The Secret of Becoming Nobody … and Everybody

Being Jacob: Young Children, Automedial Subjectivity, and Child Social Media Influencers

Among the diverse traditions sometimes grouped under the broad rubric of courtly lyric, the Galician-Portuguese cantigas—especially the cantigas de amigo and de amor, but to a substantial extent the cantigas de escárnio e maldizer as well—present perhaps the greatest formal homogeneity, marked by a devotion to structural and thematic repetition. This chapter shows how recent research in the history of emotion and lyric theory sheds light on the perennial questions of genre, conventionality, and sincerity raised by the dominant formal aspects of the cantigas. In particular, the foregrounding of poetic form and musicality in the parallelistic cantigas, often praised by critics for their quintessentially lyric quality, sits uneasily alongside transhistorical notions of the lyric as a medium for the first-person expression of emotional experience. After an overview of debates about conventionality and sincerity in the cantigas in relation to notions of lyric subjectivity, the chapter turns to the reflective relationship between the cantigas de amigo and de amor. Here, questions of gender, improvisation, and dramatization emerge as a field in which Galician-Portuguese poets playfully and self-consciously examined poetic convention. An analysis of key emotional concepts such as coita and desejo reveals how the cantigas challenge the very distinctions between repetition and variation, sincerity and irony or performance, thereby tying the notion of poetic creativity to the expression of emotion in unexpected forms.

This article introduces and examines aspects of Lacan's critical social theory, it examines why a Lacanian psychoanalytical appoach can be regarded as pertinent to analysis of planning processes. The article introduces the notion of the Lacanian subject and explains some of the key Lacanian concepts including the ‘Real’, the ‘Other’, and the Lacanian signifier. These concepts are then related to the acquisitions of planning education and professional skill development—what ‘shapes’ the planner? The article suggests that planning practices and decision‐making are often constrained by the planner's desire to conform to self‐imposed perceptions of professional and societal expectations. These practices contribute to maintenance of the ideological edifices which constitute social reality in that they do not necessarily materialise a planner's own values and beliefs, but rather the beliefs and values which a planner ‘thinks’ that planners are supposed to have and to express in society. The article concludes with a consideration of the implications this has for planning ethics.

Care is both a human ability and a human need: it is about considering the needs and interests of others. Important discussions about the philosophical foundations of care arose, along with questions about the role of employees, leaders, and managers in enacting care. Moreover, various philosophers in the distant and no so distant past were concerned with notions of care in the context of ethical living or care as an aspect of organising work. In contrast, the so-called ‘feminine’ insights have arisen from a renewed consideration of the ethical dimensions of personal and informal relationships among persons, which are also more closely associated with the notion of ethics of care. M. Fotaki draws on Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger’s work on matrixial border-spaces to consider relationality from a feminist poststructuralist and feminist psychoanalytic perspective, explaining how the notion of subjectivity is meaningless without consideration of others. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.

Filippo Forcignano's review of Mario Vegetti's Figure dell’identità greca. L’io, l’anima, il corpo, il soggetto highlights the work’s meticulous exploration of identity constructs in ancient Greek thought. This collection, featuring twelve seminal essays, underscores Vegetti’s nuanced analysis of key philosophical concepts like justice, the soul, and the body-politic analogy, emphasizing their relevance in both historical and modern contexts. Vegetti rejects simplistic interpretations of Greek psychology, presenting a complex interplay between psyche, soma, and emerging notions of subjectivity. The essays traverse the intersections of medicine, ethics, and politics, demonstrating the critical, interdisciplinary approach that defined Vegetti’s scholarship. Forcignano celebrates the intellectual clarity and moral rigor of Vegetti's work, marking it as an invaluable contribution to the study of ancient philosophy.

Reading Politics with Machiavelli is an anachronistic reading of certain key concepts in Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses (as well as some of his correspondence). In 1513, soon after the Medici returned to power in Florence, Machiavelli lost his position as First Secretary to the Republic, and he was exiled. On his family farm, he began a self-consciously anachronistic reading of great political figures of antiquity, and, in combination with his own experience as a diplomat, crafted a unique perspective on the political crises of his time. At our own moment of democratic crisis, as the democratic imagination, as well as democratic habits and institutions face multiple attacks from neoliberalism, white nationalism, and authoritarianism, I argue that a similar method, in which we read Machiavelli’s work as he read Livy’s and Plutarch’s, can help us see the contingency, and the increasingly forgotten radical potential, of our politics. Louis Althusser argued that Machiavelli functions for us as an uncanny authority, one whose apparent familiarity is dispelled as we examine his epistolary yet opaque account of history, politics, and authority. This makes his readings a potentially rich resource for a time of democratic crisis. With that challenge in mind, we will examine the problems of conspiracy, prophecy, torture, and exile and use a close reading of Machiavelli’s work to make out new perspectives on the politics of our time.

