The sense of violence and the absence of consolation

There is no shortage of gratuitous violence in cinema, and all the diverse types of violence have been disturbingly visualized. Violence in film, including mass killings, is used to show madness and mental illness. The way directors use “psychiatry” in film on violence is criticized in detail. The highly contentious relationship of epilepsy and violence is discussed. In many filmmakers’ predetermined view, neurologic disease is strongly linked with violence and murder. Some scriptwriters and film directors develop plots where individuals in altered neurologic states commit murders. Violence intersects with medicine (and forensic psychiatry) and is discussed herein. Healthcare professionals witness suffering, which means they must understand and help. Excluding gratuitous violence, one does not expect that the film industry improved medical understanding of violence, but simply corrupted it.

Mass shootings in public places such as political rallies in Arizona, movie theaters in Colorado, and grade schools in Connecticut and Norway are some of the most horrifying events we face in the 21st century. The time has come for us to research, understand, and communicate the causes for perpetrators who wreak such havoc on unsuspecting, unprepared, innocent people. The time has come for a peer-reviewed scientific journal to do everything possible to explore the contributing factors of such violent acts in order to mitigate or prevent them in the future. To this end, Violence and Gender has assembled a multidisciplinary panel of experts to look at the basic information regarding shooters--generally white males between fifteen and thirty years of age--from a wide range of scientific and behavioral perspectives as a foundation for understanding "why." Language: en

