Game of Thrones is a popular, award-winning television series with an eight-season run on Home Box Office, based on the Song of Fire and Ice series of books by George R.R. Martin. It depicts a morally complex political situation in a fantasy environment that has some similarities to medieval Europe. In the midst of this setting, the series advocates a cynical attitude towards politics, social structures, and religion. Most notably, the series suggests that there is no such thing as political (...) legitimacy. This chapter identifies a pattern of cynicism throughout Game of Thrones but points towards the thoughts of John Locke and Thomas Aquinas as possible alternatives to the story’s cynicism. (shrink)

Scholars have long seen that Horace's treatment of Homer in this Epistle demands to be read in the tradition of moral allegory in which Ulysses becomes the type of the ‘man of virtue’ : on such a reading, Circe becomes an allegory of foolish passion ‘to which Ulysses’ companions give in through their stultitia, and because of which they lose their reason and become no better than animals. Antisthenes, from whose writings such an allegorising approach probably developed, was regarded as (...) an early Cynic, and the idea became the special province of Cynic-Stoic philosophy; scholars have therefore felt justified in seeing this epistle as a criticism of Epicureanism, represented by the sponsi Penelopae, nebulones, Alcinoique … iuventus, from the point of view of a Cynic or a syncretistic Stoic. (shrink)

Although to what extent Oswald Spengler served as a forerunner or precursor of National Socialism remains controversial, scholars unanimously agree that he was a virulent antidemocratic thinker. Indeed, the mere mentioning of his name immediately conjures up among students of German political philosophy associations of intense antidemocratic sentiment. The epithet of virulent opponent of democracy is certainly well-deserved for the period in his political-philosophical development when he was famous, spanning 1919, the year the heated controversy surrounding his major work The (...) Decline of the West erupted, to his untimely death in 1936. Yet what about the little-known, but important phase in the evolution of Spengler's political thought, the years immediately before the shocking military collapse of Imperial Germany and the outbreak of socialist revolution in the fall of 1918 aroused the hostility of the entire right against Germany's first democracy? These were years when Spengler, as an unknown private scholar industriously composing his chef-d'oeuvre, was politically inactive. Was Spengler passionately anti-democratic before he became an embittered man? The following investigation of this rather obscure but important period in his thought, which draws heavily upon his private papers in the Spengler Archives, surprisingly reveals that he was not vehemently antidemocratic during this time and was, in fact, a cynical and opportunistic conservative advocate of the idea of the quasi-democratization of the Second Reich. Spengler scholars, it should be noted, including among others Anton Mirko Koktanek, Gilbert Merlio, H. Stuart Hughes, Klemens von Klemperer, Horst Moller, Walter Struve and Detlef Felken, do not argue this novel position as they are not of the opinion that any significant changes in his attitude towards democratization in Germany took place in his intellectual career. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural CriticismVera J. Camden (bio)Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller. New York: SUNY P, 2008. 258 pp.This collection takes up the uses of psychoanalysis for cultural studies in the new millennium. Its editors and contributors ask, “Where is psychoanalysis in contemporary thought?” At a time when the empirically based psychologies have long repudiated (...) the “talking cure” to the extent that the unconscious is not visible or easily measured, and when, on the other hand, psychoanalysis has been associated in the humanities with a radical political and social agenda, disappointed hopes for change have led many to throw the baby of psychoanalysis out with the bathwater of a utopian vision of transformation. The question now remains: “Whither psychoanalysis?” To answer this question (which is also a demand), the editors first acknowledge that the critique and curtailing of psychoanalytic thought in the cultural studies programs across the country in the last decade or so has been influenced by the works of Michel Foucault, his disciples, and the New Historicism. At the same time, they believe that the political, psychological, and moral dangers of embracing a knowing and cynical postmodernism that fosters hollow consumerism premised on modes of subjectivity that “neither ‘express’ interiority nor bear any relation to a lived past” are a real and present danger in contemporary life. “That the triumph of such a view has coincided with intellectuals’ renewed suspicion of psychoanalysis should, we believe, give us pause” (8). The essays that constitute the present volume thus insist on the persistence of the desire of the analyst: for knowledge of self and other, and by those who long for interpretive insight into interior lives and social places. The volume thus poses for its readers twin questions: “Why do we continue to desire psychoanalysis, and what should its role be in the cultural criticism of the new millennium?”This collection grew out of a conference organized around this question and thus reflects the varied but not necessarily interconnected papers offered in that setting. In an effort to provide some interconnections, the collection is divided into four sections grouped around the topics of psychoanalysis and the future of cultural criticism, collectivity, the author, and sexuality. The grouping does not, in my estimation, provide unity or coherence to the volume as a whole; nevertheless, each article emerges on its own terms as a strong contribution to the general field of psychoanalytic cultural criticism and critical theory. Henry Sussman’s “Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Cultural Criticism at the Millennium” provides an anchoring perspective to the volume, addressing with particular urgency the mutually transformative desire of and for analysis modeled on the transference/countertransference clinical encounter. This analogy [End Page 153] suggestively sets the stage for a like transformative intervention by the analyst in a cultural critique, while acknowledging that cultural studies provides the best interpretation and assessment of the ways that psychoanalysis operates historically and clinically in contemporary society. Sussman—and indeed many of the contributors—underscores the editors’ organizing declaration that since psychoanalysis derived from lived human experience it stands to reason that “analysis is both the product of and answer to suffering” (15).Thus it comes as something of a surprise that one of its editors, Greg Forter, in “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Psychobiography, and the Fin-de-Siecle Crisis in Masculinity,” locks the subject of psychoanalysis into a stranglehold with his presuppositions about the limits of history and the origins of psychoanalysis in the modern moment: “Because the theory and techniques of psychoanalysis were developed by analyzing modern men and women, psychoanalysis may be a theory of modern subjectivity rather than of subjectivity as such, and its mode of inquiry may be best suited to analyzing the phenomena of modernity” (148). Contrast this limiting and limited sense of the place of psychoanalysis in history (and the concomitant restriction of its utility expressed ironically in a volume with two major articles on premodern cultural texts!) to recent remarks in a new book by Christopher Bollas: “For thousands of years there has been an unconscious preconception of psychoanalysis. We [...] human beings [...] have been searching for... (shrink)

