:This article revisits Michael Haneke's Caché as a filmic transformation of the traditional bond between sacrificial violence, morality and community building. By drawing mainly on striking correspondences with Jacques Derrida's view of the “mystical” origin of authority and of the limits of moral representation, the article aims to probe into Haneke's strategies of concealment. In so doing, the article proposes a “postsecular” interpretation of the symbolic meaning of the enigmas of the “ghost director” within the film, and of Majid's theatrical (...) self-sacrifice. (shrink)

Bergson identifies multiple forms of memory throughout his work. In Matter and Memory, Bergson considers memory from the perspectives of both psychology and metaphysics, and he describes what we might refer to as contraction memory, perception memory, habit memory, recollection memory, and pure memory. Further, in subsequent works, Bergson discusses at least two additional forms of memory – namely, a memory of the present and a non-intellectual memory of the will. However, it is often not clear how these different forms (...) of memory relate to one another. With the aim of providing an overview of Bergson's philosophy of memory that can also serve as a point of entry to his philosophy as a whole, this article explores the different senses and forms of memory that Bergson describes, paying special attention to how they are distinct from one another and how they are unified. It is my intention to show that, although these various senses and forms of memory are different from one another , they are also continuous and unified insofar as they are equivalent to different tones of one's mental life and to different tensions of one duration. (shrink)

Guattari's ecosophy has implications for many types of pedagogy practiced in the school. While Guattari never explicitly advocated the educational use of ecosophy, I explore in this article how it can be used as a lens to ‘read’ pedagogy in nuanced ways, highlighting oppressive premises and practices. I first discuss Guattari's ecosophy, defining key terms and advocating ecosophy as a philosophy that calls attention to the interactions and ‘parts’ of assemblages of existence—a philosophy radical and encompassing enough to make intelligible (...) the dynamic connections between various fields of existence, trajectories into the new, and trajectories more destructive in nature. I then offer a ‘reading’ of two different pedagogical strategies that have achieved a wide following in the last few decades: direct instruction, and critical pedagogy. Reading these pedagogies through ecosophy allows us to name more fully the troubling assumptions and lacunae to be found within them. (shrink)

(2006). A ‘Retro‐version’ of Power: Agamben via Foucault on Sovereignty. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 445-459.

This paper examines Antonio Altarriba’s presentation of his deceased mother’s life-story in the graphic novel El ala rota (2016) claiming that the author’s personal trauma of mourning reveals the collective trauma of non-politically-engaged Spanish women throughout Spain’s 20th century. El ala rota contributes to the recovery of a new kind of memory by paying homage to a woman who was relegated to the private sphere and who herself believed her stories were not worth telling – a woman who was in (...) the back room of history and lacked the means and mechanism to chronicle her life. The paper demonstrates that, not only does the content of El ala rota give voice to those who did not have one, thus philosophically paralleling the aims of the Recovery of Historical Memory and the exhumations of mass graves in Spain, but also, that its specific form of comics calls attention to the way society engages with the recovery of historical and collective memory specifically with regard to gender. (shrink)

This article examines the evolution of Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of culture during his over-sixty-year-long scholarly activity. Bauman wrote his first books on the theory of culture (Culture and Society; Sketches in the Theory of Culture) when he was a Professor at Warsaw University. The ideas put forward at that time were later developed in his writings. This applies in particular to the critical nature of his thought, the combination of synchronic and diachronic perspectives, the inclusion of the context of the (...) social structure as well as his references to the structural dimension and to agency. Later years – starting with the publication of the book, Culture as Praxis – saw Bauman’s growing emphasis on the transcendence of the existing reality and the creative role of an individual in the transformation of cultural reality. This article shows how other theorists of culture inspired Bauman and how he critically referred to them. The article offers a holistic look at Zygmunt Bauman’s oeuvre. It also creates an opportunity for English-speaking readers to become familiar with Bauman’s writings in his mother tongue. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

