Finding the heart of God -- Finding God's heart -- Have you seen God's face? -- Why does God sing? -- Searching God's mind -- When God is silent -- Did you know God thinks about you? -- God has unique plans for every unsaved person -- God remembers no longer -- Did you know God reads and writes? -- The unknowable of God -- God whispers -- DoesGod have a nose? -- Wax in God's ears -- God loves to (...) provide for our needs -- God's eyes see all -- What God hates -- God heals protectively -- A laughing God -- A tired Jesus -- What angers God? -- God is love -- The holiness of God -- God is good -- God is person -- God is the all-powerful God -- God is all-knowing -- God is everywhere present -- God is spirit -- God does not change -- The Trinity three in one. (shrink)

This paper focuses on three under-researched subjects in the corporate social responsibility literature: small businesses, small towns, and consequences of social responsibility for the business owner personally. Small businesses are the vast majority of businesses and make a significant contribution to national economic vitality. Their value to the survival of small towns, where they are often the only businesses, is even more important. Research indicates that the social performance of big and small businesses alike is dependent upon the (...) values and disposition of the top decision maker. Therefore, insight into the owner's motivations for contributing to community betterment and the consequences of that behavior for the business and the owner will add to this literature. Equally important, this knowledge can inform policies aimed at increasing good citizenship for all sizes of businesses regardless of location. (shrink)

The charge of treason and the judgment of insanity have left questions that invariably intrude on an assessment of Pound’s life and work. Critics frequently adopt a strategy of separating the life and the work, but tactical review is often necessary. There is a lightness in Pound’s writing that speaks of a being detached from the concerns of the world. Yet with his economic theory of social credit, his political and racial views, as well as his concern for other writers, (...) he is of the world—in the world and part of it. He was decidedly not tied to geography. He had no region or period, and he was as comfortable in Confucian China as in Dante’s Florence or twentieth-century Rome. He could work anywhere. He wrote The Pisan Cantos while jailed in Italy. The Cantos were published while he was in a mental wart at St. Elizabeths, yet a court found that he could not understand the charges against him. Can such an impairment and such achievement occur at the same time? If you say no, then what of the treason? Did he feign madness to escape punishment? Could Pound have been convicted of treason?In this paper, I intend to examine what has been loosely referred to as “the trial of Ezra Pound” and to show that Pound’s case should have been brought to trial within one or two years after his commitment to St. Elizabeths because he had a reasonable chance of being found not guilty of treason; even if found guilty, the circumstances in mitigation of a long prison term would have been so evident that he would have likely spent considerably less time in prison than he spent locked up at the mental institution. I will do this, in part, by reviewing the similarities and differences between Pound’s case and three other treason cases that came to trial within the first years after World War II. The English case, Rex v. Joyce, was tried shortly after the close of the war and well before Pound’s competency hearing on 13 February 1945.3 The law applied in Joyce would have led Pound’s lawyer to seek some postponement of trial until the American courts decided whether to follow the English lead. The other two cases involve the Americans, Douglas Chandler and Robert Best, employees of German radio, who were indicted with Pound in 1943. 3. William Joyce was an American who came to be known as “Lord Haw Haw.” He was hanged at Wandsworth, England, 3 Jan. 1946. He was the best known of the “radio traitors.” He began his programs, “This is Jairmany calling,” and would then prophesy the destruction of English towns and cities. The name “Lord Haw Haw” was created by the English journalist, Jonah Barrington, to ridicule Joyce and to make him appear idiotic. Conrad L. Rushing is a Superior Court Judge in California and an occasional lecturer in law at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches a course in law and literature at the California Judges College and is a founder of the Sane Jose Poetry Center. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg’s Philosophy of Religion argues for a specific brand of sceptical religion that takes ‘Ultimism’ – the proposition that there is a metaphysically, axiologically, and soteriologically ultimate reality – to be the object to which the sceptical religionist should assent. In this article I shall argue that Ietsism – the proposition that there is merely something transcendental worth committing ourselves to religiously – is a preferable object of assent. This is for two primary reasons. First, Ietsism is far (...) more modest than Ultimism; Ietsism, in fact, is open to the truth of Ultimism, while the converse does not hold. Second, Ietsism can fulfil the same criteria that compel Schellenberg to argue for Ultimism. (shrink)

Continuing Franz Boas' work to establish anthropology as an academic discipline in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, Alfred L. Kroeber re-defined culture as a phenomenon sui generis. To achieve this he asked geneticists to enter into a coalition against hereditarian thoughts prevalent at that time in the US. The goal was to create space for anthropology as a separate discipline within academia, distinct from other disciplines. To this end he crossed the boundary separating anthropology from biology (...) in order to secure the boundary. His notion of culture, closely bound to the concept of heredity, saw it as independent of biological heredity (culture as superorganic) but at the same time as a heredity of another sort. The paper intends to summarise the shifting boundaries of anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to present Kroeber?s ideas on culture, with a focus on how the changing landscape of concepts of heredity influenced his views. The historical case serves to illustrate two general conclusions: that the concept of culture played and plays different roles in explaining human existence; that genetics and the concept of Weismannian hard inheritance did not have an unambiguous unidirectional historical effect on the vogue for hereditarianism at that time; on the contrary, it helped to establish culture in Kroeber's sense, culture as independent of heredity. (shrink)

In Geneva, since the beginning of pre-service secondary teacher training at university, two different types of students in teacher preparation coexist: some of them have got part-time classes, others have no teaching assignment. In an introduction to the teaching profession, students from different disciplines of the two types take a course on the same sources of professional knowledge. By analyzing the representations of the teaching profession, we find that the process of construction of their professional identity varies according to whether (...) they have a student teaching placement or not. A Genève, depuis l’universitarisation de la formation des enseignants du secondaire, deux statuts d’étudiants en formation initiale à l’enseignement coexistent : les uns à mi-temps en responsabilité de classe, les autres sans contact avec le terrain. Dans une unité de formation d’introduction à la profession enseignante, des étudiants de disciplines différentes des deux statuts suivent un dispositif de formation identique portant sur les savoirs de référence constitutifs de la profession. En analysant les représentations du métier d’enseignant des étudiants, on constate que l’identité professionnelle en construction de ceux-ci évolue différemment selon s’ils sont sur le terrain ou non. (shrink)

During the 1920s and 1930s geneticist L. C. Dunn of Columbia University cautioned Americans against endorsing eugenic policies and called attention to eugenicists' less than rigorous practices. Then, from the mid-1940s to early 1950s he attacked scientific racism and Nazi Rassenhygiene by co-authoring Heredity, Race and Society with Theodosius Dobzhansky and collaborating with members of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) on their international campaign against racism. Even though shaking the foundations of scientific discrimination was Dunn's primary concern (...) during the interwar and post-World War II years, his campaigns had ancillary consequences for the discipline. He contributed to the professionalization of genetics during the 1920s and 1930s and sought respectability for human genetics in the 1940s and 1950s. My article aims to elucidate the activist scientist's role in undermining scientific discrimination by exploring aspects of Dunn's scientific work and political activism from the 1920s to 1950s. Definitions are provided for scientific discrimination and activist scientist. (shrink)

