Loss Of Authority Research Articles

Grand Sulthan As The Basis For The Transfer Of Land Rights In Tebing Tinggi City

The transfer of land rights is a legal event/action that results in the transfer of rights from one legal subject to another legal subject, thereby causing the loss of authority over the land. Land transfer refers to the process or action that changes land ownership from one party to another. This can occur through a variety of means, including sale, inheritance, gift, or voluntary or forced surrender. For example, if someone sells a house to someone else, that is a transfer of land. This research includes normative legal research, so the legal materials used are primary, secondary and tertiary legal materials. The technique for collecting legal materials that will be used as a source in this research is library research, namely collecting legal materials by reading statutory regulations, official documents, journals, articles from the internet, and other literature that is closely related to The issues discussed are based on secondary legal materials. Transfer of land rights is a right to transfer land rights from an individual to a legal entity. Legal transitions usually occur due to legal acts and legal events. The implementation of the transfer of land rights can occur due to transfer or transfer. Switching, for example due to inheritance of Decision Number. 13/Pdt.G/2020/Pn Tbt The Panel of Judges rejected the Defendants' exception in its entirety in the main case, rejecting the plaintiff's claim in its entirety. Decision Number 422/Pdt/2020/PT Mdn that accepts the bandi application from the Comparator's Attorney for the original Plaintiff based on the Decision of the Tebing Tinggi District Court Number 13/Pdt.G/2020/Pn Tbt, dated 20 July 2020 which is appealed in the exception and rejects the exception Appellee 1 and Appellee II, in the main case, canceled the decision of the Tebing Tinggi District Court which was appealed. At the cassation level, Decision Number 1928 K/Pdt/2021, namely granting the cassation petition from the cassation applicants consisting of the Chair of the Community Empowerment Institution, formerly the Community Social Institution, represented by Iskandar and Lalang Village, Rambutan District, Tebing Tinggi City, represented by Lura Adi Supeno, thereby canceling the Medan High Court Decision Number 422/PDT/2020/PT Medan and dated 21 October 2020 which annulled the Decision of the Tebing Tinggi District Court Number 13/Pdt.G/2020/PN TBT dated 20 July 2020.

Epistemic and Deontic Authority in Parent–Teacher Conference: Referring to the Expert as a Discursive Practice to (Jointly) Undermine the Teacher’s Expertise

This article investigates the interactional constitution of a phenomenon recurrently reported by teachers who complain about a loss of authority, a systematic delegitimization of their role. Adopting a conversation analysis informed approach to a single-case study from a corpus of parent–teacher conferences, we illustrate how challenging the teachers’ expertise is accomplished by participants as an outcome of some identifiable communicative practices. Particularly, we analyze the practices of “quoting” and “referring to the expert” as interactional resources differently exploited by participants: While parents challenge the teachers’ epistemic authority and lay the foundation for claiming the right to decide what do to with their son in the classroom, teachers contribute to this epistemic positioning and cede their expert knowledge-based deontic rights, that is, the right to decide the best practices to adopt in the classroom. In the discussion, we advance that the participants’ interactive competence in navigating the complex epistemic landscape of the encounter profoundly impacts on the local definition of reciprocal epistemic and deontic rights and responsibilities. Indications for teachers’ education are provided in the conclusion.

The perspective of staff members of two forensic psychiatric clinics in German-speaking Switzerland on the introduction of recovery orientation: An explorative study.

Recovery orientation (RO) is directed at living a worthwhile life despite being impaired by the constraints of mental illness. Although being quite common in general psychiatry in Switzerland, the dual mission of forensic psychiatry-safeguarding and therapy-challenges the idea of establishing RO as a work philosophy in this context. This explorative study qualitatively investigates baseline expectations and professional perspectives of forensic staff members concerning the idea of establishing RO in Swiss forensic psychiatric wards. Thereby, three central themes were worked out, namely "challenges associated with recovery," "expected barriers," and "possible recovery-oriented interventions." From a general point of view, the staff members were uncertain whether RO interventions could be introduced at all, and if so, to what extent. This, on the one hand, had to do with structural obstacles such as security requirements; however, personal obstacles in the form of different, sometimes contradictory attitudesand ideals and fearful anticipations-such as the loss of authority and power-also played a central role. As forensic psychiatric wards are non-existent in Latin-speaking Switzerland, the study does only refer to the German-speaking language region.