Since the inception of queer theory, there has been an ongoing and perhaps constitutive resistance to its squarely confronting the manner in which Black people are placed in what Saidiya Hartman (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 185) has called "the position of the unthought." This blind spot includes, but is not limited to, the manner in which queer theory has often failed to "include" blackness (Reid-Pharr 2001: chap. 5), if by inclusion we mean the additive approach through which, for instance, black and brown stripes were recently added to the redesigned rainbow flag (Campbell 2019: 82–87). Even in inclusionary or additive gestures, race often serves either as an analogy to sexuality or as a past historical social struggle (aka. "the civil rights movement") upon which the LGBT movement now builds (Johnson and Henderson 2005: 4–5). As recently as 2005, Jack Halberstam (2005: 220) could remark how the archive of queer theory remained predominantly white, Western, and canonical, despite the emergence of queer of color scholarship. In the past two decades, an emergent field of Black queer and trans studies has continued to address this blind spot, but its recurrence in queer studies as a field must by now be attributed to something deeper than ignorance.1This recurrence, I have argued elsewhere, suggests that Black and Queer may not operate as "equally actualized signifiers" but instead depend upon a process of occulting of the Black. In order for "queer" to become visible, following Lacan's account of metaphor, "black" must be occulted, or hidden, in the chain of signifiers (Nyong'o 2008: 98–99). Three recent books help us think through this complex interplay of blackness and queerness and offer new avenues of possible redress. They each do so with distinct methodological approaches and disciplinary commitments, and they arrive at different conclusions. Even their sense of audience differs, making the task of reviewing them together less a summing up of a particular academic field than an articulation of tensions roiling underneath the disciplines and interdisciplines. Our present conjuncture—in which Black trans* and queer lives are politically central to the practice of Black revolution in previously unimaginable ways—justifies the usefulness of thinking these texts together. And while only one author under view, Amber Jamilla Musser, addresses her text extensively to the development of queer theory "proper," all three books hold great significance for the improper and heterodox itineraries for queerness that are found in Black and/or Black feminist histories and futurities.Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a landmark work of the historical imagination that centers the unruly and anarchic lives of Black girls and women at the turn of the twentieth century. This is a period sometimes known as "the Nadir" in Black history (1877–1923)—a time when the backlash against emancipation and reconstruction led to Jim Crow laws, virulent white supremacy, and lynching. It is a period that students often learn through the stories of charismatic Black male leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and his rival Booker T. Washington. Black women leaders such as anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, who spearheaded the African American women's club movement, also figure prominently. Wayward Lives acknowledges these leading figures (Du Bois in particular), but comes at the period from a different angle. Here Hartman, a scholar known for her scouring critiques of acts of archival recovery, turns to a technique she terms the "close narration" (xiii) of the lives of ordinary girls and women who migrated to Philadelphia and New York City from the South. Reading both with and against the archival grain, close narration highlights the continuity between the violence done to her subjects and the historical records through which she must access them.In order to produce a text that can center their desire to live life on their terms rather than as either respectable race women or obedient drudges, Hartman refuses the conventions of standard historiography. As such, the book defies easy summary, and the most I can hope to do in this review is encourage you to read it in its entirety. Close narration enables Hartman to re-narrate history in ways that decenter the most famous and recognizable figures in order to ask new questions about those who remain present but anonymous in the historical record and to notice those whose unrealized ambitions did not make their errancy any less real. And she also poses crucial questions about history itself, at times turning to a kind of ficto-criticism to do so. For instance, she fabulates the well-known story of Gladys Bentley, the legendary bulldagger blues singer, as "Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast by Oscar Micheaux" (the legendary early Black film director). She remaps the sexual geography of the city from the vantage point of the lesbian chorine Mabel Hampton, who aspires to become a concert singer but ends up offering her services on the infamous "Bronx Slave Market" of Black female domestic day laborers. And in the final section of the book, the chorus itself becomes a space of Black queer feminist narrative possibility, as their movements in concert on stage, in cabarets, and in close historical narration constantly test the limits of an anti-Black world. By rearranging and defamiliarizing the historical record, Wayward Lives is itself a beautiful experiment in freeing us up from our dependence on linear temporalities of progress, completion, and/or recovery.While a momentous work of cultural history, Wayward Lives also resonates in our moment because of the way it brings together blackness and queerness at the site of a revolution in ordinary life. By deemphasizing the narratives of social reformers, soapbox radicals, and official ideologies, Hartman reimagines the history of anarchism and queer refusal as a quotidian practice spontaneously adopted by these Black girls and women who simply willed their lives to be otherwise. In a short, credo-like chapter, Hartman (227–28) defines this waywardness: Waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poesis of the dispossessed. . . . To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. . . . It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offered in the open-air prison. It is a queer resource of black survival. It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live.In passages like this, Wayward Lives speaks directly to our own moment, as the best history always does. In offering up a history of the present, it redefines concepts like mutual aid, fugitivity, opacity, and queer wildness in Black feminist terms.2Another text that centers Black feminist genealogies in queer theory is Musser's Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (full disclosure: I am a coeditor of the series in which this book was published). Like Hartman, Musser is deeply invested in the wayward and insurrectionary potential of feminine desire. But where Wayward Lives adopts a close narration (or counternarration) of archives meant to police, expose, and regulate Black women's bodies, Sensual Excess employs feminist and psychoanalytic theory to launch a series of provocative readings of contemporary art. At the center of Musser's concern is a reappraisal of the body/flesh distinction in the work of Hortense Spillers and of Spillers's (2003) influential theories of the pornotroping of Black women's bodies. Whereas some readers have taken Spillers as arguing for absence or lack as constitutive of Black sexuality (emphasizing her account of slavery acting to ungender the Black body), Musser argues instead for a reading of the pornotrope as leading to sensual "excess." Musser deploys the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance in order to interrupt the popular belief that pleasure derived from this excess fulfills or satisfies the subject, rather than dividing it from itself. At the same time as the excess that is jouissance undoes theories of blackness as lack, brownness for Musser serves a means of "expanding the parameters" of the pornotrope "beyond blackness" (7). Here she joins other queer of color critics in arguing for the value of Black feminist theory for reading Asian, Latinx, and other racialized peoples' lives, moving "away from theorizing blackness as the space of negation by positioning it in relation to multiple forms of brownness" (8).3 Subsequent readings of Black and women of color artists expand upon the multiple dimensions of queer femininity that are manifested through the particular ways blackness and brownness expose histories of slavery, colonialism, and genocide.Musser's (7) detailed readings demonstrate the manner in which Black and brown queer feminine jouissance creates "inhabitations of the pornotrope" theorized by Spillers. The first two chapters directly engage inhabitations of the pornotrope through extended readings of yonic imagery in the work of Kara Walker and Mickalene Thomas. Musser's work here offers a heterotopic rereading of the feminine body, showing how labial feminist artwork often castigated as essentialist (or trans-exclusionary) is in fact engaged in a process of corporeal reterritorialization. