Four men in a cell in Rebibbia prison, Rome, awaiting trial on serious charges of subversion. One of them, the political thinker Antonio Negri, spends his days writing. Among his writings are twenty letters addressed to a young friend in France letters in which Negri reflects on his own personal development as a philosopher, theorist and political activist and analyses the events, activities and movements in which he has been involved. The letters recount an existential journey that links a rigorous (...) philosophical education with a powerful political passion, set against the historical backdrop of postwar Italy. Crucially, Negri recalls the pivotal moment in 1978 when the former prime minister of Italy, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and killed by the Red Brigades, and how the institutions then pinned that killing onto him and his associates. Published here for the first time, these letters offer a unique and invaluable insight into the factors that shaped the thinking of one of the most influential political theorists of our time and they document Negri’s role in the development of political movements like Autonomia. They are a vivid testimony to one man’s journey through the political upheavals and intellectual traditions of the late 20th century, in the course of which he produced a body of work that has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on radical thought and politics around the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 379 Amy Bhatt The Butterfly Effect of Women’s Studies My entry into women’s studies began over two decades ago when I was an undergraduate at Emory University. I took Introduction to Women’s Studies in 1998, the same year that Feminist Studies published a formative issue on the evolution of women’s studies in the academy. I turned to (...) doctoral programs in women’s studies after graduation, all the while growing aware of the heated debates over the future (and the past) of the field, the challenges of crafting interdisciplinary graduate programs, the relationship between academic and activist feminisms, and the ramifications of institutionalization. By the time I entered the University of Washington’s PhD program in 2004, these conversations were further enlivened by the expansion of graduate degrees and certificates across the country and internationally. In 2017, I was promoted to associate professor after being hired as the first women’s studies tenure-track faculty member at my current institution, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Having been a part of three differently situated women’s studies programs/departments, I have experienced both the advantages that the field offers for engaged scholarship and teaching, but also the conceptual, resourcing, and workload problems that arise from doing interdisciplinary work. While not engaging the longer history of the scholarly and institutional evolution of women’s studies, my perspective as a relatively recently minted PhD student considers two areas: the promises and pitfalls of 380 Amy Bhatt graduate training (particularly in light of a constricted academic job market) and the impact of integrating women’s studies into the academy. Impossibilities and Promises In her introduction to a special forum on the paradoxes and challenges of women’s studies in graduate education in a 2003 issue of Feminist Studies (which took up the themes raised in the 1998 issue), Pamela Caughie points out that tension is at the core of women’s studies: “Interdisciplinary work depends on disciplinary knowledges; professional training may thwart social activism; theory cannot always be applied.”1 While women ’s studies programs have proliferated across higher education, even ardent feminist academics have levied forceful arguments against institutionalizing women’s studies as stand-alone units. In the same Feminist Studies article, Caughie argues that women’s studies should avoid “disciplining interdisciplinarity,” in part, because such attempts presume a (false) coherence in traditional disciplines that is oppositional to the interstitial nature of interdisciplinarity. While she advocates for graduate training in the field, she expresses concern that by hiring faculty in women’s studies and advocating for a shared research agenda, “we risk reproducing rather than critiquing disciplinary structures.”2 Likewise, in her introduction to Women’s Studies on the Edge, Joan Wallach Scott argues that, because of its formalization within the academy, women’s studies has lost its connection to activism and institutional critique.3 And perhaps most famously, Wendy Brown argues that the work of feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonial theory ought to be returned to the disciplines, rather than remain within the separate, 1. Pamela L. Caughie, “Graduate Education in Women’s Studies: Paradoxes and Challenges (Introduction to Forum),” Feminist Studies 29, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 406. 2. Pamela L. Caughie, “Professional Identity Politics,” Feminist Studies 29, no. 2 (2003): 430. See also Robyn R. Warhol, “Nice Work, If You Can Get It— And If You Can’t? Building Women’s Studies Without Tenure Lines,” in Women’s Studies on Its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 224–32. 3. Joan Wallach Scott, “Introduction: Feminism’s Critical Edge,” in Women’s Studies on the Edge, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–16. Amy Bhatt 381 often marginalized, domain of women’s studies.4 Such critics caution against the formalization of and, in some cases, expansion of women’s studies across academe. On the other hand, advocates of women’s studies point out that the disciplines themselves are a taxonomy that reflects particular power/content /methodologicalinterventionsandthattheyarenotself-evidentspaces of knowledge production. They argue that formalization ought to be celebrated and that the debate over interdisciplinarity versus traditional disciplines has... (shrink)