Reported speech in problem telling

Like many institutional interactions, parent–teacher conferences are impregnated with a socially sanctioned distribution of epistemic and deontic rights. However, who has the right to know, to assess and to make decisions is less an overarching structural dimension than an interactional local accomplishment. This paper reports data from a research project on parent–teacher conferences that investigated the interactional constitution of a phenomenon increasingly reported by teachers: loss of authority, the systematic delegitimisation of their role. Adopting a conversation-analysis informed approach to a single case study concerning a nine-year-old child, I describe a specific resource – reported speech in problem telling – displayed by the mother during the dialogic phase of the second conference of the school year. We illustrate how, through this conversational resource, the mother accomplishes epistemic and moral work. After making information from her territory of knowledge more relevant than information provided by the teachers, she (1) provides incontestable evidential bases to her ‘problem trajectory’, (2) makes it prevail over the teacher’s ‘no-problem’ trajectory and (3) undermines the teacher’s epistemic authority by vicariously blaming her work. In the discussion, we suggest that the mother’s interactive competence in doing epistemic and moral work can explain why she succeeds in shaping the teacher’s professional conduct. In making the case for microanalysis-based teacher training, in the conclusion we discuss some applied implications of the study.

Retraction Watch: A tool for informing academia about ethical violations in publications

Retraction is one of the ways to filter low-quality academic publications. Over the last decade, the number of retracted articles from journals has been steadily growing around the world. Information about such articles can be found both on the websites of the retracting journals and in the databases that index these journals. In 2010, two doctors from the United States, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, created an Internet resource – Retraction Watch (RW), which concentrates information obtained as a result of investigations of ethical misconduct leading to retraction of articles. These investigations are conducted by the RW founders themselves, as well as by volunteers. Currently, RW contains information on over 24,000 retractions. The main violations include serious errors in methodology and calculations that lead to incorrect conclusions, manipulation of figures and data, plagiarism and self-citation, duplication of publications, etc. In its posts, RW considers unintentional mistakes, as well as deliberate fraud in order to obtain a position, degree or other benefit. Retractions can result in the withdrawal of academic degrees, dismissal from work, demotion, loss of authority among colleagues. RW posts are released daily and a cumulative RW issue – at the end of each week. The owners of the resource, having no outside funding, offer to subscribe to a paid resource or provide sponsorship assistance to those interested in maintaining and developing it. However, the resource is publicly available, and everyone can subscribe to mailing lists for free. Recent issues have focused on non-peerreviewed articles about COVID-19 that report erroneous scientific findings with possible serious implications for important decisions. In addition, Retraction Watch accumulates information on academic ethics from other sources. This article aims to describe a variety of ethical violations leading to retraction of articles and the consequences of retractions based on RW data. The sample of posts was drawn mainly from the 2021 RW issues.

Відповідальність судді, прокурора, адвоката за порушення професійної етики

The article analyzes the problems of responsibility for violation of professional ethics by judge, prosecutor and lawyer.The purpose of this article is the scientific development of the problems of liability of the judge, prosecutor and lawyerfor violation of professional ethics by determining the types of such liability, grounds and consequences of its occurrence.It is reasoned that one of the main guarantees of observance by the judge, prosecutor and lawyer of the rules ofprofessional ethics is the responsibility for their violations. The responsibility of the judge, prosecutor, lawyer for ethicsviolations can be considered in two aspects: internal and external.The internal aspect of such responsibility lies in certain experiences of the individual associated with failure to complywith ethical requirements or violation of moral prohibitions. External responsibility is manifested in two dimensions:(1) social and (2) legal.Social responsibility is manifested in the social condemnation of the offender, contempt for him from the environment,weakening social ties, loss of authority and influence on other people. Legal liability is a type of social responsibilityprovided by the law and provided by the power of state coercion and consists in the establishment of certain restrictionsfor a person in connection with the violation of norms and rules of professional ethics.It is reasoned that the legal liability for violation of professional ethics for judges, prosecutors and attorneys hasa single legal nature, and therefore can be unified, which will facilitate the establishment of a single approach to therelevant disciplinary offense and the use of charges for its commission.

