The Löwenheim-Hilbert-Bernays theorem states that, for an arithmetical first-order language L, if S is a satisfiable schema, then substitution of open sentences of L for the predicate letters of S...

By critically analyzing the status and differentiation of bodies and their lives, the author expands the vision of governmentality beyond the West in order to define the body beyond the pacified techno-promises of their emancipation through fragmentation, calculability and programmability. By elaborating the nature, power, and promises of dominant digital technologies and technobodies, the author conceptualizes them in relation to the shift between bio- and necropolitics/power and in relation to violence, (digital) coloniality, and racialization to which bodies are exposed. It (...) is about the normality of violence against the Other, also in relation to the principle of separation of virtual bodies and “surplus flesh,” which increases exponentially with technological development. The author seeks to understand how we have come to the point where techno-objects are humanized, given agency, while the body and life of the Other are dehumanized, deprived of any rights. The article contextualizes and re-politicizes the shifting relations between subject and object, particularly within our forensic contemporaneity. (shrink)

I. The Confrontation of Terror and Play: An Intellectual-Historical Constellation in Early West Germany In September 1968, a conference took place in the castle of the town of Rheda , remote from German intellectual centers. Boasting illustrious names from the German history of ideas, such as Jean Bollack, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Hans Blumenberg, and Manfred Fuhrmann, this gathering of twenty-eight highly renowned scholars appears, in retrospect, to be one of the more memorable events in the intellectual history of (...) the Federal Republic of Germany. It had a lasting impact on German research in the fields…. (shrink)

In this article, an anthropologist examines the question, asked today in diverse forms by an increasing variety of actors: what is the aim or telos of the social sciences? From within the disciplinary communities of the social sciences themselves, the answers given are inseparable from questions of theory and method. This essay engages some recent experimental, postcritical responses as formulated by scholars in the fields of anthropology and STS. Following decades of reflexive debates and changing institutional and disciplinary environments, both (...) anthropology and STS currently experience heightened levels of uncertainty about theories and methods, means and ends. In this context, the emergence and vigor of a number hybrid positions, eschewing traditional separations between facts and values, the conceptual and the empirical, and the descriptive and the performative, are noteworthy. This essay examines three distinctive and novel responses to the question of what comes after critique, found in the writings of the anthropologist Hirokazu Miyazaki, who has defined what he terms a method of hope; in the experimental anthropology of Richard Rottenburg, which offers parables of modern development aid; and in the scholarship of Helen Verran, a philosopher and STS ethnographer who constructs the figure of the good faith analyst. Coming to terms with the challenges, possibilities, tensions, and paradoxes of these and other postcritical responses is the key purpose of the present discussion. (shrink)

This essay describes the phenomenon of panic from both neurological and affective points of view. It draws on the work of Japp Panksepp, who argues for the importance of distinguishing between fear as a response to physical threat, and panic as a response to the loss of the attachment object. While fear flees, panic, perhaps contrary to appearances, seeks security. This view of panic throws a new light on classic analyses of crowd behaviour, among them those of Le Bon, Tarde (...) and Canetti, but it also has implications for how panic takes hold via electronic media, and for how outbreaks may be calmed. Finally, the essay argues that mediatised panic is a distraction from fear—in which anything at all may represent physical danger, but which at least offers a range of possible responses for addressing the problem, and offers the opportunity for the transformative work performed by cognition on affect. Here the paper draws on the script theory of Silvan Tomkins to provoke questions of the social usefulness of fear in the face of some current arguments to the contrary. (shrink)