Theorists have long sought to repress or domesticate the shaggy, obscene, and transgressive satyr that ranges through satire’s long history, lurking in dark corners, and to make it into a model of a moral citizen.Unruly, wayward, frolicsome, critical, parasitic, at times perverse, malicious, cynical, scornful, unstable—it is at once pervasive yet recalcitrant, basic yet impenetrable. Satire is the stranger that lives in the basement.Instead of trying to resolve all the problems that arise from the particular of a given tragic dignification, (...) the dramatist in his satyrplay throws out tragic dignification per se. He thus gets freedom by a flat refusal to accept any of the norms that had caused the .. (shrink)

Introduction -- The stirrings of modernity -- Rupture -- Non-affirmative painting -- Anti-platonism -- The cynical legacy.

Near the end of his Euboean Discourse, Dio attacks prostitution because it encourages men to seek sexual pleasure from other sources as well, including youths from noble households. While some scholars find no evidence in this diatribe for Dio's revulsion against male-male sexual relations per se, others conclude that it does indeed reflect Dio's contempt for all sexual relations between men. This study considers afresh Dio's treatments of sexual relations between men in his Discourses, and concludes that Dio may endorse (...) both male-male and male-female sexual relations when the agent initiating sexual contact pursues philia and eunoia. On the other hand, Dio expresses his disgust when the agent uses sexual relations self-indulgently for pleasure. The content and form of his arguments illustrate his familiarity with both Stoic doctrine and the forms of popular moralizing discourse. The paper first examines Dio's remarks in the third Discourse on Kingship, where he praises sexual relations in a measured way, indicating his familiarity with Stoic teachings on eros. Second, it considers Dio's remarks in the Euboean Discourse and supports John Winkler's argument that Dio objects to prostitution because it is rooted in self-indulgent pleasure-seeking. Dio's rhetorical approach reflects his awareness of popular teachings against self-indulgence typical of Cynic-Stoic diatribe. Third, the essay argues that Dio's remarks in the First Tarsian oration condemn adult male sexual passivity, not all aspects of sexual relations between males. Fourth, brief remarks in his Borystheniticus are not to be taken as evidence for Dio's hostility to sexual relations between men, though they possibly indicate his discomfort with how he imagines non-Greeks engage in sex. (shrink)

This special thematic issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy brings together a cross-cultural set of scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America critically to explore foundational questions of familial authority and the implications of such findings for organ procurement policies designed to increase access to transplantation. The substantial disparity between the available supply of human organs and demand for organ transplantation creates significant pressure to manipulate public policy to increase organ procurement. As the articles in this issue explore, (...) however, even if well intentioned, the desire to maximize organ procurement does not justify undermining foundational elements of human flourishing, such as the family. While defending at times quite different understandings of autonomy, informed consent, and familial authority, each author makes clear that a principled appreciation of the family is necessary. Otherwise, health care practice will treat the family in a cynical and instrumental fashion unlikely to support social or individual good. (shrink)

This is not a long book—but it is surprising that it is as long as it is. The Cyrenaics are one of a number of more or less shadowy philosophical schools which emerged in the Greek world in the 4th century BC and later. Well known are Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum; and relatively well served by the tradition are the Stoics and the Epicureans, as well as the various later varieties of sceptic; while the Cynics are remembered at least (...) by reputation and anecdote. The Cyrenaics are altogether murkier. No text composed by a Cyrenaic philosopher of any period survives. Our knowledge of them rests on a handful of sources, almost all of them reports of doctrine rather than genuine fragments, none of them detailed, most of them late, generally from the works of commentators, at best neutral, at worst positively hostile, all with their own axes to grind. The best testimony consists of a mere three pages in Sextus Empiricus’s invaluable doxography of different accounts of the criterion of truth in adversus Mathemticos 7. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"To make a difference...":Narrative Desire in Global MedicineByron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio GoodIf, as Arthur Frank (2002) writes, "moral life, for better and worse, takes place in storytelling," this collection of narratives written by physicians working in field settings in global medicine gives us a glimpse of some aspects of moral experience, practice, and dilemmas in settings of poverty and low health care resources. These essays are written (...) from the midst of practice, in diverse settings in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The majority of the writers are practitioners of contemporary 'global medicine'—physicians from North America or Europe who spend part of their lives flying into settings of poverty or special need to practice medicine and work with on-going collaborative clinical and public health systems—while a smaller number are working in the societies in which they were born. Although a few work for classic humanitarian organizations or have developed their own local NGO's, the great majority are engaged in the 'hybrid life' described by Robert Riviello and noted by Renée Fox, moving between academic medical centers and distant health care systems that are supported by local governments, major international organizations and funding agencies, and international NGO's like Partners in Health. These diverse forms of practice have become a common model for contemporary clinicians engaged in what has emerged as a new discipline of global health or global medicine, and these narratives give us a glimpse of some of the enduring, as well as newly emerging, forms of moral practice and ethical dilemmas characteristic of today's global medicine.Many of these stories are filled with the tension and pathos that makes clinical narratives powerful to read. Physicians are forced to make unfathomable decisions about whether to resuscitate and keep a baby alive, using all means available, or to let the infant die, whether to carry out a procedure that will save an infant in birth but would put the mother at risk, about how to deal with a cancer found in a very advanced state. However, virtually all of the stories transcend these classical stories of the decisions physicians are forced to make by being placed in settings of great scarcity of resources, which stand in particular contrast to the academic medical settings in North America or Europe where many of these global medicine specialists have trained and many continue to practice. The unspeakable inequality of resources emerges throughout these narratives as a kind of master theme, as the underlying moral, as opposed to plot, which gives meaning and sense to the stories. For those who practice medicine in such settings, global inequalities and scarcity of medical resources are deeply felt. They produce the rage that Jeffrey Deal describes. ("I learned to despise American churches during that time, a time when my world encompassed a dying newborn in Sudan, as well as the air conditioned padded seats [End Page 121] of our affluent suburban church.") They produce the distinctive experiences of helplessness and pain felt by clinicians who cannot separate how they would be able to treat such a patient at home from how they have to practice in these settings. For those clinicians working in their own societies, scarcity of resources often produces deep anger at the corrupt governments that fail to support basic human services for the great majority of their population. ("We were temporary actors performing in the cynical play of scarcity on permanent display in Port-au-Prince," writes Haitian physician Paul Pierre about his experience prior to joining Partners in Health.)But for those who regularly travel back and forth across the divide between rich and poor, whether across national boundaries or within their own society, the challenge to live a moral life is unendingly complicated. While becoming a part of a struggle for global justice with colleagues and advocates from both sides of the divide, few of the narrators can avoid personal feelings of ambivalence and guilt at being able to easily move from one side of that divide to the other back home. Many fantasize about giving up their lives in the north to devote themselves... (shrink)

