Ce livre est né de la donation en 1994 aux Archives nationales italiennes (section de la ville d'Orvieto) du fonds photographique d'Elisa Lombardi, « commandante » de l'« Académie féminine nationale d'éducation physique » fondée en 1932 à Orvieto par le régime fasciste. L'Académie formait en trois ans au métier d'enseignante en éducation physique des jeunes filles ayant terminé leurs études secondaires, munies d'un certificat de bonne santé (les lunettes étaient interdites, les trop ma...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Review Article:Knowledge, Ideology, and Skepticism in Ancient Slave StudiesKyle HarperNiall McKeown. The Invention of Ancient Slavery? Duckworth Classical Essays. London: Duckworth, 2007. 174 pp. Paper, $24.Ulrike Roth. Thinking Tools: Agricultural Slavery between Evidence and Models. BICS Supplement 92. London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2007. x + 171 pp. 10 figs. Paper, £28.Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari, eds. Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiv (...) + 375 pp. Cloth, $99.Page DuBois. Slavery: Antiquity and Its Legacy. Ancients and Moderns. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xi + 154 pp. Paper, $24.95.This recent harvest of books on ancient slavery shows that, thirty years after Moses Finley's Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, the central themes of that seminal study remain lively topics in classical studies. The nature of slavery and the long-term dynamics of ancient slave systems are still vigorously contested. Above all, these newer works reflect an abiding and shared sense of epistemological limits: even as our understanding of ancient slavery grows (and it does), the extent of our ignorance and the decisive role of our starting assumptions come into clearer focus.Niall McKeown's The Invention of Ancient Slavery? most clearly exemplifies this tone of pervasive skepticism. Published in the Duckworth Classical Essays series, it is a short and insightful survey of the historiography of ancient slavery. Each of the book's seven chapters is a case study of a historian or historical school. McKeown writes "in the shadow of the postmodern challenge" (8), and his project throughout is principally deconstructive. Chapter 1 begins by exposing the contemporary preoccupations which underwrote the view of slavery proposed by Tenney Frank, for instance, in his notorious 1916 account of "race mixture" in the Roman empire. The chapter juxtaposes more recent studies based on epigraphic evidence, especially Joshel's important study on labor and identity. The virtue of [End Page 160] The Invention of Ancient Slavery? is its constant skepticism, but consequently all arguments about ancient slavery are presented as the result of prior convictions: "The way we choose to interpret ancient slavery has much to do with the way we want to interpret it" (28-29).The second chapter considers the Mainz Academy's Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei and the French tradition of research centered in Besançon. McKeown describes the deep division between Anglophone scholars and their German counterparts, inspired not least by Finley's blistering critique of Joseph Vogt. McKeown identifies the genesis of his own book in the surprise he experienced upon discovering that his "liberal Anglophone" outlook was simply the "reverse image" of the Mainz Academy's broadly shared assumptions (31). McKeown is trying to unsettle the "lazy orthodoxies" (41) of the British/American tradition, but the problem with any basically empiricist model (such as the study of Kudlien which McKeown highlights) is precisely that it fails to overcome the blind spots of ancient and modern ideology alike. McKeown contrasts Kudlien's study with the work of Garrido-Hory; she reaches more pessimistic conclusions about ancient slavery, so McKeown argues, not because the evidence demands it, but because she is prepared by her starting premises to find such conclusions.Chapter 3 examines Marxist approaches to ancient slavery. As McKeown notes, Marxism can mean many different things. Shtaerman and Trofimova, for instance, described the long-term history of slavery in rather orthodox terms of continuous class struggle. McKeown suggests that Shtaerman and Trofimova's work is "perhaps the most sophisticated and wide-ranging argument ever produced on ancient slavery" (54-55), but this view will not be shared by all. Their work is by far the best of a large body of Soviet scholarship on ancient slavery, and it was produced under considerable analytical constraints, but McKeown's chapter is a devastating critique. In the space of about sixteen inspired pages, McKeown manages to undermine the foundations of the orthodox Marxist metanarrative of ancient slavery. One wishes, however, for some consideration of the Italian neo-Marxist scholarship emanating from the Istituto Gramsci; this is easily the most important tradition not submitted to McKeown's acute critical gaze.Keith Bradley, whose work is placed in its context as a polemic... (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 125-136, September 2011.

This book provides both a historical analysis of the philosophical problem of individuation, and a new trajectory in its treatment. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, as well as C.S. Peirce and the lesser-known Gilbert Simondon, Alberto Toscano takes the problem of individuation, as reconfigured by Kant and Nietzsche, into the realm of modernity, providing a unique and vibrant contribution to contemporary debates in European philosophy.