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to performances of listening and witnessing in the work of Cheryl Dunye, Xandra Ibarra, and Carrie Mae Weems, while 5 and 6 veer toward considerations of automaticity and aggression, respectively, in the work of Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, and Maureen Catbagan. With impressive sweep, Musser in each case combines close description of the aesthetic maneuvers of these artists with rigorous revisions of the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance by way of a feminist account of these artists' work. She concludes the book with a riposte to both the Lacanian neglect of the mother's desire and queer femininity's relative silence around the figure of the maternal.Even as Sensual Excess seeks to expand the parameters of the pornotrope without abandoning its grounding in Black feminist theory, the book also intervenes in the calcifying debates over "pleasure" versus "criticality" in readings of racialized sexuality. Those critics who argue against accepting lack as the condition of blackness are often accused in return of uncritically celebrating pleasure. (And to be sure, there are some who do indeed see Black pleasure as reparative or healing in a direct way, but this is not the case with any of the authors under present review.) Pushing this debate beyond the pleasure principle affords Musser new opportunities for rendering the affect and aesthetic of what she calls the brown feminine. It also affords a timely opportunity to reconsider Audre Lorde's writings on the erotic, of which Musser is among our most able contemporary critics. A return to Lorde is warranted, Musser persuasively argues, less to recuperate pleasure in sensuality and more to redress the overly self-conscious break with prior women of color feminisms that the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s effected. Reclaiming a Black socialist lesbian feminism discarded as too essentialist during the heyday of poststructuralism, Sensual Excess invites us to think with the surface and textures that queer feminism continue to afford aesthetic and erotic experimentation.In a telling coda, Musser (172–73) even revives the contested figure of the mother, arguing that a queered motherhood has been central to her book all along: "To think the mother as a place, not a void, works toward a framework of generativity, fleshiness, and sensuality. Black and brown mothers have haunted the pages of this book, sometimes appearing and sometimes absent, but always hovering. . . . This is not about producing the maternal as homeland, but about reaching toward the black and brown maternal as horizon." The jouissance of the Black mother is so frequently rendered as monstrous in the anti-Black imagination that citing examples seems fruitless (although a return to Hartman's Wayward Lives might provide one useful inventory). And while the final book under review here swerves sharply away from the inclusionary gestures of queer of color critique instanced in Musser, it shares with her text a powerful conviction that the Black body (and flesh) is a continuous shock to thought.Calvin L. Warren's Ontological Terror brings together the historiographical and theoretical concerns of the above two books with its focus on the ontology of antiblackness. On an initial approach, Warren could be counted among those critics for whom blackness must be theorized through negation and lack. In his work, the very word being, in relation to Black people, can appear only under erasure, as being. The very notion of freedom, for Black people, can only appear under the double negation "is not." As with other critics working in an Afropessimist frame, Warren argues both that anti-Black racism is a permanent feature of modernity and that appeals to Black humanity, suffering, and/or hope only intensify this bleak condition.4 Rather than pessimism per se, Warren's book foregrounds nihilism, a term rich with philosophical controversy. Ontological Terror can be read both as a defense of Black nihilism in the face of gratuitous violence and as a carefully wrought argument about how anti-Black violence works. Its combination of theoretical rigor and interrogation of legal, political, scientific, and visual archives place it squarely in conversation with contemporary debates in Africana philosophy. Of the multiple threads Warren pulls together, I will focus here on his treatment of Martin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics (at the risk of some simplification), because it provides a useful entry point into some of the central claims of the text.For Warren, the free Black "is not" because "being" is a crucial attribute of humanness, and it is precisely the humanness of the Black that is refused by modalities of power in the modern world (both under slavery and during its afterlives). Heidegger conceives human being (dasein) as a world-building and tool-bearing animal. But because the human builds his, her, or their world by reducing the slave to a tool, Warren argues, no act of mutual human recognition can be forthcoming between the human and the slave. Instead, the human must reduce the slave to a worldless thing: a tool. The free Black, the "slave without a master," is nothing to the white man (Berlin 1974). Warren accepts that Black people exist and inhabit the world (13) but denies that this existence adds up to the sort of being that grounds "metaphysical schemes of political hope, freedom, and humanity" (172). Rather than inveigh against this logic as a calumny against Black humanity, Warren aims to destitute it through a Heideggerian Destruktion. In a section titled "Chief Justice Roger Taney: Ontometaphysician" (76–87), for instance, Warren destructs the language of the notorious Dred Scott decision, not in order to retrieve the human rights that Taney's decision travesties but in order to argue "the absurdity that any right could ever change the formulation of black existence as nonexistence" (85). Following Taney, the freed or emancipated Black is not a proto-citizen ready to join human society but, as a now-broken tool, becomes newly visible in its brokenness as an insoluble problem for civil society.In a chapter titled "Catachrestic Fantasies," Warren delivers one of the most elegant destructions of anti-Black nineteenth-century visual culture in the recent critical literature. Drawing upon Frantz Fanon, David Marriott, and others, he argues for the significance of the free Black body as a site of fantasy projection in which Black being is characterized by white supremacy as a site of continuous malapropism and category collapse. This chapter is a contribution to debates on troping (and stereotyping) insofar as it focuses on the contrastive mechanism of catachresis: the misapplication of a word to describe something that would otherwise go unnamed. Where stereotype discourse presumes the repetition of a familiar trope, catachrestic fantasy intimates the disturbance of the anti-Black imaginary from within. Free blackness is this unnamed thing: it is not troped or stereotyped, it is the site of perpetual and structural misrecognition.I am summarizing all too quickly, but the nihilistic, existentialist, and at times even mystical gist of Ontological Terror should already be apparent, as should its departure from the more Hegelian account of the master-slave dialectic preferred by thinkers such as Paul Gilroy (1993) and Susan Buck-Morss (2000). Rather than a struggle to the death and consequent bid for mutual recognition, for Warren there is only "ontological terror"—a title that we must take in a double sense to indicate both the terror Black people felt at the gratuitous violence we faced before and after emancipation and, crucially, the ontological terror the anti-Black imagination experiences in encountering Black being as an inexplicable nothingness that somehow is. Here, I believe, is a crucial contribution of this book to the Afropessimist polemic: its positioning of the anti-Black human as terrified. Warren (9; emphasis added) writes: A mentor once asked me a terrifying question: why are blacks hated all over the world? Stunned, I remained silent, but the question remained with me. . . . We can call this hatred antiblackness: an accretion of practices, knowledge systems, and institutions designed to impose nothing onto blackness and the unending domination/eradication of black presence as nothing incarnated. Put differently, antiblackness is anti-nothing. What is hated about blacks is this nothing, the ontological terror, they must embody for the metaphysical world.The rhetorical doubling of terror in this passage, as something experienced by Black people and, at the same time, something caused by our existence, returns me both to waywardness as "errant path" and to "feminine jouissance" as that which splits, rather than consolidates, the subject of "pleasure." In making this observation, I am not over the and even among these critical Instead, I am to the thinking that has to Black critical theory, in its with queerness to be can so often take a one sexuality and are to Black critical Warren for instance, on when he a reading of the Black (or the of the Lacanian for the that as deeply within a of Black bodies, in these will be and On the other such a turn (or to even a placed under the of dark is what Warren with an argument against critics such as Musser and Scott who he Black in the by such a In a that such with Warren emphasis added) do not within is no more a against antiblackness than or metaphysical its when the body is and pleasure in a black is not by black death or through black from the perhaps of jouissance in this reaching its from also the of his own critical in I also to the feminism to the logic of reading as What Musser in Sensual Excess as the of thinking of in with those of is not a to theories of antiblackness through to sexual pleasure. is it to of feminine jouissance with of they as the very sort of double and negation that Warren Musser that psychoanalytic feminist such as have to logic of and as Musser it is not a to but a means of why "the problem of the black body is not as being to the problem of At on this is a question that Ontological Terror also to of this review it will have been to the of queer theory as it to with the and to Black studies in its ongoing with The that some see between and the is not one that would queerness as it to the of and sexuality or could be as a human and when it comes to the of it is a case of to these and ongoing two might be in their theoretical there may be a value in in the of both the Afropessimist and the precisely in order to to the surface all the through which and life is under the of And I would hope this review has a point of all would to an act of to or Black feminist debates over terror, and the insofar as they both and queer we are with the psychoanalytic or a more in recent critical has as a of it At the same time, it the case that the in such to the of not always do to the very of struggle they This is less a I of to hope, or as rhetorical and less a of the in the order of antiblackness. It is more a question of the archive of Black queer feminist as to as to the of the human order of metaphysical her Audre Lorde an into such of Black lesbian feminist refusal when she writes: is there for us to be after we have face to face with death and not I the existence of as a life who can ever have power over me in the terror of death is as Warren critical pleasure in the of a possible by refusal not As Hartman suggests at the of Wayward Lives, the would be the to that there is a in theoretical and perhaps even political our debates over and But there may not be two one to and the other to sensuality and Even if it would make it for of us if there

