The Avant-Garde: Race Religion War tells an unprecedented story of radical cultural production in the modern era. Rejecting the idea that the avant-garde is only about art and insisting that it is much more than a European phenomenon, Mike Sell redefines the historical, geographical, ideological, disciplinary and theoretical boundaries of avant-garde studies.

The present essay discusses how women calypsonians in the English-speaking Caribbean use Calypso performances as a theatrical platform to offer a gendered critique of the nation and engage in a dialogue, which despite exhibiting pride in the nation, questions its various exclusions in ways that seek to redefine dominant constructions of the nation as ‘we’. Not only do they offer a vision of the nation and its cultural aspects that is more inclusive, they also speak out against cultural and (...) class='Hi'>political oppression. I analyse specific performances by Singing Sandra (Trinidad) and Queen Ivena (Antigua) from my position as an ‘indigenous-outsider’ and ‘outsider within’ in order to demonstrate that Calypso performance is a post-colonial form of theatre in the English-speaking Caribbean that is being used by women as a site for feminist action and agency. (shrink)

This paper considers the Cartesian theatre as a metaphor for the virtual reality models that the brain uses to make inferences about the world. This treatment derives from our attempts to understand dreaming and waking consciousness in terms of free energy minimization. The idea here is that the Cartesian theatre is not observed by an internal audience but furnishes a theatre in which fictive narratives and fantasies can be rehearsed and tested against sensory evidence. We suppose the brain is driven (...) by the imperative to infer the causes of its sensory samples; in much the same way as scientists are compelled to test hypotheses about experimental data. This recapitulates Helmholtz's notion of unconscious inference and Gregory's treatment of perception as hypothesis testing. However, we take this further and consider the active sampling of the world as the gathering of confirmatory evidence for hypotheses based on our virtual reality. The ensuing picture of consciousness resolves a number of seemingly hard problems in consciousness research and is internally consistent with current thinking in systems neuroscience and theoretical neurobiology. In this formalism, there is a dualism that distinguishes between the process of inference and the process that entails inference. This separation is reflected by the distinction between beliefs and the physical brain states that encode them. This formal approach allows us to appeal to simple but fundamental theorems in information theory and statistical thermodynamics that dissolve some of the mysterious aspects of consciousness. (shrink)

In _Elementary Aspects of the Political_ Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in (...) the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal. (shrink)

This book focuses on experimentation that is carried out on human beings, including medical research, drug research and research undertaken in the social sciences. It discusses the ethics of such experimentation and asks the question: who defends the interests of these human subjects and ensures that they are not harmed? The author finds that ethical research depends on the adequacy of review by committee. Indeed most countries now rely on research ethics committees for the protection of the interests of the (...) human participants in research. Dr McNeill analyses how successful these committees are in balancing the interests of science with the interests of human subjects. (shrink)

This article presents and discusses an innovative pedagogical device designed for training pre-service teachers on the nature of science. We endorse an approach according to which aspects of the nature of science should be explicitly discussed in order to be understood by learners. We identified quantum physics, and more precisely the principles of uncertainty and complementarity, as a rich topic suitable for such a discussion. Our training device consists in preparing and staging a new type of theater, the “scientific (...) experimental theater,” based both on the characteristics of Brecht’s theater and Kelly’ cyclic theory of learning. This device was implemented with a group of eight pre-service teachers. According to our observations, the approach favors their involvement and provides them with a frame for expressing their doubts and confronting their points of view. By analyzing their discussion, we identified several aspects of the nature of science that the pre-service teachers raised spontaneously: subjectivity, the social and cultural embeddedness of science, the construction and status of models, and the role of questioning in the development of science. The implemented device therefore appears as an interesting means for stimulating a rich discussion on the nature of science. This study opens new avenues for teachers’ and students’ training devices aimed at developing a critical and reflective stance on science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scrutinizing the Art of TheaterAaron Meskin (bio)IntroductionIn his 1992 address to the American Society for Aesthetics, Peter Kivy suggested that philosophers of art might do best by giving up on “grand theorizing” (that is, pursuing the definition of art).1 In its place he proposed that they pursue the “careful and imaginative philosophical scrutiny of the individual arts and their individual problems.”2 Of course John Passmore and others had said (...) similar things at earlier points,3 but philosophical aesthetics has, it seems to me, finally and robustly taken the turn toward the philosophies of the arts. Much of the best work in philosophical aesthetics over the last fifteen years or so has pursued the route Kivy suggested. James Hamilton’s The Art of Theater is part of this turn—it is careful and imaginative scrutiny of the art of theater done at the very highest level, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to comment on it.4In what follows I shall address a number of issues raised by Hamilton’s work: the definition of theatrical enactment; the place of pretending and imagining in theatrical performance; the nature of Hamilton’s “ingredients model” and its relation to more traditional accounts of the work/performance relation; the account of theatrical style on offer; and the question of what we have learned from experimental theater.But before I move on to address those aspects of the book’s content in detail, let me say something about the pedagogical significance of this work. Although there are a number of legitimate ways to teach introductory courses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art (for example, by following a historical progression or by structuring it around certain key issues), one increasingly attractive option is to teach a course that focuses on those aforementioned individual arts and their individual problems. So, for example, I used to regularly teach graduate seminars in aesthetics to students enrolled [End Page 51] in a fine arts doctoral program. These students studied music, art education, the visual arts, theater, and dance; the seminars were designed to provide them with a broad foundation in philosophical aesthetics. Since they typically had no background in philosophy, I made the effort to assign readings and topics relevant to their own artistic practices and interests. Providing them with contemporary cutting-edge philosophical material on music and the visual arts was not hard. Kivy’s work, as well as that by Jerrold Levinson, Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, and others, makes that fairly easy. And intriguingly—since philosophers are commonly said to have ignored the art of dance—there’s even a decent amount of recent philosophical work on that art form by such authors as Graham McFee, Frances Sparshott, and Noël Carroll and Sally Banes.5 But where to turn to for the theater students? I would often read some of Aristotle’s Poetics with them, but I have to admit that the serious students of the theater that I encountered in those seminars typically knew that text much better than I did. (Still, I hope I challenged their breezy assumptions about catharsis!) We would read Hume on tragedy together—fun, but not really so much about the theater—and sometimes a bit of Nietzsche. But there was never much to give them from contemporary philosophers on the subject—a few articles here and there, of course, but nothing that clearly laid out the big and distinctive issues that the art form of theater raises. Nothing, to put the point a bit differently, that would provide any evidence that there really was a lively and extant philosophy of theater out there, as there are lively and extant philosophies of film, music, literature, and photography. In short, for those attracted to the prospect of teaching aesthetics as the philosophies of arts, the dearth of good work on theater by contemporary philosophers has been a significant source of frustration and even a bit of an embarrassment.The book in question is not the only recent philosophical work on theater. There are fine articles on the topic by David Osipovich, David Saltz, and Paul Woodruff, among others. Hamilton himself has a string of... (shrink)

This book explores aesthetic forms of the left to negotiate the political frontiers of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film and literature to illuminate interconnections across regions and countries, and discuss the shifting political contours of the region during the latter half of the 20th century. With a clear focus and conceptualization this volume raises two key questions; how left-wing art generated cultural and social formations, and how aesthetic (...) forms held political value across the region. Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, it traces the trajectories and nuances the left-wing cultural movement took during decolonization, and focuses on connections and continuities across post-1947 India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Following the evolution of progressive culture in the 1950s and 60s, networks of leftist filmmakers and theatre activists in postcolonial Pakistan, and the changing fate of left cultural politics in Sri Lanka and India during the 1970s, this book looks to reinvigorate the entangled histories of the left cultural movement in post-partition South Asia. (shrink)

In this paper our aim is to examine whether research conducted on human participants with LSD-25 raises unique research ethical questions or demands particular concerns with regard to the design, conduct and follow-up of these studies, and should this be the case, explore and describe those issues. Our analysis is based on reviewing publications up to date which examine the clinical, research and other uses of LSD and those addressing ethical and methodological concerns of these applications, just as some historical (...) examinations of this subject. The first chapters of the paper give an overview regarding the history of LSD-research with human participants, healthy volunteers and patients alike. The remaining chapters have a focus on questions regarding the potential ethical issues of such human trials in the contemporary research ethics framework. We also consider briefly political and regulatory issues regarding this substance that possibly affect its clinical and research applications. (shrink)

Legitimation und Musiktheater im Diskurs : politische, wirtschaftliche und ästhetische Narrative -- Material und Methode -- Legitimationsstrategien im Diskurs um das Musiktheater -- Schlussbetrachtung.

