Essay Claims Research Articles

‘A Fact in the History of the World’: The <i>Vegetarian Advocate</i> (1848‒50) and the Serialization of Life

This essay examines the Vegetarian Advocate, a British monthly periodical that ran from 1848 to 1850, and it argues that the periodical’s serial form shaped its representation of vegetarianism. As the first official organ of the UK Vegetarian Society, the Vegetarian Advocate carried different messages to different audiences. For members of the Society, it circulated information on the organization’s publications, annual meetings, membership statistics, and finances, subjects that would be of interest only to insiders. For outsiders and the uninitiated, it published articles explaining vegetarian principles, using arguments drawn from physiology, chemistry, natural history, economics, and ethics to persuade curious readers to experiment with a vegetarian diet. However, drawing on press scholarship and Michel Foucault’s techniques of the self, this essay argues that the serial form of the periodical itself carried an important message on the vegetarians’ ‘serialization of life’, their belief that life be lived serially or, in other words, that forward progress and self-improvement come through repetition, attention to routine, and the everyday training of oneself. Specifically, this essay claims that the seriality of the Vegetarian Advocate allowed the Vegetarian Society to represent its dietary regimen as serial — that is, as a repetitive yet progressive, sequential system of self-transformation in which all forms of activity (from eating to exercising to socializing) accrued meaning sequentially, serially, and relationally, orientating vegetarianism and vegetarians towards a teleological objective, or what Foucault calls the ‘telos of the ethical subject’. Serialization, it claims, was integral to both the practice and concept of vegetarianism: vegetarian print materials were published serially while the practice itself was conceptualized as a progressive step in the development of the individual and the species.

The Ideal Ego vs. the Ego Ideal: Fictionalization of Lacanian Perversion in Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse”

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), the narrator/protagonist gives us his account of how he commits a murder, but he does not provide a fully defined, convincing reason for his vile action. He speaks like a commonsensical man when he philosophizes on “perversity” in a clinically distanced tone of voice. He makes inferences and highlights the implications concerning perversity. With the same tone of voice, he also gives the readers a cold-blooded account of how he killed an old man. The insanity in the act and the way he narrates it are complicated enough for us to make sense of his situation. However, to make the issue more complicated, he gives himself away and is imprisoned to be hanged. The co-existence of these triangular dynamics has triggered a zealous hermeneutic process by/for the critics. However, none of these readings can exhaust the narrative and hermeneutical implications embodied in the story. Each of them can cover some aspects of the narrative while leaving some others untouched like the psychodynamics of the main character. In that sense, this essay attempts to make a psychoanalytic interpretation of the story by giving a Lacanian hearing to it as it might offer an explanation for certain details which otherwise remain as a rupture like the narrator’s drive to give himself away or his impulsive act of killing the old man. Using the Lacanian concepts of the ideal ego and the ego ideal, jouissance, perversity, the imaginary, and the symbolic as the conceptual backcloth, this essay claims that Poe fictionalizes Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of perversity, which refers to the partial accession to castration, in “The Imp of the Perverse”.

“Useful Knowledge” in Charles-Alexandre Lesueur’s visual and textual accounts of Missouri in 1826

Artist and naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846) valued his work as useful to science generally and to France in particular, including during the time he lived and traveled in North America from 1816 to 1837. Starting with Daniela Bleichmar’s concept of “visual epistemology: a way of knowing based on visuality, encompassing both observation and representation,” this essay claims that Lesueur’s art and scientific practice adhered closely to a belief in the authority of art from direct observation in nature, and they served different professional, educational, community, and potentially commercial purposes. It charts the conditions under which he produced the art, the purpose(s) of the art, the types of art (sketches, paintings, prints, landscape drawings), and the intended audience through four types of subjects from the expedition to Missouri in 1826: the challenges of scientific fieldwork, Blacks in Missouri, lead mining, and inland but especially riverside towns.

Recovering African Religions as “World Religions”: The Case of the Zulu Religion

ABSTRACT Drawing from John Hick’s soteriological criterion of religious pluralism (in his notion of saintliness and morality), this essay questions the validity of the Christian putative, normative status to establish Christian-like features for other religions to be considered a “world religion”. This essay claims that with a modern understanding of the globalized world, it is no longer the norm for a non-Christian religion to meet Christian-like features to be considered a “world religion”. Instead, a universal model is gaining its reality through concrete particularizations, where no one religion can claim to serve as the clear and dominant standard for any other. In this sense, this essay attempts to re-imagine and construct African Traditional Religions, particularly the Zulu religion, its deity, uNkulunkulu, and its moral fabric, as a religious particularization of the global systems.

