The importance of emotions is supported by many authors of the ethics of care in contrast to the rationalistic paradigm of justice. However, the reference to the emotions remains generic. By focusing on three paradigmatic typologies, I propose to investigate this aspect further, and distinguish between the different emotions that motivate care. I will try, first, to offer a reflection on which emotions are likely to motivate ethical action within an ethics of care; second, to survey different potential obstacles to (...) these emotions and propose how they might be overcome to more successfully achieve good care and ethical action. (shrink)

The article tells the story of the rise and fall of the organic store Yggdrasill in Iceland. That story features humble founders, caring customers, dedicated staff, as well as anonymous investment funds, and it describes the conversion of organics from a niche market to mainstream consumption. Through an ethnographic account of everyday life at the organic store, the article analyzes how intimacy within the modern food chain is established through emotional practices. Staff and customers share feelings of reciprocity, not only (...) towards organic producers, but also towards each other through acts of selling and buying organic products, forming intimate attachment and creating trust to counter the fears and anonymity of the modern food chain. Drawing on theories of affect and emotional practices and combining ethnography with narrative analysis, the article explores the role of emotions and how the doing of emotions makes organic food consumption meaningful within the industrial food system. (shrink)

The article addresses the ‘messianic turn’ in contemporary continental philosophy, focusing on the concept of the katechon as the restraining force that delays the advent of the Antichrist in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. While Carl Schmitt held the passage on the katechon to ground the Christian doctrine of state power, Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Pauline messianism rather posits the ‘removal’ of the katechon as the pathway for messianic redemption. In our argument, the significance of this text goes beyond (...) the persistence of a vestige of the theological in modern politics. On the contrary, the logic of the katechon only comes into its own under modern nihilism as the resolution of the problem of social order in the absence of the eschatological dimension. The article focuses on the lethal paradox of the logic of the katechon, whereby the function of protection and restraint is converted into violence and anomie, and global political order becomes indistinguishable from global civil war. We conclude by outlining the conditions for suspending the katechonic function in a critical engagement with Agamben’s messianic politics. (shrink)

Recent success of Indian engineers, businessmen, as well as other technically qualified professionals has created an obsession with knowledge and creativity. Documents like India as a Knowledge Superpower have proliferated and we continually hear the mantra of investing in and harnessing of human capital. There are, however, several strands of human capital in India and not all of them harness knowledge and creativity. People on whom drugs are being tested represent one such human capital, which, even though it is being (...) energetically mobilized to provide India with a strategic advantage in the world market, also highlights the contradictions within India’s shifting imaginary, economy and politics. Drug trials in India, in the context of neoliberal globalization, not only challenge and complicate, but also operate within a constellation of divisions — labor/capital, west/non-west, colonial/sovereign, national/global and so on. In this article I analyze how the people on whom drug testing is being done in India are being ‘harnessed’ as human capital, which leads to politicization of ‘bare life’ through ‘inclusive-exclusion’. (shrink)

This article argues that new (and sometimes invisible) forms of civic protest are finding a voice in the age of the Internet. It poses the questions whether these voices of protest are (a) part of a long, militant and sometimes violent tradition of street politics based on class struggle or (b) new, peaceful and creative political (and anti-political) platforms (a metaphysical revolt) offering critical and innovative insights into the possibilities of democratic renewal - as part of a process of deepening (...) democracy into more ethical and participatory forms.En este artículo se argumenta que las nuevas (y a veces invisibles) formas de protesta cívica están encontrando voz en la era de internet. Se plantea la cuestión de si estas voces de protesta son (a) parte de una larga, militante y, en ocasiones, violenta tradición de política de la calle basada en la lucha de clases o bien (b) nuevas, pacíficas y creativas plataformas (una revuelta metafísica) políticas (y antipolítica), que ofrece una perspectiva innovadora y crítica respecto a las posibilidades de renovación democrática, como parte de un proceso de profundización de la democracia en formas más éticas y participativas. (shrink)