Noting their prescience regarding 9/11 and the 21st‐century crisis of global capitalism, the Conclusion shows how the texts analysed afford critical purchase on the global market, and on French co‐implication in it. It argues that by exploring the enduring potential of the turning point, Angot, Echenoz, Houellebecq, and Redonnet evidence an implicit commitment to literary agency. The conclusion then identifies how these writers intersect and diverge in reflecting, perpetuating, and challenging the misogyny and symbolic violence of the mass media and global market. Fin de millénaire prose fiction is established as both problematic and problematizing, inviting and begging the question of how literature may challenge dominant discourses and represent or shape the future. The aesthetics of crisis of fin de millénaire prose fictions, then, demonstrate both the need to intervene in political and ethical questions and the enduring agency — critical and creative—of literature.

In an influential article published in the British Journal of Social Work in 1979, Anthony Bottoms and Bill McWilliams proposed the adoption of a ‘non-treatment paradigm’ for probation practice. Their argument rested on a careful and considered analysis not only of empirical evidence about the ineffectiveness of rehabilitative treatment but also of theoretical, moral and philosophical questions about such interventions. By 1994, emerging evidence about the potential effectiveness of some intervention programmes was sufficient to lead Peter Raynor and Maurice Vanstone to suggest significant revisions to the ‘non-treatment paradigm’. In this article, it is argued that a different but equally relevant form of empirical evidence—that derived from desistance studies—suggests a need to re-evaluate these earlier paradigms for probation practice. This reevaluation is also required by the way that such studies enable us to understand and theorize both desistance itself and the role that penal professionals might play in supporting it. Ultimately, these empirical and theoretical insights drive us back to the complex interfaces between technical and moral questions that preoccupied Bottoms and McWilliams and that should feature more prominently in contemporary debates about the futures of ‘offender management’ and of our penal systems.