This text presents a few preliminary results of research currently being conducted at the Université de Sherbrooke’s Research Institute on Educational Practices. The study seeks to understand how situations presented in teacher education can support the functioning and success of trainee teachers’ professional learning. The article’s aim is to identify the points of convergence between situations of professional activity, situations of professional learning, and training situations. The text will attempt to analyze the role that can be played by certain training (...) structures that seek to support a professionalization process that we define in terms of a general aim: the construction of professional knowledge. The originality of this research lies in that it draws on the work of Gaston Bachelard to develop a theoretical frame enabling a reading and interpretation of the results. Ce texte présente quelques résultats préliminaires d’une recherche menée présentement à l’Institut de recherche sur les pratiques éducatives de l’Université de Sherbrooke. Cette recherche vise à comprendre comment les situations présentes dans la formation à l’enseignement peuvent soutenir le fonctionnement et la réussite de l’apprentissage professionnel des enseignants en formation. Nous cherchons à identifier les points de rencontre entre les situations d’activité professionnelle, les situations d’apprentissage professionnel et les situations de formation. Nous tenterons d’analyser le rôle que peuvent jouer certains dispositifs visant à soutenir un processus de professionnalisation que nous définissons au regard d’une finalité : la construction de savoirs professionnels. L’originalité de cette recherche est la convocation des travaux de Gaston Bachelard pour élaborer le cadre théorique permettant la lecture et l’interprétation des résultats. (shrink)

In Geneva, since the beginning of pre-service secondary teacher training at university, two different types of students in teacher preparation coexist: some of them have got part-time classes, others have no teaching assignment. In an introduction to the teaching profession, students from different disciplines of the two types take a course on the same sources of professional knowledge. By analyzing the representations of the teaching profession, we find that the process of construction of their professional identity varies according to whether (...) they have a student teaching placement or not. : A Genève, depuis l’universitarisation de la formation des enseignants du secondaire, deux statuts d’étudiants en formation initiale à l’enseignement coexistent : les uns à mi-temps en responsabilité de classe, les autres sans contact avec le terrain. Dans une unité de formation d’introduction à la profession enseignante, des étudiants de disciplines différentes des deux statuts suivent un dispositif de formation identique portant sur les savoirs de référence constitutifs de la profession. En analysant les représentations du métier d’enseignant des étudiants, on constate que l’identité professionnelle en construction de ceux-ci évolue différemment selon s’ils sont sur le terrain ou non. (shrink)

This text provides a brief portrait of teacher induction programs in place in the school boards in Quebec and an analysis of three major support systems used. The analysis is based on both the descriptive documents integration programs posted on the website of the Carrefour national de l’insertion professionnelle en enseignement (CNIPE) as well as a review of research. Ce texte présente un bref portrait des programmes d’insertion professionnelle mis en place dans les commissions scolaires québécoises ainsi qu’une analyse de (...) trois des principaux dispositifs de soutien utilisés. L’analyse se base à la fois sur les documents descriptifs des programmes d’insertion mis en ligne sur le site web du Carrefour national de l’insertion professionnelle en enseignement (CNIPE) ainsi que sur une recension des recherches. (shrink)

The professional situation is considered a major interface of practicum training, here conceived as a School of conjunction, a school where one learns to make links, a foundation for the engineering of professionalization. The notion of situation is here developed based on the study of a data corpus elaborated during an experience with a practicum training model centred on writing and the construction of the professional situation by a subject-actor-author of the situation, in interaction with others, in the context of (...) nurse training. The analysis and interpretation of data brings to light a complex and unique unit, constructed in the space-time of a professional practice, a process during which several states succeed one another. The critical moment in action characterizes this unit; it is central to the process, mobilizing reflection in action, internal deliberation, and action-related decision. La situation professionnelle est identifiée comme interface majeure de la formation en alternance conçue ici comme une Ecole de la conjonction, une école où l’on apprend à relier, fondement d’une ingénierie de professionnalisation. La notion de situation est approfondie à partir de l’étude d’un corpus de données constitué au fil de l’expérimentation d’un modèle de formation en alternance centrée sur l’écriture et la construction de la situation professionnelle par un sujet-acteur-auteur de la situation, en interaction avec autrui, dans le contexte de la formation en soins infirmiers. L’analyse et l’interprétation des données permettent de mettre en évidence une unité singulière complexe, construite dans l’espace-temps d’une pratique professionnelle, un processus au cours duquel plusieurs états se succèdent. Le moment critique dans l’action la caractérise ; il occupe la place centrale du processus, mobilisant réflexion dans l’action, délibération intérieure et décision d’action. (shrink)

The professional situation is considered a major interface of practicum training, here conceived as a School of conjunction, a school where one learns to make links, a foundation for the engineering of professionalization. The notion of situation is here developed based on the study of a data corpus elaborated during an experience with a practicum training model centred on writing and the construction of the professional situation by a subject-actor-author of the situation, in interaction with others, in the context of (...) nurse training. The analysis and interpretation of data brings to light a complex and unique unit, constructed in the space-time of a professional practice, a process during which several states succeed one another. The critical moment in action characterizes this unit; it is central to the process, mobilizing reflection in action, internal deliberation, and action-related decision. La situation professionnelle est identifiée comme interface majeure de la formation en alternance conçue ici comme une Ecole de la conjonction, une école où l’on apprend à relier, fondement d’une ingénierie de professionnalisation. La notion de situation est approfondie à partir de l’étude d’un corpus de données constitué au fil de l’expérimentation d’un modèle de formation en alternance centrée sur l’écriture et la construction de la situation professionnelle par un sujet-acteur-auteur de la situation, en interaction avec autrui, dans le contexte de la formation en soins infirmiers. L’analyse et l’interprétation des données permettent de mettre en évidence une unité singulière complexe, construite dans l’espace-temps d’une pratique professionnelle, un processus au cours duquel plusieurs états se succèdent. Le moment critique dans l’action la caractérise ; il occupe la place centrale du processus, mobilisant réflexion dans l’action, délibération intérieure et décision d’action. (shrink)

This text provides a brief portrait of teacher induction programs in place in the school boards in Quebec and an analysis of three major support systems used. The analysis is based on both the descriptive documents integration programs posted on the website of the Carrefour national de l’insertion professionnelle en enseignement (CNIPE) as well as a review of research. Ce texte présente un bref portrait des programmes d’insertion professionnelle mis en place dans les commissions scolaires québécoises ainsi qu’une analyse de (...) trois des principaux dispositifs de soutien utilisés. L’analyse se base à la fois sur les documents descriptifs des programmes d’insertion mis en ligne sur le site web du Carrefour national de l’insertion professionnelle en enseignement (CNIPE) ainsi que sur une recension des recherches. (shrink)

This text presents a few preliminary results of research currently being conducted at the Université de Sherbrooke’s Research Institute on Educational Practices. The study seeks to understand how situations presented in teacher education can support the functioning and success of trainee teachers’ professional learning. The article’s aim is to identify the points of convergence between situations of professional activity, situations of professional learning, and training situations. The text will attempt to analyze the role that can be played by certain training (...) structures that seek to support a professionalization process that we define in terms of a general aim: the construction of professional knowledge. The originality of this research lies in that it draws on the work of Gaston Bachelard to develop a theoretical frame enabling a reading and interpretation of the results. Ce texte présente quelques résultats préliminaires d’une recherche menée présentement à l’Institut de recherche sur les pratiques éducatives de l’Université de Sherbrooke. Cette recherche vise à comprendre comment les situations présentes dans la formation à l’enseignement peuvent soutenir le fonctionnement et la réussite de l’apprentissage professionnel des enseignants en formation. Nous cherchons à identifier les points de rencontre entre les situations d’activité professionnelle, les situations d’apprentissage professionnel et les situations de formation. Nous tenterons d’analyser le rôle que peuvent jouer certains dispositifs visant à soutenir un processus de professionnalisation que nous définissons au regard d’une finalité : la construction de savoirs professionnels. L’originalité de cette recherche est la convocation des travaux de Gaston Bachelard pour élaborer le cadre théorique permettant la lecture et l’interprétation des résultats. (shrink)