Study is recently re-invoked as an alternative educational formation to disrupt the learning trap and trope. This paper calibrates study and learning as two hermeneutic principles and correlates them with seeing, hearing, and observing as three onto-epistemic modes that respectively underpin Greco-Christian, Rabbinic, and ancient Chinese exegetical traditions. Linking study and learning with the hermeneutic issues of language, text, meaning, and reality, my calibration unfolds in four steps. First, I introduce an epistemic aporia encountered in interpreting some Chinese educational “wind” (...) texts, exposing our naturalized reasoning of learning along a representational enclosure. Second, turning to Susan Handelman’s writing, I trace this learning-as-representation enclosure as being conditioned upon the Greco-Christian exegetical mode of seeing, meanwhile correlating study back with the Rabbinic hearing hermeneutic. Third, I move on to explicate an onto-cosmological Yijing observing, proffering a study hermeneutic as a movement of observing, following, and attuning to wendao, literally put, “a crisscrossing pattern that turns with dao.” Finally, I re-observe and study the crisscrossing Chinese educational “wind” texts, evoking a Chinese “wind-teaching” sensibility so far rarely discerned through representational thinking and learning. (shrink)

There is a loud and persistent drum beat of support for schools, for citizenship, for diversity and inclusion, and increasingly for labor market readiness with very little critical attention to the assumptions underlying these agendas, let alone to their many internal contradictions. Accordingly, in this book I examine the philosophical, motivational, and practical challenges of education theory, policy, and practice in the twenty-first century. As I proceed, I do not neglect the historical, comparative international context so essential to better understanding (...) where we are, as well as what is attainable in terms of educational justice. I argue that we must constructively critique some of our most cherished beliefs about education if we are to save the hope of real justice from the rhetoric of imagined justice. (shrink)

The machine-organism analogy has played a pivotal role in the history of Western philosophy and science. Notwithstanding its apparent simplicity, it hides complex epistemological issues about the status of both organism and machine and the nature of their interaction. What is the real object of this analogy: organisms as a whole, their parts or, rather, bodily functions? How can the machine serve as a model for interpreting biological phenomena, cognitive processes, or more broadly the social and cultural transformations of the (...) relations between individuals, and between individuals and the environments in which they live? Wired Bodies. New Perspectives on the Machine-Organism Analogy provides the reader with some of the latest perspectives on this vast debate, addressing three major topics:1) the development of a ‘mechanistic’ framework in medicine and biology; 2) the methodological issues underlying the use of ‘simulation’ in cognitive science; 3) the interaction between humans and machines according to 20th-century epistemology. (shrink)

For over 2000 years, the sublime has been a source of fascination for philosophers, artists, and even the general public at times. We have written hundreds of treatises on the subject, put forth innumerable definitions and explanations, and even tried to reproduce it in art and literature. But, despite our efforts, our understanding of the sublime remains elusive. In this paper, the sublime is explored as a potential human experience that can be evoked by an image. Drawing upon concrete experiences, (...) the phenomenon of sublimity suggests a compelling, embodied response to the visual object that can evoke a fundamental change of being. (shrink)

Although there are exceptions, most researchers on collective memory have neglected the idea that collective mnemonics involve embodied aspects and practices. And though the corpus of Collective Memory Studies (CMS) has helped us better understand how social groups relate to time, especially to the past, it has taken little notice of how embodied social actors collectively relate to time. In contrast, expanding upon the French School and the French sociological tradition, I argue for an approach that, on the one hand, (...) connects mental schemata to bodily schemata to social frameworks. And on the other hand, I speak of how embodied social actors collectively relate to common pasts and presents; and of how embodiment can thus provide a structure of possibilities for individuals and groups, as well as shared compasses and orientations that help people move toward certain futures while foreclosing others. (shrink)

According to Charles Hauss, “[i]n the last few years, reconciliation has become one of the ‘hottest’ topics in the increasingly ‘hot’ field of conflict resolution” ( 2003 , ¶1). However, despite the apparent interest in this “hot” academic topic (which is becoming increasingly warm in Canada as our own Truth and Reconciliation Commission commences), reconciliation studies have been dominated by Truth-based approaches. The restrictions of these approaches, which emphasize objectivity and rationality, often elide the body and the primacy of emotions (...) in the reparative process. This essay begins a conversation on the role of the body and emotion in the study of reconciliation by engaging the work being done in the social sciences with contemporary trends in critical theory and literature. I argue that by looking at the fundamental role the body plays on the “road to reconciliation” we can devise a more vital approach to conflict resolution and the various processes that make it up. (shrink)

Contemporary democracy has given primacy to thought. Building up institutions on thought and reasoned discourse excludes out human actions derived not from thought that one thinks. Ordinary life is visited by emotion and passion. Such actions of unknown origin are captured best in the drama. Indian theory and practice of drama and the poetics offer communion between the performer and the viewer. Blissful relish of the actions and the dialogues lift up the banal actions from the ordinary to a state (...) beyond simple event. Relishing thus resides in cognition. Drama in theory and in its practice thus offers foundation to institutions that could embrace independent actions as well. In relish there is cognition and reasoning alone cannot lay claim. Folk life and folk actions thus could be emancipatory. (shrink)

This article is a close reading of Edward Said’s image of the intellectual and offers a critique and restatement of that image. Said characterizes the intellectual in contrast to two other images:...