Infrastructures of Decolonization: Scales of Worldmaking in the Writings of Frantz Fanon

Political theorists are increasingly drawn to the recovery of anticolonial thinkers as global figures. Frantz Fanon is largely excluded from these discussions because of his presumed commitment to the nation-state and its territorialist assumptions. This essay claims, by contrast, that Fanon’s writings reveal an alternative way of thinking about worldmaking, less as a question of political and economic institution-building spearheaded by leaders than as a multiscalar project that permeates the production of the built environment and the creation of selves. I show how Fanon challenges the dichotomy between the global and the national by seeking to transform not just the national scale in relation to the international, but also the corporeal, urban, rural, and regional scales of an imperially configured world. In order to read Fanon as a scalar thinker and to highlight aspects of his thought that have been relatively neglected, I draw on concepts from geography, and specifically scalar analysis, which, I demonstrate, allows political theorists to develop a richer understanding of the operations of power in colonial contexts and how they can be restructured to inaugurate more liberated ways of being human.

Jan van Eyck at London in 1428

Abstract On the basis of reports that Jan van Eyck visited England (he was well traveled in the service of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy), this essay speculates freely on what the diplomat and painter actually did in and around London for three weeks in 1428. The essay claims, for example, that van Eyck went to the village of Foots Cray to buy watercresses to use as models when painting greenery on the Ghent Altarpiece of the Mystic Lamb (which he completed in 1432). The recently erected gateway to the palace at Greenwich is said likewise to be the model for a towered gateway depicted on the altarpiece. After providing local detail about relevant parts of England in 1428, the essay closes with speculation (although the author writes, “The facts are known”) about the origin of a harp, of a purportedly Welsh variety, appearing on the altarpiece in the hands of an angel. The author argues that it was the instrument of an itinerant Breton musician whom van Eyck had heard in recital at the Poor Clares convent of the Holy Trinity at the Minories in Aldgate. The harpist subsequently murdered his Stepney landlady and was himself killed by enraged local housewives. Van Eyck is said to have purchased the man's harp when his worldly goods were posthumously sold.

Work, Play, and Performance in the Southern Tobacco Warehouse

This paper examines tobacco warehouses in the southern United States as sites of both work and play. Using a performative approach in the study of architecture that is rooted in folklife methodology, the essay claims these quotidian working structures as places of celebratory potential amid the strictures of Jim Crow spatial segregation. In particular, it focuses on a series of massive dances held in the elaborately decorated warehouses during the early-to-mid-20th century. During these dances, Black celebrants turned the restrictive social and economic working spaces of the tobacco warehouse into places of radical potential and pleasure. The claims of this essay are supported by both conventional architectural documentation and the oral testimonies of a variety of tobacco workers, musicians, and dancers, who made use of the warehouses for a variety of often conflicting purposes. Told together, their narratives emphasize both spatialized resistance to segregation, and the importance of the ephemeral archives of individual stories and memories to the study of vernacular architectural history.

Deconstructing the Discourse of Self-Corrective Intellectual Property Markets

This essay claims that intellectual property markets are not self-corrective. The discourse of self-corrective intellectual property markets is based upon a belief regarding the tendency of the market to automatically eliminate harmful consequences resulting from piracy, fraud, corruption, and conflict of interest among agents buying and selling music, movies, and journal articles. Following the critical-logics approach of discourse theory, this essay argues that intellectual property markets function according to certain logics: their social logics are grounded in the normalization of knowledge production and exchange, and their political logics deploy judicial mechanisms and sanctions against dislocatory moments such as copyright infringement. Meanwhile, their fantasmatic logics conceal the radical contingency of the given intellectual property regime, fueled by the academic desire for recognition via publishing in journals operated by for-profit companies. In exposing the logics of intellectual property markets, the essay suggests a counterhegemonic position supporting the ethics of open access and peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing.