This volume presents new research on the use of experimental methodologies in moral and social philosophy. The contributions reflect the growing plurality of methodologies and strategies for implementing experimental work on morality to new domains, problems, and topics. Philosophers are exploring the ways in which empirical approaches can transform our idea of the good, our understanding of the social nature of norms and morality, as well as our methods of fulfilling ethical goals. The chapters in this volume extend (...) experimental work on morality to previously underexplored areas. The contributions in Part 1 explore the methods and foundations of experimental work in areas such as folk moral judgments, metaethical beliefs, moral explanations, and reflective equilibrium. Part 2 focuses on issues in normative ethics, legal, and political philosophy such as virtue ethics, utilitarianism, theories of justice, and criminal responsibility. Finally, the chapters in Part 3 tackle various applied ethical issues including feminist X-Phi, animal welfare, experimental bioethics, and self-driving cars. Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in ethics, applied ethics, experimental philosophy, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of law. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction brings together eighteen essays written by an internationally acclaimed team of scholars to provide a comprehensive overview of the work of Gilles Deleuze, one of the most important and influential European thinkers of the twentieth century. Each essay addresses a central issue in Deleuzeʹs philosophy (and that of his regular co-author, Félix Guattari) that remains to this day controversial and unsettled. Since Deleuzeʹs death in 1994, the technical aspects of his philosophy have been largely neglected. (...) These essays address that gap in the existing scholarship by focusing on his contribution to philosophy. Each contributor advances the discussion of a contested point in the philosophy of Deleuze to shed new light on as yet poorly-understood problems and to stimulate new and vigorous exchanges regarding his relationship to philosophy, schizoanlysis, his aesthetic, ethical and political thought. (shrink)

Deleuze & Guattari, Politics and Education mobilizes Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy as a revolutionary alternative to the lingering forms of transcendence, identity politics, and nihilism endemic to Western thought. Operationalizing Deleuze and Guattari's challenge to contemporary philosophy, this book presents their view as a revolutionary alternative to the lingering forms of transcendence, identity politics, and nihilism endemic to the current state of Western formal education. This book offers an experimental approach to theorizing, creating an entirely new way for educational theorists to (...) approach their work as the task of revolutionizing life itself. Examining new conceptual resources for grappling with and mapping a sustainable political alternative to the cliche's that saturate contemporary educational theory, this collection of essays works toward extracting a genuine image of education and learning that exists in sharp contrast to both the neo-liberal educational project and the critical pedagogical tradition. (shrink)

This paper responds to an invitation to historians of political thought to enter the debate on new materialism. It combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with some aspects of post-humanist and new materialist thought, without abandoning a more classically ‘historical’ characterization of materialism. Two keywords drawn from Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’ – represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention of civil science to Wiener’s cybernetic theory of society. The political (...) stakes common to these forms of mechanical materialism were attacked ontologically, epistemologically and politically by Simondon. His approach, I will argue, opens the path for a genuine materialist critique of the political anthropology implicit in modern political thought, and shifts political thinking from politics conceived as a problem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation. (shrink)

At a time when a "return to Sartre" is being heralded in France and elsewhere in preparation for the celebration of the centennial of his birth, it seems appropriate to ponder the nature and tenor of this renewal. To which aspects of Sartre's work are we returning as the centennial approaches, and are we doing so with fresh eyes or with the same critical prejudices that have obscured our appreciation of this work in the past? If one looks for answers (...) to Bernard-Henri Lévy (aka BHL), the principal instigator of this current renewal, with specific regard to the genre that interests us in these pages—the theater—one is going to be sorely disappointed. For while Lévy considers Sartre "the first [writer]—the only [writer]—to know how to split himself equally well between being a theoretician and an accomplished storyteller," he lavishes this praise solely on the theory and practice of Sartre's novels: "The concept of engagement is not a political concept stressing the social duties of the writer; it is a philosophical concept highlighting the metaphysical powers of language. … Sartre … has never really written a novel with a [totalizing] thesis or message" (BHL 85, 86). (shrink)

This work explores the complex relationship between science and politics. More specifically, it focuses on the problem of scientism. Scientism is a deformation of science, which unnecessarily restricts the scope of scientific inquiry by placing a dogmatic faith in the method of the natural sciences. Its adherents call for nothing less than a complete transformation of society. Science becomes the idol that can magically cure the perpetual maladies of modern society and of human nature itself. Whitney demonstrates that scientism is (...) intellectually impoverishing and politically dangerous. Whitney surveys the development of scientism from early modernity to the present day, beginning with Francis Bacon, arguing that Bacon stands as the founder, not only of the experimental method, but also of scientism. This is most evident in his presentation of a scientific utopia in New Atlantis. After briefly noting the impact of Isaac Newton and the French Encylopedists, Whitney then moves on to the other great representative figure of scientism: Auguste Comte, who demonstrates the religious fervor that accompanies the scientistic attitude. Continuing on the path set forth by Bacon, Comte argues for a reorganization of society based on the precepts of positive science. The solution to scientism, Whitney advances, lies in a new (or revised) science of politics; the foundation of which is based on the Classical sources that were either discredited or banned outright by the proposals of Bacon and Comte. He concludes the work with contemporary examples of scientism, including the climate change debates, genetic engineering, and the New Atheism movement. (shrink)

Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature’s images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre’s dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the (...) spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Rancière, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images. (shrink)

The method of analysis Adam Smith uses is relatively similar to the method economics generally uses today, especially the subfield of experimental economics. The method of analysis that Smith uses is coherent and consistent throughout his whole work. He searches for constant variables and then sees what variables are changed by exogenous changes. In particular, Smith looks for the constancy in human nature, and analyzes how historical and material circumstances change the incentives that the constant human nature faces. This (...) method, applied to human conduct in all its aspects, makes it easy for many economists today to see some continuity between Smith’s political economy and today’s economic science. (shrink)

In Out of This World, Peter Hallward argues that Deleuze's philosophy is, in spite of its proclaimed Nietzscheanism, intrinsically nihilistic. This article defends Deleuze against this accusation by reassessing his relationship to Nietzsche. I argue that both thinkers pose a similar problem, that of agency, and that the modus operandi of both for solving it relies on viewing agency as experimentation. The paper highlights the strong pragmatic dimension at play in Deleuze's philosophy: Deleuze aims to penetrate increasingly deeply into this (...) very world and to provide us with tools for intensifying our sensitivity to and engagement with it. To bring this into view, I offer a parallel reading of Nietzsche's and Deleuze's account of the production of our empirical experience, their critical stance towards such experience, and their means of overcoming it by engaging fully with problematic aspects of reality. (shrink)

Technology takes an unprecedented position in contemporary society. In particular, it has become part and parcel of governmental attempts to manufacture life in new ways. Such ideas concerning the governance of life organize around the same contention: that technology and life are, in fact, highly interconnectable. This is surprising because if one enters the sites of techno-scientific experimentation, those visions turn out to be much frailer and by no means “in place” yet. Rather, they afford or enforce constant interfacing work, (...) a particular mode of manufacturing life, rendering disparate, sturdy, and often surprisingly incompatible things available for one another. Here, we contend that both of those aspects, pervasive rationalities of interconnectability and practices of interfacing mark the cornerstones of what we call a new techno-bio-politics of life. In order to grasp the government of life under the technological condition, we must understand how both human and non-human entities are being rendered interconnectable and re-worked through practices of interfacing. We take neuro-technology and care robotics as two illustrative cases. Our analysis shows that the contemporary government of life is not primarily concerned with life itself in its biological re-constitution but rather with life as it is interfaced with and through technology. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