Antonio Gramsci (1891--1937) was one of the most original political thinkers in Western Marxism and an exceptional intellectual. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom, yet he wrote extensive letters while incarcerated, rich with insight into the physical and psychological tortures of prison. In meticulous detail, Gramsci records how political prisoners, himself included, contend with the fear of illness and death and the rules and regulations that threaten (...) to efface their individuality. Forming an incomparable link between Gramsci's intellectual passion and his emotional vulnerability, _Letters from Prison_ shows a man reconstructing his life while being separated from it, struggling to recapture the primary relationships that once defined his identity. Frank Rosengarten divides more than four hundred Gramsci letters into two companion volumes, complete with a chronology of the thinker's crucial life experiences, biographical notes on his correspondents, and a bibliography of works cited in his letters. (shrink)

On multiple occasions, Theodor W. Adorno turned to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a resource for the critical anatomy of a capitalist society in which laissez-faire liberalism was being overtaken by an authoritarian coordination of the political and the economic. This article revisits Spengler’s reactionary prophecies about late capitalist civilization in light of Adorno’s arguments. It explores a dimension of Spengler’s thought insufficiently addressed in Adorno’s writings and resonant with our present moment, namely the claim that an (...) emergent “Caesarism” would be helmed by figures like Cecil Rhodes, entrepreneurial Übermenschen spawned by racial imperialism. (shrink)

Among the non-monotonic reasoning processes, abduction is one of the most important. Usually described as the process of looking for explanations, it has been recognized as one of the most commonly used in our daily activities. Still, the traditional definitions of an abductive problem and an abductive solution mention only theories and formulas, leaving agency out of the picture. Our work proposes a study of abductive reasoning from an epistemic and dynamic perspective. In the first part we explore syntactic definitions (...) of both an abductive problem in terms of an agent’s information and an abductive solution in terms of the actions that modify the agent’s information. We look at diverse kinds of agents, including not only omniscient ones but also those whose information is not closed under logical consequence and those whose reasoning abilities are not complete. In the second part, we look at an existing logical framework whose semantic model allows us to interpret the previously stated formulas, and we define two actions that represent forms of abductive reasoning. (shrink)

This article traces the link between Deleuze’s philosophy of individuation, developed in such works as Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, and the notion of structure, that articulated a good part of the epistemological and ontological discussions in French philosophy and science in the 1960s. Besides pointing out the originality of Deleuze’s take on the term ‘structure’—as it ceases to correspond to a formal constant that is opposed or indifferent to the genesis of singular individuals, and becomes a virtual (...) field of pre-individual determinations—, the author presents the possible limits of its use in a philosophy of difference in itself. The reconstruction of this philosophical bet that wanted to turn “structuralism” into a new transcendental philosophy allows to assess how much of this idea of structure remains alive in Deleuze and Guattari’s later works, and to what extent their philosophy transforms or displaces the project that had been formulated in those early books. (shrink)

Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure (...) and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education. Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art. Among these “inaesthetic” variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Samuel Beckett. (shrink)

On December 29, 1918, the Spartakus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement, rose up in Germany calling for an end to class rule by the bourgeoisie. Massive demonstrations followed and more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets in January—only to be crushed by police and anticommunist paramilitary troops. Several leaders of the League were killed and the revolt was quashed. Through a detailed reconstruction of the events of that bloody winter, historian and critic Furio Jesi recasts our understanding of a (...) foundational political difference—revolt or revolution? Drawing on a deep reserve of literary sources like Brecht, Eliade, Dostoyevsky, and Mann, Jesi outlines a uniquely incisive phenomenology of revolt that distinguishes between the purposeful historical temporality of revolution and the suspension of time that marks a revolt. And with the addition of an essay on the politics of time and revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, a founding leader of the Spartakus League, this volume becomes a crucial text at the intersection of history and philosophy. (shrink)

This article locates Ernesto Laclau’s populist reason as a point of departure to understand the contemporary democratic logic and its so-called ‘excesses’. It argues that, even if resourceful, Laclau’s findings can be supplemented with a theory of the imaginary as developed by Cornelius Castoriadis, as well as with key remarks from a discussion of the theologico-political as this was characterized by Claude Lefort. The aim is to construct an understanding on the political as it is structured by language and the (...) symbolic, presenting thus democracy and populism as two opposing sides of a foundational political myth. (shrink)

