According to the UN, 65.3 million forcibly displaced people languish in camps and slums or making desperate journeys toward safety. The global community has not only failed to help many of these people; in many cases it has actively obstructed them from finding security and a new home for themselves and their families. Moral responsibilities to refugees are not exhausted by policies and actions. They also extend to how to think about the refugee crisis. Pundits, politicians, and political philosophers (...) have failed to live up to these responsibilities by perpetuating populist myths, the causes of refugees’ flight, and the policies that prevent them from resuming their lives. (shrink)

Unlike most of the literature on the contributions of refugees from Nazism to the contemporary intellectual and cultural life of the West, the role of the expatriates in creating today's large biomedical publishing industry has generally been neglected. In fact major scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing came about via this route. In doing so, it was instrumental in changing the international language of pre-World War Two science from German to English. This remains true as the industry evolves rapidly into (...) new corporate and electronic modes. (shrink)

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship. All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century (...) – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights? This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled. Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’. ☆ The article is based on a paper given at a workshop on Citizenship organized by the Centre for History and Economics and held at Robinson College, Cambridge on 14–15 July 2008. It draws largely on archival research undertaken for my Ph.D., The Politics of Refugee Repatriation in the Twentieth Century, which was completed in July 2009 at the University of Cambridge. My particular thanks to Melissa Lane and Matthew Gibney for their help in developing these arguments, and to the archivists at UNHCR and the League of Nations Archives at UNOG. (shrink)

This article presents a critical reading of Albert O. Hirschman’s typology of exit, voice and loyalty as a heuristic for understanding the changing meanings of exile in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It is argued that Hirschman’s experiences as well as the theory he distilled from them are highly relevant for researchers of forced migration and exile. After first defending the usefulness of Hirschman’s analytical framework for exile and diaspora studies, the article then highlights the need to revise and (...) complicate his approach. Hirschman could not foresee the emerging global possibilities of cultivating ‘the art of voice’, new forms of internal and self-exile as a result of post-fascist versions of authoritarianism, and the growing difficulties faced by refugees including, refugee scholars and writers, to exit their countries and find a safe haven somewhere else. The gaps in Hirschman’s theory are addressed by drawing on insights from the writings of Judith Shklar. (shrink)

This paper claims that Bauman’s personal experiences deeply shaped his work. In the first part, I draw upon my own research, combining archive documents and interviews data, as well as – for the very first time – details taken from Zygmunt Bauman’s own unpublished autobiography, accessed courtesy of the Zygmunt and Janina Bauman Archive project at the University of Leeds. The second part of the paper draws upon my wider ethnographical study into the lived experiences of asylum seekers, conducted between (...) 2017 and 2019 in Southern Europe. I focus here upon their experience of escape and their present life conditions in order to highlight important parallels with Bauman’s own experiences as a refugee. The conclusion draws both cases together in order to understand a less overt aspect of Bauman’s sociology and to claim that the term ‘migrant’ is both discriminatory and, in academic terms, incorrect. I argue that this diagnosis is reinforced further by the voices of intellectuals who themselves experienced the status of refugees: namely, Zygmunt Bauman and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

An increasing number of Muslim asylum seekers and refugees convert to Christianity in Europe. The conversion motifs in these individuals are unknown. In this study, we applied biographical interviews in 124 converts. There were two dominant patterns: intellectual —intellectual plus experimental motifs, and mystical —mystical plus affectional motifs. Pure experimental and affectional motifs were rare, and there were no revivalist and coercive motifs. Demographic parameters did not predict conversion motifs. We found no evidence for social pressure. These results indicate that (...) finding meaning and consolation in Christian religious teachings and mystical experiences with a high emotional content are the two leading religious conversion motifs. (shrink)

How did immigrant scholars such as Rudolf Carnap, Max Horkheimer, and Alfred Schütz influence the development of American philosophy? Why was the U.S. community more receptive to logical empiricism than to critical theory or phenomenology? This volume brings together fifteen historians of philosophy to explore the impact of the intellectual migration. -/- In the 1930s, the rise of fascism forced dozens of philosophers to flee to the United States. Prominent logical empiricists acquired positions at prestigious U.S. universities. Critical theorists moved (...) their Frankfurt School to Columbia University. And a group of phenomenologists taught at the New School for Social Research. Though many refugee scholars acquired some American following, logical empiricism had the biggest impact on academic philosophy. The exiled empiricists helped the country turn into a bastion of ‘analytic philosophy’ after the war. Phenomenology and critical theory became prominent schools from the 1970s onwards and continue to be influential in American philosophy today. -/- This is the first book to investigate to the migration from an integrated perspective, bringing together historians of American philosophy, logical empiricism, phenomenology, and critical theory. (shrink)

This article considers the differential absorption and integration of refugee physicists into various countries during the 1930s, and the social and intellectual factors responsible for this, focusing particularly on the social functions of the British and American university at that period, as well as continuing ideological struggles in the Soviet Union. More generally, the issue of the relative absorption of refugee physicists is used to examine the nature of the physics communities and other institutions of the host societies.

Human mass migration from place to place is well recorded in history. The ancient patterns of mass migrations could have their origins in natural forces or divine order. Simultaneously, modern recorded history suggests that human mass migrations were triggered by local and regional politics too such as political oppression or imperial invasion. However, a new pattern of mass migration emerged in the 20th century triggered by a complete new force-strategic redrawing of certain regional maps. This strategic redrawing of maps is (...) not locally inspired but imposed from abroad as part of competitive economic and military strategies of a global scale. This article intends to analyse the mass migrations triggered by Iraq-Syria civil wars in the framework of international strategic global competition. The article argues that these mass migrations are artificially caused by the economic and military strategies of international hegemonic powers. Strategic national interest abroad is the underlying objective at the cost of the sufferings of the millions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the effects of scientific governance on personal liberty in interwar Britain through the work and life of German-Jewish demographer Robert René Kuczynski. Kuczynski arrived in Britain as a refugee in 1933 and, within the span of a few years, moved from being a researcher and reader at the London School of Economics to becoming demographic adviser to the Colonial Office. In the service of the British government, Kuczynski realized the first complete demographic survey of the (...) British Empire. Based on extensive primary research at the London School of Economics Archives and the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin, this article analyses the complex ways in which Kuczynski’s experience as a forced intellectual migrant interacted with – and often contradicted – his scientific work on population and the national and imperial policies that were enabled by it. Doing so, this article points to the inadequacy of merely evaluating personal freedom by means of law and power politics and asks about the hidden constraints in technocratic governance based on scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The intellectual ferment that emerged in postwar France was marked by the renaissance of Hegel’s thought and the focus on Marx's early writings. In a parallel way, the death of Stalin, the uprising of 1953 in East Germany and the revolts in Hungary and Poland in 1956 provoked a thorough critique against the theory and practice of orthodox Marxism. The relationship between Marx and Marxism or the issue about the philosophical foundations of Marx’s thinking became the subject of long-standing controversy (...) and gave rise to several interpretations of Marx’s work. These debates were decisively fostered by the foreign intellectuals and refugees who arrived in France after the end of the Second World War; inter alia, a generation of young Greek intellectuals that included the prominent figures of Kostas Axelos, Cornelius Castoriadis and Kostas Papaioannou. This article focuses on Axelos’, Castoriadis’ and Papaioannou’s critique of Marx and provides an anti-critique of their intellectual endeavour. It outlines the common basis of their critical confrontation with the Marxian theorizing and argues that they interpreted Marx’s thought in a manner similar to orthodox Marxism. Despite the undoubted merits of their critique, they did not take it to all its theoretical and political conclusions. As a result, the horizons they opened lack radicalism and their dialogue with Marx was left open to being misunderstood. (shrink)

This article deals with the essay „How everything will be“ („Wie alles sein wird“), written in the spring of 1943 by the scholar Hans-Joachim Schoeps in exile in Sweden. This is an annotated publication of the entire manuscript, in which the Jewish refugee and intellectual imagines how he might experience his post-war return to his native Germany.

