U.S. Food and Drug Administration policy prohibits blood donation from men who have had sex with men even one time since 1977. Growing moral criticism claims that this policy is discriminatory, a claim rejected by the FDA. An overview of U.S. blood donation, recent donor deferral policy, and the conventional ethical debate introduce the need for a different approach to analyzing discrimination claims. I draw on an institutional understanding of injustice to discern and describe five features of the MSM (...) policy and its FDA context that contribute to its discriminatory effect. I note significant similarities in the 1980s policy of deferring Haitians, suggesting an historical pattern of discrimination in FDA deferral policy. Finally, I point to changes needed to move toward a nondiscriminatory deferral policy. (shrink)

A simplistic image of twentieth century French philosophy sees Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 as the line that divides two irreconcilable moments in its history: existentialism and phenomenology, on the one hand, and structuralism on the other. The structuralist generation claimed to recapture the dimension of objectivity and impersonality, which the previous generation was supposedly incapable of. As a matter of fact, in 1962, Derrida’s edition of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry was taken to be a turning point that announced the (...) structuralist revolution by introducing a reflection on the historicity and the materiality of impersonal idealities. And yet, the 1998 publication of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from his Collège de France lecture course on the same topic make manifest that he was already taking phenomenology in another direction. His 1959 reading of The Origin of Geometry shows how unexpectedly close the early Derrida is to the late Merleau-Ponty. By identifying the tension between archaeology and teleology as the basic problem of Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida each disclose the fundamental importance of history and of writing. Comparing the two readings in their specific context not only brings about a more complex picture of the intellectual debates of the time, but also shows how, with Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of The Origin of Geometry, Derrida’s “différance” predates itself and receives another genealogy. (shrink)

The educational aims described by educational philosophers rarely embrace the full range of differences in intellectual ability, adaptive behavior, or communication that children exhibit. Because envisioned educational aims have significant consequences for how educational practices, pedagogy, and curricula are conceptualized, the failure to acknowledge and embrace differences in ability leaves open the question of the extent to which students with intellectual disabilities are subject to the same aims as their “typically-developing” peers. In articulating and defending valued aims of education, educational (...) philosophers tacitly or expressly concede that particular aims will be ill suited to many children with intellectual disabilities, and that separate aims will therefore apply to them. This paper evaluates the philosophical reasoning behind this conclusion that some people, by necessity, must be governed by separate educational aims, to be decided separately and secondarily. The author calls this the “deferral stance.” First, the paper outlines concerns about a particular ability-biased social and epistemic context in which theorizing about educational aims takes place. The author then examines assumptions that underpin the logic of deferral, arguing that the logic proves flawed when subjected to conceptual and empirical scrutiny. The paper concludes by outlining an inclusive approach—the affirmative stance—to theorizing about educational aims that resists the logic of exclusion and deferral. (shrink)

This article addresses the architecture of the Inns of Court, the home of the Common Law. The approach taken, however, rejects an approach that would reduce the Inns to a roster of historical details and laudatory description. Instead, the Inns are seen, if not actually felt, as the embodiment of the “original” ground of law. This experience is revealed through a three-stage discovery process that situates the Inns within the medieval context of symbol and ritual as informed by Turner’s concept (...) of liminality; analyzes the space of the Inns using concepts of bodily disunity derived from the psychoanalysis of Lacan and Klein; relates this space to the “body of Law” in phenomenological terms, as a function of the irresolvable priority of either arché or anarché. The article concludes with a series of speculative propositions on a series of originary architectonic sites: the labyrinth, the pinnacle, and the door. These culminate in the assertion that the architecture of the Inns of Court stages the deferral of bodily interiority through which the Law simultaneously derives its infinite remove and its authority. (shrink)

René Girard’s anthropology goes beyond Durkheim and Freud in seeking knowledge in literary, mythical, and religious texts. Girard’s primary intuition is that human culture originated in response to the danger of violent mimetic crises among increasingly intelligent hominins, whose imitation of each other’s desires led to conflict. These crises were resolved by the mechanism of emissary murder: the proto-human community came to focus its aggression on a single scapegoat whose unanimous lynching, by “miraculously” bringing peace, led to its ritual repetition (...) in sacrifice. Because this theory fails to found the signs of human language and worship on the deferral of spontaneous action, Girard can only attribute the internal peace necessary to the human community to the exhaustion of violent aggression. Instead, generative anthropology proposes that, beginning from the premise that the need to control internecine violence was the source of the human, an appropriative gesture toward an object of common desire, deferred out of fear of violence, becomes understood as a sign of the object’s sacred/interdicted status, after which it can be peacefully divided among the group. Following this originary event, the sacred/signifying universe of language and religion gradually comes to include the totality of human activity. (shrink)

This paper proposes and axiomatically characterizes a model of choice that builds on the criterion of partial dominance and allows for two types of avoidant behavior: choice deferral and status quo bias. These phenomena are explained in a unified way that allows for a clear theoretical distinction between them to be made. The model also explains the strengthening of the attraction effect that has been observed when deferral is permissible. Unlike other models of status quo biased behavior, the (...) one analyzed in this paper builds on a unique, reference-independent preference relation that is acyclic and generally incomplete. When this relation is complete, the model reduces to rational choice. (shrink)

In 2015, the FDA revised its indefinite deferral policy towards MSM blood donors. I develop an empirical case for the revised policy and show why rights-based objections fail. I introduce and defend a distinction between “ordinary” and “exact” justification that accounts for the worries in the empirical case. I conclude that the FDA is committed to further revising the policy to let MSM donors with exact justification donate.