In his paper Towards a Cultural Framework of Audience Response and Television Violence Lajos Csaszi argues that media violence is not a reification of social violence; rather, a popular ritual allowing contemporary societies to sublimate, to substitute, and to discuss aggression in the public sphere. Csaszi reviews the central questions of contemporary debates about television violence including Stuart Hall's thought on this topic and introduces the ideas of Elias, Geertz, Turner, Bettelheim, Benjamin, Girard, and others in order to locate the representation of violence in an interdisciplinary context. Using the genre of the horror film as an example, Csaszi suggests alternate ways the representation of violence could be interpreted. Csaszi's objective is to reconnect the vital but neglected theoretical insights of social and cultural thinkers to existing debates about the meanings of media representations of violence. Lajos Csaszi, Towards a Cultural Framework of Audience Response and Television Violence page 2 of 13 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.3 (2008):

This article examines the role of boy witnesses in screen representations of domestic and family violence. Australian cinema has frequently placed a speechless boy at a scene of men’s violence: he might bea figure of innocence against masculinities gone bad, or a proxy for the audience, simulating a point-of-view untroubled by contemporary debates around gender-based violence. This article argues that the figure of the boy who looks is invested with multiple competing meanings attached to masculinity, including idealisations of boyhood curiosity, celebrations of boys as figures of progress, and the racialisation of Australian boyhoods within the context of colonial violence and dispossession. Furthermore, by interrogating the trope of the boy who looks, this article considers the affordances and limitations of contemporary feminist approaches to violence in cinema, and argues for an understanding of domestic and family violence in cinema as inextricably linked to the ways that we think about masculinity, cultural identity, and youth.