We live in an age of “high tech” medicine which affects both health care recipients and physicians who are taught its many wonders and uses. It is easy in this atmosphere of specialization for clinicians, professors and medical students to become isolated and to ignore social issues which affect health care in its broadest sense.Individuals who are committed to the “common good” are the ones historically who have been effective change agents. It would be tragic simply to stand back and (...) allow the cynical and greedy to dominate any profession which deals with the poor, the uninsured and the homeless.It is imperative for physicians to take a broad view of today's problems in health care delivery systems, for they can have an enormous impact on the kind of world our children will inherit. It is essential for physicians to become involved in social concerns, and in improving health care delivery, at all levels in their practice.Given their power and prestige, it is crucial for physicians and aspiring physicians to have positive role models. Dr. Julius B. Richmond provides an admirable example of a physician who cares about his profession, his patients and his nation. Through his research, his public service and his teaching, Dr. Richmond has demonstrated the difference a single individual can make in improving the quality of life for all Americans. (shrink)

The paper offers a counter- reading to Derrida's “utopian” reading of Nietzsche, focussing instead on Nietzsche's cynical view of friendship, based on the impossibility of being a friend to oneself. Unlike Aristotle, who sees the basis of human political nature in their shared rationality and mutual friendship, Nietzsche sees not only politics, but human beings themselves as being constituted by a violent act of submission, and characterised by an ongoing struggle for power. The paper further examines two intellectual traditions about (...) friendship and politics, one according to which the two are positively related and no real tension could exist between them. Another tradition holds friendship to be irreconcilable with politics. Elements of both traditions can be recognised in Nietzsche who, finding the radical deceptive nature of friendship unacceptable, moves to a solitude which is equally unbearable. For it is precisely the hermit that knows that his solitude makes him into an other to himself, which turns out to be a motive for real friendship, the third element which prevents the lonely hermit from sinking into the depth of self- interrogation. The paper concludes with the recognition that friendship, for Nietzsche, can only have an intermediary function on the way to full realisation of friendship, which will be a friendship of an inner difference or plurality, i.e. on our way to what is ultimately beyond the human condition, to the “over man”. (shrink)

Critical insights into Kierkegaard's influence on Barth's theology. Karl Barth was often critical of Søren Kierkegaard's ideas as he understood them. But close reading of the two corpora reveals that Barth owes a lot to the melancholy Dane. Both conceive of God as infinitely qualitatively different from humans, and both emphasize the shocking nearness of God in the incarnation. As public intellectuals, they used this theological vision to protect Christocentric faith from political manipulation and compromise. For Kierkegaard, this meant criticizing (...) the state church; for Barth, this entailed resisting Nazism. Meticulously crafted by a father-son team of renowned systematic theologians, Beyond Immanence demonstrates that Kierkegaard and Barth share a theological trajectory--one that resists cynical manipulation of Christianity for political purposes in favor of uncompromising devotion to a God who is radically transcendent yet established kinship with humanity in time. (shrink)

For 2,000 years all Buddhist states were absolute monarchies. Between 1850 and 1950 every Buddhist state abandoned absolute monarchy and embraced some form of constitutional, representative government. This chapter examines whether this change was a cynical abandonment of the Buddhist tradition or a defensible reinterpretation of the earlier texts, by looking at how the transition from monarchy to republicanism took place in the several Buddhist-majority countries whose governments were explicitly Buddhist. It concludes that the transition was a bit of both, (...) to different degrees in the various nations, that traditional Buddhist political theory was monarchist but had some republican elements, and that Buddhist political theory today possesses resources helpful for the future. (shrink)

This paper explores possible connections between gender and the willingness to tolerate unethical academic behavior. Data from a sample of 285 accounting majors at four public institutions reveal that females are less tolerant than males when questioned about academic misconduct. Statistically significant differences were found for 17 of 23 questionable activities. Furthermore, females were found to be less cynical and less often involved in academic dishonesty. Overall, the results support the finding of Betz et al. (1989) that the gender socialization (...) approach dominates the structural approach. (shrink)

We defend the Simulation Theory of Mind against a challenge from the Theory Theory of Mind. The challenge is that while Simulation Theory can account for Theory of Mind errors, it cannot account for their systematic nature. There are Theory of Mind errors seen in social psychological research with adults where persons are either overly generous or overly cynical in how rational they expect others to be. There are also Theory of Mind errors observable in developmental data drawn from Maxi-type (...) false belief tests. We provide novel responses to several examples showing that Simulation Theory can answer these challenges. (shrink)

Perhaps no other novel has received as much attention from moral philosophers as South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace . The novel is ethically compelling and yet no moral theory explains its force. Despite clear Kantian moments, neither rationalism nor self-respect can account for the strange ethical task that the protagonist sets for himself. Calling himself the dog man, like the ancient Cynics, this shamelessly cynical protagonist takes his cues for ethics not from humans but from animals. He does (...) not however claim much in the way of empathy or understanding of animals, and his own odd motives remain a puzzle throughout the stages of his ethical transformation. Many scholars approach Coetzee’s text through an ethics of alterity, and even argue that Disgrace is exemplary in this regard. Kristeva’s rendition of alterity ethics brings us close to the novel’s vision, and yet the novel points towards a more primordial basis for ethics in the search for meaning through the human encounter with other animal species. (shrink)

