Le culte grandiose de Kali, la Mère, son incomparable symbolisme, ses litanies et ses chants, embrasse l'âme de l'univers qu'il glorifie comme aucune conception religieuse ne le fit jamais. La terrifiante déesse sème la peste et les pires ravages sur ses pas, tout en accordant sa grâce et sa clémence à ses enfants assez hardis pour soulever l'horrible masque derrière lequel elle se cache la figure. Ceux-là retrouveront les traits radieux qui ont enchanté leur enfance. La sublime conception de Kali, (...) la Mère, découle d'une philosophie moniste qui s'écarte pourtant sensiblement de la philosophie Védanta de Shankara. Tous deux partent, il est vrai, de la même idée. Ils admettent l'un et l'autre une substance une, indivisible et éternelle, que les Védantins appellent Brahma et les adorateurs de Kali, la Mère, Siva. Mais il y a divergence quant aux manifestations. Pour Shankara il n'y a qu'illusion. Il tranche le lien qui rattache le phénomène à l'absolu. Il se demande qui a pu susciter l'apparence. Mais, l'absolu étant la vérité même, il n'a pu engendrer l'apparence pas plus que la lumière n'aurait pu engendrer l'obscurité. Qu'y avait-il donc de commun entre les Brahmas et Maya? A première vue il semble qu'il n'y a aucun rapport. Pour Shankara il n'était besoin d'aucune relation, puisque Maya n'existe pas en réalité et que le monde n'est que mirage. Le monde n'existe que pour l'esprit qui est lui-même sujet aux hallucinations. Adorer la Mère, c'est accepter l'univers dans ses aspects les plus terrifiants. Cette philosophie est diamétralement opposée au christianisme dans son culte du Dieu d'amour, du Père plein de miséricorde. Le christianisme enseigne que tout se fait pour notre bien, tandis que pour les adorateurs de Kali, l'univers est féroce et hostile à l'homme, qui avant tout doit se montrer supérieur aux événements. Mais Kali n'est pas seulement la destructrice. Si elle démolit inexorablement toutes les formes vitales qui ont fait leur temps et qui se détériorent, elle en crée au fur et à mesure des nouvelles. C'est dans cette conception de la Mère qu'il faut chercher tout d'abord le mystère de l'esprit indien. Dans son essence la plus intime la mère du monde est l'absolu, est Siva même. Comme telle elle représente la connaissance, l'entité et la joie absolues. Pour les adorateurs de Kali les mots Mantram Saham (je suis elle) renferment la clef de la vie et dissipent crainte et tristesse. (shrink)

Notre époque, traversée de courants mystiques, manifeste un intérêt tout particulier pour les idées du neo-platonicien Plotin. Pour le platonicien l'univers participe à l'idée. Platon considérait les choses comme le reflet de l'idée, ce que Plotin se refusait à admettre. La diversité dont la vie fait preuve atteste son inépuisable richesse, et si les choses dans leur état particulier sont imparfaites et défectueuses, c'est que chaque chose représente sa particularité d'une façon imparfaite. Le dualisme platonicien se retrouve chez Plotin; à (...) côté du monde de l'erreur et de l'apparence il situe celui de la vérité et de la réalité. Mais l'ordre des deux mondes étant différent, nécessairement les catégories qui y règnent diffèrent. Contrairement au monde du temps et de l'espace, où tout est désaccord et combat, l'accord et l'harmonie règnent dans le monde de l'idée. D'après Platon l'idée de l'être implique l'idée du repos. Pour Plotin le mouvement et le repos ne sont pas incompatibles. Il y a encore un point de divergence entre les deux philosophes. Tandis que Platon conçoit le bien comme idée, Plotin le superpose au monde des idées et l'en sépare. A l'oppossé du maître il n'était pas dualiste mais moniste. La conception platonicienne du bien est purement éthique, c.a.d. humaine, la conception de Plotin est plus cosmique. L'univers lui apparaît comme une trinité: le monde sensoriel, le monde idéal et l'unité suprême, et il leur découvre une base commune. Tout en admettant l'imperfection du monde, Plotin nie qu'il soit mauvais et méprisable. Il se tourne contre les Gnostiques chrétiens qui prêchent le mépris du monde, et s'oppose vigoureusement aux doctrines qui font des jouissances sensuelles l'unique but de la vie. L'exercice de la vertu n'est autre chose que le moyen de s'unir à Dieu. Pour Plotin la vertu n'est donc pas une fin en elle-même, mais elle est subordonnée à un but qui la dépasse. (shrink)