Recent debates on linguistic diversity inevitably raise questions about the value of languages. This paper deals with two descriptions of language’s value that play a prominent role in those debates: language considered as a means of communication and a cultural heritage. Its purpose is explanatory, providing an account of how languages are assessed in each of these descriptions. Moreover, the paper will also pay attention to the rhetorical uses of such value descriptions in the discourses on linguistic diversity, considering the (...) intrinsic value given to language as a cultural heritage. (shrink)

Columbia University Press's multivolume _Prison Notebooks_ is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, _Quaderni del Carcere_, this comprehensive translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood, with critical notes that clarify Gramsci's history, culture, and sources; an index of names; and a contextualization of the thinker's ideas against his earlier writings and letters. This set includes notebooks 1 through (...) 8 with all attendant notes and materials and is an indispensible resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Focusing especially on Science and the Modern World, this article explores Whitehead's understanding of the social contexts and repercussions of mathematical and scientific abstraction. It investigates his remarks on the need to offset pernicious practices of abstraction in the context of a renewed concern with the link between conceptuality and materiality in social theory. Whitehead's inquiry into the problematic legacy of Galileo and scientific materialism is then contrasted with a different diagnosis of the abstractive maladies of modern society, the one (...) put forward under the Marxist rubric of `real abstraction'. While both stances allow us to explore the social repercussions of abstractive practices, it is argued that an understanding of the practically abstract character of capitalism permits us to identify the limits of Whitehead's pedagogical wish to reform our culture of abstraction. (shrink)

This article focuses on a resonant debate initiated by the publication of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s groundbreaking article “On Defense of Abortion” in 1971. It is my contention that philosophers who argued against Thomson based on what has come to be called the “Responsibility Objection” did not fully examine the gender assumptions embedded in their logic. Rather than attempt to prove the flaw in the Responsibility Objection directly, I demonstrate it by applying the same logic used to discuss women’s responsibilities to (...) men to prove that it also supports forcing men to get a vasectomy. What I show is that the Responsibility Objection, when no longer clothed in a set of gendered assumptions, is not logically convincing. Further, given that the Responsibility Objection supports the logic the U.S. Supreme Court recently relied on in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health in overruling Roe vs. Wade, the examination of the flaws in this logic is timely and important. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

Most theorisations of fascism, Marxist and otherwise, have taken for granted its idolatry of the state and phobia of freedom. This analytical common sense has also inhibited the identification of continuities with contemporary movements of the far Right, with their libertarian and anti-statist affectations, not to mention their embeddedness in neoliberal policies and subjectivities. Drawing on a range of diverse sources – from Johann Chapoutot’s histories of Nazi intellectuals to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theorisation of the anti-state state, and from Marcuse’s (...) explorations of fascist competitive individualism to debates on neoliberal authoritarianism – this essay sketches the counter-intuitive but disturbingly timely image of a fascism enamoured of freedom and at odds with the state. (shrink)

This article takes inspiration from Allan Sekula’s remarks on New Topographics photography, as well as his own ‘geography lessons’, to interrogate how photographs of ‘man-altered landscapes’ give visual form to the problems of temporality, natural history and historical agency that mark life in the Capitalocene. It proposes that combining Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the way that capital congeals ‘quantities of the past’ into dead labour with Andreas Malm’s diagnosis of our ‘warming condition’ allows us both to diagnose and counter the (...) temptation to a sublime inhumanity that so often haunts contemporary panoramas of ecological devastation. (shrink)

Describing an algorithm can provide a formalization of a specific process. However, different ways of conceptualizing algorithms foreground certain issues while obscuring others. This article attempts to define an algorithm in a broad sense as a cultural activity of key importance to make sense of socio-cognitive structures. It also attempts to develop a sharper account on the interaction between humans and tools, symbols and technologies. Rather than human or machine-centered analyses, I draw upon sociological and anthropological theories that underline social (...) practices to propose expanding our understanding of an algorithm through the notion of ‘collective intentionalities’. To make this term clear, a brief historical review is presented, followed by an argumentation on how to incorporate it in an integral perspective. The article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term. It develops a discussion along the lines of cognitive anthropology and the cognitive sciences, therefore advancing a definition that is grounded in observed practices as well as in modeled descriptions. The benefit of this approach is that it encourages scholars to explore cognitive structures via archaeologies of technological assemblages, where intentionalities play a defining role in understanding socio-structured practices and cognitive ecologies. (shrink)

