'Hands Tied' brings together two very different films about hands: Maria Lassnig's Palmistry (1973) and Ayesha Hameed's A Rough History (of the Destruction of Fingerprints) (2016). These works are contextualised and their scope extended further by a roundtable discussion featuring participants Rachel Aumiller, Sam Dolbear, Nadine El-Enany, Amelia Groom, Clio Nicastro, Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen, and M. Ty., who discuss their relation to fate, work, pleasure, touch, and surveillance.

This chapter is particularly concerned with the status of history, dance history especially, within Dance Studies. It asks what has befallen the more recent status of history, once an epistemological support at a critical stage in Dance Studies’s early development, now that Dance Studies is better established, relatively speaking, within the academy. Is history so much scaffolding which, having fulfilled its purpose in enabling the disciplinary plant to take root, is to be dismantled and, if not actually discarded, at least (...) demoted? Three factors will be identified and proposed as having particular significance in this connection, imbuing this chapter with a tri-partite structure. The first concerns the already noted strong imprint of Cultural Studies on Dance Studies and the possible bearing of this imprint on dance history’s status within Dance Studies. For the particular manner in which Dance Studies has construed Cultural Studies may, this chapter will suggest, have impacted upon dance history’s standing within communities of dance scholarship. The second factor has to do with the implications, for dance history, of a particular critique based in a branch of dance scholarship, that perceives phenomenology, which it deems a good fit for dance inquiry, as inherently antithetical to history. In particular, this critique takes the work of Michel Foucault - which it identifies closely with, and as, historical practice - as incompatible with dance enquiry. Incompatibility is staked on the twin grounds of Foucault’s break with, and supposed resulting and enduring antipathy towards, phenomenology; and his perceived embrace of history which is, itself, also understood to result from such a break. In effect, then, this critique questions the very suitability, for dance research, of approaches based in history-focussed inquiry. The ability to call this critique into question, in the ways that the present discussion, in seeking to rehabilitate Foucault, and so history, needs to demonstrate, constitutes the third factor. This final factor makes two particular, further demands of this chapter. Namely that the interrelated questions of Foucault, phenomenology, and dance; and of the position which phenomenology has itself adopted in relation to history, be re-visited and re-evaluated to the extent that space reasonably allows. Fortunately, these interrelated questions are ones which have - relatively recently - preoccupied scholarship on Foucault, and on phenomenology, respectively. This preoccupation may in and of itself be one possible indicator that there is indeed more at stake, and so to consider, regarding both questions, than the lines drawn by the aforementioned critique might suggest. (shrink)

Physicien théoricien, philosophe de la physique et historien des théo­ries physiques, le savant catholique français Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) a profondément marqué la pensée du vingtième siècle. Chacun connaît le Système du monde, dont les dix volu­mes ont contribué à la redécouverte de la science médiévale, et La théorie physique, qui a notamment donné lieu à la célèbre «thèse Duhem-Quine». Si Clio a donc gardé de Duhem le sou­venir d’un grand historien des sciences et d’un philosophe perspicace de la physique, (...) lui-même cependant n’aspirait qu’à être reconnu comme physicien. Son œuvre est en effet traver­sée par un projet scientifique qui consiste à ordonner et à réunir les diverses branches de la physique sous l’égide de la thermo­dynamique dans le cadre d’une théorie représentative et non explicative du réel. C’est ce projet que Duhem a voulu réaliser dans ses publications scientifiques, exposer dans ses écrits philoso­phiques, et finalement cautionner par ses recherches historiques. Cependant l’investissement toujours plus important de Duhem en histoire des sciences et la présence dans son œuvre de con­sidéra­tions apologétiques et d’écrits patriotiques peuvent don­ner à penser qu’il s’est progressivement détourné de ce projet primordial au profit d’autres préoccupations. De même, les tensions qui, à l’inté­rieur de ce projet scientifique, subsistent entre sa volonté unificatrice et sa revendication phénoménaliste peuvent conduire à une relativi­sation de cette dernière, conçue comme une demande contextuelle, passa­gère et finalement peu significative. Sans ignorer ces préoccu­pations historiques, religieuses ou patriotiques, sans négliger ce con­flit d’intérêt entre les deux parties constitutives du projet duhémien, cette étude entend tout d’abord réaffirmer que ce projet scientifique ne sera jamais ni abandonné, ni amputé. Toutefois, dès lors que sont maintenues la permanence, la prio­rité et l’intégralité de ce projet, trois paradoxes surgissent im­médiatement. Si Duhem se voulait avant tout physicien et souhaitait être reconnu comme tel, par quelle extravagance de l’histoire est-il finalement connu pour ses recherches histori­ques et ses travaux philosophiques et non pour ce qui lui tenait le plus à cœur? S’il ne voulait être qu’un illustre physicien, pourquoi s’est-il acharné, au retour du laboratoire, à exhumer de l’oubli les manuscrits et les théories scientifiques des au­teurs médiévaux? Enfin, s’il voulait vraiment établir une physi­que qui soit unifiée, cohérente et parfaite, pourquoi se prive-t-il du réa­lisme et s’embarrasse-t-il du phénoménalisme? Basée sur la corres­pondance inédite de Duhem, cette étude, centrée plus particu­liè­rement sur ce troisième paradoxe, contribue fina­lement à élucider chacun d’eux. (shrink)

This paper briefly describes the life of Otte Gross and his thoughts on sexuality, society, and repression. This provides the basis to interpret the #MeToo movement as functioning in the same way as a repressed memory that breaks through to consciousness. Gross' suggestion that society "rapes" individuals and his assertion of a primordial matriarchal society are useful insights in understanding the #Metoo movement.