Le culte grandiose de Kali, la Mère, son incomparable symbolisme, ses litanies et ses chants, embrasse l'âme de l'univers qu'il glorifie comme aucune conception religieuse ne le fit jamais. La terrifiante déesse sème la peste et les pires ravages sur ses pas, tout en accordant sa grâce et sa clémence à ses enfants assez hardis pour soulever l'horrible masque derrière lequel elle se cache la figure. Ceux-là retrouveront les traits radieux qui ont enchanté leur enfance. La sublime conception de Kali, (...) la Mère, découle d'une philosophie moniste qui s'écarte pourtant sensiblement de la philosophie Védanta de Shankara. Tous deux partent, il est vrai, de la même idée. Ils admettent l'un et l'autre une substance une, indivisible et éternelle, que les Védantins appellent Brahma et les adorateurs de Kali, la Mère, Siva. Mais il y a divergence quant aux manifestations. Pour Shankara il n'y a qu'illusion. Il tranche le lien qui rattache le phénomène à l'absolu. Il se demande qui a pu susciter l'apparence. Mais, l'absolu étant la vérité même, il n'a pu engendrer l'apparence pas plus que la lumière n'aurait pu engendrer l'obscurité. Qu'y avait-il donc de commun entre les Brahmas et Maya? A première vue il semble qu'il n'y a aucun rapport. Pour Shankara il n'était besoin d'aucune relation, puisque Maya n'existe pas en réalité et que le monde n'est que mirage. Le monde n'existe que pour l'esprit qui est lui-même sujet aux hallucinations. Adorer la Mère, c'est accepter l'univers dans ses aspects les plus terrifiants. Cette philosophie est diamétralement opposée au christianisme dans son culte du Dieu d'amour, du Père plein de miséricorde. Le christianisme enseigne que tout se fait pour notre bien, tandis que pour les adorateurs de Kali, l'univers est féroce et hostile à l'homme, qui avant tout doit se montrer supérieur aux événements. Mais Kali n'est pas seulement la destructrice. Si elle démolit inexorablement toutes les formes vitales qui ont fait leur temps et qui se détériorent, elle en crée au fur et à mesure des nouvelles. C'est dans cette conception de la Mère qu'il faut chercher tout d'abord le mystère de l'esprit indien. Dans son essence la plus intime la mère du monde est l'absolu, est Siva même. Comme telle elle représente la connaissance, l'entité et la joie absolues. Pour les adorateurs de Kali les mots Mantram Saham (je suis elle) renferment la clef de la vie et dissipent crainte et tristesse. (shrink)

Notre époque, traversée de courants mystiques, manifeste un intérêt tout particulier pour les idées du neo-platonicien Plotin. Pour le platonicien l'univers participe à l'idée. Platon considérait les choses comme le reflet de l'idée, ce que Plotin se refusait à admettre. La diversité dont la vie fait preuve atteste son inépuisable richesse, et si les choses dans leur état particulier sont imparfaites et défectueuses, c'est que chaque chose représente sa particularité d'une façon imparfaite. Le dualisme platonicien se retrouve chez Plotin; à (...) côté du monde de l'erreur et de l'apparence il situe celui de la vérité et de la réalité. Mais l'ordre des deux mondes étant différent, nécessairement les catégories qui y règnent diffèrent. Contrairement au monde du temps et de l'espace, où tout est désaccord et combat, l'accord et l'harmonie règnent dans le monde de l'idée. D'après Platon l'idée de l'être implique l'idée du repos. Pour Plotin le mouvement et le repos ne sont pas incompatibles. Il y a encore un point de divergence entre les deux philosophes. Tandis que Platon conçoit le bien comme idée, Plotin le superpose au monde des idées et l'en sépare. A l'oppossé du maître il n'était pas dualiste mais moniste. La conception platonicienne du bien est purement éthique, c.a.d. humaine, la conception de Plotin est plus cosmique. L'univers lui apparaît comme une trinité: le monde sensoriel, le monde idéal et l'unité suprême, et il leur découvre une base commune. Tout en admettant l'imperfection du monde, Plotin nie qu'il soit mauvais et méprisable. Il se tourne contre les Gnostiques chrétiens qui prêchent le mépris du monde, et s'oppose vigoureusement aux doctrines qui font des jouissances sensuelles l'unique but de la vie. L'exercice de la vertu n'est autre chose que le moyen de s'unir à Dieu. Pour Plotin la vertu n'est donc pas une fin en elle-même, mais elle est subordonnée à un but qui la dépasse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a new traceability label on consumer willingness to buy the labelled product and whether the effect is mediated by moral affective evaluations of the product. A between-subjects factorial design was used to test the effect of a new traceability label on willingness to buy a chocolate bar, while controlling for different product features and whether this effect was mediated through the consumer’s moral affective evaluations of the product. A broad sample of 1,064 ordinary Danish (...) consumers was recruited for the study from the panel of an online sample provider, age range 18–80. We found that the traceability label has a significant impact on consumer willingness to buy a chocolate bar. This impact is mediated by moral affective evaluations of the chocolate bar. Based on the dual process models of persuasion, we conclude that consumers mainly process the traceability label in a heuristic way, through a peripheral route, making a fast and frugal, affect-based judgment, rather than one based on elaborate reasoning. Being one of the first empirical studies on the impact of a traceability label on consumer willingness to buy a product, it provides valuable insights for businesses on the effects of a traceability label on consumer behaviour. In addition, it provides new insights on the process through which an ethical label influences consumer evaluations and purchase behaviour. This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to show that an ethical label influences consumer decision-making through activating a holistic moral affective evaluation of the offering, rather than through strengthening the consumer’s knowledge base for a more qualified reasoning process. (shrink)