The Forbidden Subject launches from Ed Abbey's affirmation in Desert Solitaire: 'This is the most beautiful place on earth'. How could such a sentiment become construed as problematic, elitist, or worse? How did beauty become, and why does it largely remain, what Emory Elliot dubbed 'the forbidden subject'?

Excerpt from The Fact of God M onotheism is shown, by researches among the most ancient religions, to have been the original, at least the earliest known conception of Deity. The one God which the ongmal and universal idea of the super natural recognized was evidently the ob ject of the most ancient worship. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical (...) work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age examines a variety of significant multidisciplinary and multicultural topics within the subject of aesthetics. Addressing the vexed relation of the arts and criticism to current political and cultural concerns, the contributors to this volume attempt to bridge the two decades-old gap between scholars and critics who hold conflicting views of the purposes of art and criticism. By exploring some of the ways in which global migration and expanding ethnic diversity are affecting cultural productions and prompting (...) reassessment of the nature and role of aesthetic discourse, this volume provides a new evaluation of aesthetic ideas and practices within contemporary arts and letters. (shrink)

In Process Studies 39.1 Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki draws renewed attention to one of the formative issues within early process theology—the question of whether God may best be understood as a single actual entity, as Whitehead had said, or as a serially ordered or personally ordered society of occasions. Suchocki’s support for Whitehead’s original thinking is a welcome event. Unfortunately, Suchocki employs the term “dynamic” to disguise an unresolved incompatibility between temporal and non-temporal process in God. This makes her overall position (...) unstable, if not untentable. A second criticism is that methodologically Suchocki relies almost entirely on logical inferences drawn from previously accepted concepts, making her argument insufficiently empirical. Some brief suggestions are offered as hints for ways in which these problems might be resolved. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

To bring the significance of Lyotard's reading of Kant's sublime into full relief, I will begin by considering some of the philosophical developments of Descartes and Hume as they relate to issues of subjectivity and consciousness. The thought of these two modern writers informs the critical philosophy of Kant. I will then explain the aesthetics of Kant and show how with the sublime there is a unique kind of time distinct from the common time of cognition. This aesthetic time destabilizes (...) what Kant had earlier described as the basis for the way that we think about the self. In light of this concept of aesthetic temporality, I will examine, in the conclusions of my essay, Galen Strawson's pearl theory of the self, and suggest a possible alternative view. (shrink)

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a (...) political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book's own theory of creativity - "a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created - original inauthenticity" - this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone. CONTENTS: Robin Mackay, "A Brief History of Geotrauma" - McKenzie Wark, "An Inhuman Fiction of Forces" - Benjamin H. Bratton, "Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia" - Alisa Andrasek, "Dustism" - Zach Blas, "Queerness, Openness" - Melanie Doherty, "Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious" - Anthony Sciscione, "Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft's 'The Colour Out of Space'" - Kate Marshall, "Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity)" - Alexander R. Galloway, "What is a Hermeneutic Light?" - Eugene Thacker, "Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans" - Nicola Masciandaro, "Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness" - Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, "Phileas Fogg, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: On the Alchemical Elements of War" - Ben Woodard, "The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani's Cyclonopedia as Metaphysics" - Ed Keller, "...Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain..." - Lionel Maunz, "Receipt of Malice" - Öykü Tekten, "Symposium Photographs" - Reza Negarestani, "Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone". (shrink)

1999. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm 4 edited by The Linguistric Society of Korea. Hanshin Pub.co. pp. 21-39.