The late Algerian author Assia Djebar had published four novels in French before she famously retreated from writing for ten years. Disillusioned with the creative possibilities of her "step-mother tongue", yet reluctant to write in the formal Arabic she had come to associate with religious nationalism, the author turned to film to unearth the "buried voices" of Algerian women, whose accounts of occupation and independence in vernacular Arabic would reveal a rich alternative archive. Focusing on "the gaze" and "voice", two key concepts in Djebarian discussions of Algerian femininity, this contribution examines the destabilizing impact of Djebar's use of material images and sound, tracing the strategies of decoloniality and dissonance she carried into her later written work. Rather than recuperating Algerian women's voices to make up the gaps in the national/colonial archive, the article argues that Djebar's films dwell in the radical potential of irrecuperability, exploring new possibilities of feminine resistance from without re/presentation and History.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the importance of a notion of subjectivity for anthropology. It argues that recognition of the contradictions of investment and consumption enables a fuller understanding of pricelessness – being beyond price, value or worth. The book explores the concept of subjectivity by linking it to theories of the gendered subject and new forms of subjectification. It focuses on the metaphor of the whirlpool, accomplishes its own conceptual shifts through a symbolic analysis of a text that contextualizes indigenous constructs. The book considers the kind of 'closure' needed for the production of knowledge as a coherent unit; 'some notes on the context of Marilyn Strathern's scholarly oeuvre' lays out the key perspectives in Strathern's work which speak across disciplines.

The aim of this study is to rethink the notion of subjectivity within the context of «social acceleration» and the «risk society», where traditional institutions are losing their stabilizing function, and individuals face the challenges of anxious freedom and informational overload. The authors seek to demonstrate how dialogue, phenomenological self-regulation, and the principles of Gestalt therapy shape a «new face» of the subject-one capable of maintaining autonomy and responsibility in contemporary post-industrial dynamics. The methodological foundation of the study is grounded in philosophical discourse (Kant, Heidegger, Beck, Bauman, Castells) combined with qualitative analysis of psychotherapeutic practices. Key concepts of the Gestalt approach are examined-such as «organismic self-regulation», «mindful presence», and dialogical contact-drawing on case material from individual and group sessions, as well as empirical data on their effectiveness. Research results show that the skill of slowing down and observing one’s own bodily and emotional responses increases the internal locus of control, reduces anxiety, and enhances the ability to engage in constructive dialogue. Participants in Gestalt groups exhibit lower susceptibility to manipulative media stimuli and a stronger sense of authorship over their own decisions. It is emphasized that dialogical self-regulation does not contradict rationality but complements it with phenomenological sensitivity and an ethical orientation toward the «I — You» relationship. The prospects of the study promise for the integration of Gestalt principles into educational, corporate, and social programs, contributing to the development of a culture of responsibility and supporting subjective maturity in the face of accelerating global changes.

From the articulation of the theoretical contributions of Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, I contrast the dialogue between agency and structure and I describe the developments of subjectivity notions, power and structure on each author. First, I return the key concepts of Elias, to think about figuration and structuring. Then, I bring Foucault and his decentralization of subject. At last, I discuss part of Bourdieu's theory, highlighting the weight of the constructivist structural analysis. To, finally, protrude the dialogues and disputes among the three authors.

This article explores “literature sickness”, a term coined by the contemporary Iranian-American writer Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and developed, I suggest, in her novel Call Me Zebra (2018). In doing so, it aims to offer not only an account of this novel, but to consider the radical potential of the condition Van der Vliet Oloomi outlines. This potential lies in the challenge to the dualism of reality and representation posed by literature sickness, an idea I develop comparatively via Call Me Zebra and the reflections on exile and, specifically, world literature in the work of Edward Said and Erich Auerbach. To develop these ideas further, I explore key concepts relating to the politics of world literature – exile, marginalization, and dissent. I focus on the work of Pascale Casanova to show how the concept of literature sickness that I develop in my readings of the novel relates to current debates in world literature theory. I position Call Me Zebra within a wider critical debate in order to argue that this novel offers a distinctive response to the Kantian dualism evoked in much contemporary world literature theory, one that I unpack using Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour. Deleuze’s philosophy of literature is central to my reading of Call Me Zebra, as it has distinct parallels with Zebra’s own theoretical musings. I use Deleuze to illustrate how, in the novel, Zebra’s exile gives her an especial perspective on oppression and marginalization, revealing literature’s capacity for imagining new futures and ways of belonging, and making Call Me Zebra a paradigmatic text of literature sickness and its radical potential.