The contemporary US food systemis characterized by both an unprecedentedconcentration of corporate control as well as afragmentation of sourcing and marketingprocesses, introducing both new constraints andnew opportunities for more localized foodsystems. The purpose of our study is to explorethese issues by investigating three keyquestions. First, what are the key trends inthe US grocery industry? Second, how dodifferent kinds of food outlets choose,procure, and promote food products? Finally,what are the implications of recent trends inthe food retailing process for strengtheninglocal flows of (...) the production, distribution,and consumption of food? Background informationon the grocery industry and the results ofseven open-ended interviews conducted withowners and managers of grocery stores in oneupstate New York county indicate that theretailing process differs in complex ways fromstore to store and in most aspects cannot beinferred from store type. The paper concludeswith a discussion of the implications of ourfindings for local food system efforts,specifically in terms of new collaborationsamong producers, distributors, retailers, andshoppers, who play an indispensable role indeveloping viable alternatives to increasingcorporate control. (shrink)

Growing ties to private industry have prompted many to question the impartiality of academic bioethicists who receive financial support from for-profit corporations in exchange for ethics-related services and research. To the extent that corporate sponsors may view bioethics as little more than a way to strengthen public relations or avoid potential controversy, close ties to industry may pose serious threats to professional independence. New sources of support from private industry may also divert bioethicists from pursuing topics of greater social importance, (...) such as the needs of medically underserved communities. To inform ongoing debates about the financing of bioethics and its transparency to those concerned about potential sources of bias, we examined funding disclosures appearing in original research reports in major bioethics journals. Reviewing research published over a 15-year period, we found little evidence that for-profit corporations are influencing bioethics research directly. Instead, we found evidence that a great number of organizations, both public and private, support bioethics research. These findings suggest that worries about the cooption of bioethics research by a few interested stakeholders are greatly overstated and undersupported by available data. (shrink)

Animal welfare is emerging as one of the most controversial issues in modern livestock agriculture. Although consumers can buy free range products in niche markets, some have argued that existing markets cannot solve the animal welfare dilemma because there are individuals who care about animal well-being who do not eat animal products. This paper proposes a market-based solution to at least partially manage animal welfare externalities. After discussing the current lack of market incentives to promote farm animal well-being, a potential (...) scheme to quantify and trade units of farm animal well-being is proposed. The potential merits and efficacy of an animal welfare market are also discussed. (shrink)

The right to buy and sell human organs is challenged by the authors within the framework of a broad Christian perspective. Opposition to organ sales is argued in the light of the developing underclass of poor organ donors throughout the world who sell their organs to the rich. Very often neither the donors nor the recipients are fully informed about the medical risks involved in the procedure of organ transplantation.

Many people believe the global economy is unjust, but they don't know what to do about it. What responsibilities do American consumers have to workers in China making their iPhones? Should they still buy clothes made in Bangladesh's sweatshops? Offering an overview of how neoliberalism orients us to the world, Benjamin L. McKean shows the practical shortcomings of neoliberal approaches to the world and develops an alternative way of thinking and acting guided by a compelling new account of freedom. Disorienting (...) Neoliberalism offers a framework for understanding the politics of the global economy and shows how we can act in solidarity to promote justice. (shrink)