Crisis of Authority: The Truth of Post-Truth

This article is a critique of the notion of post-truth. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the epistemological crisis suggested by the notion of post-truth is epiphenomenal to a more general crisis of authority, a crisis that is poorly understood in the literature. I also argue that revisiting Arendt’s account of authority can help us elucidate the vexed dynamics of authority in modern society, as well as the dynamics behind its current crisis. The post-truth situation is a loss of authority that is political before it presents as epistemological. Effectively addressing this situation, I conclude, is a much more challenging and complex proposition than what is suggested in the literature on post-truth.

Editorial

Editorial

The Lived Experience of Early Marriage in Jordan: The Perspective of Adolescent Girls and Young Women

Child or early marriage, primarily due to cultural factors, continues as a tradition and seems to be a growing phenomenon in Jordan. This research explores the lived experience of early marriage from the perspective of adolescent girls and young women. A qualitative research design and in-depth face-to-face interviews in the Arabic language were conducted with 36 female subjects, married before the age of 18 and all newlyweds, married for less than 3 years. Six major themes emerged from the interviews to describe the experience of the participants: “Feeling remorse about getting married early”; “Loss of authority and feeling powerless”; “Reasons behind early marriage”; “Feeling pressure to have the first baby”; “Early marriage and pregnancy health consequences”; and “The positive aspects of an early marriage.” The lived experience revealed in this study confirm the overall negative effect of girls entering marriage at a young age, Early marriage is a violation of human rights, and robs girls of their childhood, education, work, and other life choices, in addition to the reported adverse psychological and physical effects.

Incomprensión o legitimación del concepto de Autoridad. ¿Qué se busca en Ecuador?

Este artículo se enmarca en cuestiones de filosofía política-educativa y tiene como objetivo fundamental analizar el fenómeno de la “crisis de autoridad” en la educación ecuatoriana; en el sentido que la autoridad tanto en su discernimiento como aplicación parece haber sido mal asociada al poder o deslegitimada. Los tropiezos dentro del sistema escolar podrían estar relacionados estrechamente con la “crisis de autoridad”. La investigación es de carácter documental, teórica, desde la perspectiva filosófica a través de la hermenéutica como método y técnica de interpretación y la dialéctica. Este artículo destaca el pensamiento B. Robbes, para quien la autoridad ocupa un lugar esencial en el proceso educativo, especificando que la “autoridad autoritaria” es un abuso de poder mientras que la “autoridad evacuada” es el déficit en el ejercicio de la autoridad, por consiguiente, ambos tipos de actitudes entrañan riesgos para el niño y/o el adolescente. Además, se ha considerado el pensamiento de Hannah Arendt, así como otros autores con el objetivo de ampliar el significado de autoridad para una convivencia en el entorno escolar saludable, que requiere de la misma para hacer efectiva la labor educativa. La “crisis de autoridad” en testimonios de profesores en Ecuador y otros países los enfrentan con la pérdida de autoridad, ya sea porque los estudiantes “no los respetan” o porque los propios profesores no la ejercen en el aula (falta de legitimidad).