It is possible to consider attention as the modulating dimension of consciousness. Understood in this sense, attention can be a privileged theme for relating the first person point of view (conceived as a psycho-phenomenology inspired by the work of Husserl) to the experimental sciences (e.g. psychology, neuropsychology, etc.), which have done a great deal of work on attention. This article will take up in succession some different points of view regarding the status of attention and its structure (e.g. static (...) aspects). It will also consider the dynamic of attention from a micro-genetic point of view as well as a functional point of view. The final section will seek to show not only the unique and original contributions of each perspective, but also each perspective''s limitations and biases. (shrink)

Prologue. Setting up the stage : "beauty is in the street" in Istanbul -- Democratic action, spontaneity, and the intermediating practices of political friendship -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau : from the unsettling reality of the theater to the dream of immediacy -- Antonio Negri : insurgencies, the multitude, and the search for permanence -- Jürgen Habermas : embracing transience, containing unpredictability -- Jacques Rancière : the theatrical paradigm and the messiness of democratic politics -- Enacting political friendship in (...) Gezi -- Epilogue. Fanning the spark of hope. (shrink)

This essay uses the concept of the constellation to characterize the relations among interdisciplinarity, cultural memory, and comparative literature. To do so entails: (a) reviewing the paradoxical interdisciplinarity of comparative literature, (b) tracing its establishment at a liberal arts college (Bryn Mawr College, USA), and (c) describing a course on “The Cultural Politics of Memory” that tested the limits of scholarship and testimony. The discussion includes an account of an unusual conference on cultural memory: that is, the ways in which (...) different cultural groups identify and describe their shared pasts. The informality and collegial dialogue of the conference were associated with a liberal arts context. It then turns to the question of theorizing aspects of cultural memory that are conveyed at the margins of conventional discourse: by what is largely unsaid, or represented in dance or pantomime. Because each of the performances discussed here is related in a distinct way to a preceding historical trauma (the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, African American slavery in the USA, the terrorism of the Shining Path in Peru), it was important to determine what source of memory, what archival materials, could persist through traumas that often suppress memory. Traditional archives consist of written documents. Moreover, they often support or represent official histories. New ways of thinking about archives--their composition, their place in cultural history, and their theoretical dimensions--have suggested new approaches to cultural memory. The essay ends with accounts of three forms of dance or pantomime that convey cultural histories informed by trauma in significantly different ways. A narrative thread foregrounds the close relations between scholarship and pedagogy. (shrink)

RESUMO:A hipótese desenvolvida nos leva a confrontar três textos do corpusrousseauísta: o Segundo Discurso, Júlia ou A Nova Heloísa e o extrato do Primeiro Diálogo, em que há a ficção do mundo ideal, textos que, apesar do seu estatuto genérico diferente, estão em coerência e convergência teórica. Desejamos evidenciar um aspecto da unidade problemática do pensamento de Rousseau concernente à abordagem crítica da sociedade de seus contemporâneos e sua concepção do papel das Letras e dos Espetáculos. A preocupação do filósofo (...) é de refundar a natureza humana, a fim de lançar as bases de uma nova organização social. Nessa empreitada, a ficção desempenha um papel crucial, o prefácio do Segundo Discurso o comprova: para bem conhecer o homem atual, deve-se supor o que ele não é mais. O homem do estado de natureza, ser de ficção, cujas paixões são retas e naturais, é o modelo teórico que reativa a sociedade dos seres ideais de Júlia. Dessa forma, a ficção é chamada a desempenhar um papel referencial fundamental para o pensamento social e político de Rousseau, aparecendo como um poderoso meio de ação sobre o público. O romance pode reeducar os povos corrompidos, pois, assim como o teatro, como denuncia a Carta a d’Alembert, possui os meios para perverter uma sociedade tida como virtuosa. ABSTRACT:The hypothesis that we will develop leads us to confront three texts of Rousseau’s corpus: the Second Discourse, Julie, and the extract of the First Dialogue that speaks of the pedagogical fiction of the ideal world. These three texts, despite their different types, are theoretically coherent and convergent. We intend to highlight an aspect of the problematic unity of Rousseau’s thought, an aspect which concerns his contemporaries’ critical approach to society and Rousseau’s conception of the role of letters and spectacles. Rousseau’s concern is to refound human nature in order to lay the basis of a new social organization. In this effort, fiction plays a decisive role, as the preface to the Second Discourse affirms: in order to know modern man, we must consider a hypothesis about what he no longer is. Man in the state of nature, a fictional being whose passions are right and natural, is the theoretical model that reactivates the society of ideal beings in Julie. For Rousseau, fiction is called upon to play a fundamental referential role for social and political thought, and it appears as a powerful means of action on the public. The novel can reeducate depraved peoples, because, like the theater, it also has the means to pervert a so-called virtuous society. (shrink)

Metaphor theory claims that there is no any construct of reality outside of domination of a picture orimage. At the bottom of any philosophical system lays an image or a picture. Analysis of thinking relatesto the analysis of metaphorical aspects of that thinking. Every concept that pretends to be abstract becomes a consequence of a concrete image. The canon of philosophy no longer lays at depth but isaroused from surface. Hana Arendt is one of the most interesting and most complicated (...) politicalphilosopher in the 20th century. This study is going to examine the role of theater metaphor in her politicalphilosophy. Arendt’s political philosophy is influenced by theater metaphor. This study aimed to examinethis by using the works of Flydenberg and Blumenberg. (shrink)

In this book, Sara Monoson challenges the longstanding and widely held view that Plato is a virulent opponent of all things democratic. She does not, however, offer in its place the equally mistaken idea that he is somehow a partisan of democracy. Instead, she argues that we should attend more closely to Plato's suggestion that democracy is horrifying and exciting, and she seeks to explain why he found it morally and politically intriguing.Monoson focuses on Plato's engagement with democracy as he (...) knew it: a cluster of cultural practices that reach into private and public life, as well as a set of governing institutions. She proposes that while Plato charts tensions between the claims of democratic legitimacy and philosophical truth, he also exhibits a striking attraction to four practices central to Athenian democratic politics: intense antityrantism, frank speaking, public funeral oratory, and theater-going. By juxtaposing detailed examination of these aspects of Athenian democracy with analysis of the figurative language, dramatic structure, and arguments of the dialogues, she shows that Plato systematically links democratic ideals and activities to philosophic labor. Monoson finds that Plato's political thought exposes intimate connections between Athenian democratic politics and the practice of philosophy.Situating Plato's political thought in the context of the Athenian democratic imaginary, Monoson develops a new, textured way of thinking of the relationship between Plato's thought and the politics of his city. (shrink)

Locke scholarship has been flourishing in Japan for several decades, but its output is largely unknown to the West. This collection makes available in English for the first time the fruits of recent Japanese research, opening up the possibility of advancing Locke studies on an international scale. Covering three important areas of Locke's philosophical thought – knowledge and experimental method, law and politics, and religion and toleration – this volume criticizes established interpretations and replaces them with novel alternatives, breaking (...) away from standard narratives and providing fresh ways of looking at Locke's relationship with philosophers such as Boyle, Berkeley and Hume. The specific topics that have been selected are ones that continue to have important contemporary moral and political implications, from constitutionalism and toleration to marriage and the death penalty. Applying Locke's views to 21st-century questions, this collection presents provocative readings of the defining aspects of Locke's philosophical thought, stimulating current debates and heralding a new era of collaborative work for Locke scholars around the world. (shrink)

This article examines central tensions in cybernetics, defined as the study of self-organization, communication, automated feedback in organisms, and other distributed informational networks, from its wartime beginnings to its contemporary adaptations. By examining aspects of both first- and second-order cybernetics, the article introduces an epistemological standpoint that highlights the tension between its definition as a theory of recursion and a theory of control, prediction, and actionability. I begin by examining the historical outcomes of the Macy Conferences to provide a context (...) for cybernetics’ initial development for scientific epistemology, ethics, and socio-political thought. I draw extensively from Norbert Wiener, Heinz von Foerster, Ross Ashby, and Gregory Bateson, key figures of this movement. I then elaborate upon certain premises of cybernetics to further elucidate an intellectual history from which to begin to construct a cybernetic epistemology. I conclude by offering the second-order cybernetic concept of recursivity as a model and method for ethico-epistemological questioning that can account for both the constructive potential and the limitations of cybernetics in science and society. (shrink)