Popular protest is occurring on a remarkable scale in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is a significant degree to which it tends to be organized and articulated through the local. This contribution argues that while the political limitations of purely local modes of organization are clear, it should not be assumed that local struggles are some sort of misguided distraction from building a broader progressive movement. It is suggested that, on the contrary, the best prospects for the emergence of a broader (...) popular struggle lie in building, sustaining and linking local struggles. (shrink)

:In this essay I will look at four recent films that have organ transplantations “at their heart”: 21 Grams, L'Intrus, Dirty Pretty Things and Heart of Jenin. Each film in its own way shows how Nancy's concept of the intruder balances in a different dynamics between biopolitical and biophilosophical concerns and proposes in various ways a changed concept of sacrifice, transforming sacrifice from religious offering into political or ethical resistance and allowing a-religious strivings to persist.

This article investigates the biopolitical dimensions that have grown out of the union between biocapitalism and current science education reform in the US. Drawing on science and technology study theorists, I utilize the analytics of promissory valuation and salvationary discourses to understand how scientific literacy in the neo‐Sputnik era has deeply involved educational life in biocapitalist circuits of exchange and production. I lay out this emerging terrain of ‘futuricity’ through a biopolitical analysis of the National Academies highly influential policy recommendation (...) on science education, Rising Above the Gathering Storm as well as the Association of American Universities' National Defense Education and Innovation Initiative. Here it is argued that the educational subject usually seen as a site of human capital investment can better be understood as a ‘biovalue’ in at least two senses: the educational subject's body as a site of investment and as an extractable source of value directly related to the larger globally competitive regime of the rapidly growing bioeconomy. I conclude my analysis of the vital politics at play in the biocapitalist articulation of science education with an alternative model of scientific literacy that is based in what I call biodemocratic practices. I explore such a rereading of scientific literacy through the example of the GrowHaus—a sustainable urban farm situated in a marginalized community in a major US city. The GrowHaus offers a model of scientific literacy that rejects extractive ethics associated with biocapitalist production and instead promotes a sustainable and socially just practice of science. (shrink)

The article analyzes the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian war in terms of a colonial seizure undertaken by a fading but aggressive Russian empire. This highly political adventure is translated into more abstract terms, that is, an irresolvable conflict between existence, which is always the experience of coexistence devoid of any essence whatsoever, and imperial expansion, which is an infinite conquest of space indifferent to all forms of life. The dualism in question is backed up by the writings of two important scholars, namely, (...) the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and the Russian scientist and revolutionary Peter Kropotkin. Nancy’s philosophy of being-in-common is the development of Heidegger’s concept of Mitsein, where the meaning of Mit- (co-, with) is existential and not categorical. Nancy’s philosophy challenges all forms of communal essence, of which empire is one blatant example. For Kropotkin, existence is even more all-embracing, implying a continuity of different life forms. His doctrine of mutual aid is a law that governs both society and nature, as well as evolution itself. Even morality springs from “solidarity” and the joys of social life, while sympathy or love are too narrow a basis for human ethics. Viewed from this perspective, a colonial war would not only be the greatest waste of human lives and natural resources—it would contradict the very order of things. (shrink)

In 1990, Antonio Negri pointed out some problems with Deleuze's political philosophy. Substituting infra-structures for life or desire, as constitutive dimensions of power formations, did not imply giving up on Marx, but it certainly did imply a change in the table of conceptual analysis and a profound renovation of the questions that pertain to militant praxis. Taking this into account, we intend to explore the sense of a rare fidelity to Marx, and a certain idea of intellectual commitment that, reframing (...) its objects and its instruments, pretends to renew political thinking in order to confront the unforeseeable of new knowledge, new techniques and new political facts. (shrink)