. The reasoning behind the reforms to education that began in 2000-2001 in Québec stemmed in part from a need to put the focus on the student’s intellectual development, rather than on overall personal development, as was the case in the 1970s. At this point, has intellectual development truly become a priority in teaching? Without providing a definitive or categorical answer, the author argues that, in some settings, socialization is more important than instruction and, in some subjects, knowledge as a (...) subjective justification takes precedence over strictly epistemological grounds. La réforme de l’éducation entamée en 2000-2001 au Québec a été justifiée en partie par la nécessité de mettre l’accent sur le développement intellectuel de l’élève et non plus, comme ça aurait été le cas dans les années 1970, sur le développement intégral de la personne. Or, aujourd’hui, le développement intellectuel est-il réellement devenu une priorité dans l’enseignement? Sans répondre de manière définitive ou catégorique, l’auteur soutient que dans certains milieux, la socialisation a plus d’importance que l’instruction et que dans certaines matières, la justification subjective de la connaissance prend le dessus sur une justification strictement épistémologique. (shrink)

Historically, Western philosophy has struggled to accommodate, or has simply denied, the moral value of spontaneous, non-reflective action. One important exception is in the work of K.E. Løgstrup, whose phenomenological ethics involves a claim that the ‘ethical demand’ of care for the other can only be realized through spontaneous assent to ‘sovereign expressions of life’ such as trust and mercy. Løgstrup attacks Kierkegaard for devaluing spontaneous moral action, but as I argue, Kierkegaard too offers an implicit view of spontaneous moral (...) response as a regulative ideal. In attempting to articulate the model of character-formation that such an ethics requires, we can see both Løgstrup and Kierkegaard as engaging with an ancient problematic, running from Classical Daoism to medieval mysticism, of achieving spontaneity through purgation rather than edification—not building the subject up, but demolishing personality in order to become a conduit for a transcendent normativity. (shrink)

L’instauration d’élections dans les campagnes chinoises a favorisé l’émergence et l’essor d’un champ de recherche sur la gestion autonome villageoise. Cet article analyse les travaux d’une école de pensée, « l’École rurale », dont la plupart des chercheurs enseignent dans le Centre de la Chine. Décrivant les changements de perspective de cette École, l’auteur montre que son principal apport théorique est de relier l’autonomie villageoise à la question de la gouvernance dans les campagnes. Cependant, il critique l’École pour ses faiblesses (...) méthodologiques, notamment son rejet des théories occidentales.Elections in the Chinese countryside have promoted the emergence and development of a research field focused on villagers’ autonomy system. This article analyses the work of a group of researchers, collectively known as « The School of Chinese rural studies », who mainly teach in the Centre of China. While describing the change of study direction of this « School », the author points out that its main theoretical feature is connecting villagers’ autonomy with governance of villages. However, the author criticizes the School for its methodological flaws, and more specifically for its dismissal of Western theories. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s first major work, L’Invitée ( She Came to Stay ), in order to reveal the text as a vital place of origin for feminist phenomenological philosophy. My reading of L’Invitée departs from most scholarly interpretations of the text in three notable respects: (1) it is inclusive of the “two unpublished chapters” that were excised from the original manuscript at the publisher’s request, (2) it takes seriously Beauvoir’s claim that (...) phenomenological philosophy is often better expressed in novels than essays or treatises, and (3) it views the novel’s main characters, Françoise and Xavière, as one woman who has multiple, contradictory, excessive selves. Thus approached, L’Invitée provides us with a thick description of one woman’s embodied consciousness and thereby shows us with specificity what a consciousness whose underlying structures reflect sexual difference looks like. This consciousness not only experiences itself as being both gendered, categorized, disciplined, and defined and in excess of these genders, categories, disciplines, and definitions at the same time, but also experiences its own self-relation through the presence of multiple selves who are each simultaneously attracted to and negating of the other. As such, the defining features of this consciousness involve experiences that I have respectively labeled “ontological multiplicity” and “auto-jealousy.”. (shrink)

Depuis une dizaine d'années, des centaines des millions d'internautes ont donné naissance à des édifices informationnels novateurs. Ces dispositifs dits Web 2.0 constituent de nouveaux modèles éditoriaux. Ces changements,qui s'inscrivent dans la continuité de l'histoire des techniques et des usages, accélèrent considérablement les processus historiques en cours. Par la métaphore des frontières, cet article analyse les profondes mutations intervenues dans le domaine des savoirs : question de l'accès, enjeux de la mémoire collective, transformation de la nature des savoirs.

"Aranguren: filosofía en la vida y vida en la filosofía" llevó por nombre la exposición sobre la figura y el legado de José Luis L. Aranguren (Ávila 1909- Madrid 1996) que pudo verse desde el 4 de junio al 26 de julio de 2009 en el Pabellón Transatlántico de la Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid con ocasión del centenario del nacimiento del filósofo abulense.

These are for entries for _The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon_, edited by Jon Mandle and David Reidy, on H.L.A. Hart, Charles Beitz, Sovereignty, and Citizen.

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

Le présent article s’intéresse aux arguments égalitariens qui défendent une ouverture des frontières nationales car ces dernières discriminent injustement, selon eux, les perspectives individuelles à l’échelle mondiale. Pour égaliser des opportunités aujourd’hui séparées par les frontières des États, il faudrait généraliser la liberté de mouvement transnationale. Nous confrontons cette thèse au cas de l’Union européenne où le statut des Européens circulant librement dans un autre pays leur a progressivement donné les mêmes droits sociaux que ceux dont jouissent les ressortissants du (...) pays d’accueil. Cela a contribué à égaliser les opportunités à l’échelon européen malgré l’absence d’harmonisation des systèmes de protection sociale et de leur financement. À partir de quelques arrêts de la Cour de justice de l’Union européenne, nous confrontons la thèse égalitarienne à trois réserves. La première, qui souligne la menace de la liberté de circulation pour la justice sociale intérieure, est rejetée pour des raisons empiriques. La seconde concerne la possibilité pour la liberté de circulation d’être le support de droits sociaux. Enfin, l’absence de solidarité dans l’Union européenne révèle que la défense égalitarienne d’une ouverture des frontières peut difficilement valoir sans être assortie de mécanismes distributifs au niveau européen. (shrink)