As an outspoken public intellectual Slavoj Žižek’s comments on today’s refugee crisis, particularly in relation to Syria, have been widely criticized. The following essay looks at the philosophy and politics of Žižek in relation to theorists such as Ranciere, Laclau and Mouffe in order to explore where Žižek’s dismissal of migrant struggle highlights the failure of his Lacan inspired Kantian transcendentalism and State based class politics to explore the political and subversive potentials of alternative sites of struggle. While Žižek’s (...) exploration of antagonism as a site of politics remains useful, his vision of State politics and class struggle as the bearers of anti- or alter-capitalist struggle, based on a Universalist politics and transcendental subject, fails to consider the multifarious political aspects of global mobility. (shrink)

This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political projects. (...) In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies. (shrink)

A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history's greatest philosophers. In particular, four women whose (...) parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century-at once in necessary dialogue and striking contrast with one another. Simone de Beauvoir, already in a deep emotional and intellectual partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg before emigrating to the US in 1926, Ayn Rand was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the 20th century. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would reach the hearts and minds millions of Americans in the decades to come, becoming canonical libertarian texts, which continue to echo today among Silicon Valley's tech elite. Hannah Arendt was developing some of today's most important leftwing ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of de Beauvoir: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war. Ultimately, in 1943, she would starve to death in England, a martyr and true saint in the eyes of many. Few authors can synthesize gripping storytelling with sophisticated philosophy like Wolfram Eilenberger. The Visionaries tells the story of four singular philosophers-indomitable women who were refugees and resistance fighters-each putting forward a vision of a truly free and open society at a time of authoritarianism and war. (shrink)

Scientific culture in Europe and the refugee generation -- Germany and Weimar Berlin as the City of Science -- Origins of a social perspective: doing physical chemistry in Weimar Berlin -- Chemical dynamics and social dynamics in Berlin and Manchester -- Liberalism and the economic foundations of the "Republic of Science" -- Scientific freedom and the social functions of science -- Political foundations of the philosophies of science of Popper, Kuhn, and Polanyi -- Personal knowledge: argument, audiences, and sociological (...) engagement -- Epilogue: SSK, scientific constructivism, and the paradoxical legacy of Polanyi and the 1930s generation. (shrink)

Deleuzian Encounters brings together sixteen accessible, thought-provoking essays that examine the practical and ethical implications of Deleuze's philosophy for different contemporary social issues. Topics explored include: the environment, terrorism, refugees, indigenous reconciliation, gender, suicide, intellectual disability, injecting drug use, classroom teaching and global activism. Each contribution provides practical examples of how to make use of Deleuze's thought in social research, and offers fresh insights into the creative and innovative potentials Deleuze's philosophy holds for social thought and action.

Dependency functions as a keyword in care theory. However, care theorists have spelled out the ontological and moral ramifications of dependency in different and often conflicting ways. In this article, I argue that conceptual disputes about dependency betray a fundamental discordance among authors, rooted in the empirical premises of their arguments. Hence, although authors appear to share a vocabulary of dependency, they are not writing about quite the same phenomenon. I seek to elucidate these differences by teasing out and comparing (...) different conceptions of dependency found in the literature. Borrowing a phrase from Eva Kittay, I trace four “paradigm cases” of dependency: the infant, the physically disabled person, the profoundly intellectually disabled person, and the refugee. These paradigm cases serve as the empirical touchstone from which theorists extract their conceptions of dependency. Each paradigm case, moreover, permits a particular ethical sensibility toward care. How we understand and value dependency thus seems to determine how we understand and value care, and vice versa. In this way, I contend, our normative orientation toward care might influence what sorts of dependency we see—and, by extension, which forms of dependency we fail to notice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Talmud Meets Church HistoryDaniel Boyarin (bio)Virginia Burrus. Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts. New York: Edwin Mellen, 1987.———. ‘“Equipped for Victory’: Ambrose and the Gendering of Orthodoxy.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4.4 (1996): 461–75.———. The Making Of A Heretic: Gender, Authority, And The Priscillianist Controversy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.———. “Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric of Gender in Ambrose and Prudentius.” Journal (...) of Early Christian Studies 3.1 (1995): 25–46.———. “Word and Flesh: The Bodies and Sexuality of Ascetic Women in Christian Antiquity.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10.1 (1994): 27–51.[1] Prologue: Morningside Heights, 1941—A Talmudist Meets a Church HistorianIn 1944, my teacher Saul Lieberman published a classic essay in which he treated talmudic martyrology in the context of patristic literature. 1 The article had been written under the inspiration of his meeting and friendship with Henri Gregoire, the great Belgian church historian, then a refugee from the Nazis in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in New York, where Lieberman, the great Lithuanian talmudist, had also found refuge and where the two met. Nearly a half-century later, this student of Lieberman’s met another church historian, Virginia Burrus, in Morningside Heights under happier circumstances, when both of us were participants at a conference on asceticism at Union Theological Seminary, and a similar intellectual interaction began. This paper represents some of the first fruits of that second encounter and aspires to modestly continue the enterprise begun by the first.[2] Intertextuality and InterdisciplinarityAveril Cameron has recently written:The myth of early Christianity as the resort of the poor and underprivileged is precisely that, and a very convenient one it has been. It is a myth that rests, moreover, on the fallacy of an original Christianity uncontaminated by external influences; but its holders then have to explain how this “new” faith could make [End Page 52] the leap to center stage. Thus, we have been told, “the naiveté of the early Christian speech came in the course of time to wed itself to the cultures of the world.” But while much of current New Testament scholarship is directed at the internal (that is, theological) articulation of the texts, there is also a perceptible trend towards a mode of interpretation that balances the external and internal factors operative in the literary texts. It is thus less a question of the degree of “influence” of Greco-Roman or Jewish literary or philosophical elements on early Christian writing than of their integral relationship.[37–38]Judaism also (and Jewish scholarship) has had a stake in inscribing itself as pure and uncontaminated, for reasons that Philip Alexander has articulated: “The attempt to [lay down a norm for Judaism in the first century] barely conceals apologetic motives—in the case of Christianity a desire to prove that Christianity transcended or transformed Judaism, in the case of Jews a desire to suggest that Christianity was an alien form of Judaism which deviated from the true path” [3]. Indeed, the very distinctness of Judaism has been articulated by Jews as precisely its distance from a “syncretistic” Christianity whose defining feature is that it is somehow a composite of Judaism and Hellenism. 2In this essay, in conversation with some of the work of Burrus, I wish to begin to suggest a few of the ways that study of the Talmud can be further enriched through the engagement of talmudic scholars with the recent sophisticated (and especially gender-oriented) work being done on early Christianity. Indeed, I will be hinting (and in future work explicitly arguing) that we have to begin seriously thinking about Judaeo-Christianity as a single cultural system: contentious, dialectical, polemical, and sometimes friendly, but—I hasten to add—not moralistic in the homogenized “family values” sense implied by the modern usage of this term. I put forth here, as a case in point, that the richest contexts for understanding the sets of cultural tensions that gave rise to a particular talmudic text are to be uncovered in contemporary patristic literature. From the point of view of a New Historicist approach to talmudic literature, this suggests that the... (shrink)

Hitler had a dream to rule the world, not only with the gun but also with his mind. He saw himself as a "philosopher-leader" and astonishingly gained the support of many intellectuals of his time. In this compelling book, Yvonne Sherratt explores Hitler's relationship with philosophers and uncovers cruelty, ambition, violence, and betrayal where least expected—at the heart of Germany's ivory tower. Sherratt investigates international archives, discovering evidence back to the 1920s of Hitler's vulgarization of noble thinkers of the (...) past, including Kant, Nietzsche, and Darwin. She reveals how philosophers of the 1930s eagerly collaborated to lend the Nazi regime a cloak of respectability: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and a host of others. And while these eminent men sanctioned slaughter, Semitic thinkers like Walter Benjamin and opponents like Kurt Huber were hunted down or murdered. Many others, such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, were forced to flee as refugees. The book portrays their fates, to be dispersed across the world as the historic edifice of Jewish-German culture was destroyed by Hitler. Sherratt not only confronts the past; she also tracks down chilling evidence of continuing Nazi sympathy in Western Universities today. (shrink)

_A gripping account of the philosophers who supported Hitler's rise to power and those whose lives were wrecked by his regime_ Hitler had a dream to rule the world, not only with the gun but also with his mind. He saw himself as a "philosopher-leader" and astonishingly gained the support of many intellectuals of his time. In this compelling book, Yvonne Sherratt explores Hitler's relationship with philosophers and uncovers cruelty, ambition, violence, and betrayal where least expected—at the heart of (...) Germany's ivory tower. Sherratt investigates international archives, discovering evidence back to the 1920s of Hitler's vulgarization of noble thinkers of the past, including Kant, Nietzsche, and Darwin. She reveals how philosophers of the 1930s eagerly collaborated to lend the Nazi regime a cloak of respectability: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and a host of others. And while these eminent men sanctioned slaughter, Semitic thinkers like Walter Benjamin and opponents like Kurt Huber were hunted down or murdered. Many others, such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, were forced to flee as refugees. The book portrays their fates, to be dispersed across the world as the historic edifice of Jewish-German culture was destroyed by Hitler. Sherratt not only confronts the past; she also tracks down chilling evidence of continuing Nazi sympathy in Western Universities today. (shrink)