Recent debates in the field of contemporary art have underlined the political importance of creative reworkings of the past, especially for those subjects that have been traditionally marginalised. A feminist perspective has been nevertheless quite absent from such debates. This article addresses feminist uses of archival documents in the visual arts through the analysis of three works produced in the past two decades: The Fae Richard's Photo Archive (1997) by Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye, Some Chance Operations (1998) by Renée (...) Green and Queen of the Artists’ Studios (2004–2007) by Andrea Geyer. These works share an interest for women's histories and representations by composing a series of documents (both factual and fictive) into complex narratives where history and subjectivity intersect. (shrink)

:The theme of sacrifice appears in Jean-François Lyotard's writings on cinema not in terms of any representational content but in terms of the economy of the images from which a film is formally constructed. Sacrifice is here understood in a sense derived from Bataille, and related to his notions of general economy, and of sovereignty. Lyotard's writings on cinema have received some attention in English-language scholarship, but so far this attention has been focused almost exclusively on two essays which have (...) appeared in English translation: “Acinema” and “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène.” I offer an analysis which also incorporates his two other important essays on cinema, “Deux métamorphoses du séduisant au cinéma” [Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema] and “Idée d'un film souverain” [The Idea of a Sovereign Film]. The interest of the former is that it makes most explicit the aesthetic politics – evident in many of Lyotard's writings on art – specific to cinema. In the latter, Lyotard gives his most extensive treatment of cinema, and frames it in terms of Bataille's notion of sovereignty. I offer an interpretation of Lyotard's philosophy of cinema which links these quite disparate essays, foregrounding the political dimension of the sacrificial economy of images he proposes: films of any variety, even commercial cinema, may include some sequences and images which are “sacrificial” in that they are “other” to the chronological narrative of the whole. These images liberate us from the seductive effects of the narrative, and the invitation to fantasise, which act as means of imposing and reproducing dominant social and cultural norms. (shrink)

Often understood as synonymous with “oral history” in Indigenous title and rights cases in Canada, “oral tradition” as theorized by Jan Vansina is complexly imbricated in the European genealogy of “scientific history” and the archival science of Diplomatics with roots in the development of property law and memory from the time of Justinian. Focusing on Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, which resulted in the first declaration of Aboriginal title in Canada, this paper will discuss Tsilhqot’in law in the context of (...) the court’s deployment of Vansina’s theory and its genealogy, and conclude that “oral tradition” functions as a legal fiction enabling the court to remain in the familiar archive of its own historiography while claiming to listen to the Elders. (shrink)

Abstract That current ideals of cognition impoverish experience is a classical observation, and complaint, of the early Frankfurt School. Adorno reacts to this phenomenon in several ways, among them his conception of metaphysical experiences. Metaphysical experiences are conventionally understood as promissory notes, as metaphors for rich experiences. This article takes a different view of metaphysical experiences. It discusses them in light of Adorno's notion that objects have priority in experience and of his further remark that metaphysical experiences are constituted by (...) error. It argues that rather than promissory notes or metaphors for rich experiences, metaphysical experiences are attempts at taking things literally. (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between visual culture and the fight for visibility and attention in contemporary society. It draws on a concept of visual culture which not only sees the rising significance of the visual and the proliferation of images as its defining traits, but also the fact that, today, people are—to a much higher degree—both consumers as well as producers of images. Based on this definition, it is argued that in visually oriented communication and media societies, the anthropologically (...) fundamental need for attention manifests itself as a fight for visibility which takes on the form of ever more extreme forms of public self-display. Furthermore, a portrait of two social figures—the star and the voyeur—will serve as further analysis and description of the social trends which can be tied to the emergence of today's visual culture. The article will close by discussing attention and visibility in terms of inclusion and exclusion and by proposing an analytical model for differentiating four modes of existence in a visual culture. (shrink)