With Donna Haraway, a new age of the feminist imaginary was born. This imaginary evocatively constructs new feminist subjectivities that are an amalgam of species, sensibilities and ambiguities. Despite the liberating potential of these imagined cyborgs devoid of normativity, the material digital cultures, and technological cultures, that enabled a social movement to this imagined cyborg was/is at a significantly different place in time without subjectivities. Writing on the “Metaphor and Materiality” of technofeminisms, Judy Wacjman opines, “Haraway is much stronger at providing evocative figurations of a new feminist subjectivity than she is at providing guidelines for a practical emancipatory politics” (101). This paper intends to extend the possibilities of feminist imaginaries for theorisations of technology by first looking at this gap between imagined and material subjectivities. I ask “Whose emancipatory politics?” to point out that despite their insistence on fragmentations of identity and forms of totalisation, western feminist imaginaries of technology do not convey or derive from an inclusive politics of representation or location. Drawing from feminist historiography and transnational feminist frameworks, I insist on the radical potential of feminist imaginaries that are written and rewritten through transnational endeavours and consideration of “nested differences”. The second part of the paper derives from the first – building on the importance of transnational feminist imaginaries – and asks how? How can western feminist imaginaries expand their potential by transgressing their postmodern notions of subjectivity and agency without abandoning them? Here I introduce the “postcolonial technological subject” as a representational figure for a transnational feminist politics of technology by drawing guidelines for transnational feminist theories of technology. My guidelines are informed by Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s conception of transnational feminism, visions for solidarity such as Black Cyberfeminism, Data Feminism and The Xenofeminist Manifesto.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the ‘servitisation’ of domestic space in the co-living sector. It considers how this has enabled providers in New York City to thrive under the institutionally precarious circumstances catalysed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The book deconstructs the discourses and imaginaries being used to justify and promote shrinking domesticities – the reframing of small housing as positive and inevitable. It highlights the implications of small and shared domestic space as lived and embodied – who is opting into these housing models, why, and how the spaces are experienced on a day-to-day basis. The book also considers the potential of tiny housing as a ‘sufficient everyday practice’, reshaping consumption practices and changing how households perceive sustainability in relation to the domestic, and presents the radical potential of alternative micro-dwelling arrangements within housing systems.

This article takes a genealogical approach to the material origin of what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘anthropological machine’, analyzing the dispositif by which the ontological and axiological dualism between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ first took place in archaic societies. Using some key concepts of René Girard’s anthropology, it is possible to argue that this dualism is rooted in the violent practice of victimage sacrifice. In other words, I claim that the anthropological machine is originally performed by a sacrificial dispositif. Though in modern society the human/animal dichotomy is performed by other dispositifs, the trace of this origin remains in the form of what Gianfranco Mormino calls sacrificial survivals. An analysis of the survival of the violent parameter of equality demonstrates that making a conceptual shift to equality as equal vulnerability is the key to creating a break with the long-lasting effects of the sacrificial dispositif. Continental and feminist approaches to animal studies reflect deeply on vulnerability since it appears to be a promising dimension with which to ground human-animal relations in non-violent ways. If we link these attempts with the Girardian context, it is possible to understand their radical potential for creating socio-political change.

This article brings into dialogue the writings of Hélène Cixous and Bracha Ettinger. I contend that Cixous’s writing unsettles the very questions that form the basis for Ettinger’s key theoretical propositions, making for a productive dialogue between these two feminist thinkers. I identify key concepts and convergences that, when considered together, offer a novel methodology for thinking our way out of a conceptual impasse in which the ‘feminine’ exists either as a lack vis-à-vis the masculine or as unthinkable. What makes this meeting of works particularly generative is their ability to slide under the phallocentricity of Language to approach an ethics of the Other. A Cixousian reclamation of the feminine, coupled with Ettinger’s theorisation of subjectivity, in which the feminine is not foreclosed, offers to feminist debate and criticism an Other axis of sexual difference accessible to all living subjects. Considered together, Cixous’s and Ettinger’s formulations offer radical potentialities for reading with: that is, not a process in which we read as I’s positioned in opposition to an Other, but rather, one in which text and reader co-exist. Such a mode contests the violence that is done by phallic disciplinary structures and indifferent practices of reading.