Le relief de la vision. Mouvement, profondeur et cinéma dansLe monde sensible et le monde de l’expressionEst-il possible d’établir une connexion entre Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression et la pensée du dernier Merleau-Ponty? De quelle manière une formulation germinale de la réflexion ontologique serait-elle présente dans le cours de 1953? Et quels sont les éléments de contact et de convergence qui permettent de retracer un tel lien?J’ai l’intention de proposer cette hypothèse à partir d’une considération du thème (...) de la vision dans son rapport au mouvement, esquissant les points dans lesquels ce lien émerge et se montre, tant de manière latente que de manière manifeste. Je voudrais montrer comment, dans le développement de ce sours, d’un côté, le mouvement est défini dans sa valeur ontologique et en vient à exprimer la relation même qui lie le corps percevant et le monde perçu et, de l’autre côté, comme le thème de l’expérience scopique arrive à éclairer le rapport entre perception et expression pour en dévoiler le caractère chiasmatique.Si les recherches menées par Merleau-Ponty dans la Phénoménologie de la perception avaient délimité le rapport d’inhérence et de co-implication entre le percevant et le perçu, les notes de cours du Monde sensible et monde de l’expression en viennent à désigner un «double mouvement» entre le sens et le sensible, ou bien un mouvement d’expression et d’empiètement de l’un dans l’autre, «réciproque» et «à double sens», dans lequel nous pouvons entrevoir une préfiguration du rapport chiasmatique et réversible qui lie le voyant et le visible dans l’ontologie merleau-pontienne de la chair. Il existe une trame qui relie le cours de 1953 avec la réflexion du dernier Merleau-Ponty, particulièrement avec L’œil et l’esprit. J’ai parcouru à nouveau les trois modes, ou plutôt les trois mouvements de la vision qui émergent à l’état germinal dans les notes du cours.- Le thème de la vision en profondeur comme découverte du rapport actif-passif entre le voyant et le visible, lié à la dimension scopique comme ouverture au lien entre vision et désir.- La notion d’œil spirituel que Merleau-Ponty emprunte à Paul Schilder, comme concept clé pour la conception de la vision dans L’œil et l’esprit, qui représente en outre un lien fondamental entre l’expérience scopique et la conception libidinale du corps propre, en syntonie profonde avec le rôle de la pulsion scopique chez Lacan.- Le thème du mouvement dans le cinéma comme point culminant de ces références à la vision, à la profondeur, au relief, et qui émergera à quelques années de distance, avec la peinture, dans L’œil et l’esprit et dans le cours sur L’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie d’aujourd’hui.The Depth of Vision: Movement, Depth, and Cinema in The Sensible World and the World of ExpressionIs it possible to establish a connection between The Sensible World and the World of Expression and the final thought of Merleau-Ponty? In what manner would a germinal formulation of ontological reflection be present in the 1953 course? And what are the elements of contact and convergence that allow us to tracing out such a link? I intend to put forward this hypothesis from a consideration of the theme of vision in its relation to movement, sketching the points in which this link emerges and shows itself, both in a latent and a manifest way. I would like to show, in the development of this course, on the one hand, how movement is defined in its ontological value and comes to express the very relation which links the perceiving body and the perceived world, and, on the other hand, how, as the theme of optical experience happens to bring to light the relation between perception and expression in order to unveil its chiasmatic character.If the research conducted by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception had delimited the relation of inherence and co-implication between the perceiving and the perceived, the course notes of The Sensible World and the World of Expression come to designate a “double movement” between sense and the sensible, or, a “reciprocal” or “bi-directional” movement of expression and encroachment, in which we can catch a glimpse of a prefiguration of the chiasmatic and reversible relation which links the seer and the visible in the Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh.There is a web which links the 1953 course with the reflection of the final Merleau-Ponty, particularly with Eye and Mind. I have again gone through the three modes, or rather the three movements of vision which emerge in a germinal state in the course notes.- The theme of vision in depth as the discovery of an active-passive relation between the seer and the visible, linked to the optical dimension as the opening to the link between vision and desire.- The notion of the spiritual eye that Merleau-Ponty takes from Paul Schilder, as the key concept for the conception of vision in Eye and Mind, which in addition represents a fundamental link between optical experience and the libidinal conception of one’s own body, which is profoundly in sync with the role of scopic impulse in Lacan.- The theme of movement in film as the culminating point of these references to vision, to the depth, to the being in relief, or depth perception, which will emerge in some distant years, with painting, in Eye and Mind and in the course on Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today. (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. DISTURBING THE WEDNESDAY-ISH BUSINESS-AS-USUAL OF THE UNIVERSITY STUDIUM: A WAYZGOOSE MANIFEST Eileen A. Joy This time it is not I who seek it out . . . it is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument . . . This element which will disturb the studium I . . . call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida What enables us to risk change is the feeling that we are understood and (therefore) accompanied. —L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer” Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions. —motto of the Bruce High Quality Foundation In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education , “Ditch the Monograph,” Jennifer Howard surveys some recent experiments by university presses to cultivate and produce shorter-form e-books (i.e., Princeton Shorts and Stanford Briefs), 1 and wonders if these books might not “pull in new readers for serious scholarship,” and at a time, moreover, when “academic libraries have ever-smaller amounts of money and space to lavish on [longer] books, which often have more pages than they have readers.” 2 Paul Harvey, the new director of Stanford University Press, explains that these books will be “accessible but not simplified, and should be digestible in one or two sessions—bite-sized—and not require a month of reading.” 3 At the same time, we are witnessing the launching of new academic publishing initiatives, such as Anvil Academic, a platform for “born-digital” and “born-again-digital” “post-monograph” (non-book) research that is pinning its hopes for the future of academic publishing on networked and “digital-only” environments that would “free scholarly argument from the limitations of the printed monograph and allow authors to bring the full force of technology to the presentation of their work.” 4 It appears important to the academic collective at Anvil to continue to maintain and ensure certain protocols of peer review, but in ways that are “better suited to network environments.” Conversely, Zer0 Books (an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, Ltd.), one of the more radical and exciting academic imprints out there today, is offering shorter-form books that are very much still books in print as well as available in e-book formats. In their mission statement, Zer0 inveighs (in somewhat hysterical tones) that a “cretinous anti-intellectualism presides” over a contemporary culture, “cheerled by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations,” and thus the time is ripe for a different set of discourses—“intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist”—and while Zer0 Books, indeed, offers a particularly electric and eclectic list of reasonably-priced, shorter-form books ( Slime Dynamics , Nuclear Futurism , and Levitate the Primate are just a few samples of their bracing titles), they do not offer any of their publications in open-access form. Thus, their desire for a reinvigorated and non-bland, non-consensual sphere of public intellectual debate is still somewhat in the shadow of the multinational corporations (such as Amazon.com, to which all of their book pages link) that their mission statement scorns. 5 While watching the fat of our wayzgoose congeal in the wood-grains of the table in our communal vagabond printer’s workshop, and while bathed in the autumnal light of the raining Gutenberg-era photons to which Issac Linder has called our attention, 6 I share this admittedly woefully brief and selective overview of current trends in academic publishing initiatives simply to highlight their austerity of (or, perhaps, their overly pragmatic) imagination as well as their “heavy” managerial structures. 7 For even while I applaud the initiative of these initiatives (and I plan to support them with my voice and wallet, being a pluralist, after all), I also despair a little at the ways in which they are each, in their own way, also locked into institutional structures (whether corporate, academic, or even ideological) that determine in advance what is and isn’t (supposedly) possible and what is (supposedly) necessary now —such that, for example, the monograph is now “out” and shorter books (or serialized e-extracts from longer works) are “in,” e-texts are more desirable (and supposedly cheaper to produce and disseminate) than traditional print media, it is necessary to shift (and even dispense with) certain publishing modes to meet the demands of currently popular text-delivery technologies (such as iPads, Kindles, and smart-phones), expert and specialist peer review is still necessary for “legitimacy,” multiple layers of hierarchical and bureaucratic academic-managerial oversight still obtain while at the same time certain layers of important editorial care and curatorship drop away (due to lack of time, money, readers’ attention spans, space, etc.), the material archive (the dream of Borges’s Babelasian library or even Richard Fenyman’s 24 million library volumes etched on the head of a pin 8 ) should simply be abandoned, and so on. Being among friends in the glow of the para-academic Outside, I will dispense with the posture of academic politesse, and attempt to say what I really feel: if a radically innovative and public cultural-intellectual milieu is to flourish, and if we are to imagine and hope for future Walter Benjamins who will still attempt to cross borders with manuscripts in briefcases that are more important to them than their very own persons, 9 then what we need now is more (more papers, briefcases, Kindles, iPads, filing cabinets, shelves, teletype machines, Linux code, microchips, mimeographs, lithium batteries, candles, pens, javascripts, and so on) and not less of everything (we need print books as well as e-texts, yellow legal pads as well as the mystic writing pads of our Evernote apps, baroquely lengthy multi-volume works as well as broadsides and post-it note scholarship, close and loving and even co-dependent editorial curatorship of others’ work, and so on), and we also need the courage (or foolishness) to depart to extra-territories not bathed in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the academy “proper.” The university will continue to be an important site for keeping open the question of thought 10 and for fostering various modes of dissemination, but I also think it’s time for a subter-fugitive, vagabond, gypsy para-humanities, especially at a time when so many of us are barely hanging on to the university by the skin of our teeth (or hands or minds). 11 Let’s “get lost” now, taking the humanities with us like so many suitcases, portable libraries, and sacks of contraband diamonds. Let’s figure out inventive ways to radicalize (and thus sustain) the humanities by absconding with them to the streets, alleys, market squares, ateliers, lounges, coffee shops, bookstores, sofas, wine bars, clubs, kitchens, bedrooms, galleries, dive bars, park benches, garages, living rooms, deserted urban zones, and crumbling basements. 12 In short, let’s re-boot, let’s situate ourselves, like Diogenes on the outskirts of Athens, on the edges of our cities and towns, never losing sight of the places (and institutions) we care about, while also saying, fuck this . Let’s embrace a radical, polyglot cosmopolitanism that enunciates a “shaggy heart,” where we will have “no fixed abode” and be “nowhere a foreigner.” 13 Like practitioners of Hakim Bey’s amour fou , we should strive to be “illegal” now, “saturating” ourselves with our own aesthetic, engaging in publishing ventures that would fill themselves “to the borders” with “the trajectories of [their] own gestures,” running “on angels’ clocks,” our only goal the “ingestion of the Galaxy,” and never tilting at fates fit only for “commissars & shopkeepers.” 14 One of the things we have lost sight of in the university, and especially in our publishing practices, is the importance of play —now is the time, again cadging from Hakim Bey, to “share the mischievous destiny” of runaways, “to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinner table while adults gibber from behind their masks.” 15 Without non-utilitarian play, and without the right to flail, flounder, and fail while playing, we risk the frigid stasis of the status quo, of always being trapped in what has already been said, what has already been played out . How did we get here? How did the creative arts get so thoroughly de-cathected from the “liberal” arts? How will we give birth to heretic-misfit love-child thoughts without unbridled play? 16 So much for ontologically anarchic poetics and Bey’s wild children and crazy love: what about practicalities? Fuck practicality; this ain’t practical. For me, the most exciting publishing and dissemination ventures going are those such as continent. , Speculations , Itineration , Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies , the Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) and its publication PELT , Uitgeverij Press, eth press: postmedieval poetries, the Hollow Earth Society, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the Confraternity of Neoflagellants, and so on 17 —journals, presses, and alternative research-cultural organizations entirely run and managed by graduate students and post-graduates (and some faculty collaborator) with no financial support to speak of and only tenuous footholds in the university (our academic precariat) and who are publishing or fostering some of the most exciting work in the humanities and arts right now, work that eschews and also troubles the waters of disciplinary genre, “review,” privilege, and status. 18 It is one of the aims of punctum books to assist these and other new (extra- but also para-institutional) publishing initiatives with various forms of regular and longer-term support (economic, editorial, aesthetic, technical, promotional, etc.), but who is paying for this? No one; at least, no one “official.” We’ve simply scraped together what we have; we’re running on the heady steam of an international all-volunteer staff and gift-share economies, also martinis, WD-40, ramen, loose change, old Talking Heads albums, matches, a glitter ball, and chewing gum. And yet, we actually believe that an open-access and print-on-demand model (in which all of our publications are both free and available for purchase) may actually lead to something like financial solvency and even jobs, but we’re not making that a condition of our future plans. We aim to grow through a vast network of talented persons (some situated in universities and cultural institutions with paying jobs, some not) dedicated to a radically independent publishing ventureshumanities that would not be beholden to any specific university or commercial academic interest, and to fostering the broadest possible range of open-access print- and e-based platforms for the sustenance of what we are calling a “whimsical para-humanities assemblage”—an assemblage, moreover, that refuses to relinquish any possible form of public-ation (the making of cultural-intellectual stealth “publics” that would seep in and out of institutional and non-institutional spaces, hopefully blurring the boundaries between “inside” and “outside”), and we are also intent on resuscitating what we are calling postmedieval and pastmodern forms of publication (from breviary and commentary and florilegium to telegram and liner notes and inter-office memo, from the Book of Hours to the cassette mixtape). The term “para-academic” was devised by Nicola Masciandaro, one of punctum’s founders, to capture the multivalent sense of something that fulfills and/or frustrates the academic from a position of intimate exteriority. Para-academia is that which is beside academia, a place whose logic encompasses many reasons and no reason at all ( para -, “alongside, beyond, altered, contrary,” from Greek para -, “beside, near, from, against, contrary to,” cognate with Sanskrit para -, “beyond”). The para is the domain of: shadow, paradigm, daemon, parasite, supplement, amateur, elite. The para-academic embodies an unofficial excess or extension of the academic that helps, threatens, supports, mocks (par-ody), perfects and/or calls it into question simply by existing next to it. 19 This accords well, I think, with some of the sentiments expressed by the editors of continent. and Speculations during an online conversation they conducted with each other on the “aesthetics of (para)academic practice,” where Michael Austin wanted to distinguish between academia and the university—“I take academia to be the culture of knowledge-communication, while the university happens to be the most notable site of such communication in present society. There is no necessary connection between the two, nor should we assume academia requires the university in order to exist”—and Paul Boshears added this important exemplification of Austin’s comments: “Both Academia and the University are imagined communities, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s phrase. However, the University is an institution that accredits, controls, and stamps the passports of those that would enter its territory. It is a striated space as opposed to Academia’s [more] fluid space.” 