The decisive inquiry into the volatile link between philosophy, revolution, and the 'radical' is arguably Marx's 'A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: An Introduction', written in 1843. We can still find all these themes introduced by Marx at work 80 years later in an emblematic and instructive confrontation between Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch. Where Lukács presents the proletariat as the practical and epistemological 'Archimedean point' capable of unhinging the capitalist totality, Bloch reveals in a subjective (...) metahistory of a utopian kernel whose drive and directionality – despite all of the changes in instruments, organisations, and motivating ideologies – remains invariant from the Taborites to the Bolsheviks. To borrow Lukács's formulation, we are thus confronted with two potent, and alternative ways, to politically and conceptually grasp the statement that man 'both is and at the same time is not', or, in Blochian terms, both is and is not-yet. This antinomy signified by the names and texts of Lukács and Bloch is visible in the insistence of contemporary radical thought on the enigmas of philosophical anthropology, the political repercussions of messianism, and the possibility of a rational and partisan subjectivity. (shrink)

Este pequeño ensayo pretende ir más allá de las celebraciones hagiográficas que hacen del Manifiesto Comunista un monumento para reflexionar sobre las lecciones que se pueden extraer de las formas específicas de su fallida realización. Contra el cliché de que el Manifiesto es un texto profético, deberíamos explorar la disyunción entre el pronóstico incisivo de la “prosa” del capitalismo y la anticipación frustrada de la “poesía” de la revolución. Este ensayo argumenta que las limitaciones analíticas y políticas del Manifiesto deben (...) ser localizadas en la excesiva linealidad y homogeneidad con que enmarca los poderes de abstracción del capital. En la medida en que el capital procede mediante una dialéctica de la homogeneización y la diferenciación, de la expansión y la división espacial, la erosión de la tradición y su refuncionamiento cínico con el objeto de apuntalar la dominación, las tareas de la unidad de la clase obrera y la internacionalización planteadas por el Manifiesto devienen aún más apremiantes políticamente, y cualquier cosa excepto inevitables. (shrink)

pThere is much theoretical work already underway on the many facets of Badiou#39;s theory of political subjectivation. However, little attention has been directed hitherto to those figures of the subject which cannot be easily identifiable with a universalist or generic orientation. Beginning with Badiou#39;s struggles with the subjectivity of the bourgeois in the seminars that make up his Theorie du sujet , this article tries to track his thinking of the #39;other#39;, non- or anti-universalist subjects of politics, and to think (...) what effects their inclusion within a theory of the subject, and indeed a theory of political praxis, may have. Taking issue with some recent remarks of Badiou on the isomorphies between Islamism and fascism in Logiques des mondes , the article also seeks to develop Badiou#39;s notion of #39;reactive#39; and #39;obscure#39; subjects through a brief engagement with recent interpretations of political Islam./p. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the idea of human dignity has a precise and philosophically relevant sense. Following recent works,we can find some important clues in the long history of the term.Traditionally, dignity conveys the idea of a high and honourable position in a hierarchical order, either in society or in nature. At first glance, nothing may seem more contrary to the contemporary conception of human dignity, especially in regard to human rights.However,an account of dignity as high rank provides (...) an illuminating perspective on the role it plays in the egalitarian discourse of human rights. In order to preserve that relational sense regarding human dignity, we can use the notion of moral status, towhich somemoral philosophers have paid attention in recent years.I explore the possibilities of the idea of moral status to better understand the idea of human dignity and its close relationship with human rights. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine the relationship between constitutionalism and democracy as the alleged tensions between them appear in diagnoses about the crisis of liberal democracy. The issue is approached through the arguments of the German jurist Martin Kriele, who holds the thesis that there can be no sovereign in the constitutional State. I will begin by explaining this thesis as well as the justification offered by Kriele. According to him, the guarantee of rights and freedoms is only possible (...) within the framework of the constitutional State. Hence, he advances a second related thesis, that democracy can only be developed in the constitutional State, that is, as constitutional democracy. However, this second thesis seems in contradiction with the first if the democratic principle implies popular sovereignty. To resolve this apparent antinomy, I will distinguish with Kriele two rival conceptions of democracy in order to point out the danger of misinterpreting the meaning of constitutional democracy. -/- En este trabajo examino la relación entre constitucionalismo y democracia, puesto que las supuestas tensiones entre ambos aparecen en los diagnósticos sobre la crisis de la democracia liberal. La cuestión se aborda a través de los argumentos del jurista alemán Martin Kriele, quien defiende la tesis de que no puede haber soberano en el Estado constitucional. Empezaré por explicar dicha tesis así como la justificación de ella que ofrece Kriele, para quien la garantía de los derechos y libertades sólo es posible en el marco del Estado constitucional. De ahí que avance una segunda tesis relacionada, cuando sostiene que la democracia sólo puede desarrollarse en dicho Estado constitucional, esto es, como democracia constitucional. Sin embargo, esta segunda tesis parece contradictoria con la primera si identificamos el principio democrático con la soberanía popular. Para resolver esa aparente antinomia, se distinguiré con Kriele dos concepciones rivales de la democracia, a fin de señalar el peligro de malinterpretar el sentido de la democracia constitucional. (shrink)