George Herbert’s “The Flower” and the Problem of Praise

AbstractThis essay dwells on George Herbert’s “The Flower” and on how its speaker can love and praise God. Writing of praise and doubt, Stanley Cavell remarks that the problem of skepticism is partly a problem of finding an object that one can praise, a search that certainly occurs in “The Flower.” While Herbert’s speaker seeks God as that object, his own memory impedes him, making him question God’s goodness and forcing him not only to abandon forms of remembering that Herbert’s sources—from psalmists to theologians—employ so as to rise to praise, but also to use form in order to forget. The essay’s conclusion compares Herbert’s poem with another strange praise poem, Paul Celan’s “Psalm.” The essay claims that if Cavell sees praise as signaling a triumph over doubt, “The Flower” shows, as only verse can, how praise and doubt accompany each other, using doubt to keep praise at a distance from both psalmic theology and skeptical philosophy.

Car Wash Operation and Odebrecht: A case that will end?

Individuals and organizations of different types are always challenged to decide by which kind of ethical framework they will abide by. The decision may be rewarding or punitive. External agents, like communities, may influence how the decision will result. This essay claims that Odebrecht corruption scandal bears an example of such a situation. Coupled with the company’s internal decisions, the external community played a role in moving Odebrecht from being a respected player in the global construction industry to the exposition of its immoral practices. The present study also demonstrates the recent attempts at political interference in the investigations of this scandal and how former Odebrecht is trying to rebuild itself as a company.

Stiegler’s Rigour: Metaphors for a Critical Continental Philosophy of Technology

ABSTRACT This essay claims that Stiegler’s sense of metaphor gives his work an overlooked rigour. Part one argues that La Faute d’Epiméthée’s key claim (that technics is philosophy’s “unthought”) opens an excess of potential that threatens to overwhelm Stiegler’s work. Part two looks at two metaphors (the pharmakon and organ). Part three argues that a focus on Stiegler’s technique of metaphor mitigates suspicions that his work is trivial or jargonistic, and allows it to emerge as a counterbalance to a positivistic tendency in contemporary philosophy of technology. This tendency is the legacy of an “empirical turn” in philosophy of technology in the late 1990s; it is problematic, I argue, because it threatens to turn philosophical engagements with technologies into endorsements of Zeitgeist-seizing artifacts (smartphones or social media, for example), to the detriment of what Stiegler’s sense of metaphor allows him to address as the broader “pharmacological” and “organological” implications of technologies for society.

Allegorization and Racialization inThe Faerie Queene

Ania Loomba has suggested that we attend to two techniques of racialized governance in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England: “the creation of internal hierarchies within a population” and the increasingly reified assumption of “correspondence between the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ of human beings.” This essay claims that The Faerie Queene produces a surprising resemblance between racialization and allegory as a literary form. Testing this hypothesis primarily in Book V’s scenes of racialized punishment, it explores how allegory produces internal hierarchies and a correspondence between the outside and inside of beings in the poem. At the same time, it suggests Spenser’s immanent critique of allegory as technique and mode might also be viewed as the poem’s own analysis of the intimacy between racialization and colonial violence, repeatedly revealing the failure of the production of difference and the instability of racialized hierarchy.

Hegel’s History of Religions

According to Hegel, the determinations of the absolute are conceptual properties that identify what the absolute is, and are related through logical entailments. The shapes of the absolute are historical configurations that religion takes as it appears in the domain of contingent existence. This essay claims that Stewart’s interpretation does not observe this distinction, and as a result transforms the determinations of the absolute into projections of a people’s self-understanding. I argue that Hegel himself takes a history of religions to be a logically necessary sequence in which the determinations of the absolute are articulated and proved, rather than a history of the cultural forms that the divine happens to have taken in the movement of human history. I examine as a test case the proper place of Islam in Hegel’s schema of determinate religions in order to show how Stewart’s conflation of determinations and shapes affects the possibility of determinate world-religions arising after what Hegel takes to be the consummate religion, Christianity.