Né à Sinope au IVe siècle avant J-C et mort à Corinthe après un long séjour à Athènes, Diogène est un personnage exubérant et scandaleux dont les provocations sont restées célèbres : il fait l'amour et se masturbe en public, éconduit Alexandre le Grand comme un importun et insulte ses contemporains. Figure de la transgression, il n'est pourtant pas un apôtre de l'ensauvagement : ce n'est pas la civilisation que Diogène conteste, mais les servitudes encombrant notre vie matérielle et les (...) conventions nous inféodant aux puissants. Mode de vie et pensée tout ensemble, le cynisme de Diogène est une manière neuve de philosopher qui, loin des constructions théoriques complexes, reste au plus près des réalités quotidiennes. En proposant l'idéal d'une vie simple soustraite aux illusions du désir, cette philosophie offre aux individus et aux sociétés un contre-pouvoir libérateur. Sa critique des valeurs sociales et sa puissance de dérangement n'ont pas échappé à Nietzsche ni à Foucault. Elles gardent toute leur actualité pour qui s'interroge sur les bienfaits et les méfaits de la croissance économique, sur les exclusions déchirant le monde humain. (shrink)

In 1951–1952 a selected committee appointed by the US Congress investigated the circumstances of the so-called Katyn Crime. The reasons why the highest US legislative body undertook the issue hale to be sought in the international situation of the day, which was determined by the Korean War.The “Katyn Committee” was called up on September 18, 1951 by the House of Representatives of the 82nd Congress on the strength of Resolution 390. Sitting on it were Daniel L. Flood, Thaddeus M. Machrowicz, (...) George A. Dondero, Foster Furcolo, Alvin K. O’Konski, Timothy P. Sheenan and Ray J. Madden, who was also appointed its chairman. The committee began interrogating witnesses on October 11, 1951 and closed the interrogations on November 14, 1952. Simultaneously, the committee inspected 183 material exhibits pertaining to the Katyn event. In all the committee took down the testimonies of 81 main and about 200 secondary witnesses as well as about a hundred written testimonies and accounts.The committee’s final report to the House of Representatives clearly stated the responsibility of the Soviet NKVD for the 1940 massacre of around 15,000 Polish officers from POW camps in Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków.In response to the committee’s proceedings the east bloc staged a propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting its work and upholding the so-called Katyn Lie—a 1943—originated false version of the events whereby the executions of the Polish officers had been carried out by the Germans in the latter half of 1941.The Soviet government took an official stand on the committee on February 29, 1952. It rejected all possibility of cooperation and underscored the Germans’ responsibility for the massacre. On March 1, 1952 the Polish government issued a statement condemning the committee and reiterating the false version of the Katyn incident. This statement appeared in the March 1 edition of the national daily Trybuna Ludu under the heading, The Polish nation indignantly condemns the cynical provocations of American imperialists, who are feeding on the tragic deaths of thousands of Polish citizens in Katyn.The main wave of attacks on the Madden Committee rolled through the Eastern European press in March, 1952. It was most intense in the Soviet Union and Poland, but also penetrated to other countries like Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In the USSR most of the related coverage was published in the communist party daily Pravda. In Poland articles attacking the Madden Committee and propagating the false version of the Katyn events appeared in all dailies and periodicals, including the party, military, youth, branch and satirical press. Especially avid in this respect were papers brought out by the Czytelnik publishers, notably Życie Warszawy. Also published was a deceitful book The Truth About Katyn by Boleslaw Wójcicki.Simultaneously to the press campaign against the Madden Committee the eastern countries launched broad scale repressions involving the prosecution, courts and intelligence services. (shrink)

The Merchant's Tale is by most accounts Chaucer's bleakest and most savagely ironic story in the Canterbury Tales. Rivaled perhaps in its cynical appraisal of human motives by the Pardoner's nervy gambit to separate the Canterbury pilgrims from their currency and other valuables, it is a story that seemingly lacks a ground of moral belief and leaves little room for sympathy with its characters. Its imaginary world is one that nobody would care to inhabit. Some modern readers offer a temperate (...) view of the tale, seeing it as an artfully contrived, lighthearted farce about marriage; but most accept the terms, if not the conclusions, that led George Lyman Kittredge to characterize the tale as “a frenzy of contempt and hatred” and J. S. P. Tatlock to remark on its “unrelieved acidity.”. (shrink)

Books reviewed in this article:John Barton, The Biblical WorldWalter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, AdvocacyBernhard W. Anderson, Contours of Old Testament TheologyJames Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament PerspectiveCarl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, Reclaiming the Bible for the ChurchNancy L. deClaissè‐Walford, Reading from th eBeginning: The Shaping of the Hebrew PsalterBirger Gerhardsson, The Reliability of the Gospel TraditionBen Witherington III, New Testament History: A Narrative AccountNeil Richardson, God in the New TestamentJohn S. (...) Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings GospelFrancis J. Moloney, The Gospel of JohnMartin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Paul Between Damascus and Antioch. The Unknown YearsF. Gerald Downing, Cynics, Paul and the Pauline Churches: Cynics and Christian Origins IIAnthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the CorinthiansKieran J. O'Mahony, Pauline Persuasion: A Sounding in 2 Corinthians 8‐9C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, Volume I: Acts XV–XXVIIApril D. DeConick, Voices of the Mystics: Early Christian Discourse in the Gospels of John and Thomas and Other Ancient Christian LiteratureManlio Simonetti, Ippolito. Contro NoetoCatherine Brown Tkacz, The Key to the Brescia Casket: Typology and the Early Christian ImaginationSerge Lancel, St AugustinePatricia Cox Miller, The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and ReligionThomas Head, Medieval Hagiography: An AnthologyAllan Greer, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth‐Century North AmericaStephen R. Holmes, God of Glory and God of Grace: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan EdwardsStephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science. Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700–1999Linda Woodhead, Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth‐Century ContextsFlorent Gaboriau, The Conversion of Edith SteinJeffrey S. Siker, Scripture and Ethics. Twentieth‐Century PortraitsRicherd B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament. Community, Cross, New CreationJohn Kavanaugh, Who Counts as Persons: Human Identity and the Ethics of KillingJohn Keown, Euthanasia, Ethics and Public Policy: An Argument against LegalisationStephen J. Pope and Charles Hefling, Sic et Non: Encountering ‘Dominus Iesus’J'annine Jobling and Ian Markham, Theological Liberalism, Creative and CriticalHans Küng, Women in ChristianityLynne Broadbent and Alan Brown, Issues in Religious EducationJeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political ThoughtGiles Fraser, Redeeming NietzscheAlexander Garcia Düttman, The Memory of Thought: An Essay on Heidegger and AdornoRobert J. Dostal, The Cambridge Companion to GadamerMichael Fuller, Making Sense of MacIntyre. (shrink)