In this essay, I focus on the extent to which the condition of exile influenced the way Hannah Arendt and Edward Said engaged with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and concepts of Binationalism. Part one is largely biographical and narrates the conditions under which both parties went into exile and they ways exile influenced their intellectual development and identity. Part two analyses Arendt’s early Jewish writings and the ways she sought to affirm notions of equality and Binationalism as a method for protecting (...) stateless refugees. Following this, I consider Said’s concern for the memory and experience of victims and his argument that the shared histories of dispossession endured by Jews and Palestinians might form the basis for an alliance. While Binationalism has largely been erased from political discourse today, I conclude by suggesting that Said’s intervention offers useful tools through which Arendt’s proposals might be rethought or reimagined today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 135-149 [Access article in PDF] Ghostly Comparisons: Anderson's Telescope H. D. Harootunian While the formation of area studies in the universities and colleges of the United States was initially inaugurated as a response to the Cold War "necessity" to win the hearts and minds of the unaligned, many of whom were new refugees of decolonization, one of its unintended consequences was to foster the development of (...) comparative perspectives of study across disciplines and different cultural regions. But this secondary goal was often diverted by the principal purpose of area studies programs to supply authoritative information on regions outside of Euro-America (the second and third worlds) considered crucial to the national security and to private businesses thrown increasingly into an expanding global market seeking new regions capable of providing buyers, workers, and materials. In time, the vocation of comparison became part of the unconscious of area studies, as the unit of the nation-state took precedence over all other considerations. Instead of envisaging genuinely interdisciplinary agendas that were able to integrate different disciplines, area studies have too often settled for simple multidisciplinarism, substituting coverage for comparison, language acquisition for method, the nation-state for the totality of the cultural region. Benedict Anderson's recent Spectre of Comparisons reminds us of the role played by area studies programs in the American academic profession during the nervous days of the Cold War and the wartime exigencies that led to their postwar organization and installation in a number of universities. But it also recalls for us the comparative promise associated with area studies and how it was either redirected to a multidisciplinary approach poorly disguised as interdisciplinarism or simply incorporated into large developmental narratives like modernization theory. It is instructive to see how Anderson's own work, rather than Southeast Asian area studies, has been able to achieve the remote goal of integration and comparison in a number of stunning examples that have eluded the collective efforts of many institutional programs. This singular success magisterially discloses how he was trained to envisage the region as a "unified" area studies program, even though little more than a geographical term named this unity, and what he needed to do to actually realize the dim prospect of achieving some sort of larger, integrated understanding, which was eventually inscribed in his seminal book, Imagined Communities. At the most basic level, Anderson was able to secure this effect first by roaming around the area (turning his banishment from Indonesia in 1972 to good use by shifting his attention to Thailand and then the Philippines). Yet, as his essays show, there were other, more intellectually and epistemologically compelling reasons which, if amplified, might provide such diversity with a sense of commonality that only geography and the putatively integrative approach of an area studies program seemed willing to promise even as they failed to deliver.Anderson situates his own intellectual trajectory within the institutional circumstances of the region as an area studies which he and his contemporary fellow students "helped give a certain reality" [Spectre 19]. In fact, "Southeast Asia" has always been [End Page 135] the common frame that structured the particular relationship between Europe of the colonizers and its Asian colonized and thus became the location that best exemplified for him the peculiar nature of the "haunting," as he puts it, as both the place of comparison and the necessity of comparability. In other words, Southeast Asia was the locus that best afforded a sighting of the spectacle of specters that recalled authorizing sister images in Europe and provided a perspective that was necessarily comparative. In Anderson's reckoning, comparison first referred to the circulation of images between metropole and colony and secondly between the various colonial sites that constituted Southeast Asia. As a result, Southeast Asia, and by extension all colonies, became the overdetermined place of haunting.Beyond the agency of the war, of course, was the experience of colonialism and those first modern interpreters of Asia who, as administrators, spent long years in the field serving imperial bureaucracies and who were in the incomparable position of examining such sites... (shrink)

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)

My essay is based on the lecture I presented at the Conference “The German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the United States and United Kingdom. 1933–1945”. I decided to publish it in honour of my friend Marek Siemek, because I think this theme is very actual, especially in light of the current crisis in Europe connected with the problems of fugitives and refugees. Ernst Bloch and Stefan Zweig, both Jews, reacted in opposite ways to their forced fate of being on (...) the run from persecution and murder. They felt like strangers in their exile. Ernst Bloch, a stranger to English and other languages, wrote his Principle of Hope in his mother tongue. Stefan Zweig, a brilliant translator, felt himself “imprisoned in a language, which he could not use”: Europe was his homeland. Tired “of all ideas in the future” he committed suicide far away from home. Ernst Bloch came back to Germany after the Second World War—first to the German Democratic Republic, and then, in 1961 to the Federal Republic of Germany. He continued his lifework against resignation and despair in keeping with what he outlined in his Principle of Hope: with his “real utopia” social model, and existence “without expropriation and alienation in real democracy,” where “there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Paul Oskar Kristeller Memorial NoticeRichard H. PopkinPaul Oskar Kristeller, the most eminent scholar of renaissance philosophy, was born in Berlin in 1904 to secularized Jewish parents. He died June 7, 1999, in his apartment in New York shortly after his 95th birthday. Kristeller studied in Heidelberg under Martin Heidegger and received his doctorate in 1927 for his work on Neo-Platonism. He was a lecturer and an assistant at Heidelberg (...) until 1933 when he had to leave Germany because of his Jewish ancestry. He went to Italy where he continued his studies and taught at Pisa. He was awarded another doctorate for his work on the Florentine Platonist, Marsilio Ficino.A few years later when Italy adopted anti-semitic racial laws, Kristeller had to leave a country a second time and went to the United States in 1939. Soon he became a lecturer and instructor at Columbia University and continued on the faculty there, retiring in 1973 as the Frederick Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy.Kristeller brought both the rigor and wealth of German scholarship in Renaissance studies to America. He helped to make materials available for American students. He was a founding member and later president of the Renaissance Society of America and gave lectures all over the United States as well as in Europe, encouraging interest and concern for serious scholarship and Renaissance Studies.He wrote voluminously, over eight hundred articles and many books on his chosen subject. One of his accomplishments was the preparation of an immense catalogue of manuscripts in Italian libraries, the Iter Italicum, and he guided the development of the vast catalogue of manuscripts of classical, medieval, and renaissance authors.Kristeller's erudition and precise and careful scholarship greatly influenced the level of research and publication in the history of philosophy in America. While his students worked mostly on topics in the Renaissance and the later medieval period, Kristeller encouraged many others like myself in branching off in directions other than those in which he was primarily interested. [End Page 141]In 1946 I showed him a seminar paper I had written on Hume and Sextus Empiricus, since part of my interest came from Kristeller's course that I had taken. He looked over the paper carefully, and then in his inimitable way, told me that I should look into whether there had been a sceptical tradition in European thought prior to Hume. This became my major concern for years thereafter. Kristeller continuously discussed my work with me and encouraged further studies. He helped greatly in bringing my work to publication, although only a small amount of it was in his chief area of interest.Kristeller was the last of the great German scholars in the humanities who became refugees in America and helped to transform the level of scholarship in many fields in this country. From early on until the end of his life, he remained a neo-Kantian. He did not find much of interest in the prevailing forms of contemporary thought. Although he spent his entire academic career in philosophy departments, he wrote little of philosophical exposition or argument about the views he held. He was mainly concerned to expound philosophers, to trace their sources and their influences. He left an enormous legacy of work, research tools, and outlook. As the various twentieth century philosophical movements became more and more antihistorical, they cut themselves off linguistically and culturally from the actual sources of their issues and theories.His focus was on the Renaissance, but he was willing to play a role in wider intellectual enterprises, seeking to improve the level of scholarship and the opportunities for research and publication. He gave much advice to those of us who in 1960 were attempting to start the Journal of the History of Philosophy. Though he did not personally get involved in our early problems, he did watch over what we produced like a hawk and gave us his critical evaluation of each issue as it appeared as well as much other advice. This was the case with the International Archives of the History of Ideas, that was also started in 1960. He evaluated proposals, advised us about publication plans, recommended scholars... (shrink)