Nurses are well positioned to contribute to child protection efforts but are underutilised. This paper describes a critical discursive analysis of nursing responses to child neglect and abuse (CN&A) in British Columbia, Canada. Legal and practice guidelines were analysed alongside nurse interview texts, offering a glimpse into how nurses prevent CN&A in their everyday practice with families. Results show how the primacy of mandatory reporting to child protection authorities coordinates a series of deferrals and how nurses engage with and interrupt (...) these deferrals in everyday practice. Nurses' relational approaches are essential to gain access to the private sphere of the family to assess, plan, elicit cooperation with interventions and monitor the situation. They considered reporting to be one among many possible responses. This study highlights how nursing contributions to prevention are largely overlooked and points to the potential for a more significant role for nurses in a public health approach to child protection. (shrink)

Blood service organizations employ various ways to ensure transfusion blood safety, including the testing of all donations for transfusion-transmissible infections (TTI) and the exclusion of donors who are at increased risk of a recent infection. As some TTIs are more common among men who have sex with men (MSM), many jurisdictions (temporarily) defer the donation of blood by sexually active MSM. This boils down to a categorical exclusion of a large group solely on the basis of their sexual orientation, which (...) is seen as unduly discriminatory and stigmatizing. Blood service organizations in the U.K. and the Netherlands have recently changed their deferral policies for MSM. The problem of the MSM deferral involves a conflict between fundamental rights: the right of MSM to equal treatment and the right to health of the recipients of blood and blood products. We distinguish and discuss three broad alternative options to the current categorical deferral of MSM donations: (1) completely abandoning donor selection on the basis of sexual behavior, (2) individual risk assessment of the sexual activities of each potential donor, and (3) individual risk assessment of the sexual activities of MSM only. The new U.K. policy falls within the second category, and the new Dutch policy is in the third category. We argue that each approach comes with moral costs but that the most reasonable option is different from the policies of both the U.K. and the Netherlands. (shrink)

Blood service organizations employ various ways to ensure transfusion blood safety, including the testing of all donations for transfusion-transmissible infections (TTI) and the exclusion of donors who are at increased risk of a recent infection. As some TTIs are more common among men who have sex with men (MSM), many jurisdictions (temporarily) defer the donation of blood by sexually active MSM. This boils down to a categorical exclusion of a large group solely on the basis of their sexual orientation, which (...) is seen as unduly discriminatory and stigmatizing. Blood service organizations in the U.K. and the Netherlands have recently changed their deferral policies for MSM. The problem of the MSM deferral involves a conflict between fundamental rights: the right of MSM to equal treatment and the right to health of the recipients of blood and blood products. We distinguish and discuss three broad alternative options to the current categorical deferral of MSM donations: (1) completely abandoning donor selection on the basis of sexual behavior, (2) individual risk assessment of the sexual activities of each potential donor, and (3) individual risk assessment of the sexual activities of MSM only. The new U.K. policy falls within the second category, and the new Dutch policy is in the third category. We argue that each approach comes with moral costs but that the most reasonable option is different from the policies of both the U.K. and the Netherlands. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of consumers’ choice deferral behavior on their intertemporal choice preference. The empirical study shows that consumers’ choice deferral behavior can significantly affect their intertemporal decision preference through the level of hopefulness. Compared with non-choice deferral behavior, choice deferral behavior can improve the level of consumers’ sense of hopefulness, which then makes them prefer larger-longer interests in intertemporal decision-making. The effect of consumers’ sense of hopefulness on their (...) intertemporal choice preference is moderated by their perceived information integrity. When the perceived information integrity is low, the effect of hopefulness on intertemporal decision preference will be enhanced, but when the perceived information integrity is high, the effect of hopefulness on intertemporal decision preference will not be affected. In addition, the theoretical and practical significance of this study and the prospect of future research are also discussed. (shrink)

A highly original and interdisciplinary study of the philosophy of the everyday.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration policy prohibits blood donation from men who have had sex with men even one time since 1977. Growing moral criticism claims that this policy is discriminatory, a claim rejected by the FDA. An overview of U.S. blood donation, recent donor deferral policy, and the conventional ethical debate introduce the need for a different approach to analyzing discrimination claims. I draw on an institutional understanding of injustice to discern and describe five features of the MSM (...) policy and its FDA context that contribute to its discriminatory effect. I note significant similarities in the 1980s policy of deferring Haitians, suggesting an historical pattern of discrimination in FDA deferral policy. Finally, I point to changes needed to move toward a nondiscriminatory deferral policy. (shrink)