Social Status of Junzi(君子): Focusing on the Loss of Authority of Zhou(周) in the Spring and Autumn Period(春秋時代)

Social Status of Junzi(君子): Focusing on the Loss of Authority of Zhou(周) in the Spring and Autumn Period(春秋時代)

Ownership in the Seventeenth-century Admiralty Court

ABSTRACT A sample of 1090 admiralty instance decrees from across the seventeenth century includes 234 that concerned either the ownership or co-owner management of merchant vessels. Some of these rulings issued by the high court of admiralty and found at the National Archives indicate what was usually required to prove title to a ship or shares in it. Some suggest whether London's civilian judges favoured crown subjects who were quarrelling with foreigners over vessels and helped to enlarge England's commercial fleet by both their prize and instance decrees. Roughly two-thirds of the decisions define the duties and powers of shareholders in managing a ship. What were their obligations to maintain it or to recover it if it were captured? Could they dismiss the ship's master for incompetence or misconduct if he were a fellow owner? Which investors could choose the ship's voyages? The cases reveal costs to litigants in time and fees. And finally they indicate that common law prohibitions ended admiralty governance of most ownership matters late in the century, lending weight to suggestions by M.J. Prichard and D.E.C. Yale about the decline of the instance jurisdiction and the civilians’ reaction to their loss of authority.

Ukrainian-Russian Relationship in 1917-1918: History Lessons

The author has carried out a comparative analysis of Ukrainian-Russian relationship between the days of the Ukrainian Central Rada and the modern period. The character and ideological basis of stable tendencies in Russia’s policy towards Ukraine have been demonstrated. The similarity in the approaches of the Russian central government to the so-called “solution of the Ukrainian issue” has been determined; the essence of Russian chauvinism in understanding the right of nations to self-determination has been demonstrated. The causes and consequences of the war between Soviet Russia and the Ukrainian People’s Republic have been analyzed. The author has determined the main significant, fateful mistakes of the leaders of the Central Rada within relations with the People’s Commissar of Russia, which led to the loss of authority and support of the Ukrainian people for national power and, as a consequence, the collapse of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The nature and essence of the ideology of the so-called “Russian world” have been revealed. It has been concluded that the history of Ukrainian statehood in 1917-1918 is instructive in many aspects, since it shows that one of the main reasons for the defeat of the Ukrainian Central Rada, which ultimately failed to defend the Ukrainian People’s Republic, was the lack of necessary consolidation of national political forces in solving urgent state affairs (creation and development of own army, timely solution of social, economic problems, efficiency of work of legislative and executive agencies, etc.). It has been noted that the challenges currently facing the Ukrainian state – Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the invasion of its troops in the East, the information war, the propaganda of the so-called “Russian world”, etc. – are not new. In many ways, they repeat what happened in 1917-1918. In particular, the proclamation of puppet pseudo-republics “DNR” and “LNR” in the East of Ukraine, through which Russian troops de facto launched the war against Ukraine. That is why modern Ukrainian politicians need to learn the lessons from the past. Nowadays, when Ukraine is defending its independence from Russia, Ukrainian statesmen and politicians must abandon their narrow party and self-interests and work together to protect national achievements from the encroachments of the “Russian world”, the most important of which is the state of Ukraine.

丁茶山政治思想中的契約論特色

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 十九世紀的東亞世界在面對西方勢力的入侵時，提出了“中體西用”、“東道西器”與“和魂洋才”的説法，然而只有日本的“和魂洋才”之説，推進了社會的改革，而取得成功。雖然大部分的學者認爲日本所以成功的原因在於揚棄儒教獨尊思想及其體用哲學。然而東亞的知識分子並未放棄傳統的思想，而持續摸索具有東亞特色的人文學與社會科學的理論。對於崇尚西學的現代東亞知識分子而言，東亞儒教文化最欠缺的是面對現實處境的理論，因而在重覆性的論點下，難有理論的發展。然而，實情是否如此？基於這個問題，本文嘗試討論朝鮮丁茶山（1762—1836）政治思想中可能的理論發展，由此説明其思想在儒學上的創新，以及與現代性思想的關聯。本文的結論以爲：丁茶山以“二人相與”説詮釋“仁”的意義，其論點可以與西方的社會契約論相連繫，在當時的儒學環境具有調整、創新的意義，在未來也有發展的可能性。由於儒學在當今已經不再具有過去東亞政治傳統的權威性，如果它不能轉變爲具有理論活力的學説，則其地位將岌岌可危，由此而言，丁茶山儒學中的契約論特色，將是東亞儒學發展中值得珍視的傳統資源。
 In response to the invasion of Western forces in the 19th century, reformers advocated three theories, of which only the one termed “Japanese spirit and Western techniques” succeeded in social reform in Japan. The other two, “Chinese essence and Western practice” and “Eastern values and Western technology” respectively, failed in other East Asian countries. Most scholars ascribe Japan’s success to the abandonment of Confucianism along with its substance-function philosophy. However, East Asian intellectuals did not abandon traditional thought but continued searching for humanities and social science theories with East Asian characteristics. For intellectuals who revered Western learning, the greatest deficiency of Confucian culture in East Asia was the lack of theories that would tackle practical problems. For this reason, they assumed, hardly any progress could be made as long as the old theories persisted. Is this really the case? This paper is an attempt to study the possible development of Jeong Dasan’s (1762-1836) political theory and to reveal his innovation of Confucianism and its connection with modern philosophy. It argues that Jeong’s idea that “‘humanity ’requires two persons to stay together” (as understood in the structure of the Chinese character ren 仁, which is made up of “two” and “person”) may be compared with social contract theory from the West and therefore has the function of moderating and improving the Confucianism of his time and the possibility of future development. Given Confucianism’s loss of authority in the contemporary world compared with past East Asian political traditions, it will be in jeopardy if there is no transformation and revival of its philosophy. In this crisis, social contract theory in Jeong Dasan’s political thought is a valuable resource for East Asian Confucianism.