Karl Polanyi and Max Weber held radically different views of liberal capitalism, but they also came to differ in significant respects with their brothers Michael Polanyi and Alfred Weber. The first section provides an overview of some critical moments in the history of liberal capitalism as perceived by some historical witnesses. The second treats the views of the Weber brothers on the world economy before 1914. The third deals with Max Weber's overlooked treatment of G. F. Knapp's once famous state (...) theory of money. The fourth turns to the circle of cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian intellectuals who passionately debated the future of liberal capitalism and almost all of whom became political refugees. (shrink)

Historical reconstructions of the effects of the intellectual migration are typically informed by one of two conflicting narratives. Some scholars argue that refugee philosophers, in particular the logical positivists, contributed to the demise of distinctly American schools of thought. Others reject this ‘eclipse view’ and argue that postwar analytic philosophy can best be characterized as a synthesis of American and positivist views. This paper studies the fate of one of the most influential schools of U.S. philosophy—Columbia naturalism—and argues that (...) both narratives are part of a larger story. First, I reconstruct the rise of the Columbia school, focusing on its naturalist analyses of science, morality, and religion as well as its contributions to the history of ideas. Next, I trace some of the naturalists’ contacts with German philosophers and show that they encountered a strong bifurcation between historical and scientific philosophy in their discussions. I argue that a similar distinction gradually infected debates between naturalists, eventually resulting in a split within the Columbia school itself. The historically-oriented naturalists, I argue, were overshadowed by the analytic movement, whereas the science-minded naturalists were able to incorporate the views of the émigrés, thereby developing the tradition in new directions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as "essentialist."2 (...) Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's (1906-1975) writings, both in public magazines and in her important books, are still widely studied today. She made original contributions in political thinking that still astound readers and critics alike. The subject of several films and numerous books, colloquia, and newspaper articles, Arendt remains a touchstone in innumerable debates about the use of violence in politics, the responsibility one has under dictatorships and totalitarianism, and how to combat the repetition of the horrors of the past. The Bloomsbury Companion (...) to Arendt offers the definitive guide to her writings and ideas, her influences and commentators, as well as the reasons for her lasting significance, with 66 original essays taking up in accessible terms the myriad ways in which one can take up her work and her continuing importance. These essays, written by an international set of her best readers and commentators, provides a comprehensive coverage of her life and the contexts in which her works were written. Special sections take up chapters on each of her key writings, the reception of her work, and key ways she interpreted those who influenced her. If one has come to Arendt from one of her essays on freedom, or from yet another bombastic account of her writings on Adolph Eichmann, or as as student or professor working in the field of Arendt studies, this book provides the ideal tool for thinking with and rediscovering one of the most important intellectuals of the past century. But just as importantly, contributors advance the study of Arendt into neglected areas, such as on science and ecology, to demonstrate her importance not just to debates in which she was well known, but those touched off only after her death. Arendt's approaches as well as her concrete claims about the political have much to offer given the current ecological and refugee crises, among others. In sum, then, the Companion provides a tool for thinking with Arendt, but also for showing just where those thinking with her can take her work today. (shrink)

Francisco Romero es una de las personalidades más significativas de América Latina. Sus escritos, su labor pedagógica, la difusión de su pensamiento y el intercambio epistolar con figuras de renombre internacional dan muestra de ello. En el trabajo nos detenemos en este último aspecto para comprobar su manifiesta intención de construir una red intelectual de filósofos en América Latina. También están presentes las inquietudes editoriales tanto de Romero, como de sus pares mexicanos. Asimismo hacemos hincapié en el tópico del exilio (...) y la Guerra Civil Española a través de las cartas que el autor argentino recibió de algunos refugiados en México. El análisis de esta fuente histórica nos permite ver el estado del campo intelectual de la región en los años estudiados, al mismo tiempo que indica un panorama valioso del contexto histórico argentino y de América Latina. Francisco Romero is one of the most significant intellectuals in Latin America. His writings, his teaching, the dissemination of his thought, and the exchange of letters with internationally renowned figures are evidence of his legacy. In this paper we focus on this last aspect to prove the manifest intent of building an intellectual network of philosophers in Latin America. The editorial concerns of both Romero as well as his Mexican counterparts are present. We also focus on the topic of exile and the Spanish Civil War, through the letters that the Argentine author received from refugees in Mexico. The analysis of this historical source shows the state of the intellectual field of the region in the period studied, at the same time that it provides a valuable overview of the historical context in Argentina and Latin America. (shrink)

This title is playful, of course. It is designed merely to attract curiosity and attention … It dates back to a childhood game of which I have forgotten both rules and stakes. An imaginary sovereign was roused from his indifference and responded with an approximate repetition of Marie-Antoinette's suggestion that if the people were hungry, food should be thrown to them. I took such caricatures of kings as anti-models, replacing bread with symbols. Now we are all too disturbed, individually and (...) collectively, by the economic discomfort which is a generalized hunger and, in too many parts of the world and - not only in the third world - by actual famines, not to be aware, on a daily basis, of the responsibility it is to cultivate and transmit to others substance which is purely symbolic. Certain statistics, which now form part of our daily life, are capable of discrediting definitively the ivory tower which our universities are accused of representing, or of having represented in the past. In my own country, Canada, one child in five lives in poverty. The economic worth of the poorest forty-eight countries in the world is equal to the combined wealth of the ten richest individuals. There were twenty million refugees in 1997. One billion two hundred million human beings are short of fresh water this year, etc. This type of figure is, sadly, all too familiar. And it is a case of preaching to the converted to assert the extent to which culture, education and all their constituent disciplines are nourishment of a different order to physical food, because intellectual work is genuine work, providing a living for those who work at it professionally, and above all also those who benefit from its immediate and continuing fruits - i.e. ideally, the whole of society, and in all countries. In this respect - and this is implicit, but through depending habitually on what is implicit nothing is ever sufficiently explicit - it is generally acknowledged (thanks to UNESCO in particular) to what extent the development of economic resources is linked with the advancement and communication of knowledge, on a scale which is regional as well as national, within cities, rural communities, families. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as "essentialist."2 (...) Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

Since its founding in the nineteenth century, social anthropology has been seen as the study of exotic peoples in faraway places. But today more and more anthropologists are dedicating themselves not just to observing but to understanding and helping solve social problems wherever they occur--in international aid organizations, British TV studios, American hospitals, or racist enclaves in Eastern Europe, for example. In Exotic No More , an initiative of the Royal Anthropological Institute, some of today's most respected anthropologists demonstrate, in (...) clear, unpretentious prose, the tremendous contributions that anthropology can make to contemporary society. They cover issues ranging from fundamentalism to forced migration, child labor to crack dealing, human rights to hunger, ethnicity to environmentalism, intellectual property rights to international capitalisms. But Exotic No More is more than a litany of gloom and doom the essays also explore topics usually associated with leisure or "high" culture, including the media, visual arts, tourism, and music. Each author uses specific examples from their fieldwork to illustrate their discussions, and 62 photographs enliven the text. Throughout the book, the contributors highlight anthropology's commitment to taking people seriously on their own terms, paying close attention to what they are saying and doing, and trying to understand how they see the world and why. Sometimes this bottom-up perspective makes the strange familiar, but it can also make the familiar strange, exposing the cultural basis of seemingly "natural" behaviors and challenging us to rethink some of our most cherished ideas--about gender, "free" markets, "race," and "refugees," among many others. Contributors: William O. Beeman Philippe Bourgois John Chernoff E. Valentine Daniel Alex de Waal Judith Ennew James Fairhead Sarah Franklin Michael Gilsenan Faye Ginsburg Alma Gottlieb Christopher Hann Faye V. Harrison Richard Jenkins Melissa Leach Margaret Lock Jeremy MacClancy Jonathan Mazower Ellen Messer A. David Napier Nancy Scheper-Hughes Jane Schneider Parker Shipton Christopher B. Steiner. (shrink)