Letters

90 OHQ vol. 122, no. 1 LETTERS To the Editor: Several articles in the Winter 2019 issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly advance our understanding of the lamentable racial discrimination that mars Oregon’s history. But the “White Supremacy & Resistance” volume is seriously compromised by the singular focus on “Whiteness” set forth in the introductory essay, a theme that carries over into most of the otherwise generally well-researched essays. The essays that follow guest editor Carmen Thompson’s confirm that Oregon’s history is replete with examples of racial discrimination still reflected in present-day institutions. But Thompson’s essay claims far more than that racial discrimination persists and that people of good will and fair mind are sometimes unaware of the lingering effects of historic discrimination and of the advantages they may derive from those effects. Thompson presents the controversial concept of “Whiteness” as an undisputed lens through which we are to look at Oregon history, leaving none of that history free from racist explanation. Thompson’s description of the concept of “Whiteness” allows for no possibility of White people who do not bear the trait of “Whiteness.” She describes “the American form of Whiteness ” as “organic” and “ubiquit[ous].” Organic implies inherent and inborn; ubiquitous implies comprehensive and omnipresent. As defined by Thompson, “Whiteness” theory posits that every White individual past, present, and future is complicit in whatever racism persists. Uncritical acceptance of the theory helps explain why White people whose lives are unblemished by racist thought or deed find themselves apologizing for their presumed racism. History viewed through this all-inclusive lens of pervasive and systemic racism ignores the complexity of history and distorts the truth historians should seek to reveal. Readers of Thompson’s essay are meant to read the remaining essays with “Whiteness” as an accepted and unquestioned explanation for all historic discrimination and for the current and future state of Oregon society. It is a simplistic, close-minded and ironically racist approach to history. In the epilogue to the volume, Quarterly editor Eliza Canty-Jones describes the project as “emotionally wrenching.” She goes on to recount recent events that she and presumably most readers find offensive. But history done well is a dispassionate enterprise. If historians, or those who publish history, prejudge or react emotionally to the actions and words of the past, the stories they tell and print will be partly theirs. An account of the background and timeline for the special issue declares that the project “is not neutral on the subject of White supremacy.” There is no disputing that. Authors and editors are seldom neutral in their personal views on the events and people they write about, but they should aspire to neutrality in understanding and reporting on those events and people. By telling the stories of history without judgment, they allow their readers to judge for themselves. Objectively and fully told, the stories of racism and White supremacy in Oregon will allow readers to understand people and events in their historical context without the filter of the authors’ or editors’ personal judgments that unavoidably reflect present-day values. James L. Huffman Lewis & Clark Law School 91 From the Editor: Having engaged in close editorial work with Carmen P. Thompson on her introductory essay, I am disappointed to learn of James Huffman’s misreading of Thompson’s framing of the concept of Whiteness. Thompson argues that “the American form of whiteness is historical and organic,” that it “has its genesis in each European nation’s initial decision to cross the Atlantic Ocean,” and that its “longstanding ubiquity . . . makes it difficult to recognize and articulate, especially for White people.” Such statements do not conflate Whiteness with White people and instead define Whiteness as being historical and constructed — that is, connected to particular places, times, events, and decisions. Thompson’s essay reviews some of the extensive literature on Whiteness, offering readers a window onto the complex arguments contained within that body of work, developed over many decades, and indicating how the Oregon Historical Quarterly’s special issue contributes to that ongoing endeavor. That Huffman could read the essay to argue that the concept of Whiteness is both simplistic and not based in policies...

“Friendlesse verse”: The Poetics of Chapman’s “A Coronet for His Mistresse Philosophie” (1595)

Published in his second poetry volume, Ouids Banquet of Sence (1595), George Chapman’s “A Coronet for His Mistresse Philosophie” is often read as a sequel to the volume’s title piece. By attending to Chapman’s controversial dialogue with the Petrarchan lyric tradition in the England of his time, to his commitment to a didactic aestheticism that defends poetry’s enlightening powers, and to his preoccupation with proportional form, the present essay claims for this miniature sequence an autonomous status as a practical poetics. Chapman’s crown of sonnets—the first English instance of this form—is a programmatic defense of the amatory lyric as an instrument that warrants poetry’s dedication to the search for knowledge.

Pelo olhar de Anísio Teixeira, um ensaio sobre a educação e nacional-desenvolvimentismo

The object of this essay is delimited within the scope of Anisio Teixeira’s conceptual framework that support the defense of education. The educational project was designed and executed by Teixeira throughout his lifetime, and it has undeniable national-developmentalist Isebian ideology. Thus, this paper explores the theoretical arguments and projects carried out by Teixeira along with modern examples that serve as test and as empirical foundations. Taking that into account, the essay claims the current opportunity and urgency of Teixeira’s dream for the resumption of national development.