This article argues that the citizens of Hegel's state cannot maintain themselves as politically free because they are susceptible to mutual enslavement. I demonstrate this by focusing on the Roman republican background of Hegel's constitution, the potential trajectory of its dissolution and the accompanying means of its cyclical fortification through courage. Hegel, by integrating aspects of the Roman mixed constitution also adopts the idea of decadence within his conception of civil society. After locating the source of decadence in the contractual (...) relations of peace and the bourgeois inability to overcome the fear of death, I go on to argue that war for Hegel provides a theatre where freedom may be regenerated through courage. However, I also show that modern wars do not provide sufficient means of perpetuating Hegel's constitution. To demonstrate this, I distinguish three forms of war: colonial, limited and total war, arguing that only the latter offers a solution to decay of political disposition and loss of freedom, but that—by being itself susceptible to decadence—it cannot salvage Hegel's state from dissolution and reduction to contractual relations. (shrink)

This article historicizes a single stage in how the contemporary obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) category was built. Starting from the position that the two central components which make up OCD are ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, it illustrates how these concepts were taken apart by a small group of clinical psychologists working at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in south London in the early 1970s, and why compulsions were investigated whilst obsessions were ignored. The decision to distinguish the previously (...) undifferentiated symptoms is attributed to the commitment amongst psychologists at the Maudsley, most notably Stanley Rachman, to an empirical conception of science which emphasized observability. Two aspects of this are discussed. First, compulsions were deemed ‘visible’ through their correspondence with animal behaviour. Second, the symptom was seen as open to an experimental modification procedure which privileged visible outcomes. Ultimately, the article concludes that the historical division between ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, and the extensive investigation of the latter, has had substantial implications for the development of OCD as a category centred on visible behaviours and treated through behavioural means. (shrink)

Danto’s interpretation about Plato’s original condemnation of art doesn’t ground in a rigorous and accurate exegesis of the Platonic text. This contributed to making the interpreters doubtful (e.g. Halliwell), since Danto seems to conceive the philosophical genesis of mimesis attributing to it an excessively univocal meaning as compared to Platonic theses. However, interesting topics about the dangers of poetry and the moral and political implications of the “philosophical disenfranchisement of art” arise from the few Danto’s mentions about Plato’s psychological (...) arguments on mimetic art. The article focuses on these psychological aspects suggesting to Danto the ethical reason why art, tragedy in particular, is considered by Plato to be “dangerous”. The analysis will point out that, with regard to a philosophical consideration of the mimesis, dramatic poetry (specifically, Greek theatre) is a perspicuous clue to clarify the control function exerted by art over the sphere of emotions. This will also allow us to recognize Danto’s debt to Nietzsche, with whom he shares the intention to overthrow Platonism. (shrink)

This article interprets Pam Gems’s play Queen Christina as an avant la lettrethesis on the performance of gender, identifying correspondences between the protagonist’s trajectory and the successive feminist interventions. Focusing on the 17th-century Swedish queen’s transformation from a masculine-identified bastion of patriarchy into an untamed rebel against political and sexual conservatism, Gems, in fact, indirectly shares her views on aspects of western feminist thought. This article’s analysis demonstrates that following Christina’s initial appropriation and subsequent contestation of patriarchal values, she (...) engages with radical feminism before briefly identifying herself as a socialist feminist. In the wake of her unfulfilled attempt at maternity, she moves on to embrace cultural feminism; though, eventually, she decides not to privilege any specific political position and thus echoes Gems’s own ambivalence and reservation towards explicit ideological commitment. (shrink)