I explore Lacan’s theory of the subject by responding to two well-known criticisms of it, found in Borch-Jacobsen’s Lacan and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s The Title of the Letter. I argue that the relation of the subject to language is an important part of Lacan’s theory, but his conception of the subject cannot be reduced to language, as the critiques allege. The real must be included in the picture too. I then discuss the situation of Lacan’s subject between language and the (...) real, and conclude with a contrast of Lacan’s subversion of the subject to a Derridean paleonymic approach. (shrink)

Alain Badiou is one of the leading philosophers in the world today. His ground-breaking philosophy is based on a creative reading of set theory, offering a new understanding of what it means to be human by promoting an 'intelligence of change'. Badiou's philosophical system makes our capacity for revolution and novelty central to who we are, and develops an ethical position that aims to make us less anxious about this very capacity. This book presents a comprehensive and engaging account of (...) Badiou's philosophy, including an in-depth discussion of _The Theory of the Subject_, _Being and Event_ and _Logics of Worlds_. In a clear and careful analysis, Ed Pluth considers exactly how Badiou's theoretical 'anti-humanism' is linked up to what is, for all intents and purposes, a practical humanism. Central to this is an account of Badiou’s theory of the subject, and his attempt to develop an 'ethic of truths'. The role of set theory, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in Badiou's philosophy is also given close attention. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, as well as to all those keen to develop a critical understanding of one of the most controversial and important thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The ethical frameworks of consequentialism and formalism predict moral awareness and behavior in individuals, but current measures either do not treat these frameworks as independent or lack sufficient theoretical underpinnings and statistical dependability. This paper presents the development and validation of a new scale to measure consequentialism and formalism that is well grounded in prior research. The Ethical Standards of Judgement Questionnaire is validated via six studies. Measurement items are developed in the first three studies, which also confirm the need (...) to eliminate a unidimensional measure and evaluate these frameworks separately. The fourth study addresses discriminant validity and the two remaining studies provide insight into how consequentialism and formalism predict the degree to which behaviors are deemed acceptable by individuals in the context of consumer beliefs and religious beliefs. Suggested uses for the scale in both academia and organizations are presented. (shrink)

This book draws together the latest work from scholars around the world using subjective well-being data to understand and compare well-being across countries and cultures. Starting from many different vantage points, the authors reached a consensus that many measures of subjective well-being, ranging from life evaluations through emotional states, based on memories and current evaluations, merit broader collection and analysis. Using data from the Gallup World Poll, the World Values Survey, and other internationally comparable surveys, the authors document wide divergences (...) among countries in all measures of subjective well-being, The international differences are greater for life evaluations than for emotions. Despite the well-documented differences in the ways in which subjective evaluations change through time and across cultures, the bulk of the very large international differences in life evaluations are due to differences in life circumstances rather than differences in the way these differences are evaluated. (shrink)

Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens examines the sensation, expression, and literary representation of envy and jealousy in Classical Athens.

Incorporating a diverse and eclectic range of theory and cultural forms, both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have persistently foregrounded Marxist questions of ideology, totality and utopia at points where they seem unfashionable and outmoded. As a phrase attributable to both thinkers, Jameson and Žižek share a commitment to writing in and against a time where it has become “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Broadly speaking, in terms of a shared politics, both (...) advocate seeing the system whole and keeping open the possibility of an “outside” to capitalism... There are, however, some significant differences between Jameson and Žižek that should not be overlooked. (shrink)

Roland Barthes remains one of the most influential cultural theorists of the postwar period and Image-Music-Text is his most widely taught work. Ed White provides students with a clear guide to this essential but difficult text. As students are increasingly expected to write across a range of media, Barthes' work can be understood as an early mapping of what we now call interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study. The book's detailed section-by-section readings makes Barthes' most important writings accessible to undergraduate readers. This (...) book is a perfect companion for teaching and learning Barthes ideas in cultural studies and literary theory. (shrink)

In the tradition of Roland Barthes' Mythologies and Walter Benjamin's aphoristic Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ed Simon's Furnace of this World is a fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism. Furnace of this World interrogates the concept of goodness, while arguing that it's always more interesting and radical than its opposite. With neither hubris nor reductionism, Furnace of this World speaks of what it means to pursue justice in (...) a fallen world."--Amazon.com. (shrink)