El concepto de derecho como concepto funcional

In her book Positivismo jurídico "interno" Cristina Redondo claims that legal theory can be neutral from a moral point of view. An essential part of her argumentation is based on the criticism of an anti-positivist conception of law developed by Fernando Atria, according to which, since law is a functional concept, no descriptive or morally neutral theory of law can be provided. The essay claims that while Atria's conception of law encounters some difficulties, Redondo's criticism is not conclusive. More importantly, there are two types of natural law theories which also claim that law is a functional concept but which do not face Atria's difficulties. One holds that law is a functional kind and the other claims that the concept of law is a normative-functional concept. The latter type of theory seems particularly suitable for avoiding not only Redondo's criticism but also standard objections from the positivist camp. If this type of theory is correct, a theory cannot be morally neutral.

Militancia femenina contra la dictadura de Pinochet: Legitimación memorística de La mujer metralleta

This essay analyzes the representation of female activism in La mujer metralleta, a documentary by Chilean Francisco López Balló that reconstructs the biography of Marcela Rodríguez Valdivieso, a guerrilla who has succumbed to the oblivion in Chile. It is necessary to highlight her anti-dictatorial fight in order to recover her name and that of so many other militants. My study aims to eliminate the prevailing silence around the exiles who also contributed to the redemocratization processes in Chile and participated in the resistance against Pinochet. Despite their constant political activism, women have been excluded from official historiography. This essay claims a place in the world to one of the many activists who experienced the process of Chilean exile and whose biography contributes to a better understanding of female activism. This documentary offers a new approach to the past is constructed that questions the relations between the State and the revolutionary position of women, despite the fact that women have historically played a marginal role in war conflicts. My paper points out the relevance of this guerrilla, how this documentary contributes to reconstructing history and how exile affects the transmission of memories.

Hospitality, ethics of care and the traditionist feminism of Beit Midrash Arevot

This is an exploration of women’s tradition of hospitality, the epistemic and moral contribution of their practices of welcoming the other and their historical experience as providers of care. The essay claims that female hospitality has largely consisted of care for others, which challenges a social model based on individualism and self-sufficiency. The argument is rooted in ethnography and Jewish thought and reclaims the home as an ethical space. This text analyses two disturbing and painful stories from the Tanakh that are both examples of the consequences of extreme or absolute hospitality and violence against women. The famous works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Lévinas on hospitality as ethics and hospitality as the feminine are discussed vis-à-vis anthropological and feminist approaches to the connection between the female welcoming of the other and the ethics of care. Finally, the reflections of the members of Beit Midrash Arevot (Jerusalem) shed light on a traditionist feminism that develops an ethics and practice of hospitality as welcoming otherness.

Minding Marx’s Mind: A Philosophical Reflection on the ‘Mind’ Question—Part I

The ‘mind’, one could say, is a dangerous thing, dangerous not only in terms of Kant’s ‘unknowable thing-in-itself’, but a dangerous ‘thing’ as in Marx’s concept of reification. According to the concept of reification, there is a personification of things with the consequent depersonification of human life. Apply this theory of reification to the ‘mind’ and what we get is the theory of the ‘mind’, where the ‘mind’ is depicted as having some sort of uncanny life of its own, doing magical things. Consequently, the ‘mind’ could mean everything and yet mean nothing. This essay keeps the mind in two forms: in inverted commas and not in inverted commas. Thus we have the ‘mind’ and the mind. One must understand this radical difference. This essay further claims that while there are idealistic conceptions of the mind, so too does one have biologist ideas of the mind developed by what is now called ‘brain sciences’, generously funded by the corporate world. In contrast to idealism, biologism and the brain sciences, contemporary studies that interface philosophy, psychoanalysis and neuroscience offer newer possibilities on what the human mind means. Here the ‘mind’ has not to be understood as either in the form of ‘spirit’ or ‘thing-matter’, but in the form of historicism and humanism, where humanity as a species being is defined by labor. This essay analyzes whether there can be a real dialectical materialist theory of the mind, and how this new theory needs a critical humanist and naturalist grounding. It claims that there is a radical difference between this critical and humanist Marxism and the Marxism of post-Marx Marxism.