Bad philosophy is responsible for the climate and nature crises, and other global problems too that threaten our future. That sounds mad, but it is true. A philosophy of science, or of theatre or life is a view about what are, or ought to be, the aims and methods of science, theatre or life. It is in this entirely legitimate sense of “philosophy” that bad philosophy is responsible for the crises we face. First, and in a blatantly obvious way, those (...) institutions, organizations, corporations, businesses, endeavours, and activities of humanity that cause the crises and global problems we face, do so because of the aims they pursue (profit perhaps, or power, or heat and light for homes), and the methods adopted in pursuit of those aims – the philosophy in other words, built into the institution, organization, business, human activities, or whatever it may be. It is the philosophy of these institutions, organizations and activities that we need to change to put a stop to, or at least lessen the severity of, the crises we face, the global problems that confront us, above all the climate and nature crises. One institution has an especially crucial role in this respect: our universities. They are dominated in a multitude of ways by a particularly disastrous philosophy, a philosophy of inquiry which may be called knowledge-inquiry. This holds that the basic aim of the university is to acquire and apply knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; once acquired, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this philosophy of knowledge-inquiry is an intellectual disaster. As a result, universities are, in devastating and almost entirely unrecognized ways, humanitarian disasters too. Judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, the university shaped by the philosophy of knowledge-inquiry violates THREE of the four most elementary rules of rational problem solving conceivable in a wholesale, structural fashion, and it is this gross, wholesale, structural irrationality of the university, unnoticed by all but a few scientists and scholars, that is in part responsible for the creation of our grave global problems, and our current incapacity to learn how to solve them. The pursuit of knowledge, conducted in universities, within the framework of knowledge-inquiry over the decades and centuries, has produced much of great benefit to humanity. It has made the modern world possible. It has led to modern power production, modern industry and armaments, modern agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern travel and communications, and the internet. But these very successes have also created many of our most serious current global problems: the climate crisis; the destruction of natural habitats, the catastrophic loss of wild life, and impending mass extinction of species (the nature crisis); the lethal character of modern war; the impact on the natural world of the rapid growth of the human population; the menace posed by nuclear weapons; pollution of earth, sea and air; threats to democracy caused in part by the internet and social media. All these grave global problems have been made possible by modern science and technology, pursued largely in universities within the framework of knowledge-inquiry. Nevertheless, it is not science and technology as such that are the problem, but science pursued in a way that is dissociated from a more fundamental task of the university to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that progress may be made to a better world. Science and technology, pursued within the framework of knowledge-inquiry, create for some of us the power to act, but not the power to act wisely – not the power to learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. For that, we need our institutions of learning, above all our universities, to take as their primary task to help humanity learn how to do it. In order to do that, the philosophy of inquiry put into practice by universities needs to be dramatically transformed. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry – a revolution in the philosophy of the university, all around the world, wherever possible, so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, construed to be the capacity, active endeavour, and perhaps desire, to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom in this sense including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides, methods being dramatically modified too so as to help achieve the new academic aim. The basic task of the university would be, not to solve problems of knowledge, but rather to help people in the social world beyond the university to resolve conflicts and problems of living so that what is of value in life may be realized by everyone, insofar as that is possible. The pursuit of knowledge would be vital, but not intellectually fundamental. The intellectual and institutional revolution we so urgently need in our universities would affect every discipline and aspect of the university; it would dramatically affect both research and education, and the whole way the university is related to the rest of the social world. The revolution, from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry would dramatically enhance the intellectual integrity and rationality of natural science, social inquiry, the humanities and technology, the character of these disciplines and the relationships they have with one another. University education throughout the university would be dramatically improved. And academic inquiry as a whole would do what, on the whole, it fails to do at present: it would help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational and, as a result, increasingly successful ways, progress at last being made to a genuinely good, civilized world – a world in which there is peace, justice, liberal democracy, individual freedom, education, reasonable equality, sustainable prosperity and worthwhile opportunities in life, all of these for everyone, insofar as this is possible. Why, it may be asked, has academic philosophy not noticed that we urgently need to transform the current bad philosophy of inquiry of knowledge-inquiry into the far more intellectually rigorous and humanly valuable philosophy of wisdom-inquiry, so that we can begin to do what so far we have failed to do so lamentably: learn how to avoid impending disasters, and even make progress to a better world, something that seems at present almost unthinkable given the horrors of war, poverty, political enslavement of the 20th century, and the horrors of this century so far too? The answer is that academic philosophy is in a particularly pitiful state, as philosophers themselves, are just beginning to realize and lament. That is why academic philosophers are blind to the intellectual and humanitarian disaster of the bad philosophy that dominates universities today, and inconceivable to them to them that they might have, as a disciplinary task, to ensure academic inquiry implements a good philosophy of inquiry, and advocate and argue for change if it does not. Once upon a time, in Europe at least, philosophy was an intellectual power in the world. In the 17th century it created modern science which massively increased and improved our knowledge and understanding of the world, which in turn led to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the modern world. Philosophy was once so intellectually powerful and influential that it changed the course of history. But philosophy also made in the past three disastrous intellectual blunders: the post-Cartesian blunder, the post-Newtonian blunder, and the Enlightenment blunder. Never acknowledged and corrected by subsequent philosophy right down to the present, these unrecognized intellectual blunders rendered academic philosophy the esoteric, pathetic, and powerless discipline it is today, so that throughout the last century and, so far, throughout this one, academic philosophy has remained blind to the intellectual disaster of knowledge-inquiry, and thus failed entirely to take up its proper disciplinary task of warning fellow academics of the structural irrationality of the philosophy that prevails in the university, and of proposing what steps need to be taken to put things right. Instead of performing such an urgently needed philosophical task, so-called analytic philosophy was reduced to analysing the meaning of words. Since then, there has been hardly any discernible improvement, even if analysis of concepts no longer dominates the scene. Bad academic philosophy is indeed responsible for intellectual and humanitarian failures of the university. What the three past intellectual blunders of philosophy are, why their persistence so dramatically reduces academic philosophy to a triviality, and why, furthermore, this results in the failure of scientists and scholars to see what is so blatantly bad about the philosophy prevailing in universities around the world – the failure to see what so urgently needs to be done to put right what has been wrong for so long: all this is made clear in this book. A new kind of philosophy emerges during the course of the argument, critical fundamentalism, which has as its task to keep alive imaginative and critical – that is rational – thinking about our fundamental problem: How can our human world, the world we experience and live in – the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That problem encompasses all others of life, science and thought. Critical fundamentalism tries to improve answers to aspects of this problem; but it also seeks to encourage everyone to think about the problem, from time to time, and think about how it interacts, in both directions, with more urgent particular and specialized problems of life and thought. Critical fundamentalism sets out to help improve bad philosophy wherever it is to be found: in social, political, commercial, legal, financial, and international life; and especially in academia, in institutions of learning, so that they become devoted to enhancing the capacity of people to learn how to achieve what is of genuine value in this brief life of a few decades if we are fortunate. Critical fundamentalism does everything it can to bring about the revolution in our universities we so urgently need. If taken up by mainstream philosophy, it might really have an impact, and begin to transform universities for the better, in both intellectual and humanitarian terms, and thus, enable humanity to learn how, after the grim failures and horrors of the last century and this one, to make progress to a better world. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of PracticeHeidi WesterlundPaul G. Woodford, Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice ( Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005)Paul G. Woodford's Democracy and Music Education needs to be warmly welcomed in the field of philosophy of music education. It contributes to the discussion centering on ethics and music education—a discussion that after multiculturalism, pluralism, praxialism, and (...) other recent "isms" still awaits its appearance in a stronger sense. Woodford writes that the aim of the book is to enhance democratic ends by inviting music educators to contribute "to wider intellectual and political conversations about the nature and significance of music in our lives and those of our children."1Woodford borrows ideas from many thinkers creating an interesting synthesis and lines of thought throughout the book. His main resource in developing a liberalist music education is, however, along the ideas of the American pragmatist and educational philosopher, John Dewey. Woodford's choice is well thought out. Dewey deserves to be redeemed and recognized in music education, not the least because of various distorted interpretations of his views that have commonly been accepted in the profession in the past. Woodford argues that the music appreciation movement, which aimed at developing good musical taste equally in all children, has not in any particular way been a Deweyan democratic movement. Music educators have not acknowledged their role as agents in the [End Page 235] transformation of school and society. Instead, he states, they have continued to subscribe to the older aesthetic and utilitarian rationales and yet neither approach prepares students "to question and challenge authority and thereby to transform musical society."2It is noteworthy that Woodford does not elaborate on Dewey's central concept, experience, but unexpectedly draws upon concepts such as abstract reason or the autonomous individual to reconstruct music education. Critical conversation becomes celebrated against performance-oriented music education. The book leaves open the discussion between utilitarian and aesthetic rationales and carefully avoids Dewey's notion of the aesthetic and experimentation, which could have brought new angles in understanding his notion of democracy and its relation to the social and musical.3 Woodford tries to maintain a middle ground in the North American philosophical battlefield of music education stating that music educators "should listen more closely to one another while avoiding extremes."4 His critique targets critical theorists, radical feminist writers, and modernist as well as postmodernist ideas, while Woodford himself seeks a middle way between laissez-faire and elitist or autocratic concepts of music education.As a whole, Woodford's conceptual toolkit for promoting ethical aspects in music education are less akin to Dewey's thoughts and more to the Greek philosophers and their notions of virtues. Woodford writes, "democracy depends on the existence of good faith and generosity of spirit, of character and love for one's fellow men and women."5 These virtues are "the glue that can bind us together as society."6 How is this achieved in music education? Teaching love becomes a practical problem: explaining love requires it to be modelled and experienced, Woodford writes. However, he leaves this cornerstone of his conceptual scheme to rest on the notion of intellectual conversation.Allow me to explain briefly in what way Dewey's philosophical project differs from the Greek philosophical ethos and why abstract reason and intellectual conversation are not central concepts in Dewey's pragmatism (this does not mean that they cannot be celebrated as Woodford has done). For Dewey, the virtue of love signifies devotion, interest, and courage since genuine interest challenges us to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way.7 Interest and devotion are not just attitudes or intellectual modes in the sense of mental states, but linked to doings and active transactions with and in the environment. Interest is co-extensive with action and devotion with dedication to shared projects. This devotion to shared doings and their significance is the socially inclusive ethical side that Dewey brought to the individualistic humanistic theory of self-realization and to the theory of experience. The vision of humanistic self-realization, as has been presented in... (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser encountered Machiavelli’s work and they both attempted to rethink the very possibility of political practice through their respective readings of the Florentine thinker. In a certain way for both Gramsci and Althusser, the reading of Machiavelli was the experimental site where they elaborated their own conceptions of politics, either in the form of Gramsci’s quest for the ‘modern Prince’, the political and organizational form of a potential hegemony of the subaltern, or in (...) the form of Althusser’s constant redefinition of a potential new practice of politics in a communist perspective. The reading of Machiavelli was for Althusser also one of the terrains upon which he attempted to confront Gramsci, something that is particularly evident in a series of Althusser’s texts in the 1970s from Machiavelli and Us to the recently published Que faire? The aim of this article is to do a comparative reading of the approaches to Machiavelli offered by Gramsci and Althusser, focusing in particular on the tensions running through Althusser’s reading of Gramsci’s writings on Machiavelli. In particular, I will offer a reading of Althusser’s extensive criticism of Gramsci in 1977–1978, linking it to his critique of Eurocommunism. Then, I will go back to Gramsci, and in particular Notebook 13, in order to bring forward not only the aspects of Gramsci that Althusser tended to overlook but also how Gramsci is in fact thinking the very question that Althusser attempted to pose, namely that of a new practice of politics for communism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Replies to CriticismsJames R. HamiltonI am grateful to Noël Carroll, David Davies, Sherri Irvin, Aaron Meskin, and Paul Thom for stimulating discussions of The Art of Theater over the past year, culminating in these carefully crafted critical comments on various aspects of the book.1 I especially appreciate the efforts of Sherri Irvin, who edited this special issue and without whose encouragement, enthusiasm, and careful editing this would not (...) have happened.Whenever the central proposals made in The Art of Theater were made by theater people during the past hundred years, they were greeted with a kind of baffled outrage by many traditionalist literature scholars who had taken it as an obvious fact that theatrical performances are nothing more than illustrations or interpretations of works of dramatic literature, at best requiring artistry for performance but not issuing in independent works of art. Quite a few contemporary literature and theater scholars have seen errors in the traditionalist view and proposed that theatrical performances are capable of even great artistry and, perhaps, of being works of art in their own right. It must be said, however, that they will not find my defense of that position congenial. Indeed, it will seem worse still from their point of view because my defense of the position does not require semiotic analysis, let alone any sort of poststructuralist thinking about theatrical performances that depends on seeing performance as a novel kind of text—a “theater text.” This will disappoint because, unlike many contemporary literary theorists (and even some theater theorists), I do not think of theatrical performances as something to be read and, further, as something that falls within the purview of literary scholarship after all. Performances are actions and are to be understood in the ways we understand all other actions.I knew the central proposals in The Art of Theater would seem a little strange to philosophers. Some of the strangeness that they have felt about the view—if not the baffled outrage felt by literary theorists—can be mitigated, I believe, by considering three facts that served as motivations for making the proposal. I encountered these facts while teaching experimental theater techniques in a workshop format. Only gradually did I come to realize they are facts about any theatrical performance—its presentation, its [End Page 80] preparation, and its reception. It was only after I realized how general these facts are that I began to wonder why the view they seem to suggest is not more widely held, or even discussed, among philosophers working on the performing arts. My book was designed to get that discussion going. And, to judge by the quality of the discussion in this volume, it has succeeded admirably in meeting that goal. I think the book is also largely correct, however, so it is worth beginning at the beginning, with the basic facts I encountered in teaching experimental theater.First, it is undeniable that what typical spectators for any theatrical performance grasp is delivered to them entirely during the time of the performance itself. The typical spectator—which excludes academics and professional critics—is usually unfamiliar with what she is about to see and hear, in content if not in kind. Nevertheless, most spectators are successful in tracking most theatrical performances, even some in wildly unfamiliar styles and traditions. This is an important fact. Its importance lies in the implication that spectators do not need to recognize anything beyond what they see in the performance to regard the event as something they can assess aesthetically and artistically.Second, rehearsal processes for theatrical performances involve a lot of experimentation that focuses on how to make features of actors’ bodies and voices render clearly what the audience is supposed to see and hear and on how to make the sights and sounds generated by the ensemble, the set, the lighting, and so on focus audience attention in the places that will best enable them to understand what the company is presenting. This too is an important fact, for it highlights what any spectator has to know something about in order to make cogent artistic assessments of the event she has witnessed.Finally, consider the following case... (shrink)