Beginning with a reconsideration of what the school is and has been, this paper explores the idea of the school to come. Emphasizing the governmental role of education in modernity, I offer a line of thinking that calls into question the assumption of both the school and education as possible conduits for either democracy or social justice. Drawing on Derrida’s spectral ontology I argue that any automatic correlation of education with democracy is misguided: especially within redemptive discourses that seek to (...) liberate education from its present enclosure. This rereading of the field of education in the light of an account of the fundamental ontology of its key institution problematizes all rhetorics of education as social salvation. Education, it proposes, cannot be conceived as the ideal soul of a corrupted or as yet defective body, the school. Education—having taken on the character of an ontotheological principle—has become a governmental instrument as much as its specific institutions. This ontological condition can be understood within various accounts of the nature of contemporaneity. This paper considers the monstrous proposal that education be abandoned as the grounds for social, ethical and cultural redemption. The good news is that this abandonment opens the possibility for thinking beyond education, a beyond that is also beyond the strictures of instrumental rationality. (shrink)

This article, drawing on Peter Beilharz’s account of Bernard Smith’s conception of the Antipodes, argues for the utility of using the connections between Australia and New Zealand as a means of exploring aspects of settler state and national relations within a local, meso-regional and global perspective. The historical development of British imperial and settler state citizenship provides the setting for demonstrating how an Antipodean viewpoint could be pursued. Emphasis is placed on the creation and reproduction of aboriginal and immigrant minorities, (...) the establishment of strategic cross-Tasman regional relations, and shifts in the reconstruction of majority ethnic and national imaginings. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, biopolitics has become an established research field within the humanities and the social sciences. However, scholars agree that the academic status of biopolitics remains problematic due to the latter’s conceptual fuzziness, unmanageable scope and weak foundations. To address these issues, biopolitics theorists have engaged in reflexive efforts to convert biopolitics into a respectable discipline with a clear definition, research agenda and canon. In this article, I examine the reflexive biopolitics scholarship that has emerged in the (...) last decade and conclude that while biopolitics may not satisfy the criteria for achieving disciplinary respectability due to the chief aporia that both underpins and undermines the academic biopolitics project – namely, its seemingly infinite reach – the structure of biopolitics matches that of experimental knowledge, also known as counterscience, the university without condition and nomad science. (shrink)

I argue that Giorgio Agamben employs two, contradictory theories of the state in his works. Earlier works, such as "The Coming Community" and "Means without End", suggest that the state today functions as an aspect of the society of the spectacle where spectacle is the logical extension of the commodity form under late capitalism. This part of Agamben's work attributes a determined character to the state and a determining power to the economic forces of capitalism that conditions particular forms of (...) the state. Later work, such as "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" and " State of Exception", are preoccupied with the logic of juridical sovereignty and the increased frequency of states of emergency. This part of Agamben's work attributes a determining strength to the state under current conditions. Although his earlier work provides a more coherent narrative of how it is possible to move from contemporary society to ideal community, it does not provide the theory of political action necessary to overcome the power of the state he describes when he theorizes the state in "Homo Sacer" and " State of Exception". None of the three possibilities of political action present in his later works provides passage beyond state sovereignty without violating his philosophical commitments. (shrink)

The political economy of the information machine is discussed within the Marxist tradition of Italian operaismo by posing the hypothesis of an informational turn already at work in the age of the industrial revolution. The idea of valorizing information introduced by Alquati in a pioneering Marxist approach to cybernetics is used to examine the paradigms of mass intellectuality, immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism developed by Lazzarato, Marazzi, Negri, Vercellone and Virno since the 1990s. The concept of machinic by Deleuze and (...) Guattari is then adopted to extend Marx’s analysis of the industrial machine to the algorithms of digital machines. If the industrial machine can be described as a bifurcation of the domains of energy and information, this essay proposes to conceive the information machine itself as a further bifurcation between information and metadata. In conclusion, the hypothesis of the society of metadata is outlined as the current evolution of that society of control pictured by Deleuze in relation to the power embodied in databases. (shrink)