Like many ethics debates surrounding emerging technologies, neuroethics is increasingly concerned with the private sector. Here, entrepreneurial visions and claims of how neurotechnology innovation will revolutionize society—from brain-computer-interfaces to neural enhancement and cognitive phenotyping—are confronted with public and policy concerns about the risks and ethical challenges related to such innovations. But while neuroethics frameworks have a longer track record in public sector research such as the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, much less is known about how businesses—and especially start-ups—address ethics in tech (...) development. In this paper, we investigate how actors in the field frame and enact ethics as part of their innovative R&D processes and business models. Drawing on an empirical case study on direct-to-consumer (DTC) neurotechnology start-ups, we find that actors engage in careful boundary-work to anticipate and address public critique of their technologies, which allows them to delineate a manageable scope of their ethics integration. In particular, boundaries are drawn around four areas: the technology’s actual capability, purpose, safety and evidence-base. By drawing such lines of demarcation, we suggest that start-ups make their visions of ethical neurotechnology in society more acceptable, plausible and desirable, favoring their innovations while at the same time assigning discrete responsibilities for ethics. These visions establish a link from the present into the future, mobilizing the latter as promissory place where a technology’s benefits will materialize and to which certain ethical issues can be deferred. In turn, the present is constructed as a moment in which ethical engagement could be delegated to permissive regulatory standards and scientific authority. Our empirical tracing of the construction of ‘ethical realities’ in and by start-ups offers new inroads for ethics research and governance in tech industries beyond neurotechnology. (shrink)

In “Acquiescence Is Not Agreement: The Problem of Marginalization in Pediatric Decision Making,” Caruso Brown argues that clinicians and ethicists should attend to voices marginalized by hie...

Waiting belongs to the greatly overlooked practices of everyday life, and among the many fields enforcing waiting times, transportation certainly accounts for a most prominent generator.

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Giorgio Agamben's account of the history of bio-politics in the Beast and the Sovereign. In this account, the ‘threshold of bio-political modernity’ is identified with the collapse of an allegedly immemorial distinction between life and the law. According to Derrida, however, this in-distinction between life and the law, which supposedly marks the historical emergence of the bio-political, is in fact an originary event. Agamben, therefore, announces a bio-political modernity that has always already existed. (...) In this essay, I argue that Derrida, in the Beast and the Sovereign, fails to grasp the significance of one of the principal figures employed in Agamben's theory of the bio-political, the ‘threshold’. This figure, which Agamben opposes, elsewhere in his writings, to the Derridean notion of difference/deferral, does not refer to either an historical beginning or something that has always already existed. Rather, the threshold is defined as a particular moment in which an originary phenomenon becomes a decisive historical norm. In his ‘history’ of the bio-political, therefore, Agamben identifies the modernity of the latter in terms of the historical normalization of an in-distinction between law and life that has always already occurred. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Heidegger explicitly defers any consideration of ourselves (Dasein) as embodied. I try to account for Heidegger's reluctance to talk about 'the body' in connection with his explication of Dasein, by arguing that doing so would be at odds with the kind of investigation his 'phenomenology of everydayness' is meant to be. That Heidegger omits discussion of the body in Being and Time might lead one to think of the human body in terms of the other categories (...) Heidegger deploys: readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand (Being and Time) and biological organisms (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics). I argue that any such identification ought to be resisted, as these categories serve only to deprive our bodies of their specifically human dimension. Indeed, by surveying the failure of these categories as proper to the human body, we gain further insight into Heidegger's initial deferral: only given the existential analytic can one begin to offer a proper account of ourselves in bodily terms. (shrink)

In the last decade, the organization of pharmaceutical research on neglected tropical diseases has undergone transformative change. In a context of perceived “market failure,” the development of new medicines is increasingly handled by public-private partnerships. This shift toward hybrid organizational models depends on a particular form of exchange: the sharing of proprietary assets in general and of intellectual property rights in particular. This article explores the paradoxical role of private property in this new configuration of global health research and development. (...) Rather than a tool to block potential competitors, proprietary assets function as a lever to attract others into risky collaborative ventures; instead of demarcating public and private domains, the sharing of property rights is used to increase the porosity of that boundary. This reimagination of the value of property is connected to the peculiar timescape of global health drug development, a promissory orientation to the future that takes its clearest form in the centrality of “virtual” business models and the proliferation of strategies of deferral. Drawing on the anthropological literature on inalienable possessions, we reconsider property’s traditional exclusionary role and discuss the possibility that the new pharmaceutical “commons” proclaimed by contemporary global health partnerships might be the precursor of future enclosures. (shrink)

Healthcare policies developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to safeguard community health have the potential to disadvantage women in three areas. First, protocols for deferral of elective surgery may assign a lower priority to important reproductive outcomes. Second, policies regarding the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 may not capture the complexity of the considerations related to pregnancy. Third, policies formulated to reduce infectious exposure inadvertently may increase disparities in maternal health outcomes and rates of violence towards women. In this commentary, (...) we outline these challenges unique to women’s healthcare in a pandemic, provide preliminary recommendations and identify areas for further exploration and refinement of policy. (shrink)

The way in which mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid puts them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of "transitional" justice encourage future generations to move forward by creating a false assumption of closure, enabling those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends when justice begins. Rather, it assumes that a time _before_ justice is the moment to put evil (...) in the past. Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of "never again" or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it _was_. Meister criticizes such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation and elaborates the flawed moral logic of "never again" in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect. (shrink)