As Death Comes for the Archbishop approaches one hundred years of critical scrutiny, it still speaks to readers in much the same way it did in the 1920s. A critical response to early twentieth-century materialism and mendacity, the story of nineteenth-century New Mexico Archbishop Jean Marie Latour and his friend and Vicar, Fr. Joseph Vaillant affirms as it dramatizes friendship and renunciation while simultaneously celebrating the centrality of the transcendent self and the richness and value of lived personal experience.

The Query is reasonable (First Order) Predicate Logic (PL:) is a ”Universal Grammar" for the languages of Elementary Arithmetic, Euclidean Geometry, Set Theory, Boolean Algebra, .... It defines their expressions, their semantic interpretations, and texts, called proofs, that syntactically characterize the boolean semantic entailment relation: P entails Q iff Q is true whenever P is.

In this chapter we shall examine the characteristic properties of a construction wide-spread in the world’s languages, the passive. In section 1 below we discuss defining characteristics of passives, contrasting them with other foregrounding and backgrounding constructions. In section 2 we present the common syntactic and semantic properties of the most wide-spread types of passives, and in section 3 we consider passives which differ in one or more ways from these. In section 4, we survey a variety of constructions that (...) resemble passive constructions in one way or another. In section 5, we briefly consider differences between languages with regard to the roles passives play in their grammars. Specifically, we show that passives are a more essential part of the grammars of some languages than of others. (shrink)

For courses in the Philosophy of Religion, taught in either Philosophy or Religious Studies departments. This book provides a concise introduction to the main ideas and issues in philosophical theology. While covering a wide range of classic and contemporary perspectives, the text stresses a historical approach, focussing primarily on the development of philosophical theology in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

If, as the title of this book suggests, the state of Tractatus commentary has at times recently resembled something close to a state of war, then it has most of all resembled a war of attrition. Against this background, Roger White's "Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder" makes for refreshing reading. To be sure, White repeats some of the familiar misconceptions of what resolute readers do or must claim that have marred the debate over the adequacies or inadequacies of (...) such an approach to the Tractatus (TLP). But he also introduces some novel and interesting lines of criticism that merit serious attention. Foremost among the latter is White's treatment (in Section III of his paper) of three engaging examples that he sees as making trouble for resolute readers, and for their opposition to the standard idea that the lesson of the Tractatrrs could consist in its communicating, and our grasping, ineffable insights by way of its nonsense-sentences. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In order to explore what it means to pursue philosophical investigations for theological reasons, this paper argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein continues and corrects Pseudo-Denys’ project in The Divine Names. I first argue that The Divine Names should be interpreted as attempting to render human thought transparent to the divine by relativizing our concepts. The success of this project is compromised because the concept of ‘unity’ is not relativized. I then develop the claim that Wittgenstein does relativize unity in a (...) similar way and for similar religious reasons to Pseudo-Denys. As such, he can be read as continuing and correcting the Pseudo-Dionysian project. I conclude by reflecting on several of this argument’s implications for the relationship between philosophy and Christian systematic theology. (shrink)

Public debates on reality television often address the display of emotion and immoral conduct. Television scholars have recently proposed that while reality television offers its audience an opportunity to learn valuable lessons, they rarely address the issue of the morality of the genre. In this contribution, we analyze the display of emotion and immoral conduct in the Dutch reality show The Golden Cage. Reality television is viewed as constituting a ‘moral laboratory’. The question guiding our research revolved around the kind (...) of exercise this moral laboratory provides for. A dramaturgical study of the display of actions and emotions as part of participant “projects” was used to answer this question. Results indicate that moral issues and emotions were continuously at stake, and immoral conduct appeared to be coupled with pleasurable emotions. It is concluded that the laboratory of The Golden Cage is at least equally suited for exercising autonomy and identity performance under competitive pressure as it is for the simulation of moral conflicts. (shrink)