Publication date: 31 January 2018 Source: Author: Zari Dorri Holden Caulfield, the major character in Jerome David Salinger’s most rewarded novel The Catcher in the Rye, long stood as the innovative and leading figure for such distinctive and revolutionary traits in a character he presented in 1959s’ America literary domain. Salinger media-shy and no interview policies led the public to spread out the idea of the author’s being the whole genius behind the sheer novelty of Holden Caulfield character by making (...) a myth out of the author who turns down any kind of publicity and is finally lionized. This student-friendly hero who denigrate respectability and” phoniness” with his cynical attitude and obscene language, in one way or another, is kept being compared to such huge characters like Huckle Berry Finn whose universal popularity is barely deniable; but the question is that, could at any rate, J.D.Salinger be the sole innovator behind this genuineness? On the other hand, are there any other social and environmental factors, which came to pave the way for any kinds of Holden to be born and well liked? The main purpose of the paper is to answer these questions by a kind of critical theory as New Historicism and survey through the history as a discourse in this method. The results and findings indicate that, apparently, there was a specific social context for the emergence of this novel, with which the author had to interact. By opening up the environmental condition of those days and considering the facts, which affected Holden’s birth and popularity in that era. This essay will point out the fact that criticizing America’s 50s in such aforementioned ambience was inevitably and to some extent predictable. (shrink)

We would like to thank Dolega and Dewhurst for a thought-provoking and informed deconstruction of our article, which we take as applause from valued members of our audience. In brief, we fully concur with the theatre-free formulation offered by Dolega and Dewhurst and take the opportunity to explain why we used the Cartesian theatre metaphor. We do this by drawing an analogy between consciousness and evolution. This analogy is used to emphasize the circular causality inherent in the free energy principle. (...) We conclude with a comment on the special forms of active inference that may be associated with selfawareness and how they may be especially informed by dream states. (shrink)

Si le cynisme a toujours eu mauvaise presse sur la scene philosophique, c'est en partie a cause des traits scandaleux que l'Antiquite, s'appuyant sur la Politeia et les tragedies de Diogene, lui a pretes. Mais ces traits se retrouvent dans la Politeia de Zenon et chez des Stoiciens aussi importants que Cleanthe et Chrysippe. Comment expliquer que des philosophes dont la reputation de serieux est bien connue aient pu accepter et meme louer des principes aussi scandaleux que l'anthrophagie, la liberte (...) sexuelle totale, l'indifference a la sepulture, l'egalite hommes/femmes, la negation du sacre, la remise en cause de la cite et de ses lois? Un Appendice sur Apollodore de Seleucie (IIe s. av. J.-C.), entend rendre justice a ce philosophe au role meconnu. (Franz Steiner 2003). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ill HUME ON THE MORALITY OF PRINCES "There is a maxim very current in the world," says Hume (Treatise III, ii, sec. 11) "that there is a system of morals calculated for princes, much more free than that which ought to govern private persons. " He interprets the maxim to mean that "the morality of princes... has not the same force as that of private persons, and may lawfully (...) be transgress 'd from a more trivial motive." And he gives as an example: "we must necessarily give a greater indulgence to a prince or minister, who deceives another; than to a private gentleman, who breaks his word of honour" (T 569). This passage, cryptic though it is, makes Hume sound bad. He seems to be a cynic, or a skeptic, or an immoralist, with respect to the morality of nations. Does he think that princes have a special right to act immorally? Even worse is the reason he gives: international relations just don't matter very much, he says. And the chapter in question is not just a self-contained essay more or less tacked on to the Treatise. Hume tries to connect it integrally with his theory of justice. The point of the chapter is not to put forward a view about the morality of international relations (a view Hume himself admits may be found shocking), but to demonstrate the power of the theory of justice by showing how the "maxim current in the world" can be defended upon the theory's principles. The passage has not won approval from recent commentators. One, Marshall Cohen, labels Hume a "moderate skeptic" with regard to international morality and argues vehemently that Hume's position 2 should be condemned as immoral. Cohen, who thinks that there is only one system of morality and that it 112 applies "with equal force to princes and private persons," evidently thinks any system weakening ordinary standards is immoral by definition. He traces Hume's allegedly morally flawed views to what he regards as a deep flaw in Hume's moral theory, namely, his conventionalism. J. L. Mackie and Jonathan Harrison are both considerably more sympathetic to Hume's general position, but nevertheless are critical of the chapter in question. They agree with Hume's observation that international morality is weaker than private. (Harrison points out that people tend to regard breaches of private morality as more serious than breaches of international morality: "A minister may be dismissed for sexual misconduct, although he breaks solemn treaties with other nations with impunity." But, contrary to Hume, they find this weakness deplorable, Harrison arguing that, given the relative amount of harm princes do, the indulgence allowed them is irrational. Harrison in fact at first agrees with Hume: "He is right, too, in suggesting that the obligations of nations to be just in their dealings with one another is [sic] of less force than the obligations of private persons." But after ten pages he has evidently changed his mind: "[with respect to] what Hume says about the comparative force of the morality of princes and the morality of private persons, though it is clear that there is nothing in principle wrong with Hume's view that the former has less force than the latter... it is doubtful whether he is right in saying that the former do in fact have less force than the latter." Like Cohen, who holds that "Injustice among nations should be regarded as being as reprehensible as injustice among individuals," Harrison concludes (more tentatively than Cohen) "my 113 own feeling... is that though Hume is right in thinking that the morality of princes is commonly regarded as being of less force than private morality, he is wrong... in thinking that... they [sic] are of less force." So none of our commentators agree with Hume that international morality not only is, but is properly, weaker than domestic. How did Hume go wrong? Hume argues that international morality is weaker because the interests at stake are less. Where the interests at stake do not matter very much, Hume thinks, it is not so important what people do, and thus the moral obligations involved are weaker. (Hume thinks this idea... (shrink)