Adaptive management is commonly identified as a way to address situations where ecological and social uncertainty exists. Two discourses are common: a focus on experimentation, and a focus on collaboration. The roles of experimental and collaborative adaptive management in contemporary practice are reviewed to identify tools for bridging the discourses. Examples include broadening the scope of contributions during the buy-in and goal-setting stages, using conceptual models and decision support tools to include stakeholders in model development, experimentation using indicators of concern (...) to stakeholders, an experimental focus that reflects the level of statistical confidence required by management, and the engagement of stakeholders in data interpretation so that those affected by management outcomes can learn and adapt accordingly. In this context, a framework of questions that managers can use to reflect on both ecological and social uncertainties as they relate to individual management contexts is proposed. (shrink)

roots In the Lexicon of Malagasy we include an entry whose string part is vidy ('buy'). Its category is 'RT [AG, TH) ', indicating that it is a root and is associated with a two element set of theta roles, AGFNT and THEME. Semantically this entry is interpreted as a binary relation (= a two participant event), noted VIDY'.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 199-206 [Access article in PDF] Notes and FragmentsArt and Friendship Noël Carroll YASMINA REZA'S PLAY Art is about one man, Serge, who buys a painting, and the reactions of his friends, Marc and Yvan, to his purchase. 1 Marc's response is quite volcanic; for him, Serge's purchase of the painting threatens to wreck their friendship. Yvan tries to mediate the disaffection between Serge (...) and Marc, often at the cost of redirecting their hostilities at himself.As the play opens, Marc addresses the audience directly. He says: My friend Serge has bought a painting. It's a canvas about five foot by four: white. The background is white and if you screw up your eyes, you can make out some fine white diagonal lines. Serge is one of my oldest friends. He's done very well for himself, he's a dermatologist and he's keen on art. On Monday, I went to see the painting; Serge had actually got hold of it on the Saturday, but he's been lusting after it for several months. This white painting with white lines. 2This prelude explicitly connects the two major themes of the play—art and friendship (Serge is one of Marc's oldest friends), and the relation thereof. After this brief exposition, then, there is a flashback to the scene where Marc first sees Serge's painting, a painting by Antrios, a famous artist. At first Marc reacts warily, tentatively, but, in almost no time at all, he denounces the painting as shit, despite its whiteness. Marc tries to pass off his vituperation as humor and invites Serge to [End Page 199] laugh along with him. But Serge finds nothing funny about the situation, which deteriorates throughout the play as everyone's nerves fray and angers mount.The action of the play raises an immediate question. Why is Marc's reaction to the painting by Antrios so intense, so violent? Why would a painting endanger a friendship? Why do Marc and Serge seem to be willing to split apart after fifteen years over a matter of taste? Can't they just agree to disagree and leave it at that?But Marc, at least, cannot. He says, "It's a complete mystery to me, Serge buying this painting. It's unsettled me, it's filled me with some undefinable unease." And that undefinable unease is enough to motivate Marc to attack Serge and Yvan savagely to the point where the friendship among them seems no longer possible. But what is the nature of this undefinable unease and what does its existence tell us about the relation of art to friendship?Marc and Serge obviously see the painting very differently. Marc keeps referring to the Antrios as white, prompting Serge to correct him—pointing out that it has diagonals as well as bits of various other colors in it. Perhaps this is author Yasmina Reza's way of signaling that Serge, so to speak, sees something in the painting—sees that there's something to it—whereas for Marc, it's a blank, it's empty, it's nothing, it's worthless. Marc continues to be amazed that Serge has paid two hundred thousand francs for the painting. But it's not the money, as such, that bothers Marc; it is what the money symbolizes: that Serge sees something worthy in that which Marc finds worthless. And this threatens their friendship. Why?One of the earliest conceptions of friendship in Western thought is Aristotle's notion of what he calls the friendship of character or character friendship. This is not the only type of friendship there is—there are also friendships based on such things as expediency—but, for Aristotle, character friendship is the highest sort. This is the type of friendship that obtains between equals—people of equal virtue and excellence.Now you might think that people who are virtuous and excellent already should have little need of friends. They already have it all. 3 But Aristotle suggests that without friends—friends who are... (shrink)

Are there universal ethical principles that should govern the conduct of medicine and research worldwide? -- Is it morally acceptable to buy and sell organs for human transplantation? -- Were it physically safe, would human reproductive cloning be acceptable? -- Is the deliberately induced abortion of a human pregnancy ethically justifiable? -- Is it ethical to patent or copyright genes, embryos, or their parts? -- Should minors have the right to refuse treatment, even when against the will of their parents (...) or guardians? -- Is physician-assisted suicide ever ethical? -- Should stem cell research utilizing embryonic tissue be conducted? -- Should we prohibit the use of chimpanzees and other great apes in biomedical research? -- Should the United States of America adopt universal health care? -- Is there a legitimate place for human genetic enhancement? -- Can there be agreement as to what constitutes human death? -- Is there ever a circumstance in which a doctor may withhold information? -- Should in vitro fertilization be an option for a woman? -- Are international clinical trials exploitative? (shrink)