This paper examines how Jacques Derrida appropriates and deepens Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In Derrida’s early essay on différance, Kant is conspicuous in his absence. One of the essay’s key aims is to re-think space and time, drawing on the work of Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, and several others to do so. It is therefore curious that Kant is never mentioned, especially because the method and conceptual framework Derrida ends up adopting owes a huge debt to transcendental arguments. Derrida posits a (...) fundamental double- movement of differing and deferral - différance - as the condition for the possibility of anything to be at all, the originary constitution of space and time. It therefore functions as a kind of ‘ultra-transcendental’ condition, as Derrida would say later in his career, that reaches a level of fundamentality that Kant was unable to, making possible not just human experience, but existence as a whole as such. (shrink)

The aporia inherent in Kojève’s discussion of the end of history stems from the temporality implicit in the moment of inscribing the end of history in philosophy. Hegel’s Phenomenology as the unfolding of absolute knowledge stands at the last moment in history, without necessarily constituting its end. Reading the post-NEP Soviet ideology through Kojève demonstrates that the doctrine of “socialism in one country” similarly situates itself outside historical time as history’s last moment, marked by the coincidence of being and concept, (...) the disappearance of negation, and classless society without an historical agent. In the reconceptualization of labor in Stalinist ideology as a temporalization of being without negation, the representation of time in five-year plans radically reinvents temporality as a suspension of history in the perpetual deferral of its end. Going beyond Kojève, the immanent logic of temporality of five-year plans enables a non-teleological reading of Hegelian philosophy with regard to the status of its method and the function of the end of history. (shrink)

Cinema against Spectacle -- Introduction -- Cinema against Spectacle -- I. Opening the Window? -- II. Inventing the Cinema? -- III. Filming the Disaster? -- IV. Cutting the Figure? -- V. Changing the Spectator? -- Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field -- Introduction -- I. On a Dual Origin -- The ideological place of the "base apparatus" -- Birth = deferral: The invention of the cinema -- II. Depth of Field: The Double Scene -- Bazin's "surplus realism" (...) -- The work of "transparency" -- For a materialist history of the cinema -- "For the first time ..." -- III."Primitive" Depth of Field -- IV. Effacement of Depth/Advent of Speech -- V. Which Speech? (shrink)

Inspiring and distinctive, After Meaning provides a radical challenge to the way in which international law is thought and practised. Jean d'Aspremont asserts that the words and texts of international law, as forms, never carry or deliver meaning but, instead, perpetually defer meaning and ensure it is nowhere found within international legal discourse. In challenging the dominant meaning-centrism of the international legal discourse and shedding light on the sovereignty of forms, this book promotes a radical new attitude towards textuality in (...) international law. The author offers new perspectives on interpretation, critique, history, comparison, translation and referencing, inviting international lawyers to reinvent their engagement with these discourses. Chapters define meaning and form in international law, explore deferral of meaning and make an unprecedented use of post-structuralist theory to rethink international law. After Meaning will be an essential reference point for legal scholars, researchers and students who seek to understand a different way of thinking about meaning in international law. The book's engagement with post-structuralism will also prove beneficial to anyone interested in the philosophy of language and literary theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that the sublime feeling can only announce itself as a paradoxical mixture of pain and pleasure in an experience of a lost or irrevocable past. Presenting the typical evanescence and inevitable deferral of the past in musical terms, this paper rewrites the sublime feeling as a musical feeling: a suspended feeling wavering in-between apparently opposite intensities of tension and respite. This suspended feeling is analyzed through a juxtaposition of the sublime with Sehnsucht, or the potentially endless (...) longing for an irretrievable past, and trauma, or the potentially endless rehearsal of an unforgettable past. (shrink)

Technology tends toward perpetual innovation. Technology, enabled by both political and economic structures, propels society forward in a kind of technological evolution. The moment a novel piece of technology is in place, immediately innovations are attempted in a process of unending betterment. Bernard Stiegler suggests that, contra Heidegger, it is not being-toward-death that shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. Rather, it is technological innovation that shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. In fact, for Stiegler, (...) human evolution has always been part of technological evolution. While one can quibble with the notion of human-technology co-evolution, there is something to be said for the way in which human perception of time, of ageing, and of death seems to be judged against the horizon of perpetual evolution of technological innovation. In this technological imaginary, of which modern medicine is constituent, ageing and death seemingly may be infinitely deferred, and it is this innovating deferral that shapes the contemporary social imaginary around ageing and death in modern medicine. Yet, the reality of living and dying always manifests itself differently than the scripts given to us by the technological imaginary with its myth of endless innovation. In fact, I shall argue that, where the Church created an ars moriendi, the technological imaginary gives us an ars ad mortem when it becomes clear that ageing and death cannot be infinitely deferred. And further, I shall argue that the Church must revivify its ars vivendi—that is to say, its liturgies, its arts, its technics—as a counter narrative to the myth of perpetual innovation that shapes the technological imaginary. (shrink)