Be aware... and you will be mindful of a notable ambiguity in semiotics as well as of those who have masterfully strived to transcend it. This event, commented on by Elize Bisanz (Texas Tech University) and chaired by William Passarini (Institute for Philosophical Studies), is part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of (...) Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project. *** Ionut Untea is currently a fellow-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart, where he is researching on the semioethic and aesthetic coordinates of the “social compact” and intercorporeal relationships. In 2021, he has taught a course entitled “Intercultural Philosophy: Semiotic Approaches and Aesthetic Themes” as a Visiting Professor at Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro. Since 2016, he has been teaching History of Western Philosophy and Semiotics at Southeast University, Nanjing. He previously taught at the University of La Rochelle, and was a postdoctoral fellow of the Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue (FIIRD) at the University of Geneva. He obtained his doctorate in 2013 at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), in Paris. He holds Romanian citizenship, having obtained his first degrees in philosophy and theology at the University of Bucharest. His focus is on the modern and contemporary intersections between semiotic, moral, political and religious thought. He has published recently “Peircean and Confucian Interpretations of Self-Development: Semiotic, Normative and Aesthetic Aspects,” Philosophy East and West 72.1: January 2022: 188–209. His recent work has appeared in academic journals such as The American Journal of Semiotics (2021), Semiotica (2021), Ethical Perspectives (2021, 2019), Philosophical Forum (2019), Journal of Aesthetic Education (2020), Politics and Religion (2019), The Monist (2018). *** Dr. Bisanz's education includes an MA (Philosophy) from the University of Lüneburg in Germany; Graduate Studies in Jacques Derrida's philosophy Seminars at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; a Ph.D. (History of Communication Sciences) from the Technische University of Berlin; and a post-doc Habilitation Degree (Image Studies), from the University of Lüneburg. Bisanz has published several interdisciplinary books reflecting her educational background; these include a major European edition of Peirce's writings The Logic of Interdisciplinarity: Charles S. Peirce, The Monist Series (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 2009), which was realized with the aid of research and publication grants from State and private endowments; Prolegomena to a Science of Reasoning: Phaneroscopy, Semeiotic, Logic, which is a collection of manuscripts by Peirce on reasoning (Peter Lang Publishers, Berlin, 2016); Overcoming the Iconic Turn: Cultural Concepts of Images [in German: Die Überwindung des Ikonischen: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven der Bildwissenschaft] (transcript Verlag, Hamburg, 2010). Bisanz is a member of the advising board of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik and chair of the society's subdivision for Cultural Studies. Since her Fulbright scholarship in 2006 at Texas Tech University, Bisanz has been an active member of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. She has organized several international congresses dedicated to Peirce and interdisciplinary research. *** Homepage: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s Auditorium: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s/auditorium *** Technical support assured by Robert Junqueira. The cover image for the video was designed by Zahra Soltani. (shrink)

“The crowns and scepters of stage emperors,” remarked Sancho, “were never known to be of pure gold; they are always of tinsel or tinplate.” “That is the truth,” said Don Quixote, “for it is only right that the accessories of a drama should be fictitious and not real, like the play itself. Speaking of that, Sancho, I would have you look kindly upon the art of the theater and, as a consequence, upon those who write the pieces and perform (...) in them, for they render a great service to the state by holding up a mirror for us at each step we take, wherein we may observe, vividly depicted, all the varied aspects of human life; and I may add that there is nothing that shows us more clearly, by similitude, what we are and what we ought to be than do plays and players.” Miguel de Cervantes,Don Quixote, II, iii, 12. (shrink)

El objetivo de este ensayo es mostrar algunos ejemplos del papel fundamental que tuvo la Biblia en la evangelización del Nuevo Mundo durante el siglo XVI. Tres aspectos serán estudiados aquí: 1) el intento inicial de traducir los textos bíblicos a las lenguas indígenas, finalmente frustrado; 2) la importancia de la Sagrada Escritura para dilucidar las estrategias políticas y religiosas a seguir con respecto al Nuevo Mundo, ejemplarizada en la cita de Lc 14,23; 3) los temas bíblicos en el teatro (...) de evangelización. The aim of this essay is to show some examples of the important role that had the Bible in the evangelization of the New World during the 16th century. Three aspects will be studied here: 1) the initial attempt to translate biblical texts to indigenous languages, finally frustrated; the importance of Sacred Scripture for political and religious strategies to be followed with respect to the New World, exampled on the appointment of Lc 14.23; biblical themes in the theatre of evangelization. (shrink)

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial (...) Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