The Demise of California's “Master Plan for Higher Education”After buying a home, a university education is the largest financial investment that most Americans ever make. Universities provide the learning environment to produce an informed electorate, support basic research and train professionals. A college education prepares a skilled workforce but, above all, the main purpose of higher education is to create and transmit knowledge, promote critical thinking and literacy, and prepare students to be enlightened, active citizens. California taxpayers generally considered public (...) higher education one of the best investments they could make in the future of their state. Since 1960…. (shrink)

This book, originally a doctoral dissertation directed by Gottfried Martin and presented to the University of Bonn in 1970, concentrates on the problems which the Parmenides has triggered for more than two thousand years: Is the dialogue a mere dialectical exercise or an introduction to Plato’s own metaphysics or what? Are the hypotheses which constitute its second part logically valid or fallacious? Does Plato seriously intend the apparent contradictions within and between them? How closely related is the second part of (...) the dialogue to the first? Koumakis attempts to solve them in several ways. He substitutes "Wie-Frage" for "Was-Frage". In Ch. 11 he semantically investigates on in Plato and Zeno’s paradoxes. In subsequent chapters he turns to the hypotheses themselves: Plato’s introduction to them in 136A-B, their philological and philosophical underpinnings, the syntactical identity between hypotheses 1 and 2, the possible localization of the one in itself and in the other. In the final section he acknowledges failure in coping with the paradoxical dialogue. Lest anyone be turned away from the book by this acknowledgement, he should realize that it is worth buying for its bibliography alone, as well as for its helpful digests of that literature. Slip-ups in proofreading occur mainly in English quotations.—L.S. (shrink)

This article focuses on the impact of globalization on international law and the discourse of sovereignty. It challenges the claim that we have entered into a new world order characterized by transnational governance and decentered global law, which have replaced “traditional” international law and rendered the concepts of state sovereignty and international society anachronistic. We are indeed in the presence of something new. But if we drop the concept of sovereignty and buy into the idea that transnational governance has upstaged (...) international treaty organizations, we will misconstrue the nature of contemporary international society and the political choices facing us. In the contemporary context where there is a powerful imperial project afoot (on the part of the United States) that seeks to develop a useful version of global (cosmopolitan) right to justify its self-interested interventions, proposals to abandon the default position of sovereignty and its corollary, the principle of nonintervention in international law, are both premature and dangerous. Instead, we should rethink the normative dimensions of the concept of sovereignty in light of the new principle of sovereign equality articulated in the UN Charter, and show how it can complement cosmopolitan principles such as human rights and collective security. The task is to strengthen, not abandon, international law and supranational institutions, and to foster a global rule of law that protects both the sovereign equality of states, based on a revised conception of sovereignty, and human rights. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the empirical phenomenon of large multinational corporations acquiring socially oriented enterprises, such as the Unilever–Ben & Jerry’s, and the L`Oréal-The Body Shop takeovers. When focusing on these cases, we argue that variance in organisational identity orientations, as the dominant logic of managers within the acquiring organisations, determines whether MNCs consider the transaction not only in financial terms, but also decide to adopt “social technology” in the form of CSR-related organisational practices from the acquired unit. We (...) argue that in turn based on a “match” with the organisational identity of the acquired unit, managers will opt to adopt CSR practices more fully or selectively, and in more substantial or symbolic ways. With these propositional arguments we not only aim to contribute to the literature on CSR adoption by MNCs, but we also set out to develop theory on the widespread but so far undocumented phenomenon of MNCs “buying CSR” by acquiring socially oriented enterprises. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Practical Medical Ethics. By Alastair Campbell, Grant Gillett, and Gareth Jones. If I Were a Rich Man Could I Buy a Pancreas? and Other Essays on the Ethics of Health Care. By Arthur L. Caplan. Bloomington Ethics on Call: A Medical Ethicist Shows How to Take Charge of Life and Death Choices in Today's Health Care System. By Nancy Dubler and David Nimmons.

This paper expands the definition of gray-marketing to include some ethically problematic marketing activities and techniques used in personal selling in China. Based on this, a conceptual model of gray-marketing for a particular type of selling in which both the sellers and the buyers exhibit problematic ethics in an exchange and the associated hypotheses are developed and tested. The findings show that, first, the respondents have different ethical evaluations of different marketing practices used in personal selling such as giving and (...) accepting gifts, buying and accepting meals, and offering and accepting kickbacks. Some of these practices may not be considered unethical. Second, in terms of ethical assessment, gray-marketing practiced by buying agents is more unacceptable than when practiced by sales agents. Third, a person's ethical evaluation of gray-marketing behavior, empathy for gray-marketing, and belief that gray-marketing has serious consequences, significantly affects his inclination to use gray-marketing. This paper concludes with a discussion of some possible applications of our research findings. (shrink)