A striking feature of the relatively new philosophical genre of speculative realism is that it includes theories that explicitly seek to bridge or overcome the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Two such theories are Markus Gabriel’s ontology of fields of sense and Tristan Garcia’s ontology of formal things. Both theories hold that all entities - be they physical, mental, fictional, technical, or otherwise - are equally and irreducibly real. This article first describes the core features of these ontologies. This (...) provides insight into these theories themselves and also gives us a glimpse of what philosophy ‘beyond the divide’ might look like. In addition, both theories are shown to be examples of what I will call ‘relational’ philosophy, or philosophy that exhaustively defines entities in terms of how they appear to or feature in other entities. I argue that all such philosophies are haunted by the ‘infinite deferral of specification,’ a specific problem that I argue renders them inconsistent. Finally, I oppose such ‘relationist’ philosophies to ‘substantialist’ ones, and suggest that this distinction might one day succeed the division between analytic and continental philosophy. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary epistemology. Contextualists claim that ‘know’ is a context-sensitive verb associated with different evidential standards in different contexts. Contextualists motivate their view based on a set of behavioural claims. In this paper, I show that several of these behavioural claims are false. I also show that contextualist test cases suffer from a critical confound, which derives from people's tendency to defer to speakers’ statements about their own mental states. My (...) evidence consists in results from several behavioural experiments. I conclude that contextualism is an idle hypothesis and I propose some general methodological lessons. (shrink)

Whereas there are many aspects of Roger Simon’s thought that can be privileged, one of the most compelling points of entry for beginning to consider his legacy in the field of education, and beyond, lies with his concern for the difficult work of receiving and transmitting, of giving countenance to, the traces of those now absent. Indeed, in the last 20 years of his scholarly work, Simon pressed us to consider the pedagogical stakes in forging an ethical living relation with (...) the remnants of past and presently unsettled—ongoing—historical wrongs. Keenly aware of how memorial practices risk falling into facile assurances and deferrals, Simon emphasized the important work of “remembrance-learning,” in which the task is to learn how to ethically receive and translate the remnants of a difficult past in our present, so that we might be able to more thoroughly think our time. In this paper I provide an overview of a certain tendency in Simon’s later thinking, pointing to how his work on pedagogy, aesthetics, curation and collective study was motivated by a not so ordinary way of thinking that takes seriously the fact that the dead cannot bury the dead; that they need those in the present, those whose turn it is to do the work, to offer human significance and a human completion to what remains a remnant. (shrink)

In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narrative I develop a rather different account of the current (...) ecopolitical moment. I first argue that an understanding of anthropogenic climate change must be grounded in a biosemiotic analysis of the evolving metabolism between society and nature, one that is alert to the way that metabolism involves a folded relation between inside and outside, and that recognizes the constant deferral of biosemiotic meaning in ecological systems. I then use a deconstructive reading of climate technics to problematize the distinction between the diagnosis and solution of climate change, and expose modern scientific practices of reading the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of weather’s technological writability. Exploring the notion that previous transformations of the metabolic regime of society have always involved transformations of notions of the human, I conclude by sketching out a different way of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the ‘opening’ of climate change, that problematizes the idea of the human as the end of nature, and that thereby implies a more radical version of climate responsibility. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe and explore the current state of internet regulation through content filters in Swedish public libraries. Design/methodology/approach Data was collected through an electronic survey directed to library managers of Sweden’s 290 main municipal libraries. 164 answers were returned, yielding a 57% response rate. The analysis comprises descriptive statistics for quantitative data and an activity theory approach with focus on contradictions for qualitative counterparts. Findings In total, 33% of the responding libraries report having (...) content filters; 50% have not; and a surprising 18% do not know. There is a strong correlation between internet misuse and positive attitudes towards filters, and, reversely, between lack of misuse and lack of active stances concerning filters. Rather than seeing this as weakness, the authors suggest that there is strength in a context-bound flexibility open to practical experience and weighting of values, ethics, legislation and local circumstances. More troublesome indications concern the high deferral of decision-making to local authorities (municipalities) whereby libraries are left with limited insight and influence. Research limitations/implications The situation calls for professional organisations to address political mandate questions, and educational programs to strengthen future information professionals’ knowledge of IT in general; filter issues in specific; and local authority decision-making. The study highlights the need of adequate information professional competences and mandates to decide on and oversee internet regulation. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first internationally published study on content filters in Swedish public libraries. (shrink)

Drawing from the critical phenomenology of Alia Al-Saji, Christina Sharpe’s notion of “the wake,” and Jan Slaby’s work on affect, this paper offers a critique of George Ciccariello-Maher’s (2017) formulation of Frantz Fanon’s decolonized dialectic. I argue that Ciccariello-Maher’s formulation, while excellent in most respects, nevertheless contains a significant lacuna. While he is correct to point out that Fanon’s critique of universal reconciliation forces his dialectical activity to remain firmly rooted in the present, by failing to fully draw out how (...) the past always already weighs on the present, Ciccariello-Maher runs the risk of obscuring the affective weight of Fanon’s historical critique. This is problematic for the way it obscures the full range of ethical possibilities that stem from this particular affective experience—possibilities that Jan Slaby (2020: 189–95) makes clear via Christina Sharpe’s notion of “the wake.” In other words, while Ciccariello-Maher seems to frame Fanon’s recourse to infinitely deferred reconciliation as a reflection of the “ethical nihilism” (2017: 62) that characterizes the system of oppression he is responding to, a reformulation of Ciccariello-Maher’s observations with respect to affectivity re-frames this infinite deferral as an “embodied ethics of being and knowing” (Slaby 2020: 189). I will ultimately argue that this reformulation helps us understand Fanon’s parting words in Black Skin White Masks—“Oh my body, always make me a man who questions!” (Fanon 2008b: 206; 1952: 188)—as a call for the type of ethics suggested by Sharpe’s notion of “the wake” (2016). (shrink)