Given classical (2 valued) structures and and a homomorphism h of onto , it is shown how to construct a (non-degenerate) 3-valued counterpart of . Classical sentences that are true in are non-false in . Applications to number theory and type theory (with axiom of infinity) produce finite 3-valued models in which all classically true sentences of these theories are non-false. Connections to relevant logic give absolute consistency proofs for versions of these theories formulated in relevant logic (the proof for (...) number theory was obtained earlier by R. K. Meyer and suggested the present abstract development). (shrink)

An important role of the philosopher is to critically reflect on what is often taken for granted, using the tools of argument and analysis. This article engages with six different papers that offer critical reflections on conventional concepts and beliefs in bioethics regarding informed consent, continuous deep sedation, traditional moral theories underlying bioethical thinking, the definition of mental disease, and codes of ethics for particular medical specialties.

Signs and Wonders: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel. By R.A. Anderson. Pp.xvii, 158, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1983, £4.25. Inheriting the Land: A Commentary on the Book of Joshua. By E. John Hamlin, Pp.xxiii, 207, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1984, £4.75. Servant Theology: A Commentary on the Book of Isaiah 40–55. By G.A.F. Knight. Pp.ix, 204, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1984, £4.75. God's Chosen (...) People: A Commentary on the Books of Amos and Lamentations. By R. Martin‐Achard and S. Paul Re'emi. Pp.viii, 133, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans; Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1984, £4.50. The Parable of the Wicked Tenants. By Klyne Snodgrass. Pp.x, 140, Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1983, 72 DM. The Johannine Paraclete in the Church Fathers. By Anthony Casurella. Pp.xiv, 258, J.C.B. Mohr Tübingen, 1983, 78DM. Sacraments and Liturgy: The Outward Signs. By Louis Weil. Pp.vii, 115, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1983, £9.50, £3.95. Le Sacrement de l'Ordination. By Joseph Lécuyer. Pp.281, Paris, Beauchesne, 1983, 150 Fr. Christ's Lordship and Religious Pluralism. Edited by G.H. Anderson and T.F. Stransky. Pp.viii, 209, New York, Orbis Books, 1981, £5.50. Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions. By Alan Race. Pp.xi, 176, London, SCM Press, 1983, £5.95. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. By Wayne A. Meeks. Pp.xii, 299, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1983, £15.00, £6.50. Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity. By Raymond E. Brown and John P. Meier, Pp.xii, 242, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1983, £5.95; Ramsey, Paulist Press, 1983, $9.95. The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians. By Rosamund McKitterick. Pp.xiv, 414, London, Longman, 1983, £9.95. The Medieval Reformation. By Brenda Bolton. Pp. 126, London, Edward Arnold, 1983, £4.50. Robert Grosseteste Hexaëmeron. Edited by Richard C. Dales and Servus Gieben. Pp.xxix, 374, London, for The British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1983, £40.00. William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste. By Steven P. Marrone. Pp.xi, 318, Princeton University Press, 1983, £28.00. Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford. CM. Dent. Pp.viii, 262, Oxford University Press, 1983, £17.30. Paolo Sarpi between Renaissance and Enlightenment. By David Wootton. Pp.viii,192, Cambridge University Press, 1983, £20.00. The Jesuits in England from 1580 to the Present Day. By Francis Edwards. Pp.333, Tunbridge Wells, Burns and Oates, 1985, £20.00. Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom. By Alan White. Pp.xii, 201, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983, £16.50. Sophists, Socratics and Cynics. By H.D. Rankin. Pp.263, London, Croom Helm, Totowa, Barnes and Noble, 1983, £17.95. Early Medieval Philosophy : An Introduction By John Marenbon. Pp.ix, 190, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, £9.95. Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers. By Edward Booth. Pp.xxvi, 314, Cambridge University Press, 1983, £35.00. About Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation. By Armand A. Maurer. Pp.135, Houston, Center for Thomistic Studies, 1983, $6.00. A History of Ideas and Images in Italian Art. By James Hall. Pp.xi, 415, London, John Murray, 1983, £17.50. Inconsistencies: Studies in the New Testament, the Inferno, Othello and Beowulf. By William Whallon. Pp.107, Woodbridge, D.S. Brewer, 1983, £15.00. The Language of Grace: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy and Iris Murdoch. By Peter S. Hawkins. Pp.xiv, 137, Cambridge, Cowley Publications, 1983, $6.95. Iulia de Beausobre. By Constance Babington Smith. Pp.xi, 195, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1983, £9.95. A History of Psychoanalysis. By Reuben Fine. Pp.xii, 686, New York, Colombia University Press, 1979, $31.20. Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. Edited and translated by Stuart Schneiderman. Pp.viii, 265, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, £12.60. Work: The Shadow and the Substance. By David Bleakley. Pp. 121, London, SCM Press, 1983, £4.95. M.R. James: An Informal Portrait. By Michael Cox. Pp.xviii, 268, Oxford University Press, 1983, £14.50. (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 title of this piece is meant to evoke at least three sources. The first – and perhaps the only obvious one – concerns the ability of holograms to display parallax, a shifting of visual viewpoint that allows a three-dimensional image to reveal background objects behind those in the foreground. This parallax view is a unique feature of holograms as visual media. A second allusion is to the American film The Parallax View (1974, director A. J. Pakula), a rather paranoid (...) thriller focusing on conspiracy theories concerning government and corporations. To a casual observer, the bare details of the military origins of holography suggest just such cynical and centrally-directed development, although I hope to dispel such simplistic ideas here. And a third passing reference is to the book The Parallax View (2006) by Slavoj Zizek, a wide-ranging and deep exploration of duality in political views, ontological interpretations and scientific methods, among other topics. Zizek’s theme, as well as Pakula’s, is relevant to my approach, which focuses on a parallax of both practice and intent. During the first successful decade of holography, conflicting viewpoints developed between distinct communities: the militarily-guided engineers who invented practical holography, and the later imaging scientists and artisans who stressed three-dimensionality and other attributes instead of the original goal of optical image processing. I argue that distinct groups of users had different perceptions of what holography is and what it is for. (shrink)

