Fashion is defined by an infinite variation of a single tautology … stripped of content, but not of meaning. A kind of machine for maintaining meaning without ever fixing it, it is forever a disappointed meaning. … [I]t … becomes the spectacle human beings grant themselves of their power to make the insignificant signify; Fashion then appears as an exemplary form of the general act of signification, thus rejoining the very being of literature which is to offer to read not (...) the meaning of things but their signification.Meaning is distributed according to a kind of revolutionary grace; its power becomes so autonomous that it can act at a distance and in the end dissolve substance itself. … [M]eaning denies substance... (shrink)

When discussing one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novels, Mikhail Bakhtin ruminates on the poietic power of dialogue: in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is—and […] not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. […] At the level of his religious-utopian worldview Dostoyevsky carries dialogue into eternity, conceiving of it as eternal co-rejoicing, co-admiration, concord. […] Two voices (...) is the minimum for life.1 Notably, Bakhtin's commendation of dialogue as a sine qua non ontological condition communicates both necessity and hope, implying the indispensability of an encounter... (shrink)

The article is an examination of the 1930 play Brain. A Play of the Whole Earth, by an obscure early twentieth-century British writer, Lionel Britton, in the light of the writings of Polish Jewish physician and philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck and the sociologist Émile Durkheim. A consideration of the notion of collectivity as depicted in the text, its complex representation of a posthuman existence, and the unusual generic characteristics of the play lead to the suggestion that Brain may be (...) regarded as a utopian bildungsroman whose main focus is the life of an idea in society. (shrink)

The nineteenth century was the time of the emergence of the concept of solidarity, which "to an extent replaced [the older term fraternity],"1 as well as of a dramatic increase in utopian thinking and writing.2 A notable place among the impressive body of utopian literature of the era belongs to feminist and antifeminist visions of alternative futures, especially from 1860s onward, which Lewes links with "middle class women's overwhelming frustration... with the apparent failure of the suffrage movement."3 The concept of (...) womanhood was also undergoing transformations at that time, variously defined with reference to contending and sometimes complementary tendencies: the cult of domesticity and the women's rights... (shrink)