20 It is punctum’s aim to occupy this more fluid space but to also de-territorialize the University itself, disturbing and disrupting the Wednesday-ish, business-as-usual protocols of both the generic university studium and its individual cells and holding tanks, while also extending the very important work of the University into new and often untended spaces. Because our press was founded and is directed by premodernists (medievalists and early modernists), 21 we have some serious love of the book as a material art object and we also embrace the idea of the itinerant and also the cloistered scholar. We also can imagine that printed matter might be of some use during and after our own pre- and post-apocalyptic “Age(s) of Simplification,” while we are also intent on making use of whatever “generators of electrical essences” we can get our hands on. 22 We want it all, and we’re not inclined to ask for permission to “pretty, please” let us publish whatever it is we want to publish. In this sense, we are also impatiently presentist: we want things now, as opposed to later and if we make mistakes, if we speak (or publish) too soon, too hastily, we’ll depend on what Kathleen Fitzpatrick has termed post-publication review 23 to sort that out. What we need now is more, and not less, thought, with more words, ruly and unruly, jostling with each other across the pages and liquid retina displays of our dispersed yet still ex/intimate “commons.” This is not to say that punctum books does not care about the quality of the work it publishes (we wouldn’t publish just anything but we would certainly publish almost anything if it were interesting enough and well-written and if it appears to take seriously what we say we are looking to “pimp”: “writing as risk, adventure, a going-forth without ‘papers’ or guarantees: falling through the hole/ punctum , a falling down, free-fall. . . . quixotic, sagely mad engagements that generate and satisfy noetic-erotic need, textual thought-bodies that give pleasures only to be possessed in their presence”). Nor is this to say that we do not lavish close and creative attention upon the editing, formatting, and creative design of our publications (indeed, we want to distinguish ourselves in this manner from university and commercial academic presses that increasingly either outsource this work or defer upon authors the responsibility for editing and proofing and sometimes even formatting the layout of their own manuscripts). We are not interested in the maintenance of specific genres or disciplines (is it literary theory? poetry? philosophy? art history? memoir? sociology? cybernetics? speculative fiction? who can tell?), and thus we take seriously Derrida’s belief in a university “without condition” which has the task, especially by way of the humanities, of ensuring “the principal right to say everything, whether it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it.” 24 We want a radical Open of thought. This is thus also about freedom, something in very short supply in the university these days, and which also has something to do with well-being, with eudaimonia , or flourishing. But we do not scorn the University-at-large, or even specific institutions (Harvard, University of Chicago, Brooklyn College, Eastern Carolina University, Berkeley, whatever), which is to note (again) that para - is also the space of the “beside” and the “near,” and more than wanting to go against or beyond the university, we seek a more supplementary (even inter- or co-dependent) relationship, 25 if also an occasionally antagonistic one. And I am not sure I would draw the same distinctions that some of the editors of continent. and Speculations might want to draw between “academia” and the “university/University.” For me, the university (similar to how both Michael and Paul described academia/Academia) is everywhere and anywhere I am at any given moment, and this also extends to all who think and write alongside me, in whatever “location,” virtual, material, or otherwise. The university is not just the buildings and lawns demarcated by specific geographical coordinates (42° 22′ 25″ N, 71° 6′ 38″ W: Harvard), but anywhere we gather to disseminate : I define this as a practice of, quite literally (following the Oxford English Dictionary ), “scattering [knowledge] abroad” and “sowing” things and “spreading [knowledge] here and there,” and “dispersing (things) so as to deposit them in all parts.” Obviously, in some cases, specific locations matter a great deal, and the very hard work of the faculty and student activists to preserve the formerly free system of public higher education in California or to maintain the disciplines of philosophy or paleography at certain universities in the UK are extremely worthwhile and important political-pedagogical causes that we should all support however we can. Wherever persons gather to pro-fess and learn, there is something of value worth protecting, while at the same time, the university proper is increasingly becoming less “liveable” for increasing numbers of teaching faculty and actual and potential learners, and we need to pay attention to that. 26 While some people fight the good fight on the inside of specific campuses and even across specific campuses, some of us will have to be willing to create and foster new domains of thinking-together (which is not the same as thinking alike). This will require risk, and a willingness to fall and tumble into holes. Speaking of holes: punctum , in the idioms of the Middle Ages and Roland Barthes (refer to my first epigraph above), is simultaneously the moment (Augustine’s punctum ; writing as always momentary ), the pricks and punctures and perforations made by awls punching holes in vellum (what makes writing, but even more so, books , possible, opening-to-writing/writing-as-opening), and also the “pointed instrument” that disturbs the studium , the sting , the speck , and the cut , into and out of which anything might fall or emerge, and by which we feel ourselves pierced (writing as shock to the system—ours, our minds, our bodies, but also systems more largely). punctum is also the cast of the dice: we’re taking chances out here. It’s a form of play, but it’s also work, perhaps the best precarious job at present in the humanities-at-large. NOTES See Princeton Shorts: Short Takes, Big Ideas , and “‘ Bite-sized’ Reading from SUP ,” Stanford University: The Dish , May 17, 2012. There is something delightfully silly in how the titles of both these book series conjure up images of men’s underwear, and it also reminds me that not many university presses are run by women. Palgrave Macmillan also recently announced a shorter-form e-book series, Palgrave Pivot . Jennifer Howard, “ Ditch the Monograph ,” The Chronicle of Higher Education , October 14, 2012. “‘Bite-sized’ Reading from SUP.” “ About Anvil Academic ,” Anvil Academic . See also Adeline Koh’s interview with the head editor of Anvil, Fred Moody: “ A Digital Solution to Academic Publishing? Introducing Anvil Academic ,” ProfHacker [ Chronicle of Higher Education weblog], September 24, 2012. I will note here that Anvil was conceptualized and is managed by a consortium of institutions (such as the Council on Library and Information Resources [CLIR], the National Institute for Technology in Library Education [NITLE], and University of Michigan Library’s MPublishing office, which is also partnered with Open Humanities Press), university scholars, and academic librarians, and is partly funded by various universities with an intensive interest in the digital humanities (such as the University of Virginia, Washington University in Saint Louis, and Stanford University, among others). Anvil appears to not have fully made up its mind whether or not it would offer services to those who might want to publish monographs (whether longer or shorter), edited collections, and journals in digital form (at times, in their various statements, they seem to be saying analog-style digital publishing is passé and not their focus, and at others, that they would welcome helping academics with digital platforms for e-versions of academic monographs, etc.). What does appear clear is that one of their chief motivating impetuses and concerns seems to be ensuring the maintenance of traditional forms of expert peer review, albeit within newly innovative digital publishing environments, and yet, at the same time, what is not clear from their website or published pieces on their project is exactly how (or what ) they plan to offer in the way of technical infrastructures, platforms, and ongoing support for those new (and increasingly networked) environments. “ About Us ,” Zer0 Books . Zer0 Books is a subsidiary of John Hunt Publishing, Ltd., a trade publisher based in the UK, known especially for the books it has published in the genres of spirituality or “New Age” studies (through its O-Books, Dodona, Mantra Books, Moon Books, Soul Rocks, and Circle Books imprints) and also in the genres of parapsychology, esoteric and mystic knowledges, holistic health, juvenile fiction, and erotica, among other subjects. While Zer0 Books is a welcome imprint in the multiverse of what might be called “radicalized” para-academic publishing, it appears to offer practically no editorial support to its authors and also offers multiple levels of “contracts,” some of which essentially amount to self-publishing. Why I bother to mention this at all will be more apparent as my little wayzgoose diatribe here gathers more steam. Let it be said, however, that I have regularly purchased titles from this imprint because they are publishing authors whose work I admire (Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood, Mark Fisher, Graham Harman, Steve Shaviro, Eugene Thacker, Ben Woodard, to name some but not all), even while I find Zer0’s editorial oversight, such as it is, appallingly uneven. In his opening remarks to the “All in a Jurnal’s Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose” session (2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, Boston, MA, 20-22 September 2012), from which my remarks here are culled and expanded upon, Isaac shared with us that, “as we proceed into the autumn with our printing projects always ahead of us and to be done, we will tonight literally be bathed not only by the artificial candlelight of our screens, but as well, in part bathed by photons raining down on us at 186,282 miles per second,” and also that “these photons that are raining down on us, will rain down on us all winter, [and] have been raining down on us all year . . . had their origin in the combustion cores at a center of 9 cyg, 572 years ago, in 1440, the year which we point to today as the common year in which, as we all know, Gutenberg is said to have brought the movable type press to the western world, inaugurating an era that stretches farther into the past and future than [Marshall] McLuhan could justify.” I would note here that I am in deep admiration of the work of Open Humanities Press , and am especially keen on their experimental writing + publishing modes as evidenced in their Living Books About Life series and Liquid Books imprint, edited by Clare Birchall and Gary Hall, as well as in some of their journals, such as Vectors . From my vantage point, OHP has been consistent in thinking “outside the box” of traditional university and commercial academic publishing and they have published some of the most radical new thinking in the humanities (albeit somewhat slowly ), but they cannot be viewed as completely “independent” of the university milieu from which all of their Editorial and Open-Access Board members, as well as the members of their Steering Group and Partners, hail. I simply seek a more radical, even anti-peer departure out of the academy for so-called “academic” publishing, while at the same time I support the idea of the university as one place among others where more radical publishing modes might be cultivated (as is the case with Anvil, OHP, Stanford Shorts, etc.), more on which below. See Richard Fenyman, “ There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom ,” Engineering and Science 23.5 (February 1960): 22–36. See Julian Yates, “ The Briefcase of Walter Benjamin/Benjamin Walter’s Briefcase: An Invent/ Story ,” rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010. Here, as always, I defer to Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). An important, more recent companion to Readings’ book is Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). I’m thinking here especially of all the post-grads with no, or contingent, jobs, the adjunct teaching staff, but also those who, for various reasons (including economic constraints), have been cut off or distanced from university life, who hope that they can play a role in intellectual “life,” but who feel increasingly unable to participate. And here I would also pause to praise para-academic educational initiatives and organizations, such as The Public School New York , The Saxifrage School , The Vancouver Institute for Social Research , The Art School in The Art School , and The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research , to name just a few, no matter how long- or short-lived, that take advantage of non-traditional, non-institutional, and anti-hierarchical spaces in which to craft new teaching and learning environments that still value embodied social-pedagogical practices. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves , trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 140. Hakim Bey, “Amour Fou,” in Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991). Bey, “Wild Children,” in T.A.Z. 16. On the importance of artful play to the humanities as well as to well-being, see L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 41–64, where she writes that, “Playing and pretending are crucial to the becomings of living creatures, to adaptation and behavioral flexibility; . . . it is transformative and transforming. We can neither thrive nor survive without it” (57). See also Aranye Fradenburg, “Frontline: The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 39.4 (Winter 2011): 589–609. See Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism , Itineration: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Rhetoric, Media, and Culture , Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies , Organism for Poetic Research and PELT , Uitgeverij Press , eth press: postmedieval poetries , Hollow Earth Society , Bruce High Quality Foundation , and the Confraternity of Neoflagellants . Or as Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei put it during our BABEL Waygoose session, “Fuck peer review.” And as Vincent also puts it in one of the five maxims for his press, Uitgeverij (meaning simply, “Publisher”), “Only experiment can present the present. We only care about the new, whether past, present, or future. We enjoy publishing anything that’s between categories, obscure, or witnessing the edges of language. For us, all audience is potential” (see footnote 17 for Uitgeverij’s website address, where you will find all five maxims in a variety of different languages). Nicola Masciandaro, quoted in Eileen Joy, “ PARTY! Or is it a Panel Discussion on Para-Academic Publishing, or BOTH? ” punctum books [weblog], February 20, 2012. Jamie Allen et alia, “ Discussions Before an Encounter ,” continent. 2.2 (2012): 136–147. But is it important to note here that punctum books aims to publish books and other types of texts across a wide range of fields and disciplines, and our Advisory Board is made up of scholars and artists who work on diverse subjects, from political science to architecture to feminist philosophy to metal theory to new media studies to art history and beyond. References to Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1959). See Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Peer Review,” in Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 15–49. Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition (thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ what could take place tomorrow),” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader , ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 26 [24–57]. On the important possibilities of newly imagined co-dependent co-disciplinarities and radically open confraternities as one way of moving the work of the para-“University” forward, see Jonathan Hsy, “ Let’s FAIL Together, yeah yeah YEAH! ” In The Middle , October 5, 2012. As Thomas Gokey, one of Speculation ’s editors, has put it, “In the United States at least, universities have been turned into shell corporations for Sallie Mae. That might sound overly dramatic or overly cynical but I think it is the most accurate way to think about our current situation. Right now the community of questioning, learning, researching and teaching has been captured by a system whose primary function is to extract as much value out of academics as possible. The main thing that universities produce is precarious, indebted, docile workers. Universities are one of the primary tools used to produce and maintain class difference. For the most part the poorest get excluded outright, the richest pass “Go” and collect $200, everyone else gets buried in decades worth of crushing debt for the privilege of receiving an education that will be recognized. An academic is a battery that gets plugged into this dying machine” (Allen et alia, “Discussions Before an Encounter”). (shrink)