David Roberts has always had a keen, sharp and even mischievous eye for paradox, for pointing to what used to be termed in Hegelianese, ‘contradictions’ or ‘dialectics’ of modern society and its forms. Roberts’ keen eye has focused on the paradoxes (rather than negative dialectics) of aesthetic modernity and the forms that these paradoxes have taken within the historical time consciousness and self-understanding of modernity. This paper will suggest – although only sketchily and in outline – that Roberts’ keen eye (...) notices and reconstructs three paradoxical models or forms of aesthetic modernity: 1. The total work of art of aesthetic modernism; 2. the contemporary postmodern plurality of the present which is captured as musealization; 3. interpretation, play and humour as the open acceptance of the contingency and paradoxes of the present. (shrink)

In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase 'ways of knowing', which, for linguistic and conceptual reasons, confuses discussions about epistemological diversity. I here expand this inquiry by considering languages in which more than one equivalent exists for the English verb 'to know'. French, for example, (...) has both savoir and connaître , and German has wissen and kennen . This interlinguistic translation thus allows for a reconsideration of the inquiry into the phrase 'ways of knowing': do problems arise with 'ways of knowing-in-the sense-of connaître ', or with 'ways of knowing-in-the-sense-of savoir ', or both? Displacement is, more generally speaking, a method used by philosophers. Shifting the concept or phenomenon under consideration into a different context or discursive register allows one to defamiliarise it and see it in terms of something else. Through translation, whether interlinguistic or interdiscursive, philosophers ask what questions and understandings become possible when we see A in terms of B. (shrink)

Emancipation serves not only as a midwife for progressive agendas such as greater equality and sustainability but also as their gravedigger. This diagnosis underpins Ingolfur Blühdorn’s ‘dialectic of emancipation’, which depicts a dilemma but offers no perspective on how to deal with it. By drawing on Foucault, this article suggests conceiving of emancipation as a task moderns are confronted with even if a given emancipatory project has come to devour its children. Claiming autonomy from given social constellations is key to (...) this task; key also is judging between legitimate and illegitimate claims to autonomy. In late modernity, the criteria for such judgement are no longer universally given. Instead of regarding the latter as entry into mere subjectivism, this article presents judgement as a key political, ‘world building’-activity, a critical social theory may join in, by not only observing the world but by also taking sides in it. (shrink)

This essay places the recent academic fascination with trauma and victimhood in a psycho‐social context within which identifications with pure victimhood hold sway. The essay takes as its starting point Freud's description, in Civilisation and its Discontents, of the formation of the super‐ego via the small child's negotiation of ambivalence towards its first authority figure. It is argued that this process lacks secondary re‐inforcement in western urban postmodernity, where authority has become diffuse, all‐pervasive and unavailable as a point of identification. (...) In this context, aggression becomes harder to acknowledge and manage resulting in a tendency towards Manicheanism and the attenuation of ambivalence. Taking as its case‐study Marianne Hirsch's writings on the ethical aesthetics of postmemorial photography, the essay concludes that recent work on trauma and testimony fails to acknowledge that identifications may straddle victimhood and perpetration. This acknowledgement is only possible where some containment of aggression feels possible. (shrink)

Mimicry is common among animals, plants, and other kingdoms of life. Humans in late capitalism, however, have devised an unique method of mimicking the signs that trigger evolutionarily-programmed instincts of their own species in order to manipulate them. Marketing and advertising are the most pervasive and sophisticated forms of known human mimicry, deliberately hijacking our instincts in order to select on the basis of one dimension only: profit. But marketing and advertising also strangely undermine their form of mimicry, deceiving both (...) the intended targets and the signaler simultaneously. Human forms of mimicry have the regular consequence of deceiving the imitator, reducing meta-cognitive awareness of the act and intentions surrounding such deception. Therefore, the deceiver in the end deceives himself as well as intended targets. Drawing on scholarship applying Niko Tinbergen’s ethological discovery of supernormal stimuli in animals to humans, this article analyzes sophisticated mass mimicry in contemporary culture, in both intended and unintended forms. (shrink)

A hypertext learner navigates with a instinctive feeling for a knowledge. The learner does not know her queries, although she has a feeling for them. A learner’s navigation appears as complete upon the emergence of an aesthetic pleasure, called rasa. The order of arrival or the associational logic and even the temporal order are not relevant to this emergence. The completeness of aesthetics is important. The learner does not look for the intention of the writer, neither does she look for (...) significance. Lexia has a suggestive power and she is suggested in the arrival of aesthetics. Hypertext learning does not depend on communication. The learner in her pleasure transgresses the bounds of space-time to be in communion with several writers/learners. Hypertext learning does not appear to be fundamentally different from the analog learning; however, in performance, as in navigation, the learner assumes a mental state that helps her in her emergence into aesthetic bliss, of an arrival to the completed lexial navigation. This completeness is owing to aesthetics and is not owing to either the semantics or the query-fulfilling qualities. (shrink)