Human enhancement technologies raise serious ethical questions about health practices no longer content simply to treat disease, but which now also propose to “optimize” human beings’ physical, cognitive and psychological abilities. These technologies call for a reassessment of our relationship to health, the human body and the body's organic, identity and social functions. In nursing, such considerations are in their infancy. In this paper, we argue for the relevance of critical phenomenology as a way to better understand the ethical issues (...) related to human enhancement technologies (HET). In so doing, we seek to problematize HET and assess their influence on the future development of nursing science and practice. It is difficult to anticipate the concrete effects of HET, we suggest, because these practices reconfigure the meaning of normativity and disorient our conventional ethical landscape. In this context, we argue that the later work of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault invites a critical perspective into how techno‐scientific discourses modify our relationship to care, to health and to our own social and corporeal identities. Despite the traditional philosophical opposition between phenomenology and critical theory, we maintain that a hybrid critical phenomenological approach opens new ways to assess the integration of technology and practice. Our analysis understands HET as a process of “hybridization” between technological objects and human subjects. Critical phenomenology thus effectively questions anthropocentric definitions of technology, challenges the dichotomy between curative treatment and enhancement and, finally, prompts valuable reflection on the implications of HET for nursing theory and practice. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the way in which proximity and distance have been made relevant to cosmopolitanism and I discuss the significance contemporary theory attributes to border crossing. By employing colonial border crossing and its rationalization as an example, and by drawing from Alain Badiou's critique of political philosophy, I expose some of the problems of facile and faddish approaches to planetary movement. I argue that the real borders to be crossed by true cosmopolitans are internal and, regrettably, traversible, (...) raised at an early age, preserved through education and carried along wherever one goes. Then, I show how this thesis relativizes the drastic choice between cosmopolitanism and patriotism that is imposed by many current theories. By elaborating on Heraclitus's dictum that ‘the citizens must defend the law, as they would defend the wall of the city’, I sketch an account of patriotism that is (a) compatible with, and conducive to, cosmopolitanism as well as (b) mindful of the duplicity of the interplay of proximity and distance. (shrink)

In the aftermath of 9/11, world leaders addressed the nation as a body under threat and hastened in new policies to bolster border protection and ‘securitize’ immigration. While the terrorist attacks cast new forms of public attention on the risks posed by mobile agents, the link between national security and regulating migration has always been at the forefront of the constitution of the nation state. Despite this persistent anxiety towards the social impact of migration and the status of people on (...) the move, a more general understanding of mobility is not only missing in public debates, but has been a lacunae in the social sciences. What is mobility — a state, a force, a set of shifting co-ordinates? How does the definition of mobility shape social attitudes and personal experiences? This article examines the use of organic and mechanistic metaphors that have underpinned the classical paradigm for understanding of mobility in the social sciences. It argues that the global patterns of migration and the contemporary forms of hybrid subjectivity do not fit well with this paradigm. The limits and kinetophobic associations generated by the classical paradigm are examined through Harald Kleinschmidt’s theory of residentialism. The final part of this article outlines an alternative conceptual frame that is based on key terms from complexity theory. (shrink)

The article considers the research developed by the UniNomade project concerning the global financial crisis within the theoretical framework of Italian ‘workerism’ and post-workerist theory. On the whole, the UniNomade project offers a rich variety of stimuli to debate. However, in the work of UniNomade, there are some problematic elements, particularly when the authors invoke a series of ‘excesses’ in ‘cognitive capitalism’. This review-article argues that the old post-workerist thesis of an obsolescence of the law of value introduces into UniNomade’s (...) work an ambiguous determinism. (shrink)