Depuis 2011-2012, les milieux de migrants russes en France se mobilisent politiquement. On peut observer, d’une part, une mobilisation liée aux mouvements de protestation en Russie à la suite des élections jugées « truquées » et, d’autre part, une mobilisation encouragée par la politique de l’État russe envers « ses » émigrés. L’histoire, le passé, jouent un rôle primordial dans ces mobilisations. Du côté des autorités russes, les concepts et moments clés de l’histoire nationale sont mobilisés pour une construction consensuelle (...) qui est par la suite « imposée » aux migrants, perçus comme les messagers de la parole des autorités russes dans les pays d’accueil. Cependant, cette reconstruction historique par l’État russe se confronte à des contradictions qui sont à la fois internes au projet de l’État russe et relatives aux temporalités subjectives des migrants. Ces dernières fournissent autant de contrepoints et de formes de contestation, explicite ou non, au récit historique unifié que s’efforcent de bâtir les autorités russes. Ces temporalités subjectives se traduisent par des identifications : avec les années 1990 qui, dans le discours politique sur l’histoire russe, sont perçues comme des « années noires » ; avec une « classe sociale » qui appartient au passé ; et enfin, avec des segments spécifiques de l’histoire et de l’espace russes, loin des conceptions totalisantes forgées par le projet extraterritorial des autorités. (shrink)