This volume is a critical investigation into the contemporary phenomenon of the dissensus of the globe and the planet, and the new terrains of consciousness that need to be negotiated towards a possibility for transformation. It examines the possibilities of alternate, sustainable modes of being and existing in a world which requires a unified, ethical, biopolitical worldview. The book explores themes like philosophical posthumanism and planetary concerns; disruption of cultural and intellectual inequality; bodily movement through nomadic subjectivity; dystopic spatialities of (...) game(re)play; globalization, and speculative imaginaries of the body; and theory of multiplicity. It also discusses impact of COVID on human beings, role of the neoliberal media, the question of rights of robots and cyborgs in sci-fi movies, and representation of refugees in literature. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, political philosophy, cultural studies, literary cultures, post-colonial studies, critical theory, and social anthropology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seeking the Sources of a Theologian:In Memory of Fr. Roch Kereszty, O.Cist. (1933–2022)Joseph Van House O.Cist.Fr. Roch Kereszty long enjoyed thinking about how, and how much, we can discover the truth about Jesus of Nazareth through historical research into his earthly life. Fr. Roch also often enjoyed indicating that at least part of the answer is that research about a human being can never be content with descriptions of (...) any number of empirical facts or ideas from that person's life. The true goal of one who writes or reads about the life of another is insight into the meaning of that person's life. Such insight is possible some extent while the person's life is ongoing, but it calls for a more decisive kind of assessment after the person's death. The meaning of a life also cannot truly reveal itself when viewed through the lens of an inadequate philosophy or theology. Indeed, Fr. Roch tended to think that philosophy itself is adequate to show that any quest to understand another human being cries out to be structured by love, or at least some form of empathy: I can truly understand another only in my proportion to my ability to discover communion or affinity with that person, to find in him or her another self who is in some deep way similar to my own self.1 [End Page 781] Although Fr. Roch elaborated such ideas to guide historians seeking to write a "biography" of Jesus, and although they make great demands of many kinds, it nevertheless seems fitting to consider them when beginning to memorialize Fr. Roch himself.Last December, God granted Fr. Roch the gift of a passage from this life that was surrounded by the love of many people who had known him on earth. Among them were many who had known him through his theological writings and had found them to offer a special combination of intellectual vigor and personal relevance. It is a blessing now to be able to offer a short memorial for the benefit of his sympathetic readers of the past and the future. Attempting to explain the golden thread that unites his many books and articles seems unreasonable; the writings themselves remain their own best explanation. Such an approach could also perhaps suggest that we are most loved in our productivity rather than in the ways we are dependent on God and others. For both of these reasons, one good way to serve love and communion with a theologian of interest would be to portray him in some of the ways that he himself was loved, fathered forth and shaped, by the One from whom all fatherhood is named. In this essay, then, I offer a simple and very fragmented portrait of the sources of a theologian, the fontes theologi: the different ways that God fathered in Roch Kereszty a theological writer who was a blessing to people who read periodicals such as this one. If I provoke either fresh appreciation of his writings or deeper reflection on the variety and patterns in the ways God leads his children generally (and especially those who are interested in theology), then this act of thanksgiving to God for a good teacher will have been successful.A Reader Raised in RomeIt is suggestive to notice that Fr. Roch was born in central Europe just six years after Joseph Ratzinger, and died seventeen days before him; their lifespans as theologians roughly overlapped and were formed by engagement with many of the same theological movements and crises. This said, moving quickly to the specifics of the person in question, it seems especially natural to attend to the character of Fr. Roch's formal theological education. This education took place in Rome, in the company of a handful of fellow bright young refugee Hungarian Cistercians, from 1957 to 1962 (during which time he also made his solemn vows and was ordained). In those days leading up to the Second Vatican Council, theology in the Roman universities was dominated by an increasingly stale and self-contained Neo-Scholasticism. The Benedictine Athenaeum of Sant'Anselmo, where young Roch and his [End... (shrink)

This syllabus engages dialogue about indigenous philosophical ideas and issues that frame contemporary global indigenous thought, perspective, and worldview. We explore how presuppositions of indigenous philosophy, including epistemology (how/what we know), metaphysics (what is), science (stories), and ethics (practices), affect global research programs, intellectual cultural property, economic policies, ecology, biodiversity, taxonomy, health, housing, food, employment, economic sustainability, peace negotiations, climate justice, human/treaty rights, colonial law, refugees and incarceration, self-determination, sovereignty, nation building, and digital information. Readings provide an understanding of traditional (...) and contemporary indigenous philosophical frameworks of interpretation, developments of the 1994-2004 United Nations Decade of Indigenous Peoples, the UN Permanent Forum of Indigenous Peoples, and the recent Indigenous Conference in Cancun (philosophical importance of the World Trade Organization [WTO], the World Bank [WB], the International Monetary Fund [IMF], and NAFTA). (shrink)

The beating of Rodney King and the resulting riots in South Central Los Angeles. The violent clash between Hasidim and African-Americans in Crown Heights. The boats of Haitian refugees being turned away from the Land of Opportunity. These are among the many racially-charged images that have burst across our television screens in the last year alone, images that show that for all our complacent beliefs in a melting-pot society, race is as much of a problem as ever in America. In (...) this vastly important, widely-acclaimed volume, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanaian philosopher who now teaches at Harvard, explores, in his words, "the possibilities and pitfalls of an African identity in the late twentieth century." In the process he sheds new light on what it means to be an African-American, on the many preconceptions that have muddled discussions of race, Africa, and Afrocentrism since the end of the nineteenth century, and, in the end, to move beyond the idea of race. (shrink)

During the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, and he is now considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. When he arrived in Manhattan aboard a crowded refugee ship in 1941, however, he was virtually unknown in the United States and had yet to write his best-known books, _From Caligari to Hitler_ and _Theory of Film_. Johannes von Moltke details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual (...) and political context shaped Kracauer’s seminal contributions to film studies and shows how, in turn, Kracauer’s American writings helped shape the emergent discipline. Using archival sources and detailed readings, von Moltke asks what it means to consider Kracauer as the New York Intellectual he became in the last quarter century of his life. Adopting a transatlantic perspective on Kracauer’s work, von Moltke demonstrates how he pursued questions in conversation with contemporary critics from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt, from Clement Greenberg to Robert Warshow: questions about the origins of totalitarianism and the authoritarian personality; about high and low culture; about liberalism, democracy, and what it means to be human. From these wide-flung debates, Kracauer’s own voice emerges as that of an incisive cultural critic invested in a humanist understanding of the cinema. (shrink)

The failure of post-war institutions to fully grasp the depth and permanence of the placeless condition in the twentieth-century is at least in part responsible for the re-emergence of camps, barbed wire, sunken boats, and separated children in our own. As Seyla Benhabib demonstrates brilliantly, none of key intellectual exiles at the center of her book believed that political thought could simply accommodate the age of the refugee: the terms under which it operated had to shift with the moving (...) world. I argue that there is an important kind of border poetics at work in these accounts of exile, migration and statelessness and within Benhabib’s analysis of the challenges that the placeless condition presents to the institutions of law and democracy today. This is no-coincidence. The modern history of placelessness required—and requires—a political imagination, and a language, that we are yet to fully appreciate or articulate. The wager of Benhabib’s book is how we might cultivate a poetics of exile which relinquishes claims to sweeping universalism whilst imagining the new forms we so urgently need to keep political life open to the differences and otherness that is its lifeblood. (shrink)

This paper presents Michael Polanyi’s escape from Berlin to Manchester as part of a major wave of intellectual migration at the time of Hitler’s rise in Germany in 1933. Many émigré scientists and social scientists from Hungary experienced forced and unexpected relocation twice in the interwar era: first in 1919-20, after the fall of the Bolshevik-type Hungarian Republic of Councils, and again after the Nazi takeover. Once in exile, they formed an unusually tight support group assisting each other by cohorting, (...) networking, and bonding. Their group included a host of major refugee scientists, scholars, visual artists, musicians, men of letters, and public figures. The rich Hungarian contribution to German and, later, U.S. culture and civilization was, to a very great extent, the result of anti-Semitic policies and practices in Hungary after 1920 and in Germany after 1933. (shrink)

This book is a collection of recent lectures by Agnes Heller, delivered all over the world. These essays are edited and introduced by the author of the most significant intellectual biography of her work, John Grumley. In these lectures, Heller engages one of her greatest strengths: to discover philosophy within the very flux of contemporary events. These bring together such timely topics as refugees, human rights, truth in politics and the contemporary university as well as perennial issues like the possibility (...) of artistic representation of the Holocaust, the question whether revolutions are always betrayed, and the possibility of universality in the contemporary multicultural world. (shrink)

Over the last few years, I have attended several political meetings concerned with the refugee crisis, multiculturalism or Indigenous rights in Australia, meetings at which liberal democratic–minded ‘left-wing’ people came together to discuss, or agitate for change in, governmental policies. At these meetings, I always found it difficult to accept the slogans on their placards and in their speeches: ‘Shame Australia! Reconciliation for a united Australia’, ‘Wake up Australia! We welcome refugees!’ or ‘True Australians are tolerant! Let’s celebrate multicultural (...) Australia!’ My uncomfortable feeling came not only from the fact that I was left out because of my Japanese nationality but also because I had never seen or heard words like ‘shame Japan’, ‘wake up Japan’ or ‘true Japanese are...’ at Japanese ‘left-wing’ political gatherings. In Japan, these are words used only by right-wing nationalists. Indeed it is difficult to even imagine liberal-left intellectuals in postwar Japan calling for a ‘true Japanese’ political response, such is the extent to which the idea of ‘good nationalism’ is now regarded as an oxymoron. This is my starting point for an essay in which I want to be attentive to the different roles played by national in the Japanese and Australian political environments. (shrink)