Companion review: this sleek but violent film asks interesting ethical questions about our relationship with AI

Is virtue sufficient for happiness? That question has had two different histories. Cicero writes that the defining question in ethics since Aristotle was what happiness consists in. In contemporary debate, by contrast, the sufficiency question is usually taken to have been settled by Aristotle. The second history makes the first unintelligible. The author argues that the first history has it right, because the Stoic case for sufficiency was stronger than the Aristotelian case against it. The Stoic case rested on two theses: that happiness consists in activity and that the attachments within which we act are not constituents of those activities. Thesis 1 rests on deep eudaimonist commitments about goodness, the author also argues, so an attack on the sufficiency thesis should offer an alternative to 2. This chapter sketches such an alternative, and shows how the resulting view of the self alters the modern view of the debate. Keywords: Aristotle; Cicero; Eudaimonia; Stoic's sufficiency thesis

In Ethics and Accountability in Criminal Justice: Towards a Universal Standard, Prenzler offers a clear and compelling account of ethical challenges in criminal justice and provides critical perspective on the means by which the professional integrity of criminal justice personnel can be maintained and enhanced. Using detailed empirical examples and case study material drawn largely from Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, Prenzler shows how many of the ethical dilemmas and scandals that have engulfed police, courts and corrections are rooted in institutional practices and wider political and policy discourse about law and order. Individualistic perspectives that explain unethical behaviour in simplistic terms of flawed personalities or deviant subcultures are eschewed in favour of an analysis that recognises that problems can also derive from financial pressures, incompetent management, and political interference. Prenzler also shows that questions about ethics cannot be disentangled from wider philosophical concerns about the proper role of criminal justice institutions in contemporary society. By considering wider arguments about punishment in society and the impact of political and social inequality on criminal justice, Prenzler reminds us that ethical questions are central to many contemporary debates such as those relating to civilian oversight of policing, adversarial versus inquisitorial court systems, or the use of community sentences as alternatives to prison. The book is divided into three main sections relating to police, courts and prisons as the major component parts of the criminal justice system. Prior to these, Prenzler reviews philosophical perspectives on morals and ethics. In particular, he outlines how religious foundations of moral and ethical behaviour gave way to Kantian ethical formalism and to the utilitarian approaches that continue to dominate debate about due process, equality of decision-making, individual and collective rights, and so on, that figure in much of the rest of the book. Each subsequent section comprises three chapters, exploring the broad range of ethical concerns in that part of the system, examples of abuses that have caused public concern in recent times, and various efforts to improve integrity management and accountability. Organising the material in this way certainly makes it accessible for Asian Criminology (2011) 6:121–122 DOI 10.1007/s11417-009-9076-5

With our success in mapping the human genome, the possibility of altering our genetic futures has given rise to difficult ethical questions. Although opponents of genetic manipulation frequently raise the specter of eugenics, our contemporary debates about bioethics often take place in a historical vacuum. In fact, American religious leaders raised similarly challenging ethical questions in the first half of the twentieth century. Preaching Eugenics tells how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders confronted and, in many cases, enthusiastically embraced eugenics-a movement that embodied progressive attitudes about modern science at the time. Christine Rosen argues that religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets. The liberals and modernists-those who challenged their churches to embrace modernity-became the eugenics movement's most enthusiastic supporters. Their participation played an important part in the success of the American eugenics movement. In the early twentieth century, leaders of churches and synagogues were forced to defend their faiths on many fronts. They faced new challenges from scientists and intellectuals; they struggled to adapt to the dramatic social changes wrought by immigration and urbanization; and they were often internally divided by doctrinal controversies among modernists, liberals, and fundamentalists. Rosen draws on previously unexplored archival material from the records of the American Eugenics Society, religious and scientific books and periodicals of the day, and the personal papers of religious leaders such as Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rev. John M. Cooper, Rev. John A. Ryan, and biologists Charles Davenport and Ellsworth Huntington, to produce an intellectual history of these figures that is both lively and illuminating. The story of how religious leaders confronted one of the era's newest sciences, eugenics, sheds important new light on a time much like our own, when religion and science are engaged in critical and sometimes bitter dialogue.