This article integrates research on gendered organizations and the work-family interface to investigate an innovative workplace initiative, the Results-Only Work Environment, implemented in the corporate headquarters of Best Buy, Inc. While flexible work policies common in other organizations “accommodate” individuals, this initiative attempts a broader and deeper critique of the organizational culture. We address two research questions: How does this initiative attempt to change the masculinized ideal worker norm? And what do women’s and men’s responses reveal about the persistent ways (...) that gender structures work and family life? Data demonstrate the ideal worker norm is pervasive and powerful, even as employees begin critically examining expectations regarding work time that have historically privileged men. Employees’ responses to ROWE are also gendered. Women are more enthusiastic, while men are more cautious. Ambivalence about and resistance to change is expressed in different ways depending on gender and occupational status. (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

An empirical study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (King, L. A. and C. K. Nappa: 1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(1), 156-165) concludes that people generally believe meaning and happiness are essential elements of the good life, whereas money is relatively unimportant. Yet, the authors also state that although "we do know what it takes to make a good life...we still behave as if we did not." The authors are suggesting that despite a general (...) belief that money is relatively unimportant in creating happiness, many people continue to focus their behaviors on increasing income and wealth. This is the classic conflict between the folk wisdom that money cannot buy happiness, on the one hand, and a continued focus by many people on achieving material success on the other. The issue is of particular importance to business professionals, not only because profit maximization is the central focus of business, but also because college students often pursue business as a profession for the express purpose of maximizing personal income and wealth. In the business world a focus on personal financial success is the norm. Wealth and income are honored. The purpose of this is to critically analyze psychological studies comparing happiness and financial success. The results are then contrasted with philosophical wisdom and religious writings comparing happiness and money. The intent is to determine whether psychological studies provide incremental insights into the connection between financial success and happiness. (shrink)

La présence dans le prologue des catégories centrales de la pensée johannique affirme son lien au corps de l’évangile, tandis que l’absence dans ce dernier de plusieurs thèmes majeurs du prologue crée une distance entre l’un et l’autre. Pour rendre compte de cet ensemble de continuités et de discontinuités, beaucoup d’exégètes recourent aux analyses diachroniques, les uns voyant dans l’évangile le commentaire postérieur du prologue, d’autres, inversement, faisant de celui-ci le résumé d’un évangile antérieur. L’analyse littéraire du genre « prédiscours (...) » paraît plus féconde. Sa fonction est d’inciter au désir de lire, de mettre le lecteur en position d’écoute, de solliciter sa mémoire, de guider sa lecture, de décoder le récit évangélique. Par le langage mythologique de la remontée au commencement, le prologue invite le lecteur du récit à appréhender Jésus dans son égalité et son intimité avec Dieu. Par la dynamique de la descente du Logos divin vers le monde, il articule l’histoire de Jésus à son origine en Dieu. Ni résumé ni commentaire, mais acte de relecture, il fixe le cadre herméneutique dans lequel doit être lu le récit johannique.The presence in the Prologue of the central categories of Johannine thought affirms its connection to the body of the Gospel, while the absence in the latter of a number of major themes of the Prologue creates a distance between the one and the other. In order to take into consideration this ensemble of continuities and discontinuities, many exegetes have recourse to diachronic analyses. Some see in the Gospel a posterior commentary on the Prologue, others, on the contrary, make of the latter a resumé of an anterior Gospel. The literary analysis of a “prediscourse” genre seems more fruitful. Its function is to incite a desire to read, to put the reader in a position of listening, to provoke his memory, to guide his reading, and to decode the Gospel story. Through mythological language of a going back to the beginning, the Prologue invites the reader of the narrative to find Jesus in his equality and intimacy with God. Buy the dynamism of the descent of the divine Logos towards the world, it articulates the history of Jesus from his origin in God. Neither resumé nor commentary, but an act of rereading, it sets the hermeneutical framework in which the Johannine narrative ought to be read. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Practical Medical Ethics. By Alastair Campbell, Grant Gillett, and Gareth Jones. If I Were a Rich Man Could I Buy a Pancreas? and Other Essays on the Ethics of Health Care. By Arthur L. Caplan. Bloomington Ethics on Call: A Medical Ethicist Shows How to Take Charge of Life and Death Choices in Today's Health Care System. By Nancy Dubler and David Nimmons.

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (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)

The draft Code of Conduct for Research is an important initiative towards assisting the scientific community in complying with the provisions of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). However, its approach towards cross-border data sharing should be reconsidered to clarify the ambiguities inherent in the legal requirements for the cross-border sharing of health data in the POPIA. These ambiguities include the concept of ‘transfer of information’, the application of adequacy as a legal mechanism for transfer, the (...) nature of consent for cross-border sharing and the scope of the recipient third party. We suggest that the draft Code of Conduct for Research can be improved by: Explaining or defining the concept of ‘transfer of information’ and when it applies to cross-border sharing in research Clarifying the application of adequacy as a legal mechanism for transfer vis-à-vis the other alternatives Expanding on the interpretation and application of consent as a legal mechanism for cross-border transfers Expanding the category of persons who may be recipients of personal information in a third country. (shrink)

Islamic sermons, Arabic; Islamic ethics.