Athenian citizens deliberate in the assembly, but the theatre also becomes a place for public debate. In addition to being a consequence of economic or cultural aspects, democracy is a consequence of the development of a democratic imaginary. Located in that imaginary, Greek tragedies, regarded as «democratic myths», work to reaffirm Athenian democracy. Far from being dogmatic, the tragic myth explores the contradictions of social and personal life and implicitly or explicitly seeks their correction. This dramatic genre encourages participation from (...) the spectator (citizen) that greatly exceeds the schematic reduction in Aristotelian theory of catharsis. Greek tragedy proposes the existence of an «audience», of spectators who need a sufficient level of maturity to make that assessment. Democracy is a path, or perhaps an active utopia, which should combine the political order with a coherent culture and art.Los ciudadanos atenienses deliberaban en la asamblea, pero también el teatro se convierte en un lugar de debate público. Porque una democracia (también la ateniense) no solo es consecuencia de aspectos económicos o de orden cultural, sino también del desarrollo de un imaginario democrático. Y es en dicho imaginario donde se inscriben las tragedias griegas, consideradas como «mitos democráticos» que servían para reafirmar la democracia ateniense. Lejos de cualquier dogmatismo, el mito trágico explora las contradicciones de la vida social y personal, y se pregunta, de manera expresa o tácita, por su posible corrección. Este género dramático induce a una participación del espectador (ciudadano), que va más allá de la esquemática reducción de la teoría aristotélica de la catarsis. El teatro griego propone la existencia de un «público», de unos espectadores que precisan de una gran madurez para emitir ese juicio. La democracia es un camino, o quizás una utopía activa, que debe conjugar el orden político con una cultura y un arte coherentes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of PracticeHeidi WesterlundPaul G. Woodford, Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice ( Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005)Paul G. Woodford's Democracy and Music Education needs to be warmly welcomed in the field of philosophy of music education. It contributes to the discussion centering on ethics and music education—a discussion that after multiculturalism, pluralism, praxialism, and (...) other recent "isms" still awaits its appearance in a stronger sense. Woodford writes that the aim of the book is to enhance democratic ends by inviting music educators to contribute "to wider intellectual and political conversations about the nature and significance of music in our lives and those of our children."1Woodford borrows ideas from many thinkers creating an interesting synthesis and lines of thought throughout the book. His main resource in developing a liberalist music education is, however, along the ideas of the American pragmatist and educational philosopher, John Dewey. Woodford's choice is well thought out. Dewey deserves to be redeemed and recognized in music education, not the least because of various distorted interpretations of his views that have commonly been accepted in the profession in the past. Woodford argues that the music appreciation movement, which aimed at developing good musical taste equally in all children, has not in any particular way been a Deweyan democratic movement. Music educators have not acknowledged their role as agents in the [End Page 235] transformation of school and society. Instead, he states, they have continued to subscribe to the older aesthetic and utilitarian rationales and yet neither approach prepares students "to question and challenge authority and thereby to transform musical society."2It is noteworthy that Woodford does not elaborate on Dewey's central concept, experience, but unexpectedly draws upon concepts such as abstract reason or the autonomous individual to reconstruct music education. Critical conversation becomes celebrated against performance-oriented music education. The book leaves open the discussion between utilitarian and aesthetic rationales and carefully avoids Dewey's notion of the aesthetic and experimentation, which could have brought new angles in understanding his notion of democracy and its relation to the social and musical.3 Woodford tries to maintain a middle ground in the North American philosophical battlefield of music education stating that music educators "should listen more closely to one another while avoiding extremes."4 His critique targets critical theorists, radical feminist writers, and modernist as well as postmodernist ideas, while Woodford himself seeks a middle way between laissez-faire and elitist or autocratic concepts of music education.As a whole, Woodford's conceptual toolkit for promoting ethical aspects in music education are less akin to Dewey's thoughts and more to the Greek philosophers and their notions of virtues. Woodford writes, "democracy depends on the existence of good faith and generosity of spirit, of character and love for one's fellow men and women."5 These virtues are "the glue that can bind us together as society."6 How is this achieved in music education? Teaching love becomes a practical problem: explaining love requires it to be modelled and experienced, Woodford writes. However, he leaves this cornerstone of his conceptual scheme to rest on the notion of intellectual conversation.Allow me to explain briefly in what way Dewey's philosophical project differs from the Greek philosophical ethos and why abstract reason and intellectual conversation are not central concepts in Dewey's pragmatism (this does not mean that they cannot be celebrated as Woodford has done). For Dewey, the virtue of love signifies devotion, interest, and courage since genuine interest challenges us to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way.7 Interest and devotion are not just attitudes or intellectual modes in the sense of mental states, but linked to doings and active transactions with and in the environment. Interest is co-extensive with action and devotion with dedication to shared projects. This devotion to shared doings and their significance is the socially inclusive ethical side that Dewey brought to the individualistic humanistic theory of self-realization and to the theory of experience. The vision of humanistic self-realization, as has been presented in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature, Politics, and CharacterOliver Conolly and Bashshar HaydarWhat is the relationship between literature and politics? We might interpret this question in terms of causality. For example, we might ask whether literature has any effects in the world of politics and if so how. Auden famously proclaimed that poetry makes nothing happen, while it was central to Brecht's dramaturgy that theatre has certain political effects on its audience. Conversely, (...) we might see literature as an effect of political causes and claim that certain political environments give rise to certain types of literature, and that those political backgrounds thereby explain certain aspects of literary phenomena. Both kinds of causal relationship are at the heart of Marxist literary criticism, and of the many schools of academic criticism which share the Marxist assumption that individual consciousness, and its literary manifestations, are subordinate to political environment.These causal questions are important and interesting, particularly if approached with requisite critical tact. However, in this paper we would like to focus on the epistemological and normative questions of whether literature is suited to communicate political knowledge or insights, and whether we value, or rather ought to value, literature for such communication. These two questions are in our view intimately related. While there is no doubt that literary works can be made to communicate virtually all kinds of knowledge, from knowledge about the Big Bang to knowledge how to smuggle illegal immigrants into First World countries, these kinds of knowledge are not what we go to literature for. We go to literature and value it for giving us knowledge which it is peculiarly suited to communicate. It is natural to praise a novel for its insight into, say, character but odd to praise a novel for its [End Page 87] insight into, say, meteorology. This is because literature is suited at communicating insights into character, and is not suited at communicating insights into meteorology.The suitability of literature to explore the inner life derives from the expressive and imaginative possibilities inherent in the very medium of literature. For example, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady reveals the inner logic (or psychologic) that underlies the self-destructive behavior of its heroine, Isabel Archer, her disastrous choice of husband being dictated by a desire to prove a point to herself—that she is indifferent to his poverty relative to that of the other suitors—rather than an informed sense of her true interests.1 This is not to say that literature is the only medium in which insight into character can be communicated, but that this is one of the kinds of insight which literature is suited at communicating.The question of whether literature is suited to impart political insights is thus determinative of the question of whether its doing so counts towards its value as literature.2 This is the question to which we now turn.IThe question of whether literature is suited to impart political insights presupposes an understanding of the scope of the political, and the kinds of phenomena that can properly be called political. The scope of the political can be conceived more or less broadly. The narrow view is that politics is concerned with the nature and legitimacy of the state, government, legal and other coercive institutions. The broad view is that politics is concerned with power relations between social groups that are mediated not through institutions but through attitudes.The distinction can be illustrated with reference to two kinds of feminist argument. Feminist arguments for laws on sex discrimination and equal pay, and their proper implementation, are political in the narrow sense. However, feminists may also argue, irrespective of such institutional changes, that social attitudes towards women—the attitudes of a given society, including those of women—should be changed in certain ways. For example, a generally held view that emphasizes the importance of women's appearance, their role as adjuncts to their husbands—the kinds of views that were prevalent in the 1950's, say—is open to challenge by feminists outside a narrow institutional framework. The reason this [End Page 88] stance is political is that it concerns systemic attitudes which underpin power relations between one group... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 2–5 To begin with, as we understand from a remote place like Seoul, there have been two different conceptions of materiality in the Western experimental ?lm history: materiality of cinema and of ?lm. The former has been represented by the practitioners of the so-called the “Expanded Cinema” and the latter by the tradition of the “Hand-made” ?lm. Whereas for the Expanded Cinema, the materiality or the “medium-speci?city” includes not only the ?lm material but also the entire (...) condition and environment in which the cinematic experience is situated (i.e.: screen, projector, audience and theatre); for the Hand-made ?lm, it is the whole ?lmic process prior to the screening in front of the audience (i.e.: hand-processing and optical-printing). The two practices share in the materialist turn that opens up the radical possibilities of aesthetic (and even political) interventions into a process previously considered seamless and transparent. What can be called to attention through the materialist turn includes the aesthetic-institutional process in the projection-spectator relation and the (non-) representational process in ?lm-making. Moreover, these interventions bring their own temporalities back to those processes, and this returning emancipates the temporalities from their subordination to the cinema-as-commodity. Hangjun Lee is a ?lm-based artist whose practice is concerned with Hand-made Film and Experimental Cinema. Given these interests, Lee questions the linkage between materiality and temporality. This was his preoccupation around 2006, the time at which he started to collaborate with Chulki Hong, the noise improviser. The improvisational nature of their audio-visual performances opened means of detouring from the conventional editing techniques. Their collaboration also afforded critical investigations into the performativity of the practices in both the darkroom and the screening room, as well as in the private recording/practicing studio, and public performance spaces for the improvising musician. In fact, it was a kind of common interest shared by both us from the outset. In our collaboration, we avoid sacri?cing/concealing/minimizing one form of performativity (the performative nature and temporality of compositional process) for the sake of the other (i.e. those in improvisational and executional process). In the ?eld of experimental music and sound, this kind of approach has been comprehensively called “cracking” or “hacking”. The concepts are ?nely formulated in the coinage of “Cracked Everyday Electronics” (by Voice Crack) or more generally “Handmade Electronic Music” (by Nicolas Collins). 1 And this was a pure but perhaps necessary coincidence. the original title of the work of our collaboration and, retrospectively, of the set of our working principles at the same time, “The Cracked Share” was named by Lee after Georges Bataille’s masterwork, The Accursed Share , with the substitution of the adjective with “Cracked” as a synonym for ‘reticulated’ in the photographic image. We think the ascetic and subtractive aesthetic turn of the contemporary non-idiomatic improvised (and even somewhat non-improvised) music 2 pushed us further towards more radical dissociation with the empty temporality of commodi?ed audio-visual experience. It can be called the aesthetics of “without,” and exemplars include Yoshihide Otomo’s Turntable Without Records , Sachiko M’s Sampler without Samples . There are also other radical experiments even with the (non-)improvised music without noise and sounds that neatly meet the rules and idioms of the existing/established experimental music. For us, this thread among the experimental music currents weighs in its emphasis on subtractive and dissociational power unique to improvisational action. Surely, the tradition of the Cracked and Handmade improvised music teaches us the crucial lesson that “[m]edia and mediation are never transparent” and that “[m]ediation actively transforms data from one form to another and is never passive.” 3 We couldn’t agree to this statement more. However, without the removal and withdrawal power of improvisation that poses and keeps both subjects (performer and audience) and objects (projector and instrument) in “inferiority,” 4 generalized cracking and hacking practices—or simply “glitch”—in music and visuals would be either sublimated into the mystical and ritualistic forms of “Film Alchemy” and “Noise Music” (to which both of us still strongly feel a belonging but also, more or less, ambivalent sentiments), or else assimilated into the logic of the commodi?ed audio-visual communication. Today in music, this principle of improvisational performativity should be formulated as the dis-organization of sound against the associational de?nition of (electronic) music and it needs to be translated into audio-visual experiences. In other words, cracking practices of free improvisation need not be limited in artistic creativity, in a darkroom, in a studio, or on the stage; the principle of the dis-organization of sound should be the principle of dis-organization (or cracked organization) of audio-visual performance space itself. NOTES 1) Norbert Möslang, “How Does a Bicycle Light Sound?: Cracked Everyday Electronics,” Leonardo Music Journal 14 (2004): 83; Nicolas Collins, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (New York: Rutledge, 2006). 2) We refer this not to the historical style or genre but rather the idea and practice that ?free improvisation? stands for. On the distinction between idiomatic and non-idiomatic improvisation, see Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1993). On radically politico-histrorical interpretations of free improvisation and noise music from various present viewpoints, see Noise and Capitalism , (eds.) Mattin & Anthony Iles (Arteleku Audiolab, 2009). 3) Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), p. 29. 4) I borrow the term from my long-time collaborator, Choi Joonyong. See Ryu Hankil, Hong Chulki & Choi Joonyong, Inferior Sounds (Balloon and Needle, CD, 2011). (shrink)