In the rise of modern scientific philosophy, one can distinguish four general periods. Its early phase is part of the intellectual history of 19th-century Austria-Hungary. Second, we find it reaching its self-confident form in the 1920s and early ‘30s, chiefly in the collaborative achievements of the Vienna Circle and its analogous groups in Prague, Berlin, Lwow and Warsaw. Third is the period of its further growth and accommodation during the period roughly from the late 1930s to about 1960, especially in (...) the U.S.A., as mediated largely by the European refugees from fascism. Lastly, the movement’s fate from the 1960s on may be understood as its integration with, or dissolution into, other related modern streams. (shrink)

‘On the “Subject” of Žižek’ is a three-part review essay looking at two recent texts on Žižek’s political interventions: Sean Homer’s Slavoj Žižek and Radical Politics, which takes up Žižek’s writings on the Balkan Wars, and Adam’s Kotsko’s series of web posts on Žižek on the refugee “crisis” in Europe. As well, it examines Zizek’s 2016 book on Islamic terrorism and the same “crisis”, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours. Through a close reading (...) of Žižek’s text, the review asks what is the proper philosophical response to these contemporary events. It proposes that critics of Žižek’s intellectual interventions fail properly to grasp his Hegelian method, which at once is to propose solutions and to think the limits and conditions of possibility of such solutions. It ultimately suggests that such solutions are their own failure, which are intended to lead to a better thinking of our situation – a thinking, consistent with Žižek’s Hegelian method, that could not have been arrived directly, but only through and as the failure of previous solutions. (shrink)

