference for multi-level systems that can serve as the foundation for an anti-reductionist interventionist account of causation.1. (shrink)

showing what makes causal facts both true and accessible enough for us to have the knowledge of them that we ordinarily take ourselves to have. Some current approaches to analyzing causation were once resisted. First, analyses that use the counterfactual conditional were viewed with suspicion because philosophers also sought (and still do seek) similar understanding of counterfactual facts. Since the same can be said for the other nomic concepts--causation, lawhood, explanation, chance, dispositions, and their conceptual kin--philosophy demonstrated a preference for (...) non-nomic definitions of causation, analytic completions of (S) with no nomic terms in the analysans. Recently, however, philosophers have been less demanding regarding what terms may be used. Attention has been given to analyzing causation in terms of chance, the counterfactual conditional, and lawhood. If we reserve the term ‘causal’ for the terms and concepts that have extremely obvious connections.. (shrink)

In this chapter, we evaluate the politically generative dynamic of urban space. Notably, we put forward the notion of the ‘multiplier effect’ of the urban, referring to its ingrained tendency to multiply resistance to oppression and violence being exerted against subaltern groups and minorities and, in doing so, to turn this multiplied resistance into an active force of social change. We, therefore, look at the twofold valence of ‘resistance’: negative and affirmative. Resistance initially takes form as (...) a defensive response to oppression and violence. When this happens, the urban becomes the living platform for a multiplying dynamic of encounter and, potentially, of inter-group solidarity, thus laying the foundations for a cooperative – rather than competitive, as in neoliberal rationality, or inimical, as in national-populist reason – way of ‘being together’. After having developed this argument against the backdrop of the women’s movement in Tehran and the urban disobedience to anti-immigration policies in Italy, our chapter concludes by reflecting on the multiplier effect of urban resistance within the current context of national revanchism. (shrink)

This is a reply piece to a series of book symposium contributions to my book, Resisting Scientific Realism. The contributions were by Steven French, Peter Vickers, Stathis Psillos, and Kyle Stanford.