Katherine Hallemeier.J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. 201. US$90. Well-known for his preoccupation with ethical questions about responsibility to and interaction with others, J. M. Coetzee offers one of the most intriguing archives for critics of to consider. Katherine Hallemeier's J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism, focused on his recent fiction (beginning with 2007's Boyhood), provides a thorough examination of Coetzee's engagement with a variety of forms of Hallemeier offers a persuasive argument for reading Coetzee's later fiction as interventions into contemporary debates about the nature of and, particularly, its ethical implications. The book begins by outlining two ways of categorizing current theorizations of and their links to sympathy: rational cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanism. The first posits sympathy supplements reason while the second imagines that sympathy is extrarational (16). Both are similar insofar as they a perfect human sympathy that is never interrupted by the of misunderstanding or inequality (17). In her examination of and its enactment in Coetzees fiction, Hallemeier notes that Coetzee critiques these models through a suggestion that paranoia can undergird the privileging of rationality while an emphasis on the affective can uncritically reinforce gender stereotypes. Hallemeier goes on to identify another strand of cosmopolitan thinking in which might offer a useful interruption of vision of sympathy [as] dramatically by envision [ing] a that admits to the possibility of experiencing the self-as-other (97-98). Yet as Hallemeier illustrates through Coetzee's exploration of the limited cosmopolitan potential of shame (100), is not without its similarly utopian aspirations for emotion and its ethical potential. This analysis of the role of sympathy and in current cosmopolitan theory (roughly the first three quarters of the book) offers a thorough overview of the field and its variety of approaches to both affect and universality. For those who are new to this body of theory or those who would appreciate an outline of many of the key approaches to cosmopolitanism, this part of the book will prove very helpful. At the same time, Hallemeier demonstrates how fiction might provide a useful additional voice in the critical debates surrounding the forms cosmopolitan practice might take, experiment[ing] with the possibility that thinking through an idea across different genres enables conversations that are incommensurable [approached differently but with shared priorities] yet complementary (16). …

Martin Luther King, Jr., taught us that every great political controversy turns on a moral question. He also discovered that great moral issues become fiercely contested political debates. There are striking parallels in the controversy that erupted in the 1830s over immediate, unconditional, uncompensated emancipation of some two million black slaves and the contemporary debate over the legal personhood and rights of the unborn. Each era witnessed a deeply divided public; a contest between divergent value systems; the formation of dissenting minorities who assumed their cause as a sacred vocation; attempts at governmental compromise; debates over the proper sphere of the judiciary; questions of constitutional interpretation; charges and countercharges of moral self-righteousness; conflicting legal, social, and economic interests; the failure of antagonists to agree to disagree; and even the running of single-issue political candidates. Our contemporary struggle over the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 rulings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton evidences, however, a unique gambit by prochoice advocates -a legal attempt to disbar religious groups from successfully influencing public policy in the direction of their moral beliefs. As I intend to suggest with an examination of the debates concerning the Hyde amendment, this reflects a modern malady that would reduce religiosity to private and fragmented systems of ultimate meaning and, were it to become sustained by the courts, would cast a shadow over the legacy of many American reform movements, particularly the antislavery crusade in which religious concerns were instrumental in shaping the political debate.

The nebulous practices and tropes of ‘neoliberalism’, the rather loose political movement that has propelled the idea of ‘market society’, as well as commodified notions of the ‘individual’ and ‘freedom’, remain deeply embedded in contemporary public debates and cultural activity, including in public relations (Surma and Demetrious, 2018). Under neoliberalism, human subjects are normatively understood as rational and competitive market actors; private and public domains are reconceived as markets; and ethical questions are recast as principally monetised or calculable concerns. This is no more evident than in current debates about energy and climate and about refugees (Demetrious, 2019; Surma, 2018)...

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) is now widely recognised as one of the most important Marxist public intellectuals and German philosophical and political thinkers of the twentieth century. Adorno was central to the development of the Frankfurt School, or simply critical theory, a movement that played a formative role in the rise of Western Marxism (as a nuanced alternative to the Marxist claims of Leninism, Stalinism and Trotskyism) and came to be one of the main influences on the so-called cultural turn in the human and social sciences in 1980s. He defined the role of an active public intellectual, engaged in social and cultural analysis that was articulated beyond the university, evidenced by his numerous radio talks and newspaper articles, essays and interventions in the German public sphere. At the same time his work dissolved the boundaries that previously separated the disciplines of sociology, psychology and philosophy and influenced decades of social research (Adorno 1970–1986). His major works—especially the seminal Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia—his writings on modernist aesthetics, his critique of popular culture, his dialogue with Walter Benjamin and his reflections on the Holocaust continue to be of interest and relevance to contemporary public debates, whether focused on the nature of ‘left’ (Marxist) thinking (Jameson 1967, 1971), the need to address the cultural in social and political thought (Jameson 1990) or ethical questions around the nature of the human subject (Bernstein 2001).