Through recourse to Gilles Deleuze’s short polemical essay ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ and the accompanying interview on ‘Control and Becoming’, this article attempts to map out the conceptual contours of an artistic war machine that might be pitched against control and also play a role in the more ethico-political function of the constitution of a people. Along the way a series of other Deleuzian concepts are introduced and outlined – with an eye to their pertinence for art practice and, indeed, (...) for any more general ‘thought’ against control. At stake here is the development of a concept of fictioning – the production of alternative narratives and image-worlds – and also the idea of art practice as a form of myth-science, exemplified by Burroughs’ cut-up method. It is argued that these aesthetic strategies might offer alternative models for a subjectivity that is increasingly standardized and hemmed in by neoliberalism. (shrink)

At stake for this essay is the distinction between politics and war and the extent to which politics can survive war. Gender analysis reveals how high these stakes are by revealing the complexity of militarism. It also reveals the impossibility of gender identity as foundation for a more robust politics with respect to war. Instead, a non-ideal normative differentiation among kinds of violence is affirmed as that which politically cannot not be wanted.

Hardt and Negri's Empire pronounces the end of socialist/communist history based upon class and colonial struggles. The only dialectic of history is in the capacity of American capitalism for self-transformation and universalization. Empire presents a revisionary narrative of American republicanism, New Deal and post-war hegemony that has evolved into the current new world order. In this project, the struggle for social justice has shifted from national to international institutions of humanitarian justice and security sanctioned by US military and commercial power. (...) Yet Empire delivers its own post-communist manifesto, arguing that information capitalism cannot dominate the general intellect of its symbolic labour force. The latter must be understood in terms of Spinoza's concept of the constitutional capacity of the multitude for exercising its collective freedom, becoming-communist. Empire concedes the privatization of the industrial commons and ignores the repressive and violent interventions of old-order US imperialism. (shrink)

Over the last decade, there has been a considerable expansion of mindfulness programmes into a number of different domains of contemporary life, such as corporations, schools, hospitals and even the military. Understanding the reasons for this phenomenon involves, I argue, reflecting upon the nature of contemporary capitalism and mapping the complexity of navigating new digital technologies that make multiple and accelerated solicitations upon attention and our affective lives. Whilst acknowledging the benefits of mindfulness practice, this article argues that it is (...) equally important to attend to the ethical framework that gives orientation to these practices and the outer conditions that shape lived daily experience, such as school or work environments. I suggest that the well-meaning efforts to secularise mindfulness, provide scientific evidence for its effectiveness, and introduce it to wider publics may have served to impoverish the rich contribution that practices of mindfulness, situated within a broader ethical framework, can make to human lives, and arguably contribute to the educational endeavour. For example, the emphasis on transforming inner conditions of students’ lives can lead to the neglect of outer conditions, such as structural inequality, or unhealthy and exploitative work practices. This can result in practices that privilege individual wellbeing over compassion and concern for the happiness of others, providing a buffer against loving attention to the world and others. Instead, I ask how mindfulness in educational settings could come to be viewed in a different light if we reflect upon the ways in which school environments and curricula can promote mindfulness, awareness, sensitive inquiry, and contemplative practices through the day, rather than offering it as a discrete intervention focused on the self and wellbeing. (shrink)

O’BYRNE P and WATTS J. Nursing Inquiry 2012 [Epub ahead of print] Include, differentiate and manage: gay male youth, stigma and healthcare utilizationIn Canada, there has been a recent increase in HIV incidence among young men who have sex with men. However, gay male youth (GMY) may forego HIV testing due to fear of stigmatization. Therefore, the aim of this research was to explore the perceptions of stigma in health care within this population. The research was conducted through a series (...) of semi‐structured interviews with eight GMY aged 20–29, who frequented a gay‐friendly clinic in downtown Ottawa, Canada. In a sub‐analysis of the interviews utilizing the work of Hardt and Negri’s three‐part sequence – inclusion, differentiation and management – we found that homosexuality‐related stigmatization affects the interaction between GMY and health professionals. Interview participants perceived HIV‐related risk counselling as a manifestation of stigma. These findings reveal that the experience of stigma and stigmatization is not necessarily based on health professionals’ intentions, but rather, on patients’ perceptions of the interactions they have with health professionals. Specific modifications to the delivery of health care may help to overcome stigmatization. (shrink)

Methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) is a harm reduction approach for persons who wish to stop using opioids and is rather effective if used for a minimum of 12 months. Notably, research demonstrates that many persons enrolled in MMT programs discontinue care before this time, limiting its effects. To better understand this process, we undertook an exploratory descriptive qualitative study and interviewed 12 men and women who were using MMT. Using the theoretical work of Foucault and Hardt and Negri, the interview (...) data highlighted that MMT continues to be strongly stigmatized, and that it is a system of care that involves rewards and penalties, based on if patients behave according to prescribed norms. These results suggest that MMT is a disciplinary mechanism, albeit one that impedes its own access. We consequently recommend that healthcare providers work to facilitate access to MMT, which means altering care delivery. (shrink)

The paper identifies three recent lines of interpretation of the politics that can be derived from Deleuze and Guattari, all of which share a way of reading the dualisms in their work that can be traced back to how they understand the actual/virtual partition, and to an alleged pre-eminence of the virtual over the actual. It is argued that this reading is not only inaccurate, but obscures the political dimension of Deleuze and Guattari's work. Clarifying the latter requires a reinterpretation (...) of the dualisms involved (as dyads rather than binaries), of the relation between virtual and actual (as a formal distinction where one acts back upon the other), and the drawing of a clear distinction between what Deleuze calls a ‘transcendent exercise’ of thought and sensibility and the properly metaphysical exercise that sets up the distinction between virtual and actual. What then appears is an image of Deleuze's and Guattari's thought that is far more concerned with practical questions and with a situated political practice of intervention. (shrink)

Is the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri compatible with critical realism? In this article I argue that their book Empire is not, whereas Multitude is. Critical realists should be interested in this question because the passage from Empire to Multitude can be reconstructed as a case of critical realist underlabouring and, as such, exemplifies an openness to critique and changing political circumstances that critical realists prescribe for themselves but unfortunately tend in practice to ignore. Highlighting the concepts and (...) practice of underlabouring, of judgemental rationality and epistemological relativism, I argue that Hardt and Negri can also underlabour for critical realists, in that their work demonstrates the need for underlabouring to proceed in a non-philosophical as well as philosophical vein. Thus, striving for a new science and human emancipation in critical realism can assume a theoretically as well as an empirically informed content, and a historically situated commitment. (shrink)

This article explores the link between the territorial imperative of the modern state, the exercise of violence and the practice of cartography. After first tracing the ways in which the exercise of ‘non-state’ coercion has been either eliminated historically or isolated ideologically, the question of the map is brought to bear on the issue of violence and territoriality. The article thus illustrates the importance of cartographic violence: the way the state and its violent constitution of territory have been sanctified through (...) the project of the map. (shrink)

Democracy and the state are two political notions that have come under considerable duress in late modernity. This paper considers a prominent critic of both, Sheldon Wolin. The paper examines three elements that figure in Wolin's analyses of democracy and the modern state in a central way: community, memory, and the culture of history. A theorisation of these elements can illuminate what is at stake in the articulation of political conceptions that yield communal forms through the constitution of political space. (...) Wolin's analyses of democracy, the state, and modern power can be of help, first, in elucidating the political valences of the three elements themselves; second, in specifying relationships of mutuality among them; and third, in theorising what is at issue in the transposition of these elements from the domestic sphere to the international. The paper speaks mainly to the first and second concerns. A path is explored for thinking what is at stake in the third, namely, locating in and then transposing from the domestic sphere a ‘we’ which does not enjoy a precise ontology, but which is nonetheless capable of giving collaborative efforts in world-political spheres another political ground. (shrink)