The ArgumentThere can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapin's discussion of the emergence of the scientific laboratory in seventeenth-century England provides a convincing demonstration that credible knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social (...) distinctions. In this paper I take up Shapin's theme of the “siting of knowledge production,” but I give it a different treatment – one based on ethnomethodological studies of work. Without denying all that can be witnessed in the spectacle of the scientist at the bench and of the architectural habitat of the bench, I argue that the “place” of scientific work is defined by locally organizedtopical contextures. The paper describes two examples of such spatial orders – “opticism” and “digitality” – associated with distinct complexes of equipment and practice. These topical spaces might initially be viewed as “ideal” or “symbolic” spaces, but I argue that they are no less material than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting. (shrink)

This study undertakes a hermeneutical reading of some texts in which the question of the embodiment of the categorical imperative, the responsibility enjoined by the procedural form of the moral law, is introduced. It is hoped that this reading will contribute to our understanding of the body of experience, the so-called body-subject, showing the body to be not only an object-body, not only, as in the work of Foucault, a material substratum for the application of power, but also, as Levinas (...) thought, the primordial bearer of a certain rudimentary moral compass, at the very heart of which there lies, if only deeply encrypted, the categorical assignment of the moral law. (edited). (shrink)

Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

_Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze._.

In adult education there is always a problem of prefabricated and in many respect fixed opinions and views of the world. In this sense, I will argue, that the starting point of radical education should be in the destruction of these walls of belief that people build around themselves in order to feel safe. In this connection I will talk about ‘gentle shattering of identities’ as a problem and a method of radical education. When we as adult educators are trying (...) to gently shatter these solidified identities and pre‐packed ways of being and acting in the world, we are moving in the field of questions that Sigmund Freud tackled with the concepts of ‘de‐personalization’ and ‘de‐realization’. These concepts raise the question about the possibility of at the same time believing that something is and at the same time having a fundamentally sceptical attitude towards this given. In my article I will ask, can we integrate the idea of learning in general with the idea of strangeness to oneself as a legitimate and sensible experiential point of departure for radical learning? (shrink)

Las narrativas que han afirmado la relación de la modernidad con lo Occidental, así como aquellas que han tratado de descentralizar el centro de lo moderno coinciden en un aspecto primordial: ver la modernidad como un producto de Occidente. Lo que está en cuestión, entonces, es pensar si se puede hallar una manera de teorizar la cuestión de la modernidad que la relocalice en un contexto mundial, y al mismo tiempo, permita a ese contexto complejizar, en lugar de simplemente revertir, (...) la lógica narrativa de la modernización. En este sentido, una de las cuestiones que se proponen revisar es la manera en la que se da la interacción entre Occidente y el no-Occidente para poder asumir la escenificación que define lo moderno en la diferencia constitutiva de su espacialidad y su representación. (shrink)

This article is a philosophical analysis of escapism as a pedagogical possibility, with a particular focus on TV series. Taking my own, as well as students, experience of escapism into TV series as a starting point, that is, their ability take us somewhere far away, something which has become more acute during the pandemic time since we remain more or less self-isolated because of the corona virus Covid-19, the article discusses escapism in relation to distraction and attention in life as (...) well as within teaching, but also in relation to colportage, hope and social justice. According to Ernst Bloch, social justice cannot materialize without regarding things differently. Something that is often dismissed as mere escapism might be a seed for a new and more humane social order, as it can be seen as an “immature, but honest substitute for revolution”. Drawing on Bloch’s understanding of colportage and hope, as well as Walter Benjamin’s understanding of mass culture and cinema, the article treats escapism and TV series not as something simple, but rather as possible seeds for a new social order and thus as having pedagogical possibilities. (shrink)