Over the last few decades, the notion of improvisation has enriched and dynamized research on traditional philosophies of music, theatre, dance, poetry, and even visual art. This Handbook offers readers an authoritative collection of accessible articles on the philosophy of improvisation, synthesizing and explaining various subjects and issues from the growing wave of journal articles and monographs in the field. Its 48 chapters, written specifically for this volume by an international team of scholars, are accessible for students and researchers alike. (...) The volume is organized into four main sections: I. Art and Improvisation: Theoretical Perspectives II. Art and Improvisation: Aesthetic, Ethical, and Political Perspectives III. Improvisation in Musical Practices IV. Improvisation in the Visual, Narrative, Dramatic, and Interactive Arts Key Features: Treats improvisation not only as a stylistic feature, but also as an aesthetic property of artworks and performances as well as a core element of artistic creativity. Spells out multiple aspects of the concept of improvisation, emphasizing its relevance in understanding the nature of art. Covers improvisation in a wide spectrum of artistic domains, including unexpected ones such as literature, visual arts, games, and cooking. Addresses key questions, like: - How can improvisation be defined and what is its role in different art forms? - Can improvisation be perceived as such, and how can it be aesthetically evaluated? - What is the relationship between improvisation and notions such as action, composition, expressivity, and authenticity? - What is the ethical and political significance of improvisation? (shrink)

The conversation between Giorgio Barberio Corsetti and Pietro Montani, led by Dario Cecchi, focuses on some of the principal aspects of the career and work of Paolo Rosa and Studio Azzurro, by making reference also to the occasion when the director and the philosopher met the artist and his team. Of such an artistic path, they have been particularly emphasized the interest for the dialogue among different artistic languages (theatre, video art); the attention to the way images are able to (...) refresh the meaning of action and word within theatre and performing arts generally speaking; the relationship between art and technics in the perspective of a “poetic” (or better “poietic”) use of technologies and media; the importance given to the public (ethical and political) dimension of images and art installations, able to working through the sense of belonging to a community. (shrink)

This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe. What I call a ‘theatre of the impasse’ seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished. Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision to resolve its conflicts. (...) I situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an ‘allegorical’ theatre in Benjamin’s terms. Blitz Theatre’s Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence. In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt. I read the performance, instead, as an elegy to Nancy’s inoperative community, at the centre of which are the figure of lovers, bound to, yet unable to take possession of, one another. Staging impasse, Late Night allegorises the fragile human community, exposed in its fundamental precarity. (shrink)

Although utopian and dystopian elements are a prominent characteristic of twenty-first-century British plays, there is still a significant research gap on these works, as the conference's organizers, Merle Tönnies and Eckart Voigts, pointed out in their introductory remarks. Bringing together drama and theatre studies, cultural studies, and political sciences/sociology, Tönnies and Voigts agreed to convene a conference to address this topic in an interdisciplinary and comprehensive manner. It was originally intended to take place at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (...) at the University of Bielefeld in April 2020, which would have provided a space to bring together not only different... (shrink)

Fabriquer un être humain supérieur, artificiel, voire immortel, dont les imperfections seraient réparées et les capacités améliorées. Telle est l'ambition du mouvement transhumaniste, qui prévoit le dépassement de l'humanité grâce à la technique et l'avènement prochain d'un "homme augmenté" façonné par les biotechnologies, les nanosciences, la génétique. Avec le risque de voir se développer une sous-humanité de plus en plus dépendante de technologies qui modèleront son corps et son cerveau, ses perceptions et ses relations aux autres. Non pas l'"homme nouveau" (...) des révolutionnaires, mais l'homme-machine du capitalisme. Bien que le discours officiel, en France, résiste encore à cette idéologie, le projet technoscientifique avance discrètement. Qui impulse ces recherches? Comment se développent-elles dans les champs médicaux, militaires et sportifs? Comment les débats démocratiques sont-ils éludés? Et comment faire face à des évolutions qui ne feront que renforcer les inégalités? Surtout, quel être humain va naître de ces profondes mutations, de ces expérimentations brutales et hasardeuses sur notre espèce, dont l'Homo sapiens ne sortira pas indemne? (shrink)