Losing the authority – what institutional architecture for cooperative governance in the Murray Darling Basin?

ABSTRACTWater governance strongly depends on the institutional arrangements in place. The plethora of recent inquiries into the adequacy and integrity of governance arrangements in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) indicates a crisis of trust, legitimacy and public confidence – in short, a loss of authority. With the prospect that current arrangements are losing the authority and legitimacy needed to govern the Basin, pressure is mounting for further reforms due to scandals exposed in the media throughout 2017 and 2018. These and subsequent inquiries have revealed serious concerns about probity, integrity, maladministration and the adequacy of compliance and enforcement regimes. The productive potential of this crisis is that draws attention to the need for reforms to governance institutions. This paper aims to explore the redesign of the institutional architecture in the MDB. Given the profound challenges of social and climate change that are demanding reconsideration of the underlying models used in adaptively governing large complex socio-ecological systems, the paper asks what arrangements are suited to the challenges of governing the Basin in the 21st century? This paper explores the nature of the redesign challenge, exploring principles, practices and features of MDB governance. The need for institutions with capacity for strategic navigation, goal seeking and the cultural co-construction of authority are suggested in the interests of cultivating debate about prospective reorganisation.

The social construction of Paul’s apostolic leadership in Corinth

In a climate of institutional change and loss of authority, it is urgently needed to rethink the legitimacy of religious authority. This article offers a case study of Paul’s authority claims in Corinth, using French & Raven’s theory of social power, to offer new insights into the construction of religious leadership. Paul negotiated renewed acceptance as Corinth’s founder and apostle by appealing to legitimate power that he was a better leader than Moses, even Christ’s ambassador, and by undermining the legitimate power of his opponents who claimed Jewish descent and apostolic miracles as key leadership markers. Similarly, Paul appealed to referent power by portraying his suffering as a mark of Christ-embodying leadership and undermined the referent power of his opponents by denouncing status, patronage support and rhetoric as legitimation for leadership. Paul did not appeal to other power bases (informational, expert, reward and coercion), because he could not be sure to outrank his opponents on those counts. This analysis suggests that religious authority in the form of Paul’s founding apostleship was difficult to comprehend and embed in the social and cultural structures of Corinth at that time. Paul needed to engage in intense contention and negotiation to construct a socially and culturally viable model of leadership that would do justice to his vision of Christian identity. As a corollary, the evidence of the intensity of this conflict at various levels throughout the epistle can be interpreted as supporting the literary unity of the epistle.