In the wake of Foucault, the debate on biopolitics has focused on the tensions of bíos and zoé, community and immunity, generation and thanatopolitics. What remains obscure in these accounts is the experiential aspect of life – its unfolding and entanglement with the ageing process. This is true both of approaches that emphasize the ethical implications of the life sciences and those that explore the biopolitical workings of wider social processes. In the contemporary capitalist formation, life’s unfolding is caught up (...) in global flows of information, finance and labour. The organization of the human faculties, the general preconditions for knowledge and communication, becomes central to value creation. And the human body, like fixed capital for Marx, becomes a cost to be amortized as quickly as possible. Investigating these processes with regard to transformations in practices of care provides a means for reassessing current debates regarding the ageing of people and populations. (shrink)

Institutionalized practices of collective justification are central for theorizing international fairness. Institutions matter because they play a significant part in the construal of fairness claims through the provision of internal standards for moral assessment. Conceptions of international fairness must spell out how collective justification works by addressing the jurisprudential and institutional issues at stake in the specification of the moral grounds for compliance with international institutions on the one hand and international civil disobedience on the other. Theoretical models of institutions (...) that do not pay attention to collective justification are inadequate on fairness grounds. More specifically, mainstream neoliberal institutionalist accounts of international regimes are deeply problematic when used in the normative evaluation of international institutions, as they offer the wrong benchmark for moral assessment, given their roots in a brand of exchange theory that is blind to the distribution of burdens and benefits from cooperation. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to explicate the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work through the concept of immanent causality. Deleuze finds in Spinoza a philosophy of immanent causality used to solve the problem of the relation between substance, attribute and mode as an expression of substance. But, when he proceeds to take up this notion of immanent causality found in Spinoza in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze instead inverts it into a modal one such that the (...) identity of substance may be said only of the difference of the modes. Complicating this further, Deleuze and Guattari claim in A Thousand Plateaus that substance, attribute, and mode are each, themselves, multiplicities. What is Philosophy? takes up immanent causality once again, this time through a constructivist lens aimed at resolving the question of the relation between philosophical multiplicities: ‘plane,’ ‘persona,’ and ‘concept.’ By following the different formulations of immanent causality in these works this essay hopes to discover the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work. (shrink)

This article inquires into the clinical figure of paranoia and its constitutive role in the articulation of the nation-state discourse in Europe, uncovering a central tension between a principle of integrity and a dualist spatial configuration. A conceptual distinction between ‘border’ (finis) and ‘frontier’ (limes) will help to expose the political effects of such a tension, unveiling the way in which a solid and striated organisation of space has been mobilised in the topographic antagonism of the nation, sustaining the phantasm (...) of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient finitude. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article addresses the fundamental question of what is ethical leadership by rearticulating relations between leaders and followers in terms of “affective leadership.” The article develops a Spinozian conception of ethics which is underpinned by a deep suspicion of ethical systems that hold obedience as a primary virtue. We argue that the existing research into ethical leadership tends to underplay the ethical capacities of followers by presuming that they are in need of direction or care by morally superior leaders. In (...) contrast, affective leadership advocates a profoundly political version of ethics, which involves people in the pursuit of joyful encounters that augment our capacity to affect and be affected by others. Instead of being led by people in leadership positions, we are led by active affections that enhance our capacity for moral action. (shrink)

The problematique addressed by the article is the growth of a dominant discourse in early childhood education and care, which has a strong effect on policy and practice, paralleled by an increasing number of other discourses which problematise most of the values, assumptions and understandings of the former. Yet there is very little engagement between these discourses, in large part because they are situated within different paradigms—modernity in the former case, postfoundationalism in the latter. The author argues that the absence (...) of dialogue and debate impoverishes early childhood and weakens democratic practice. The article considers whether and in what conditions the concept of agonistic pluralism might provide a framework for political engagement among at least some on either side of the paradigmatic divide, and takes evaluation as one example of a subject for an agonistic politics of early childhood. (shrink)