Feminist philosophers are right to criticize Hegel’s prejudices against women. In many of his works, Hegel reduces women to their physiology as means of explaining why they occupy a subordinate role in nature and in society. Such treatment seems arbitrary at best, for the gendering of roles disrupts Hegel’s dialectical approach to spirit without any meaningful gain. Despite this defect in Hegel’s work, what is positive in Hegelian social and political philosophy remains intact. In this paper I argue that the (...) sexist claims that Hegel makes about women are irrelevant to his theory of the family in the Philosophy of Right. Therein, Hegel outlines three components that are necessary for the completion of the family: marriage, property and assets, and the raising of children. Hegel also includes a description of the different roles occupied by family members and divides these roles along gender lines. Given the three components that are essential to the family, I argue that there is no necessary basis for familial roles to be divided by gender. (shrink)

Al penetrar en el tiempo histórico y en la figura de Simón Rodríguez, Arturo Uslar Pietri esboza una explicación del problema originario de la identidad de América; su conflicto consigo misma, las trampas de la libertad, las dificultades dramáticas con las que tropieza el proyecto civilizatorio de la América republicana. Esta visión conflictiva de lo americano aparece prefigurada magistralmente en la propia vida del hombre Simón Rodríguez, por la desmesura de su figura, tanto intelectual como humana, por encarnar de la (...) forma más intensa posible la utopía de la fraternidad y la libertad. En este trabajo nos aproximamos a la visión uslariana de Simón Rodríguez y a la simbología de su figura como representación del problema esencial de Hispanoamérica. (shrink)

Friedrich Schlegel's theory of irony is examined with reference to his theory of the literary fragment. Both are informed not only by Fichte's I = I but by Ritter's theory of galvanism as well as by John Brown's theory of medicine. In Ritter, electrical energy is created through the compression of opposite chemical elements in a closed (fragmentary) space. Brown's theory of excitability presents the compressive "other" as actually soliciting the energetic sparks that Schlegel associates with Witz. The literary fragment (...) is an electrically charged engine for the ironic production of further fragments. (shrink)

The article re-visits the different scholarly approaches to Hegel's end-of-art scenario, and then proposes a new reading whereby ending and finitude are presented as essential features of beautiful art. The first and most determinant of art's endings is the death of the Christly art object, not representations of Christ, but the actual death of (the son of) God himself as the last classical artwork. The death of God represents the last word in Greco-Roman art, the accomplishment of the beautiful individuality (...) and its failure to present the Absolute in a singular, naturally infected, lively, human (made) form. The ending of art brings about a new form of the sacred: the representational language of revelatory religion. The ongoing production of modern artistic forms is a feature of actuality ("Wirklichkeit") and as such is condemned to an infinite approximation of what has been. Such actuality nonetheless "ends" in the ironic discourse of contemporary artistic expression, which Hegel qualifies as a "Vereitelung". The final realization of the beautiful art form, as a human-informed singularity embodying absolute content, may well be the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, whose performative iteration takes place in the form of "worship" practiced in the modern, state university. (shrink)

Hegel's critique of Schleiermacher as the embodiment of two currents of romantic irony: empiricist skepticism (Schlegel) and feeling (Novalis), are explicitly presented as "absolute presupposition of our time". The article associates these "presuppositions" with features of postmodernity, as presented by Lyotard. Thus, the Hegelian critique of Schleiermacher might be read as a critique of postmodernity.

After noting how academic philosophers have shunned psychobiography, the author brings to focus the psychobiographical sources of Martin Heidegger's "turn" from a hermeneutic phenomenology to a form of metaphysical mysticism.

In his Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2008), entitled ‘The Puzzling Hegel Renaissance’, Frederick Beiser, the editor of the volume, claims that Anglophone Hegel research has been in the main deeply problematic and proceeds to offer a program of research for its rejuvenation. The paper argues that the reasons based on which he exercises his critique (antiquarianism and anachronism) fail on internal grounds and that, therefore, Hegelforschung should not be reduced to his proposed research program (...) (Konstellationsforschung). The argument is built around four Hegelian themes: (a) the nature of the Hegelian categories, (b) Hegel’s philosophy of nature, (c) the relation between antiquarianism and our culture, and (d) Hegel’s methodology. (shrink)