Following the 1988 publication of Bergsonism by Gilles Deleuze, many contemporary critics such as Leonard Lawlor and Paul Douglass have re-contextualized Bergson within poststructuralism. In so doing, Bergsonian theory enables us to readdress questions associated with concepts of temporality and their relation to language. In considering this re-appropriation, Suzanne Guerlac in Thinking in Time: an introduction to Henri Bergson (2006), asks why Bergson has never been considered in relation to Derrida, given that the two philosophers share fundamental concerns about time (...) and writing. Following Derrida’s critique of Husserl in La Voix et le phénomène (1967), it is perhaps the case that many critics categorize Bergson as a phenomenologist. However, I aim to develop the argument that Guerlac instigates and show that Derrida’s critique of Husserl in fact establishes a close proximity with Bergson’s view that Western metaphysics suppresses time as durée . I will show how both Bergson and Derrida operate with the understanding of a particular rupture in the full presence of the present, an expansion of consciousness as a ‘now’ to include a constant deferral to memory. While this overlap establishes an affinity, I conclude by showing that it simultaneously marks a point of diffraction with regard to how both seek to methodologically embody such a concept of time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This issue of Feminist Studies includes a cluster of essays that demonstrates new approaches to life writing, with special attention to unconventional women’s autobiographies. Lara Vapnek describes the historical inhibitions that shaped the self-presentation of pioneering American labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in the early twentieth century such that she omitted her sexual relationships with both women and men from her autobiographical writings. Overlapping with Vapnek’s historical focus, (...) Nora Doyle’s essay takes a new look at Gertrude Stein’s bestknown and most accessible work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, seeing it as Stein’s clever reworking of the women’s genre of domestic fiction in its pairing of a domesticated wife with a “genius” husband. In her examination of Kamala Das’s Balyakala Smaranakal (Memories of childhood), Sharmila Sreekumar discusses how the memoir’s depiction of self-deferral rather than self-realization unsettles autobiographical conventions through its troubling of the relationship between “self,” “life,” and “writing” that is constitutive of the genre. In Olga Zilberbourg’s short story, two women are baffled as they contemplate a friend’s suicide: what does it say about their own accomplishments and losses? Attention to the visual aspects of women’s lives and to their embodiment is highlighted in Estelle Carol’s memoir about her time spent as a member of the Graphic Collective of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in the 1970s. Corey Hickner-Johnson’s lyrical essay describes the first-person I of the poem as pushing herself to a physical extreme. Her autobiographical crisis-moment, depicted in acutely visceral and visual terms, wills into relief life’s underlying colors against a backdrop of otherwise drab monotony and disappointment. Feminist graphic artwork is discussed in Hillary Chute’s review essay on the newly popular genre of graphic novels by women. Alexandra Ketchum’s “‘The Place We’ve Always Wanted to Go But Never Could Find’: Finding Woman Space in Feminist Restaurants and Cafés in Ontario 1974–1982” and Samantha Pergadia’s “Geologies of 8 Sex and Gender: Excavating the Materialism of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler” shift our attention away from individual life trajectories to broader sweeps of space and time. Ketchum’s history of feminist restaurants and cafes in Ontario, Canada, in the mid 1970s to early 1980s encourages us to consider the importance of space to the formation of feminist solidarities and political organizing, while Pergadia’s analysis of the geological understandings that undergird the work of both Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler invites us to rethink the temporalities through which gendered and sexed subjects, as well as academic disciplines, are formed. In closing, Ashwini Tambe reflects on the #MeToo movement and how we might fashion a more responsive public reckoning with sexual coercion. The issue leads off with Vapnek’s essay, “The Rebel Girl Revisited: Rereading Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Life Story.” As Vapnek details, Flynn, an activist in the Industrial Workers of the World, chronicled her life only as far as 1926. Although she envisioned women’s emancipation as an integral component of the socialist revolution, her self-censorship reveals “how communism as well as anticommunism has limited our knowledge of the feminist past.” Flynn remained committed to socialism and women’s rights and continued to agitate for social change, but her efforts to narrate her later life were stymied by internal inhibitions and external forces. For a decade she lived with another woman at a time when leftists were not open about same-sex relationships. Nor did she wish to reveal her sexual relationships with a number of men or the psychological breakdown she suffered in 1926. Joining the US Communist Party in 1936 re-energized her career as a labor organizer and resulted in her being sent to prison from 1955 to 1957 during the period of the Red Scare in the United States. By her middle age, she had experienced not only nonconventional personal relationships but also a dramatic change in her appearance: rather than the slim girl pictured on the cover of songs designed to encourage the labor movement, she was a stout, matronly woman. Inhibited from revising her autobiography to account for her later life... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 136-146MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]The Christian Bain de Diane, or the Stakes of an Ambiguous ParatextPatrick AmstutzTranslated by Gerald MooreUpon its publication, Le bain de Diane elicited few reactions on the part of criticism. Klossowski's name was still a secret and, despite its note among writers such as Bataille, Beauvoir, Camus, Parain, and Sartre and their public following, the number of readers to have read this (...) fifth work remained confined to those already familiar with Klossow-ski the essayist (Sade mon prochain, Méditations bibliques de Hamann), or the novelist (La vocation suspendue, Roberte, ce soir). The discreet silence that characterized the first reception of Le bain de Diane would last until the end of the seventies, despite a reedition in 1972 by the same publisher. During this time three important moments made Le bain de Diane resurface at the heart of the literary world: first, in fictional form, thanks to a subtle but explicit homage paid by Henri Thomas [Le promontoire]; second, in the form of a penetrating commentary article by Michel Foucault ["La prose d'Actéon"], and finally, at the hands of René Micha and Catherine Backès-Clément, key contributors to the issue that the review L'Arc dedicated to the writer. The reedition of Le bain de Diane by Gallimard1 would significantly relaunch interest in this work which, one comes increasingly to realize, is a major text in the Klossowskian oeuvre: offering a reflection on the image and writing, it was Gilles Quinsat who would open this new period of critical reception.An Uncertain IdentityQuinsat emphasizes the "series of 'tableaux' that glazes Le Bain de Diane" in accordance with a "circular" descriptive movement, he says, "from vision to commentary, attributed to the deferral without end of signs, and which feeds the entire work of Pierre Klossowski" [95]. And if he borrows the term "exegesis" from Foucault to describe the genre of the work, he immediately associates it with that of "narrative." A quarter of a century earlier, a commentary in the new Nouvelle revue française had already underlined the "disconcerting" character of Klossowski's book, by accentuating not only the strangeness of its thematic, but also the difficulties posed by the uncertainty of its generic belonging (which is echoed by the absent mention of a paratext): the critic, hesitating, suggested somewhat confusedly a typological kinship with philosophical commentary, theological scholasticism, prose poetry, series of paintings, historical narrative and even the analysis of myths [Amer 144]. In fact, this mythological "reverie," neither an essay nor a narrative, is, from this point of view, a typically Klossowskian [End Page 136] book, as Ian James has more recently reminded us [143]. Le bain de Diane mixes erudite commentary and narrative discourse so well that it entices its commentators into the traps of scholarly, historical, and philological annotation. Yet this would be to forget, as Maurice Blanchot has observed [92–94], that the written oeuvre of Klossowski belongs fully to the field of literature, even more so than to those of philosophy, theology, or psychoanalysis.When it comes to discerning the literariness of this literary object, which the different paratextual and intertextual stakes and levels underline, the principal difficulty consists in not losing oneself in a mythological labyrinth and innumerable variants of the cult of Artemis, which was one of the most significant, oldest, and popular cults of the Greco-Roman era and which plunges into a world on whose complexity historians and philologists have insisted on many occasions. The study of Klossowski's sources could lead one through multiple disciplines (philology, mythography, psychoanalysis, the history of religions, history of art, French literature—all centuries cobbled together, and so on) to overly vast inquiries: the goddess "of a thousand names" assumes a properly vertiginous semiotic richness, and the cult of Artemis, before being linked to that of Apollo, stretches back to time immemorial where, behind Artemis, can be glimpsed the Asiatic figure of a Great Mother Goddess, whose... (shrink)