La primera prueba cartesiana de la existencia de Dios tiene como condición la certeza de la finitud del ego. Esta certeza se obtiene, a su vez, mediante actos por los cuales el ego conoce su propia finitud al compararse con una idea implícita de l’infini (Dios). Estos actos son la duda y el deseo. Sin embargo, estos importantes problemas exigen previamente el análisis de la ideas de l’infini y l’indéfini. Sostengo en este artículo que l’indéfini es el término que ocasionalmente (...) designa en propiedad lo que el término l’infini designa por analogía de atribución cuando Descartes lo predica de entes ontológicamente finitos tales como la idea del número o extensión interminable. (shrink)

Le présent article décrit l’élaboration de la Charte de Lampedusa et analyse les bouleversements politiques et géopolitiques qui ont suivi son écriture, en parallèle avec les évolutions des dispositifs humanitaires-militaires de création, de gestion et de contrôle des frontières dans la zone euro-méditerranéenne. Les frontières sont considérées à partir de leur fonction de séparation ; une séparation qui n’est pas seulement géographique, mais également sociale, culturelle, économique, et qui l’est aussi à l’intérieur des limites nationales. Potentialités et limites de la (...) Charte sont ainsi évaluées à la lumière de sa capacité de représenter un cadre de référence encore actuel, aspirant à construire une vision alternative au modèle politique, économique, social et culturel prédominant en Europe ; un modèle qui aujourd’hui nécessite plus que jamais d’être complètement déstructuré. Cette vision alternative est imaginée à partir d’une conception des droits inclusive et « par le bas », qui s’oppose à leur histoire d’instrumentalisation institutionnelle, et à leur « réduction » dans le paradigme de l’humanitaire. (shrink)