The problematique addressed by the article is the growth of a dominant discourse in early childhood education and care, which has a strong effect on policy and practice, paralleled by an increasing number of other discourses which problematise most of the values, assumptions and understandings of the former. Yet there is very little engagement between these discourses, in large part because they are situated within different paradigms—modernity in the former case, postfoundationalism in the latter. The author argues that the absence (...) of dialogue and debate impoverishes early childhood and weakens democratic practice. The article considers whether and in what conditions the concept of agonistic pluralism might provide a framework for political engagement among at least some on either side of the paradigmatic divide, and takes evaluation as one example of a subject for an agonistic politics of early childhood. (shrink)

Since representations of social life are rarely separate in their effects from the worlds they aspire to depict, this article argues that as producers of such representations, sociologists are automatically responsible for considering the performative consequences of their work. In particular, it suggests that sociologists have an ongoing normative responsibility to draw out emergent strands of social hope from their empirical analyses. Through a comparison of Rorty, Levitas, and Unger’s different theorizations of social hope, the article argues for a pragmatic (...) model of social hope that is rooted in empirical conceptions of the past and present, but, alive to the transcendent possibilities of the emerging future, refuses to be entirely determined by these conceptions. (shrink)

Sensory and tracking technologies are being introduced into workplaces in ways Taylor and the Gilbreths could only have imagined. New work design experiments merge wellness with productivity to measure and modulate the affective and emotional labour of resilience that is necessary to survive the turbulence of the widespread incorporation of agile management systems, in which workers are expected to take symbolic direction from machines. The Quantified Workplace project was carried out by one company that fitted sensory algorithmic devices to workers’ (...) computers and bodies, which, this article argues, identify workers’ so-called agility and reveal management practices that track affective and emotional labour, categorized in the project as stress, subjective productivity and wellbeing. Capital’s accelerated attempts to capture more areas of work and workers’ capacities facilitate the conversion of labour power into a source of value but also results in alienation and abstraction. Participants’ resistance to participation in the Quantified Workplace reveals tensions in the labour process when affect is measured in processes of corporate change. (shrink)

In this response to Pieter Lemmens’ post-autonomist evaluation of the liberatory potential of digital network technologies, Kate Milberry finds the concept of pharmakon as a diagnostic to uncover what ails the worker in technocapitalism wanting. Through an exploration of Marxian concepts and critical theory of technology, she explores ways to augment political responses to capitalist exploitation in the digital age. Milberry concludes that it is not possible to change the sociotechnical foundation of contemporary life until we fundamentally alter the capitalist (...) social relations concretized in technology. This can only be done through adopting an ethic of care, that is to say: only through love. (shrink)

The article interrogates transnational feminisms as a concept and as a practice. It frames its analysis using contemporary theories of globalization and the older concept of global sisterhood as a backdrop to the concept of transnational feminism. To assess the practical dimension of transnational feminisms, the analysis focuses on women's rights as a human rights movement and the transnationalization of Latin American feminisms. The article suggests that, although transnational feminisms (particularly feminist postcolonial theories) envision themselves in a new frame and (...) see themselves as committed to intersectional analysis and transversal politics, there are important gaps between the intentions (theory, tactics) and outcomes of their theory and practice. (shrink)

The principal argument advanced here is that the principle of immanence, common to Deleuze and Spinoza, will — if we follow its political radicalism — lead to a revalorization of existing Western democracy, to the degree that it allows for an internal and permanent self-reflexivity . The principle of the discontinuity of spheres of rationality, the emotive basis of all political power, and the principle of multiple and incomplete association distinguishes this idea from the Habermasian public sphere. Confrontation with the (...) void of the political, as much as the absence of a substantive People and knowledge of justice, is the key aspect of a democratic politics of multiplicity and heterogeneity. (shrink)

Hardt and Negri’s Empire series has inspired twenty years of debate and experimentation across the social sciences and humanities in fields as divergent as international re...