« The form within which contractions can move ». The case for a reconstruction of the materialist theory of law The article begins with an appraisal of the legacy of Marxist legal theory in the last century as the starting-point from which to update the various attempts to grasp the connection between the capitalist mode of production and modern law. By way of a critical inquiry of its merits and failures, the article tries to re-construct the findings of Marxist legal (...) theory and thus propose an updated version of a materialist legal theory. The main argument is that law in capitalist societies takes the form of a technology of cohesion which possesses its own logic of self reproduction. Law’s ´relational autonomy` is both an effect of its autonomisation from social relations, behind the back of its producers, and the main condition for a deferral of power. Under the structural conditions of the legal form, juridical intellectuals organise hegemony via the infrastructure of a seemingly neutral legal argumentation. (shrink)

Photography has often been scrutinized regarding its relationship to reality or historical truth. This includes not only the indexicality of photography, but also the question of how structures and processes that comprise history and historical events can be depicted. In this context, the Holocaust provides a particular challenge to photography. As has been discussed in numerous publications, this historic event marks the “limits of representation.” Nevertheless there are many photographs “showing” the Holocaust that have been produced in different contexts that (...) bespeak the photographers’ gaze and the circumstances of the photographs’ production. Some of the pictures have become very well known due to their frequent reproduction, even though they often do not show the annihilation itself, but situations different from that; their interpretation as Holocaust pictures results rather from a metonymic deferral. When these pictures are frequently reproduced they are transformed into symbolic images, that is, images that can be removed from their specific context, and in this way they come to signify abstract concepts such as “evil.” Despite being removed from their specific context these images can, as this essay argues, refer to historical truth. First, I explore the arguments of some key theorists of photography to investigate the relationship between photography and reality in general, looking at their different concepts of reality, history, and historical truth, as well as the question of the meaning of images. Second, I describe the individual circumstances in which some famous Holocaust pictures were taken in order to analyze, by means of three examples, the question what makes these specific pictures so particularly suitable to becoming symbolic images and why they may—despite their abstract meaning—be able to depict historical truth. (shrink)