La nouvelle rhétorique de Perelman identifie plusieurs types d'auditoires, dont l'auditoire spécialisé (un groupe de physiciens, les adeptes d'une religion) et l'auditoire universel ("l'ensemble de ceux qui sont considérés comme des hommes raisonnables et compétents en la matière"). Ce dernier se distingue des autres par son caractère fictif, car il est une construction mentale de l'orateur. Il pourrait donc reposer sur une pétition de principe, c'est-à-dire sur une ou des prémisses que l'on suppose admises alors qu'elles ne le sont pas. (...) L'examen de cette question est d'autant plus crucial que, pour Perelman, c'est le recours à ce type d'auditoire qui caractérise le discours philosophique. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analytical framework – derived from the Herbert L.A. Hart’s philosophy of law – for the study of the phenomenon of habit and custom from the perspective of normativity. Its starting point is the Hart’s concept of “internal aspect of rules” as a necessary criterion for the rule’s normative character. The internal aspect exists in two forms: the “recognition” based on specific rules, and “acceptance”. The concept of acceptance reveals a difference between (...) habit and custom, by capturing the normative character of the latter. The formation of the customs – by way of unprecedented punishment of a rule’s violation – reveals the ambiguity of the term “sanction” as referring to not only the external aspect, but also to internal aspect of rules. (shrink)

Si l’on souligne d’ordinaire la dette de Condillac envers Locke, notamment en ce qui concerne l’association des idées, on doit également rappeler l’importance de Malebranche dans l’élaboration de la pensée de l’abbé. Cependant la reprise condillacienne de Malebranche, une fois émancipée d’hypothèses psychophysiques sur l’union de l’âme et du corps, doit trouver de nouveaux outils pour expliquer le phénomène de la variété des esprits, que Descartes et Malebranche expliquaient facilement dans le cadre de l’union, notamment par la référence à la (...) variété des corps et des événements corporels. C’est donc la tension entre la généralité et l’unité des lois d’association des idées, d’une part, et les modalités de leur particularisation dans des esprits différents, d’autre part, qui est étudiée dans cet article. (shrink)

Law, Morality and Society Essays in Honour of H.L.A Hart.

Aborder l’exposition comme média implique de considérer le point de vue du producteur (commissaire), celui du récepteur (visiteur) et celui de l’exposition (à travers les moyens employés et l’aspect de l’architecture communiqué). Deux manières d’envisager la communication de l’architecture au musée sont abordées. Pour la première, et selon nous la plus ancienne, le terme architecture est pris au sens de bâtiment. Les commissaires tentent alors de transmettre à la fois l’expérience et la matérialité du bâtiment. Pour la seconde manière, apparue (...) ces vingt dernières années, c’est plutôt le projet architectural (idée, processus, bâtiment et représentations) que l’on communique. La communication de l’idée et du processus semble être une tendance forte qui cible la pratique architecturale. Cette réflexion critique mène au constat suivant : d’un point de vue communicationnel, l’exposition d’architecture oublie trop souvent de considérer son destinataire, et les commissaires n’utilisent donc pas son plein potentiel comme média. (shrink)

« L’anarchie », comme en témoigne l’omniprésence du qualificatif « anarchique » dans De l’absurdité sur des échasses, est essentielle pour comprendre le chemin argumentatif développé dans la critique benthamienne des droits de l’homme. C’est seulement à partir d’elle qu’apparaissent clairement les différents pans de cette critique, mais surtout son ordre et son sens déterminés par ce qui vaut comme le fondement de toute la critique, la théorie des fictions. Une fois reconnue l’importance de ce fondement, alors la continuité et (...) la systématicité de la critique comme la propension dévastatrice de cette argumentation se déploient entièrement, et devient cette « machine de guerre » contre les droits de l’homme. « L’anarchie » est bien le fil directeur de la critique, en tant qu’elle est le moyen et la fin même de la Déclaration des droits de l’homme pour Bentham. (shrink)

This article examines Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and mining community development, sustainability and viability. These issues are considered focussing on current and former company-owned mining towns in Namibia. Historically company towns have been a feature of mining activity in Namibia. However, the fate of such towns upon mine closure has been and remains controversial. Declining former mining communities and even ghost mining towns can be found across the country. This article draws upon research undertaken in Namibia (...) and considers these issues with reference to three case study communities. This article examines the complexities which surround decision-making about these communities, and the challenges faced in efforts to encourage their sustainability after mining. In this article, mine company engagements through CSR with the development, sustainability and viability of such communities are also critically discussed. The role, responsibilities, and actions of the state in relation to these communities are furthermore reflected upon. Finally, ways forward for these communities are considered. (shrink)

La création d’entreprise n’obéit pas toujours à la finalité économique de la recherche du gain et du profit. Elle peut être aussi le moyen par lequel certains groupes sociaux, en l’occurrence ici les entrepreneurs d’origine maghrébine, contournent le marché du travail qu’ils considèrent comme le lieu privilégié d’expression de la discrimination ethnique. Seront analysées les trajectoires sociales et professionnelles de ces petits entrepreneurs et la façon dont ils mobilisent les réseaux sociaux pour trouver de nouveaux marchés, recruter du personnel ou (...) encore se procurer l’argent nécessaire pour lancer leur entreprise ou parer aux difficultés économiques conjoncturelles.The creation of an enterprise does not inevitably stems from an economic search for money and profit. It may also be the means through which some social groups – in this case entrepreneurs of Maghreb immigrant background – skirt around the labour market they regard as a privileged place for the emergence of ethnic discrimination. The social and occupational paths of these small companies’ heads will be analized, as well as the way they mobilize social networks with a view to finding new markets, recruiting staff or raising enough money to set up in business or face an economic crisis. (shrink)

Au fil du temps, les données personnelles semblent avoir changé de nature. Désormais, elles saisissent des éléments intrinsèques de la personne. Or, en même temps, elles paraissent échapper à la maîtrise de l’individu, et ce, à deux égards. Premièrement, la personne ne parvient pas à les appréhender intellectuellement. Deuxièmement, elle semble être dans l’impossibilité de les protéger juridiquement. Cette situation aboutit à une utilisation étendue et moins contrôlée des informations, utilisation dont le but est d’anticiper les besoins et comportements de (...) l’individu. Ce dernier est enfermé dans un profil qui ne peut lui correspondre parfaitement, mais sur la base duquel sont pourtant prises des décisions à son égard. Un nouveau modèle se construit, automatisé et systématisé, dans lequel la personne est objectivée et réduite à un amas d’informations. L’éthique n’est alors plus vecteur d’équilibre et se fragilise au fur et à mesure de l’appréhension des informations personnelles. (shrink)