The Abrahamic tradition that the Arabs value most was ḥajj. The ḥajj, which means to visit Kaʿba was the greatest means of getting closer to Allāh. The Kaʿba was the house of Allāh. And the visitors of the Kaʿba were Allāh’s guests. For this reason, the Arabs used to great respect to the visitors and they never used to attack a man in the ḥarem (the area around the Kaʿba). The same respect included visitors’ travels to the Kaʿba. There were (...) two Abrahamic traditions that ensured the safety of visitors and sacrifices: Ḥaram months and qalāid. Ḥaram months were Dhū l-Qaʿdah, Dhū l-Ḥijjah, Muḥarram and Rajab. And the Arabs did not used to attack anyone in those months. For visits outside the ḥaram months, the visitors used to use the qalāid as a primitive visa. Qalāid is the plural of the word qilāda, meaning necklace. The Arab, who saw the qilādas, used to understand that the person who wore the qilāda wanted to go to the Kaʿba or had returned home from the Kaʿba. Qilādas used to be knitted from wool ropes and they used to be hung on animals’ neck or humps. Sometimes horseshoes used to hang on these qilādas. On the way back from Kaʿba, the barks of the ḥarem trees used to hang on the qilādas instead of the horseshoes. The Qurʾān orders Muslims not to disrespect the qilādas. This order also reveals that the Qurʾān recognizes the qilāda tradition. Allāh’s Apostle (sallallaahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) and Ṣaḥāba are also known to continue this tradition.Summary: Ḥajj was the most important worship of the Arabs in the pre-Islamic period. Human and commodity mobility in the ḥajj had an important place in the life of the Meccans who lived in land unfit for agriculture. This fact is expressed as follows in Abraham’s (Ibrāhīm al-Khalīl) prayer: “Our Lord! Lo! I have settled some of my posterity in an uncultivable valley near unto Thy holy House, our Lord! That they may establish proper worship; so incline some hearts of men that they may yearn toward them, and provide Thou them with fruits in order that they may be thankful.” (Ibrahim 14:37) The Arabs who lived in various parts of the Arabian Peninsula used to come to Mecca during the ḥajj season and present their sacrifices. They also used to buy their needs from nearby markets. These markets were also places where traders had the opportunity to sell their products.Because the Arabian Peninsula is unfavorable in terms of climate and soil, many Arab tribes used to raid and attack other tribes to sustain their existence. It is even known that some Arabs proud of their raids. The attacks only used to stop in the ḥaram months (Dhū l-Qaʿdah, Dhū l-Ḥijjah, Muḥarram and Rajab). Because of the prohibition of fighting in the ḥaram months, the visitors used to visit the Kaʿba with confidence. Thanks to this truce, the trade goods carried by visitors used to reach to Mecca with confidence.It was possible that the visits outside of the ḥaram months were safe. However, it was necessary to follow some traditions in order to achieve this confidence. Visitors to the Kaʿba used to use some signs that they were visitors to the Kaʿba. One of these signs was qilāda (necklace) hanging on the neck or hump of the animal. The person wearing qilāda was Allāh’s guest, and his sacrifice was the property of Allāh. For this reason, no Arab would to dare to attack these visitors and property. Because of the Arab reverence for the Kaʿba, visitors wearing qilādas used to come to the Kaʿba and present their sacrifices throughout the year. The sacrifices had an important place in the livelihood of the poor.Qilādas were mostly used for visits outside the ḥaram months. The qilādas used to hang on the necks of the animals shipped to the Kaʿba as sacrifice. However, it is also known that qilādas are sometimes hung on hump. People who did not deliver sacrifices (animals) to the Kaʿba used to hang the qilāda his neck to show that he was a visitor to the Kaʿba. Similarly, it is known that people who sacrificed their animals on the Kaʿba hang the qilāda their neck on the way back. The qilādas fitted on the way to the Kaʿba were made of ropes spun from wool or hair. Sometimes horseshoes used to hang on these qilādas. Ḥarem plants (grass, tree bark) used to use in the qilādas on the way back.The Qurʾān orders Muslims not to disrespect the qilādas. This order also reveals that the Qurʾān recognizes the qilāda tradition. The word qalāid is mentioned twice in the Qurʾān: “O ye who believe violate not the sanctity of the symbols of Allāh, nor of the sacred month, nor of the animals brought for sacrifice, nor the qalāid, nor the people resorting to the sacred house, seeking of the Bounty and good pleasure of their Lord.” (Al Māʼidah 5:2), “Allāh made the Kaʿba, the sacred house, an asylum of security of men as also the sacred months, the animals for offerings, and the qalāid.” (Al Māʼidah 5:97) Considering the practices of the qilāda, it is understood that qilādas are a kind of visa. It is understood that all practices related to the visit to the Kaʿba, especially the ḥajj, have an aim to satisfy the material-spiritual needs of those who come there for the purpose of visiting and trading, as well as those who reside in the Kaʿba. Therefore, it will not be far away to say that qilādas can be used today for the same purpose. For example, labels, banderols, visas and passports can be used instead of ropes, horseshoes and plants. On the other hand, the meaning of the āyāt (verse) in which the word qalāid is mentioned is not limited to the Arabs. The same āyāt declare that qilādas are a development (qiyām) instrument for people. Therefore, the qilāda has a meaning potential beyond the 7th century and the inhabitants of this century. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the encounter between religion and music via ideas taken from Olivier Messiaen. I first present his categorization of music and the concepts of sound-colour and dazzlement as the 'directional meaning' of music. I then show how Messiaen relates this to the phenomena of natural resonance and afterimages, and based on this, I present-via Goethe and Rudolf Steiner-the notion of an etheric, evanescent or incorporeal matter. This understanding and experience of matter is then brought to bear (...) on music. In this context the notion of a 'religious experience' can be understood as both referring to content and sentiment related to a religious belief, and, in a more general sense of 'religare' (to bind), as a deeper bond with the material-temporal flow of nature. This gives way to a Johannine vision of Messiaen's musical thinking where the creative-sounding Logos or 'word' is both spirit and matter, and where music may represent a potential awakening to this reality. (shrink)