Pediatric dentists rely on access to hospital operating rooms for safe, effective, and humane delivery of dental care. The children who benefit most from dental treatment in a hospital operating room are those who are very young, have dental anxieties or phobias, are precommunicative or noncommunicative, need extensive or invasive dental treatments, or have special healthcare needs. Diminishing access to hospital operating rooms for pediatric dental treatment has become an escalating problem in contemporary times. Financial barriers, hospital costs, reimbursement rates, (...) health insurance policies and deductibles, out-of-network hospitals, socioeconomic factors, and the COVID-19 pandemic are prominent contributing factors. This problem in access to care has resulted in long waiting times for hospital operating rooms, deferral of medically necessary dental care, and pain and infection among this vulnerable patient population. Pediatric dentists have responded to the problem by utilizing alternative methods of care delivery, such as in-office deep sedation or in-office general anesthesia, and by implementing aggressive medical management of dental caries. However, the youngest of pediatric patients and children with special healthcare needs still remain at a disadvantage in receiving definitive dental treatment. This article aims to highlight the ethical challenges faced by pediatric dentists in contemporary practice in the face of limitations in hospital operating room access through four case scenarios. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments TO THE UGHTHOUSE AND THE FEMINIST PATH TO POSTMODERNITY by Bill Martin Postmodernity is in part the existence of an unprecedented space for feminism. Already in this formulation, however, we encounter two major terms that require explication. I will argue in this essay that Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse provides the basis for productively understanding postmodernism and feminism in relation to each other.1 The question of (...) placing feminism temporally has of course been raised before; I will simply mention two occasions. In Sexual/Textual Politics, Toril Moi argues for a kind of natural affinity of feminism with literary modernism's implicit critique of notions of the unified self.2 Here the comparison of Woolf with Joyce is appropriate. Moi moves from this perceived affinity toward the notion of écriturefeminine. Practitioners of the latter have been much more interested in Joyce than Woolf. Joyce, especially in Finnegans Wake, thoroughly shatters the self, reaching the highest expression of modernism. Woolf does something different. In To tL· Lighthouse, she not only decenters the subject, she also reconstitutes the subject. If Woolf had only reinstated the subject, as a matter of simply returning to the previous paradigm, then obviously her writing would have to be considered anachronistic. Though the affinity posited by Moi is real and useful (if made problematic by what seem to be real affinities that also exist between modernism and misogyny ), the force of another affinity can also be felt: in her deconstruction /reconstitution, Woolf achieves a writing that is both postmodern and feminist. The both/and relation here is itself a cultural creation, 307 308PHrLOSOPHY and Literature however, which points to the elective affinity involved in joining a particular politics with a particular artistic practice. The question is whether a political argument that does not avoid questions of artistic integrity can be marshaled to the task of showing that the affinity of feminism and postmodernism is more viable in the contemporary context than the affinity posited by Moi.3 Elaine Showalter, in her formulation of "women's time," raises the possibility ofanother kind of temporalized feminism. In "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Showalter pursues the idea that there might be a time and space which women occupy without their location being known or knowable to men, and perhaps without women fully knowing it themselves.4 In short, this "time" is conditional and predicated upon a possible future in which people will remember and be more fully aware of their spatial/temporal context. I would propose that this same conditional and uncertain sense of time applies to postmodernism. For the very terms "postmodernism" and "postmodernity" connote a transitional period in which it is not certain how elements which are for the time being in flux will ultimately setde down and congeal. The "aftereffect of the "post" in postmodernity will be truly understood only in the longer run, if even then. Showalter takes it that there is a sense in which "women's time," the "Age of Feminism," is occurring right now, but in a concealed way. Again, something like this may be said of postmodernism. In either case there is the sense of creating artifacts for a future which may or may not exist. There is also the sense of permanent postponement or deferral which is integral to the very notion of "possibility." Add to these references the by now familiar postmodern and feminist criticisms of grand narratives that crush difference, and I think we are in possession of a set of basic issues common to both feminism and postmodernism: the nature of the self and its possible recreation, the question of periodization and our "time," problems of difference and questions of doing something different (in the latter case feminism is much more explicit about doing something different that is also emancipatory, though some forms ofpostmodernism stress this as well). Given these common concerns I simply want to set the new affinity as follows: postmodernism is a social and cultural atmosphere in which feminism and other emancipatory trends might flourish. In this context, To tL· Lighthouse is a trailblazing feminist-postmodern artifact. The project here is not to generate or force a postmodern reading (any more... (shrink)

The article reconsiders the nature and location of science in the development of genetic classification. Drawing on field studies of medical genetics, we explore how patient categorization is accomplished in between the clinic and laboratory. We focus on dysmorphology, a specialism concerned with complex syndromes that impair physical development. We show that dys-morphology is about more than fitting patients into prefixed diagnostic categories and that diagnostic process is marked by moments of uncertainty, ambiguity, and deferral. We describe how different (...) forms of evidence are brought into play and how patterns of physical features are identified as genetic or not. We suggest that clinical categorical work helps articulate the genetic as an emergent domain of medical classification and that moments of ambiguity and deferral create an imperative space that helps legitimate the need for more technoscience, and consequently, more clinical judgment with which to fix the genetic future. (shrink)