Writing Law at the Edge of Empire: Evidence from the Qazis of Bharuch (1799–1864)

When judicial department officials at Bombay began to enforce the British East India Company’s (EIC) authority over the production and authentication of certain types of legal documents in the late 1830s,qāẓīs (Islamic judges) like Sayyid Aḥmad Ḥusain of Bharuch, objected to their loss of authority. In petitions sent to the Governor in Council from the edges of empire, these legal intermediaries objected to the Company’s interference with their livelihoods. Although the qazis’ complaints did not yield the desired results, by demonstrating the utility of their record-keeping abilities, qazis were able to retain discrete rights. The effects of these negotiations demonstrate the ways in which the intersections of expanding Company policies and local legal activity contributed to the growth of imperial power. Attending to the particularities of local legal practice, captured in the writings of these qazis, this article highlights the material mechanisms by which the EIC co-opted existing documentary cultures to extend state surveillance over local populations and challenges prevailing histories of legal translation and codification by focusing on the social ramifications of changing legal definitions at the moment such relations were first articulated in writing.

Images

Images Pascal Schwaighofer Royal Batik It might be risky and somehow shallow to start by saying that the featured artworks "deal" with traces. After all, which artwork does not? Opening a discussion on artifacts by comparing them with traces might lock you up in a mental maze. To put it simply, should we consider traces to be anonymous and mute marks or meaningful signs demanding to be deciphered? Artifacts, indeed, might force you to decide for the latter, but then we might ask: do they really "demand" such a thing? And to complicate it a little bit, one might continue and wonder: do these signs refer to something beyond or "just" to themselves? The main reason I am cautious is my supposition that in this case some of the questions related to traces have become tightly "wrapped" into a form and, instead of unfolding them, it might be more rewarding to contemplate their folded shape. I am saying this not for the sake of mystification or some hermetic détournement, but because sometimes fossilized "wrinkles" get easily spoiled, and the better way to appreciate their untranslatable sinuosity is to keep them "unaltered." To avoid that, therefore, I will refrain from quoting, and try to contain, let's say, theoretical speculations. To start with, Sketches for a Flag (Royal Batik) is one of several outcomes of a longterm project with the overarching title Royal Batik. As the name suggests, it has as its starting point the wax-resist—mainly beeswax—dyeing process called batik. The etymology of the ancient craft reflects its Javanese and Proto-Austronesian roots referring to "writing" or "tattooing," whereas the contemporary word is the result of British and Dutch colonial butchering of the original term. The second work is called La mala mimesis; plaster casts of framed honeycombs. While plaster molding is renowned as the pivotal process that facilitated for centuries—and still does—copying and reproducing forms ad libitum, forcing bees to nest into frames is a practice that allows modern apiculture to exploit these laborious tiny workers also, almost—recent bees' colony collapses rectify—ad libitum. It goes without saying that in both artworks technique and history or, in other words, material culture and politics, meet and mingle; making a thorough "unpacking" difficult. I will attempt, nevertheless, to delve first into the craft, or perhaps the technical aspects. For many centuries plaster models were considered in the Western tradition only for planning, sketches, or transitory processes. Particularly for sculpture, plaster was considered handy either for scale models in the planning phase or as molds for metal casting. Gessoes sculpture allowed the Maestro—usually assisted by a number of anonymous apprentices—to better control the carving process by transposing with pantographs the statue's features and proportions from model to stone. At the end of the nineteenth century, plaster was no longer deemed a poor and transitory material and was elevated to the realm of creativity. Before that shift, however, plaster casting had already been popular among physicians, ethnologists, botanists, and zoologists. Casts of fruits and vegetables, [End Page 122] animals, and body parts—particularly those deformed by pathologies or not complying with "Western" traits—were common pieces of bourgeois and Eurocentric curiosity. The early birds, that is, the artists who introduced the casting of body parts in the sculpting process were at first labeled by their contemporaries as cheaters. Among the detractors, one might find big names such as Charles Baudelaire and Auguste Rodin. If we consider their historical context, it is no surprise that the liberal arts felt the threatening pressure of impressive new technologies. Plaster casting was in fact associated with photography: the latter a menace for painters, the former for sculptors. Having said that, the strong resistance cannot be reduced only to a reaction against technical reproduction and loss of authority. To cut short a long analysis, up to the end of nineteenth century, artistic disputes took place in the borderlines of metaphysical debates between "realists" and "animists." As surprising as it might sound, there is something photographic about batik. By this I mean that phenomenologically speaking it is reminiscent of the photosensitive chemical process. Fabric soaked in wax becomes...