The trend to centralization of the Mizrahi narrative has become an integral part of the nationalistic, ethnic, religious, and ideological-political dimensions of the emerging, complex Israeli identity. This trend includes several forms of opposition: strong opposition to "melting pot" policies and their ideological leaders; opposition to the view that ethnicity is a dimension of the tension and schisms that threaten Israeli society; and, direct repulsion of attempts to silence and to dismiss Mizrahim and so marginalize them hegemonically. The Mizrahi Democratic (...) Rainbow [The Keshet], the most prominent proponent and representative of this trend, was established in the 1990s with the intention of being a leading civic and political body in Israeli society. While it was the Mizrahi worldview that led to selection of the organization's name and aims, their vision was to be involved in social struggle on behalf of other groups in Israeli society. Since it was established, The Keshet has aimed to function as an assertive, long-term alternative coalition exerting influence, power, and pressure on the Israeli narrative network. And, indeed, the organization has succeeded in disrupting Israeli discourse, principally, by challenging the ideological foundations of the Zionist meta-narrative. Nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century and nearly a decade since it was established, The Keshet not only represents the most current wave of Mizrahi discourse, it has changed it to such a great degree that it is impossible to ignore its influence. Further, this alternative narrative may have significant potential to advance the internal Jewish discourse so fundamental at this time given the changing Israeli situation and regional conditions. And, while it is possible to view The Keshet and this new narrative as a continuation of the Mizrahi struggle, as a narrative The Keshet's agenda represents a post-colonial perspective and multi-cultural alternative to Zionism as a social vehicle. Amidst all of this, The Keshet continues to offer concrete proposals to change the Jewish character of the state as well as its internal and external relations. One of the primary goals of this study was to examine the rise of the Mizrahi narrative over the last two decades and the new Mizrahi discourse in Israeli society. More specifically, the study sought to attain an in-depth understanding of the central narrative created and represented by The Keshet. An additional goal was to investigate the influence of The Keshet's activity and the narrative it constructed in regard to other narratives. In particular, the study focused on The Keshet's opposition to the central Zionist narrative that infuses civic, political, and academic frameworks in Israel. Accordingly, the primary research questions investigated in the study sought to determine: What has been the influence of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow on the Mizrahi narrative in Israel? And, what are implications of such influence for the central Zionist narrative? Methodologically, the study was based on narrative and comparative analyses of texts from different periods of the older and newer Mizrahi narratives. The corpus included two types of texts: First, academic texts and opinion pieces, both philosophical and programmatic in nature, published in magazines, journals, books, as well as position papers; second, all of the texts published by prominent and influential figures who charted the path of The Keshet or led it organizationally and/or intellectually over the last twenty years (e. g., Yehudah Shenhav, Yossi Yona, Moshe Krief among others). All texts were examined by means of philosophical, historical and critical hermeneutic tools. This analysis revealed different levels of Mizrahi and civic discourse in Israel as well as among The Keshet's founders and leading ideologues. The study was based on a three stage process model, developed for purposes of this study, for investigation and analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative as well as other oppositional narratives, in particular opposition to the hegemonic meta-narrative. The stages are: issuing the challenge, dissolution and, liberation; that is, liberation is the measure of the ultimate success of the struggle for narrative change. Such change is not based on success in the field, but rather on a radical, fundamental reversal of thought, discourse patterns, stylistic structures, as well as forms of questioning - in this case of taken-for-granted racist mechanisms. However, the principal change is in achieving a deep, inner de-legitimization of the signifiers, categories, and reproductions of all manner of mockery that are based on immoral colonialist processes that are reinforced by regimes of fear and intimidation whose self-destruction began upon their very creation. This three stage model charts the course of the oppositional Mizrahi narrative from: accounting for the past (passing judgment on the so-called historic colonialist Zionism) to writing a new (pure Mizrahi) history and creation of a Mizrahi-Arab identity separate from the Ashkenazic, identified as Zionist. Contemporary post-colonialist discourse is integral in these stages. Such a perspective has been transformed by transitions from - binarism to hybridity, Orientalism to Occidentalism, the politics of "liberation" to "constructive" politics, from the history of consciousness to the history of change, as well as from nationalist to post-nationalist questions. Fundamentally, according to this approach, political and other struggles for the emerging narrative of Mizrahi (or Arab) history seek to centralize it in society and weave it amidst the models of multiculturalism. Undertaken in parallel, the central characteristics of all these stages are borrowed from countries in which the need for national reconciliation led to renunciation of apartheid and racist policies and historical judgment of the hegemony supported by racist leaders. In addition, these three moves were undertaken in Keshet and its ideologues by means of substantive symbolic violence directed at the hegemonic Ashkenazic discourse, which included creation of hatred of it, use of stereotypes the opposite of oppressive discourse, and adoption of an arrogant point of view toward it. This stands in stark contrast to the claims of the self-proclaimed new Mizrahi stance of a discourse established on purely ethical grounds that sought to cleanse itself of these very same oppressive elements. The model developed for and demonstrated in this study allows for analysis of oppositional narratives in which the libratory stage evolves into a form of entrapment, as appears to be occurring to the new Mizrahi discourse. This conclusion is based on the observations shared by many Keshet proponents including leading intellectuals who worked on the manifestos that were the subject of criticism from the Zionist camp. The study identified and defined the following six interwoven strata, which for purposes of explication are each discussed in a separate chapter: The first chapter presents a general theoretical discussion of the issue of the narrative and the inter-narrative struggle that has become central and applicable in various ways in the latest generation (e. g., anthropologically, hermeneutically, and philosophically). The analysis surveys different discussions in the inter-narrative struggle and locates them in the contexts, relations, and meanings derived from, representing, and indeed reproducing the narrative of national identity. The second chapter includes a historical survey of the older Mizrahi struggle that existed prior to the ascendance of the new Mizrahi narrative. Initially, Mizrahi discourse focused on expressing the ethnic protest that grew in years to follow. These feelings of discrimination and social distancing of the immigrants from Islamic countries gave birth to expressions of protest, the most prominent of which were Wadi Salib and the Black Panther Movement's various activities. The research literature contains many explanations for the exacerbation of the ethnic problem and creation of a situation that could not be ignored. The consensus academic view reached at the end of the 1970s identified a number of primary factors for this situation: the existence and extensive numbers of different ethnic groups; the relative or absolute segregation of frameworks within which members of these ethnic groups lived and acted; and the significant overlap between socio-economic status and feelings of discrimination retained by members of the Mizrahi group due years of neglect by the Ashkenazic establishment, the strengthening of Mizrahi social, cultural, and political power, as well as the emergence of a Mizrahi elite that identified with Mizrahi problems. The severe consequences of feelings of discrimination were expressed in a long series of events, such as: rioting by residents of the Rehovot Sharayim neighborhood in 1956; events of Wadi Salib in Haifa in 1959; and a chain of activities involving the Black Panthers in the 1970s. Protest was also an aspect of the "tent movement" in the 1970s and 1980s. Political activities were advanced by the Tami Movement that competed in the election for the 10th Knesset in 1981 and the Shas Movement that has continued to garner political power since being found in 1984. The 1980s and 1990s were characterized as the era of radical consciousness of Mizrahi discourse as well as by the rise to power, in consecutive order, of the political parties – Tami, Shas, and the Mizrahim HaHadashim [the New Mizrahi]. The latter party laid the foundations of the new radical Mizrahi discourse from which emerged such cultural activities as: Iton Aher [A Different Newspaper]; Bimat Kivon Aher [Another Direction Forum]; Efir'yon journal; the Halah Organization for Education in Neighborhoods, Development Towns, and Villages; Kedma; the newspaper – Patish [Hammer]; and, eventually the establishment of Keshet. The third chapter presents an examination of the materialization of the inter-narrative struggle in the case of Israel, with a specific focus on The Keshet and the new Mizrahi narrative advanced by it and intellectuals. The Keshet ideology is examined in the context of its grounding in post-colonial thought, especially that of Edward Said; the directions proposed by Ella Shohat and her followers; the central thinkers of the narrative in Israel in the last decade; and the harsh critique leveled at the Ashkenazic-Zionist narrative. The practical steps proposed for implementation within the multicultural model are also examined. Here the effort to reduce the centrality of Zionism while revealing its oppressive mechanisms was undertaken in parallel with use of these mechanisms in order to create a Mizrahi space with broad margins inclusive of alternative forms of Israeli identity in the Middle East and in conjunction with Arabs within and beyond Israel. Mizrahi traditionalism is examined in the fourth chapter in two particular respects. First, the criticism of the new Mizrahi narrative leveled by the renewed view and, second, the implications of the alternative in terms of creating a Mizrahi space that does not oppose Zionism. Rather, in opposing the post-colonialist perspective, this renewed traditionalist perspective criticizes as well as values Zionism. This space seeks to be both Jewish and Mizrahi. It does not detach itself from nationalist Zionism but rather views itself as a continuation of this tradition and, accordingly, is an effort to develop a next stage in its development. For example, an essential dimension of the traditionalist perspective, "commitment," is considered in this stage to be a fertile basis for dialogue with the past and as an anchor for contemporary interpretation of Mizrahi and other Jews' identities in Israel. The fifth and sixth chapters deal with all of the vectors of criticism directed at the new Mizrahi narrative, including its ideological foundations, philosophical stance, as well as intellectual and practical basis in the Israeli sphere in the face of Palestinian nationalism. These vectors of criticism from within and beyond The Keshet deal with issues, such as, the meaning of the movement's activities and the narrative that it offers regarding questions of Israeli identity, Israeli collective memory, and Mizrahi self-perception. At the same time, it must confront the capitalist neo-liberal narrative in a global world and thrive in a context in which it must make itself manifest amidst oppositional narratives. The final chapter presents a comprehensive, critical analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative. It does so by means of a theoretical model that examines it as an oppositional narrative – one that seeks to challenge the hegemonic meta-narrative, to dissolve the boundaries of the narrative discourse, and to propose liberation and redemption that may led to entrapment amidst a changing, a-dichotomous realities (e. g., global economic development in the face of Zionist nationalisms that display ideological strength as well as development of the sense of being an Israeli that maintains its vitality and continuity while being constituted by sectors that challenge being a Mizrahi, such as co-ethnic subjects. The Keshet's influence is dramatic and extends in a number of central directions. Its political activity and non-entry into the domains of the Israeli parliament granted the movement significant power in civic discourse and contributed to changing the persona of the Mizrahi discourse; for example, from political-party struggles over budgets and obtaining shares of the regime to changing the face of Israeli society and the centrality of the Mizrahi narrative. This change included deconstructing the Ashkenazic narrative and constructing comprehensive Ashkenazic-Zionist guilt, as evident in the Ehud Barak's request for collective forgiveness. This was accomplished through the participation of leading members of Keshet who appeared in prominent intellectual forums and engaged in lively discourse - principally in academic, social, and media domains. Such participation gave new meaning to various aspects of Israeli society while establishing different models of multiculturalism. The rise of the new Mizrahi narrative is a significant marker in the inter-narrative struggle as it represents a desire for separate or hybrid identities. And, the deep probing of the narrative constructed by leaders of The Keshet and those who identify with the movement produced a number of clear ways to distinguish it from the old Mizrahi struggle, whose history was portrayed through social protests, in a manner similar to linear vectors marked with wars and elections. The old Mizrahi struggle selected the traditional tactical struggle identified usually with social and political movements that seek to change political, social, and economic reality - from the bottom up. Their primary demand was to change decisions as well as the division of social goods and resources. Hence, this older period of struggle was not aimed at opposing the ideological foundations of the hegemonic narrative nor did it seek to undermine in a radical manner the unique nature of the state of Israel as a revolutionary solution for the problems of the Jews according to the Zionist approach, as a national home for the Jewish people, and recognition of the right to an preferred and meta-definition of Jewish nationalism. In contrast, the top down struggle advanced