A lo largo de su obra Ronald Dworkin ha planteado una cuestión crucial acerca de la libertad de expresión: ¿es un derecho tan importante que su protección exige permitir formas de expresión que consideramos despreciables, ofensivas o socialmente dañinas? En este trabajo me gustaría analizar la reflexión del filósofo en torno a tal cuestión, centrándonos en la pornografía y los discursos del odio. Estas formas de expresión constituyen un desafío para los defensores de esa libertad, pues nos obligan a revisar (...) los argumentos tradicionales empleados en su defensa. Para ello, consideraré en primer lugar la cuestión de si existe un derecho a la pornografía y cómo se podría justificar. Después revisaré su polémica con autoras feministas como Catharine MacKinnon a propósito de la prohibición de la pornografía, pues varias de las cuestiones son pertinentes en relación con los discursos del odio. Para concluir examinaré el modo en que R. Dworkin replantea la defensa de la libertad de expresión, pues tiene relevancia en el contexto de la discusión sobre la penalización de los discursos del odio. (shrink)

This text introduces the symposium on Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019), the second volume in his six-part The Poetics of Social Forms. It frames the debate with a brief exploration of some of the figures and problems of allegory that appear across Jameson’s œuvre, and surveys some of the Marxist conceptualisations of allegory that have shaped Jameson’s approach, as it straddles allegories of the commodity and allegories of utopia. The musical investigation of the nexus of allegory and affect, and (...) the presentation of political allegory as primarily concerned with the disjunction between (national and international) levels are also touched upon as salient dimensions of Jameson’s theorising. (shrink)

La presente reflexión analiza los aspectos bioéticos inherentes a las tecnologías de mejoramiento humano (TMH), esto es, las implicaciones éticas que conlleva la intervención genética, la transformación bioquímica y el modelamiento del cuerpo y del cerebro por medios tecnológicos. Para llevar a buen puerto este objetivo, primero se plantea el problema del “analfabetismo emocional”, expresión acuñada por Günter Anders y que que tomamos de este autor con el fin de presentar la dificultad con la que tropezamos al reflexionar sobre la (...) tecnología en general, y las tecnologías de mejoramiento humano en particular. En segundo lugar, en relación con las TMH, se identifican los tópicos clave en disputa, y se reconstruyen los principales argumentos esgrimidos tanto por los abanderados (transhumanistas) como por sus críticos (conservacionistas). En tercer lugar, se plantea la pregunta por los límites éticos del uso de las TMh para, finalmente, analizar hasta qué punto y en qué medida existe o no un deber moral de intervenir tecnológicamente (TMH) en casos como el de la era de las crisis socioambientales. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Marx’s thinking on religion in light of current preoccupations with the encroachment of religious practices and beliefs into political life. It argues that Marx formulates a critique of the anticlerical and Enlightenment-critique of religion, in which he subsumes the secular repudiation of spiritual authority and religious transcendence into a broader analysis of the ‘real abstractions’ that dominate our social existence. The tools forged by Marx in his engagement with critiques of religious authority allow him to discern the (...) ‘religious’ and ‘transcendent’ dimension of state and capital, and may contribute to a contemporary investigation into the links between capitalism as a religion of everyday life and what Mike Davis has called the current ‘reenchantment of catastrophic modernity’. (shrink)

Is it possible to derive the outlines of a thinking of politics from the writings of Gilbert Simondon ? We will sketch an affirmative response by focusing our attention on three aspects of Simondon’s philosophy: 1. The manner in which the concept of Nature or the pre-individual displaces the debates over the relationship between political action, human nature and biological capacity; 2. The importance of the excess of « subject,) over « individual o as the matrix of a politics of (...) the transindividual; 3. The possibility of envisaging the notion of disparation, especially through its Deleuzian reading, as an essential contribution to a political philosophy of difference, that is, to a non-dialectical thinking of construction and conflict. We will end with a consideration of the limits of Simondon, limits in our view concentrated in the equivocal and irenic notion of « culture » or « technical culture. ». (shrink)

Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, Translated, Edited and withan Introduction by Norman Madarasz ISBN - 9780791442197Alain Badiou, Deleuze. The Clamor of Being, Translated and with aPreface by Louise Burchill ISBN - 9780816631391.