It was not until the emergence, in the 19th century, of new technical devices – such as the telegraph and the phonograph – that the term medius came to serve as a collective noun (media) for advanced communication technologies. Although mediation is extensively theorized in philosophy and sociology, and is approached by medium theory and media studies, the concept remains undertheorized in the field of communication theory.By exploring the problem of mediation and by challenging its representationalist and transmissive accounts, this (...) paper posits mediation beyond the medium. It traces mediation as a relational principle which can be best understood as modulation involving inherent translation, inflection and movement. Mediation is not a simple transportation of meaning through a passive intermediary. It is not just something which stands or comes between things otherwise separated or opposed. Mediation is neither a middle-thing linking separate entities, nor do things get mediated: They are already forms of mediation. Mediation is, foremost, a connecting mean that generates modified experiences and relations, a modulating process that re-connects at the moment it separates. (shrink)

Up to the introduction of the term and concept of incommensurability by T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend in the early 1960s, scientific texts were supposed to pose no problem as regards their translation, unlike literature, which was thought very difficult to translate. After the introduction of the term, translation of scientific language became equally problematic because, due to conceptual and perceptual incommensurability, there was no common observation basis to ground linguistic equivalences between languages of incommensurable paradigms. This article (...) highlights the presuppositions that link incommensurability to dramatic consequences (impossibility of communication, translation, and comparative evaluation of paradigms) and tries to sketch an alternative way of understanding incommensurability and translation drawing on Kuhn’s work. From this perspective, translation is not an all-or-nothing affair for either science or literature and becomes a problem to be solved for each particular set of circumstances. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between identities and the bicycle as portrayed in films. The analysis finds that taking the viewpoint of the bicycle emancipates the bicycle from being subjected to closure, as the constructionists would have it, and thus articulates the differences with which the bicycle can communicate to its rider. The paper examines the bicycle as depicted in three films: Premium Rush, A Sunday in Hell and Life on Earth. It engages with the concept of ‘interpretative flexibility’ and (...) the development of the bicycle, as examined by Wiebe Bijker and others, and argues that the interpretative flexibility of bicycles does not cease just because the high-wheeler was abandoned and the ‘safety’ bicycle was universally accepted. The fight for the role of the bicycle continues and the bicycle is subject to constant transformations in order to reconstruct it according to human needs. Andrew Feenberg’s modified constructivism is applied to re-examine the technical development of the bicycle, claiming that technology is dependent on specific social structures as well as human agency. The paper argues that just as social structures are negotiable and unfixed at any point in time, the bicycle too is never neutral but remains negotiable and unfixed. Consequently, since the bicycle constantly ‘speaks’ back to the user, there is never closure in the technical development of the bicycle. Drawing on the writings of Bruno Latour and the Deleuzian idea of assemblages, the bicycle and its rider are considered as an organic entity that is constantly forged and un-forged. Understanding the rhetoric of the bicycle machine helps the convergence of a bicycle becoming with becoming a rider, marking the bicycle as equal to its rider. Viewed in this way, the hierarchy of agency collapses and a crystallization emerges out of the rider and bicycle entwinement. (shrink)

The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of (...) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions. (shrink)

In the lexicon of rights, the concept ofhumanrights can play a wide variety of roles. Human rights can be defined as substantive natural rights that transcend politics and culture or as the rights that underlie political and cultural differences. They can be defined narrowly as rights that could be asserted against enemies in war or, more broadly, as the aspirational goals to which governments are held accountable by their citizens and the world. Despite their lack of recognition in covenant and (...) positive law through much of the twentieth century, human rights are increasingly asserted on the basis of such recognition. To some, human rights are simply the sine qua non (procedural? biological?) for asserting other rights, whatever these may be. In this paper I do not choose among these uses of the concept of human rights by propounding a single definition; neither do I defend or criticize human rights in general. (shrink)

Two themes run through Kierkegaard’s authorship. The first defines existential requirements for “becoming human”—reflective honesty and earnest humor. The second demarcates the religious phenomena of sobriety when human becoming suffers insurmountable collisions. Living with existential pathos teaches the difference between the either/or logic of collisions and the both/and logic of development and transitions. There is a difference between self-transformation and a progressive individual and social development. In the developmental mode self experiences gradual progression or adaptive evolution; in the self-transformative mode (...) self undergoes qualitative upsurges, leaps, gestalt switches, musical key transpositions of becoming in individual and social evolutions. Each individual in every epoch begins at the beginning. The author traces the movements of becoming in their parallel dimensions, drawing a fork through Kierkegaard’s writing. The first leads through the existence spheres of his pseudonymous authorship. The second intensifies the movement on the spot and in the moment. (shrink)