by the new narrative is part of an ideological movement led by the educated that is assertive and ground in post-colonialist theory. Accordingly, it was critical of the techniques and mechanisms of oppression as well as sought to attack the Zionist ideological foundations and to reveal its racist operations and the regimes that have preserved it so efficiently for many years. The uniqueness of this narrative is the intellectual offensive that continues to be advanced and, in parallel, development of the discourse struggle in Israel concerning the justification for Zionism and the concrete political proposal that Jews reject the taken-for-granted status of it as an ideology. This new narrative recognizes the historic difficulties of subversion as an emancipatory and, principally, moral effort. In addition, the new Mizrahi narrative shares the foundations and narrative of Palestinian victimization. In its radical version, the new Mizrahi narrative seeks to connect to the Palestinian narrative in order to create a new space here. According to this version, this action will take place gradually. The first stage will be characterized by opposition to Western European, Ashkenazic Zionism. The Eurocentric Zionism will surrender in the second stage, to be followed in the last stage by creation of a coalition of Jews and Arabs that will be establish through concrete actualization of the refugee status and victimization that is shared by both Palestinians and Mizrahim (whether as Mizrahim or Jewish-Arab). Not a speculative academic exercise, the goal sought by this narrative is delineate and to achieve a multicultural model in which equality, liberty, and social justice will overcome the nationalism and colonialism of either side; that is it will be neither Zionist nor Jewish. Thus, this approach stresses what is shared (e.g., acceptance of the Arab space and not a rejection of it; the legitimacy of the Arab language and culture). This is part of detachment from and historic judgment of the colonialist Zionist enterprise. This possibility includes moral elements that remove the evil and harm caused by Zionism for many years as well as inner cleansing – primarily among Ashkenazim – of attitudes towards Jews and non-Jews. Though, in this regard, it should be noted that, to date, the new narrative has not made similar claims that Palestinians undergo a similar process. The assumption seems to be that this should be tested, that the coalition proposed is a possibility that will be recognized by the Palestinians, and that they are prepared to undergo a similar, shared moral process that involves negating the state of Israel as a Jewish, Western state, a state of the Jewish people, and not only for those who live within it. These Mizrahi thinkers conducted a significant move through deconstruction and substitution of the Eurocentric narrative with a multi-cultural proposal that is optimistic and even attractively naïve. Today, they acknowledge that they did not take into account Palestinian nationalist violence directed to citizens, the traditionalist alternative, and widespread opposition within the Mizrahi community toward what is perceived to be Mizrahi seclusion. They also did not take into account the harsh criticism rendered by young and educated Mizrahim who claim that they were born into a complex, multi-dimensional, multi-layered identity that includes internalization of the language of the West and rules of the game of this complex identity. And, though they are critical of some of its values, this makes it difficult to mount internal emotional opposition to the West and to the globalization contained within this world. Hence, this more familiar world is preferred over the values of the Mizrahi-Arab alternative, particularly in regard to problems in the domains of democratic citizenship, stance taken toward women, and freedom of speech. Further, educated Mizrachim reject the post-colonialist perspective and are stridently critical of its dichotomization. They claim that such a division is irrelevant in a world in which older ideologies have collapsed and new spheres – such as cyberspace and others – are open to them in which they can present themselves with an Israeli identity that is not categorized as necessarily Mizrahi. (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. A CONTINUOUS ACT Nico Jenkins In Pierre Hadot’s extraordinary book, Philosophy as a Way of Life , the practices of philosophy—that is the exercise of what we can term pre-institionalized love of wisdom, what Philo of Alexandria described as a training towards wisdom—are described as, following the Stoics, “a continuous act, permanent and identical with life itself, which had to be renewed at each instant.” This renewal of thinking, this coming to be of being itself —meeting itself on its own ground, concerns the way philosophy is practiced, and more often, taught, or rather not taught. Hadot continues his thinking with a description of what happens to the structure of thought in the medieval ages as it becomes adopted—co-opted— by the university, and by extension, by the institution of the church. Philosophy becomes no longer a way of living, no longer a praxis as such but becomes a condition that is locked in a theoretical construct, one which was literally removed from life (and in life we read then love, wisdom, being etc, also the home, the market, the field, the street) and secured behind the high walls of the monastery (which were shortly replaced by the high walls of the Academy) where thinking unfortunately rests for the most part today. Hadot writes further that this dangerous movement of removal reduces thinking to a theoretical practice akin to the mythical Ouroborous; “education was thus no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to becoming fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in order that they might learn how to train other specialists.” Thought then is trapped behind the walls of the academy, and with the exception of such thinkers as Spinoza, Descartes, and Liebnitz as well as others who think from an outside in, thought remains, in the form of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, a practice reduced or removed from life and restricted to what Schopenhauer will call “mere fencing in front of the mirror.” This is of course the tendency today and philosophy remains, for the most part, a discourse produced and thought inside the academy and disseminated, in seminated through university presses and of course the academic journal. It seems necessary to me that we have to have a place, a return, to a thinking which is closer to the Stoics, closer to the pre-Socratics, to a thinking which is a practice of becoming, a training to think, to live, to die. this is not south romantic than imperative . This thinking is one of a deep ir responsibility because it is not known, it is not figured out. It requires a risk and what Heidegger calls a leap (for there is no bridge to it). I call it irresponsible because for too long sanctioned thought has had as its premise the idea that thinking has a goal, a direction, a telos ; that it is not an activity but a process which gives a product; that the responsibility of thinking in turn demand an answer. In my mind, only freed from that goal can thinking, in contrast, bask in its own thinking, bask in a state in which the unknown can remain unknown, that mystery can rest as mystery. This is not to say that the world needs no answers, or to promote a Whitmanesque “leaning and loafing” as the only valid practice. It is only to say that for too long, thinking has been validated by the academy, by the answerable, by the already decided. To me, this requires—as an answer— the ir responsibility of thought, what Nancy calls, “a world for which all is not already done (played out, finished, enshrined in a destiny), nor entirely still to do (in the future for always future tomorrows).” This is a thinking not sanctified by the academy, made sacred by the church or the palace but rather it takes place on the périphérie , beyond the ring road, in alleyways behind the marketplace, in cafes stained with the syphilitic patina of irresponsible talk, of loose talk, the kind of talk made loose not only by the tankard and the goblet by the practice and training of attuned thinking. continent. was formed as a collective of thinkers coming out of the European Graduate School (also known as the University of Disaster) three years ago, in an effort to combat, or challenge, the dominant paradigm which isolates thinking from the street, from life, from where perhaps wisdom tends to emerge. We feel that not only is the university herself no longer the privileged site of where true thinking takes place—and where only official thought can take place—but that the very artificiality of the academy denies thinking—at times—authentic, thought. Our goal at continent. is to create a media agnostic publication which is rigorous in its intellectual underpinnings but which will remain permanently beyond and out of reach of the academy. Though many of us butter our bread with academic paychecks (maid!) we attempt to keep continent. as a refuge—and a refugee—from the University in ruins, from the University as a site of preformed and institutionalized pre-set dialogues. In concert with other publications-both cyber and print—as well as various blogs we are attempting to re-dialogize the dialogue of thinking. We are attempting both to speak to— as well as with and against —the university as a site of accreted knowledge. We have not been utterly successful and continue to attempt to define what that role of being perpetually beyond is (while still trying to maintain rigorous intellectual standards) but it is just that, a goal, which is perpetually opening, perpetually unanswered, perhaps even by design, perpetually unanswerable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Just Peace:A Buddhist-Christian Path to LiberationKyeongil JungThe primary goal of religion is liberation from suffering, and the state of liberation is peace. In that sense religion is a salvific and peace-seeking path. But just as many rivers flow into one great ocean, there are many paths to liberation, that is, to peace. Since the destination is the same, peace-seekers may walk on one path, two paths, or more. I (...) don't know whether it is due to good karma or divine grace, but I have been walking on two paths, Buddhist and Christian, since I began to pursue a spiritual-social transformation of the self and the world. This is possible, as my late friend Praveen Chaudhari said, not because the two paths are the same but precisely because they are different.The contrasting difference I have experienced is that while Buddhism is a path of peace to peace, Christianity is a path of justice to peace. This difference has become more apparent to me as I have studied and practiced both socially engaged Buddhism and liberation theology. Engaged Buddhists seek to achieve peace through "being peace," which is an impartial and nonadversarial way of proceeding, whereas liberative Christians seek to achieve peace through working for justice, which entails a preferential and confrontational attitude. But in these differences I believe that the two approaches can complement, not contradict, each other. They can do so because Buddhism and Christianity are differently but equally salvific paths on the common ground of human suffering.I walk on the two paths to peace at the same time. While this may not be possible intellectually and logically, in my experience it becomes possible through praxis. Liberation theologians are right that theological reflection is a "second act" that follows the first act: the praxis of liberation. In this essay I reflect on four major oppositions that have arisen in the course of my dual praxis: compassion language and justice language, peace and justice, nonviolence and violence, and meditation and action. In each case the opposition is resolved through mutual correction in view of the salvific purpose of both emphases.Compassion Language and Justice LanguageThere are two languages that inspire people to respond to human suffering, namely, the language of compassion and that of justice. Though the two languages are spoken [End Page 3] by Buddhists as well as Christians, compassion language is often attributed to Buddhism and justice language to Christianity. Buddhists draw mainly on compassion language to respond to human suffering. Such language is impartial: it does not discriminate between victims and victimizers, but encourages Buddhists to be compassionate toward both. Thich Nhat Hanh gives a striking illustration of the impartiality of Buddhist compassion: "I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving."1The two italicized "be" verbs challenge me. Though it is not always easy, I have no problem with the first "am" in the poem. I am compassionate toward the poor twelve-year-old girl. I feel her pain, shame, and despair. The compassion language does not allow me to distance myself here from her there. The girl's suffering is my suffering; I am the twelve-year-old girl. But, the second "am" takes my breath away. It is unthinkable and even immoral to identify myself with the sea pirate and to be compassionate toward him. I am not the pirate. Instead of compassion, I feel anger. The pirate should be punished for his heinous crime. I must take sides with the girl against the sea pirate. Why on earth is Nhat Hanh compassionate toward the evil sea pirate?Nhat Hanh was also angry when he heard of the girl's cruel fate. However, after meditating on the tragedy, he realized that he could not simply take sides: "If I had been born in his village and brought up under the same conditions, I would be exactly like him."2 He cannot take sides because he is aware of conditions in which a poor... (shrink)

This book offers a critical discussion of Joseph Carens’s main works in migration ethics covering themes such as migration, naturalization, citizenship, culture, religion and economic equality. The volume is published on the occasion of the annual Münster Lectures in Philosophy held by Joseph Carens in the fall of 2018. It documents the intellectual exchange with the well-known philosopher Joseph Carens by offering critical contributions on Carens’s work and commentaries of Carens as a reply to these critical contributions. With his various (...) works on migration ethics, Joseph Carens must be seen as one of the leading academics in the political and ethical discourse of migration in the last years. The topic of migration raises questions not only regarding naturalization and citizenship but also cultural, economic and religious differences between aliens, citizens and persons whose status lies in between and calls for further determination. Such questions gain more and more importance in our globalized world as can be seen for example in the context of the refugee crisis in the European Union and the U.S. The book covers different systematic topics of Carens’s work as can be found in his widely read book “The Ethics of Immigration” but also in further publications. It provides papers with critical discussions of Carens’s work as well as his responses to these, thus enabling and documenting the fruitful dialogue between the contributors and Carens himself. The aim of this book is to sharpen and shed light on Carens’s arguments concerning migration by offering new and critical perspectives and fine-grained analyses. (shrink)