Interpretation, Revolution, Inheritance: Benjamin with Marx

Interpretation, Revolution, Inheritance:Benjamin with Marx Gerhard Richter (bio) In Section III of her seminal if controversial reading of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt rightfully remarks upon Benjamin's engagement with what she diagnoses, here and elsewhere in her works, as a certain Traditionsbruch, or "break in tradition." She reminds her readers that, insofar as "the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority," and to the extent that "authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition." Benjamin, Arendt suggests, "knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable," propelling him "to discover new ways of dealing with the past." According to Arendt's account, if Benjamin's trademark insight is "that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present," then his new way of organizing the past is to quote it in ever-renewed and reconceptualized constellations, rather than seeking to "repair" a broken tradition by reinserting the past into it.1 Next to the practice of citation, Arendt trains her focus on Benjamin's privileging of the figure of the collector in response to the Traditionsbruch in modernity. The [End Page 523] one who cites and the one who collects each assemble their shards of history in ways that creatively and strategically reconfigure the tradition in which they find themselves. Yet what is missing from Arendt's consideration of this shifting relation to the disruption of tradition and its transmissibility is the critical and abiding role that the categories of interpretation and inheritance play for Benjamin in this context. In the pages that follow, I wish to suggest some of the ways in which these two categories of reflection enrich our understanding of Benjamin's singular relation to a refractory tradition and the variegated movements of transmission, reception, and reinscription without which it can hardly be thought. In the process, Benjamin's work will enter a dynamic and, I would argue, often under-appreciated relationship with certain elements of Marxian modes of thought. Among the substantive topics that Benjamin addresses in a consequential letter from December 9, 1923 to his friend Florens Christian Rang, one finds not only the nature of the "idea" as he was concurrently attempting to develop it in the Trauerspiel book, and, by implication, the attendant relation of the specifically Benjaminian idea, his idea of the idea, to the idea in the Platonic, Kantian, and Hegelian senses. What concerns Benjamin above all else in the letter is the fundamental question regarding a possible relation between the work of art and what he calls "geschichtliches Leben," historical life. He writes: "What has been preoccupying me is the question of the relationship between works of art and historical life. In this regard, it is evident to me that there is no such thing as art history. The concatenation of temporal occurrences, for example, does not imply only things that are causally significant for human life." And he adds: "Rather, without a concatenation such as development, maturity, death, and other similar categories, human life fundamentally would not exist at all. But the situation is completely different as regards the work of art. In terms of its essence, it is ahistorical."2 If the essence of the artwork can be said to be ahistorical, it is because the "attempt to place the work of art in the context of historical life does not open up perspectives that lead us to its innermost core as, for example, the same attempt undertaken with regard to peoples leads us to see them from the perspective of generations and other essential strata."3 The relationship between the artwork and its historicity therefore cannot [End Page 524] be reduced to a thematic history or to a history of form. Yet, at the same time, "there remains an intense relationship among works of art" in a way that renders them "similar to philosophical systems, in that the so-called history of philosophy is either an uninteresting history of dogma or even philosophers, or the history of problems."4 If one wishes, by extension...

On neither burying nor praising religion

In response to the April 2017 Critical Research on Religion editorial “On a balanced critique: (or on the limits of critique),” the author suggests first that defining religion is possible and helpful, and that even those who claim not to define the subject demonstrate knowledge of its boundaries. Academic research on religion can offer useful generalizations and insights, while having no impact on the fortunes of religion in the real world. When believers perceive academic research as hostile to religion, they are absolutely right. All academic approaches to religion reflect its loss of authority under secularization. Our work is always a critique in the strongest sense, especially when it deals with the psychological foundations of religious beliefs. Even a “balanced” critique undermines belief plausibility and will incur the wrath of true believers.