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash INTRODUCTION Religion has long provided guidance that has led to standards reflected in some aspects of medical practices and traditions. The recent bioethical literature addresses numerous new problems posed by advancing medical technology and demonstrates an erosion of standards rooted in religion and long widely accepted as almost axiomatic. In the deep soul-searching that pervades the publications on bioethics, several disturbing and dangerous trends neglect some basic lessons of philosophy, logic, and history. The bioethics (...) discourse on medical aid in dying emphasizes similarity over previously recognized important distinguishing features. For example, it overplays a likeness between assistance in dying and the withdrawal of life-saving technology. In many bioethics’ topics, arguments based on a logical continuum are used to question the lines demarcating important moral differences. l. The Line Between Ethical and Not: Logic Based on Continuum Careful case selection, often either end of a continuum, allows the tearing down or ridiculing of many rules and codes across most professions and fields of interest. This situation holds true for traffic laws as well as medical ethics guidelines. It is relatively simple for those who desire to attack a particular viewpoint by selecting a case that makes that position seem untenable. In the ethics realm, good and bad medicine exist at opposite ends of an ethical continuum, with many practices lying in between. For example, much of medical ethics exists between the Nazi criminal physicians and the most sainted nurse or physician. A gradual progression occurred over less than two decades from a utilitarian position that supported limited euthanasia for those with certain mental illnesses to genocide. German society embraced a utilitarian ethic in which the value of human life no longer was intrinsic but instrumental.[1] Many morally significant points on a continuum were then ignored as the misguided utilitarian policy rampantly continued. A point in the continuum to distinguish between ethically justifiable and that which is not can be difficult to identify compared to the two extremes. This continuum is not unique to ethics but can be applied to almost any other aspect of human life and endeavor. Between a severely ill schizophrenic person and a superbly well-adjusted individual, there is a continuum of mental and psychological function. The existence of a continuum should not paralyze thinking and prevent us from drawing lines and identifying moral differences based on objective criteria as well as moral philosophy. Yet, by focusing on a continuum, many bioethicists use logic to disregard dividing lines between an "ethical" and an "unethical" act. Unfortunately, sometimes bioethicists draw revolutionary conclusions that would change the scope of medical practices which is accepted as ethical. There are many examples of similar shifts on the continuum. Many authors argue for the ethical permissibility of abortion by pointing out that the human fetus is no different in various characteristics, one arguing it is as like an ape or chick as it is like a person,[2] and does not achieve unique human and individual characteristics until well into the first year of life.[3] While human fetuses arguably do not have certain distinctive qualities of personhood, most people shy away from the logical next conclusion: permitting infanticide. For example, Joshua Lederberg condemns infanticide, in the face of biological illogic, because of our emotional commitment to infants, to me, a relatively weak explanation. Sir Francis Crick suggests we might consider birth at two days of life in order to decide whether an infant is a "suitable" member of society.[4] Giublini and Minerva suggest that infanticide should be permissible since late pregnancy abortions are permissible, arguing there is no significant difference between a fetus just before birth and an infant just after birth.[5] Clearly the continuum approach would allow for subjective arguments in favor of later infanticide at other points many days post-birth. Years ago, with a cynical tone, I mentioned infanticide as a further step on the continuum beyond abortion, and I was rightly shouted down as being deliberately provocative to assert the logic would ever stretch so far. While it is not an accepted mainstream position, the movement in academic settings from widespread condemnation to limited possible acceptance of infanticide has taken place in an incredibly short time. Public opinion and medical opinion in these areas have shifted dramatically in a short time. In another area, from a biological and chemical point of view, there is a continuum from man down to a single carbon atom. Yet, it would not seem logical to ignore the emotional differences, the meaning of personhood, or the moral distinction between killing an insect and killing a person. ll. A False Continuum: Medical Aid in Dying I assert that there has been an erosion of ethical guidelines in recent years attributable to using continuums to camouflage important distinctions. James Rachels’ work on active and passive euthanasia, which contends that the two are ethically identical, exemplifies that logic.[6] He illustrates this thesis, using a continuum to compare different scenarios with like consequences as morally equivalent, by comparing the deliberate drowning of a child with a deliberate failure to rescue a drowning child when easily able to do so. The author's comparison proposes that since much of the medical profession has already made peace with withholding treatment in order to hasten death, consistency inexorably demands that we permit active euthanasia as well.[7] When permission for active euthanasia was first introduced, it was limited exclusively to patients suffering severely from an intractable, incurable, and irreversible disease. These guidelines have been continuously eroded. There is now a substantial serious consideration for permitting active euthanasia of healthy elderly individuals who feel that they have completed their lives and are "tired of living."[8] There are many moral and factual differences along the ethical continuum. In human life, there is a difference between a live baby and a fetus, between a viable fetus and one that is not, between a fetus and a zygote, and between a zygote and a sperm cell. Similarly, there is a difference between pulling a trigger to kill someone and not interfering in preventing his death, which is reprehensible though both may be. There is a difference between not resuscitating an 80-year-old man with cancer when his heart stops and injecting him with a fatal dose of potassium chloride. I argue that an overt act of taking life repels civilized human beings is to be commended and encouraged as the reverence for human life or even for just a moment of human life is one of the great contributions of our civilization. CONCLUSION As an orthodox Jew, I feel that divinely inspired guidelines that have stood the test of centuries shape my beliefs, and such guidelines contradict medical aid in dying. I cannot speak to the viewpoint of those who do not access religion in defining their moral stance, nor do I implicate them in the current bioethics' trends, as I am not aware of the personal role of religion in the lives of most such authors. While many nonreligious people have a firm philosophical grounding and oppose medical aid in dying, I suggest that in the absence of any religious or other absolute standards, developing logically defensible ethical guidelines may be challenging. At the least, religion may play a role in defining the points on the continuums that are ethically meaningful and refuting the trending beliefs that if the endpoint is the same, allowing different methods of arriving at that end are somehow ethically equal. The continuum of ways death may result does not negate analysis of whether death is brought about in ways that recognize the importance of life. The German philosopher Hans Jonas said, "It is a question whether without restoring the category of the sacred, the category most thoroughly destroyed by the scientific enlightenment, we can have an ethics able to cope with the extreme powers that we possess today and constantly increase and are compelled to use."[9] While countries vary on the role of religion in policy, with many emphasizing freedoms of religion, a recent position paper released by a group of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem leaders suggested the need for agreement on the unique sanctity of human life.[10] I would recommend that such a document serve as an example of consensus on critical foundational bioethical guidelines for democratic secular societies. - [1] Alexander L Medical science under dictatorship. New England Journal of Medicine, 241, p39-47 DOI10.1056/NEJM194907142410201 [2] Lederberg J. A geneticist looks at contraception and abortion, Annals of Internal Medicine 67, sup 2, 25-27. https:/doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-67-3-25 [3] Ibid. [4] Editorial, Sociology: Logic of biology. Nature 220, 429 https://www.nature.com/articles/220429b0 [5] Giublini A Minerva F After-birth abortion: why should the baby live. J Med Ethics 39, 261- [6] Rachels J Active and passive euthanasia. New England Journal of Medicine 292, 78-80 [7] Ibid. [8] Cohen-Almagor R Euthanizing people who are "tired of life". in Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide-Lessons from Belgium. Ch 11 of Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, Cambridge University Press pp173-187. 2017 and DOI; https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108182799.012 [9] Hans Jonas, Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics, 1972, found as Chapter IX, Philosophical Essays, 1980. https://inters.org/jonas-technology-responsability [10] A position paper of the Abrahamic Monotheistic religions on matters concerning the end-of-life. Vatican Press 28 October 2019 https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2019/10/28/191028f.html. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