This commentary contributes to philosophical reflection on the growing challenge of digital distraction and the value of attention in the digital age. It clarifies the nature of the problem in conceptual and historical terms; analyzes “freedom of attention” as an organizing ideal for moral and political theorizing; considers some constraints of political morality on coercive state action to bolster users’ attentional resources; comments on corporate moral responsibility; and touches on some reform ideas. In particular, the commentary develops a response to (...) an anti-paternalistic line of argument rooted in Mill’s Harm Principle that would oppose state regulation on the grounds that securing attentional capacities is a matter of personal responsibility alone. The commentary engages throughout with James Williams’s recent work on the attention economy by identifying areas of agreement and difference. (shrink)

The downsides of monogamy are felt by most people engaged in long-term relationships, including restrictions on self-discovery, limits on friendship, sexual boredom, and a circumscribed understanding of intimacy. Yet, a "happily ever after" monogamy is assumed to be the ideal form of romantic love in many modern societies: a relationship that is morally ideal and will bring the most happiness to its two partners. -/- In Why It’s OK to Not Be Monogamous, Justin L. Clardy deeply questions these assumptions. He (...) rejects the claim that non-monogamy among honest, informed and consenting adults is morally impermissible. He shows instead how polyamorous relationships can actually be exemplars of moral virtue. The book discusses how social and political forces sustain and reward monogamous relationships. The book defines non-monogamy as a privative concept; a negation of monogamy. Looking at its prevalence in the United States, the book explains how common criticisms of non-monogamy come up short. Clardy argues, as some researchers have recently shown―monogamy relies on continually demonizing non-monogamy to sustain its moral status. Finally, the book concludes with a focus on equality, asking what justice for polyamorous individuals might look like. (shrink)

'A Differential Play of Forces' is a study of transcendental empiricism in musical contexts. It presents a reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical apparatus and explores how music can be thought of as functioning in the operation Deleuze terms transcendental empiricism. Central to transcendental empiricism is the idea of an encounter with intensive difference and the consequent experience of intensive and virtual forces. The thesis sets out to explore this idea in three interwoven steps. First, it develops transcendental (...) empiricism as a philosophical framework, expounding central notions related to time and aesthetic experience. In the context of this philosophical apparatus, music is then discussed as an encounter with intensity and what this may entail for our understanding of musical experience and its potential. The third part of the thesis explores the idea of experiencing intensive forces through music in the thinking and poietic of three composers of the twentieth century: Arnold Schönberg, Olivier Messiaen and Giacinto Scelsi. The thesis develops three ‘images of thought’ corresponding, respectively, to the composers’ expressed theoretical ideas, identifying central concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. A mutual illumination of ideas about music and transcendental empiricism is thus presented, pointing towards a possible convergence between theory and practice, thinking and aesthetic experience as a differential play of intensive forces. (shrink)