Reviewed: The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, State University of New York Press, 2009, 232pp., pb. $24.95. ISBN-13: 9781438428246. This review analyzes the extent to which The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, may contribute to recent treatments of sensibility and affect in critical thought. After first posing the question of why community appeared to recede from the critical attention (...) it received in the 1990s, my discussion then assesses the ways the volume’s essays argue collectively for a renewed engagement with community via the work of Bataille. I attempt to show how Mitchell’s and Winfree’s volume provides an important provocation to recover the exigency of community at a time when popular appeals to community remain no less spectacular, inflated, and cynical than they were at the height of its engagement by critical thought. The essay concludes with a suggestion of how Bataille’s work can intervene in what Fredric Jameson has called the post-09/11 manufacturing of affect. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN AQUINAS IN THIS PAPER I discuss principally the claim of Aquinas that the divine attribute which is the formal constituent of the divine nature is es.'!e. I also discuss the consequent attribute of simplicity, with some reflections on this relation of consequence. I conclude with some remarks on philosophical realism in general, which I take to be the necessary background to this theory or, as (...) I argue, discovery. * * * In St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae we are confronted first, not with a study of the attributes of God, but with Five Ways of knowing that God exists. Strictly consequent upon this, there are then two basic movements of thought upon which, to mix the metaphor, the next structure after the Five Ways, that of the attributes, is laid. The first step is to find just one attribute which can be put forward as the formal constituent of the divine natura, its essentia (this will be the so-called metaphysical essence, since the real divine essence is one with the simple and hence constituentless divine nature). This is come upon through an immanent logic arising strictly out of conclusions reached through the Five Ways, and is in fact subsisting existence, ipsum esse subsistens, often called Being, confusingly, since this translates ens as well as esse. If it were not this there would be unexplained composition in God, at least between His nature and His act of existing. The second step is then to derive whatever attributes can be strictly deduced from this conception of God as subsistent esse, while a subsidiary step is to divide these into what commentators later called entitative and operative attributes. The first step identifies the nature of God with His aot of existing, 37 38 liTEPHEN THERON actus essendi, stressing that as pure ad He is not in any genus, not to be grasped in an abstract idea, even though the theory of the attributes must go on to say He is truth, is goodness and so on. The saving grace of these attributions, however, is that they do not imply limitation, even though it is a general principle of the Thomistic interpretation of things that form is what places a limitation on being, so that in being a man I cannot be an elephant. Of course the necessary infinity of these absolutely simple perfections entails that each of them is really identical with the divine nature, itself identical with His esse, His actus essendi. There can only be one reality in God, understood as the infinite. But my intention here is not to run through all the well-known arguments yet again. Thus that God, any God, must be subsisting Existence, I take to be well established. We can't have a divine essence capable of receiving existence, and for God to be love, say, He has first to be. I can make no sense of saying that this is merely chosen as appropriate to our way of thinking. I would rather say it thinks itself, once we 'let being be' (Heidegger's inspired definition of thinking). Of course God is not being identified with ens in commune, that almost cynical error of pantheism. God is identified with His own act of existing, proper to Him alone. Since this is, as divine, an act without limitation, we then go on to say that this cannot be an existence shared with any other existing, that God must exist in a uniquely eminent way, that that act of existing which He himself is, is transcendent. In the sense in which God exists, nothing else does, as the doctrine of analogy should bring out rather than obscure.1 Nonetheless, we need to enquire into the significance and implications of it being just existence which is the formal attribute 1 Cf. Leo J. Elders, Die Metaphysik de Thomas von Aquin, I, Salzburg 1985, p. 133: 'Das ens commune ist das geschaffene Seiende... Gott fallt nicht unter das ens commune: Er ist das ganz Andere, von dem wir wohl wissen konnen, daB Er ist, nicht aber, was Er ist.' THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN AQUINAS 39 of the divine nature, something to which both Kant and Aristotle... (shrink)