Modern Subject Research Articles

Esty’s Erlebnis and Moishe’s Mikveh: Experiencing Berlin in Netflix’s Unorthodox

Netflix has repeatedly used the four-part series Unorthodox to show the success of its international offerings. While the series was popular in the United States and Britain, it was named a "Binge-Watch Phänomen" among German audiences. The story follows Esty, a Jewish woman who escapes her Satmar Orthodox Jewish community to Berlin. Although she is pursued by her husband and an outcast from her former community, Esty moves through the enlightened, welcoming city of Berlin like a modern subject. Using and re-appropriating Walter Benjamin’s competing concepts of urban experience, Erfahrung and Erlebnis, this article probes into ethical questions about the way that Unorthodox’s protagonists interact with the city: how can a German series responsibly criticize the violence of an Orthodox Jewish community and present Berlin as the answer to a Jewish problem?

Number one crash: vehicle accidents and technological anxiety in the poetry of Polish futurists

ABSTRACT In the history of twentieth-century literature, futurism was one of the most technology-focused experimental movements. By modern technology, one can understand, for example, the object of desire, prosthesis, model, tool, and poesis. This article, however, discusses the curious fascination with transportation disasters and malfunctioning machines (particularly cars, trams, and planes) in the poetry of Polish futurists. The author argues that these images reflect repressed technological anxiety present in discursive practices of the interwar media in Poland. A close analysis of Yeży Yankowski’s “Burning of the Aviator,” Bruno Jasieński’s “Corpses with Caviar,” and Tytus Czyżewski’s “The Flame and the Well” presents diverse strategies of self-exploration for the anxious modern subject and varied approaches to the question of representation. In this poetry, defective machines are not just agents of doom but also, peculiarly, essential elements of the defence mechanism in the psychic apparatus. Drawing from psychoanalysis, the author understands writing as the “talking cure” and frames reading as spectatorship. Consequently, the poems become exercises in losing and gaining agency, thereby enabling the subject to overcome fear of technology.

Rethinking Joseph Conrad's Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity

Rethinking Joseph Conrad's Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity

Recontextualizing Son of Saul: Masculinity in Totalitarian Spaces in Hungarian Film History

Abstract As a result of its radical approach to the topic of the Holocaust, as well as due to the long list of prestigious prizes it won, Son of Saul (Saul fia, 2015, directed by László Nemes Jeles) has put the relation between Eastern European societies and totalitarianism in the centre of public and academic discourse. Though most reviews and articles placed the film in the history of Holocaust-representations, this is not the only context in which the film can be understood. In the present article I argue that Son of Saul can also be read outside (or at least at a distance from) the context of a Holocaust-film, as it also belongs to another, quite different and internationally much less known local cinematic canon. There is an unclaimed heritage behind Nemes Jeles’s controversial masterpiece, a trend in Hungarian cinema that explores the crisis of masculinity in totalitarian political regimes, thereby performing an allegorical critique of modernity and modern subjectivity. My recontextualization of Nemes Jeles’s work indicates the ways it is influenced by a local, Eastern European filmmaking tradition (which includes the work of his own father, the filmmaker András Jeles as well), and is supported by three interrelated conceptual focus points: a post-Foucauldian understanding of cultural and cinematic space, an awareness of the workings of modern cinematic allegory, and finally the use of male protagonists as prime sites for the inscription of social crisis and historical trauma.

The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization: Why the Study of Denominations Still Matters

The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization: Why the Study of Denominations Still Matters

Allochronie im Anthropozän: Ein Gespräch mit Erhard Schüttpelz

Abstract Against the backdrop of the climate crisis and Anthropocene injustices, this conversation unfolds the concept of allochrony to examine modernity as a temporal regime that relied on the attribution of non-simultaneity to the populations of western colonies under the ethnographic gaze of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Positioning the racialized signifier of “the primitive” as a key concept and foil in understanding the articulation of modern subjectivity around 1900, modern temporalities are grounded in the construction of a temporal hierarchy that legitimized the dispossession of land and oppression of Indigenous peoples at the height of European imperialism. Drawing on cultural anthropology, media theory, and the history of science, this conversation provides a critical assessment of the Anthropocene by foregrounding the colonial violence and inherent paradoxes of modern epistemologies as a function of temporal categorization.

자유의 주체와 주인의 성별: 19세기 초 쿠바 노예 서사에 재현된 권력과 젠더 담론

This study analyzes the concept of modern subjectivity focusing on the gender representation of female masters in Juan Francisco Manzano''s Autobiografía (1836), Anselmo Suárez y Romero''s Francisco, El ingenio o las Delicias del Campo (1839) and Félix Tanco y Bosmenie’s Petrona y Rosalía (1838). The narrators of these texts set the cause of the harsh and violent treatment of slaves by upper-class women as lack of rational ability and instability. Through this engendered characterization of masters, these texts internalize the modern subject as a specific man imagined by each narrator. In this regard, this analysis reveals how the modern subject in each text is constituted through the multifaceted characterization of female masters.

“I Wish They Were All Christians”: On Isabella Bird’s Grapplings with Indigenous Beliefs in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan

The religious aspect of Japanese life has a prominent place in Bird's Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. And her lengthy explications of the irreligious state of Japan contributed greatly in popularizing the image of the passive "Oriental" as they were quoted by those interested in disseminating knowledge on the religious plain of the “Far East.” Despite the importance of religion in Unbeaten Tracks, there are no focused studies of Bird's interpretation of Japan's indigenous religions such as Shinto and Buddhism. This study explores how Bird, even as she acknowledges Japanese modernity, demotes the Japanese to second-rate citizens in the hierarchy of peoples. The double role Japan plays as the modern subject and the “uncivilized Oriental” reveals the flexibility of the Victorian triad, and allows Bird to widen the gap between Japan and the “properly civilized” nations of the West. While there are vociferous locals who refute the premise of the triad, Bird sutures the holes they puncture in her Eurocentric narrative by using plural temporalities.

The Influence of European Intellectual Ideas Upon Iranian Prose and Non-fiction in the 60s and 70s

"Following the coup d’etat of 1953 and the trauma caused by it gradually in the 60s and 70s in Iran a new subjectivity, a new vision for the Iranian subject of modernity emerged. Iranians were called by their intellectuals to overcome the trauma, which was called “occidentosis”, a state in which everything that they try to create and produce is “stilborn”. They were asked to no longer accept predestination and quietism, developing courage instead, becoming militant and finding their own, authentic way of encountering technologies and the West. This paper systematically demonstrates that the new subjectivity, which can be seen in the Iranian prose and non-fiction in the 60s and 70s is heavily influenced by European intellectual ideas. Keywords: European intellectual ideas, subjectivity, prose, non-fiction, Iran. "

The system of subjects of intellectual property law in the conditions of the cyberspace formation

The article is devoted to identifying the system of subjects of intellectual property law in the conditions of the formation of cyberspace. The topic of the article covers the subject composition of intellectual property legal relations. The purpose of the article is to define the system of subjects of intellectual property law, taking into account the virtual and digital aspect.
 The research methodology consisted of a system of general scientific and special methods of scientific knowledge. The application of the dialectical method has made it possible to establish that digital law is developing as a complex institution that gravitates towards private law. Thanks to the use of the formal legal method, it has been stated that the author and co-authors have the right to create their own virtual identity in the digital environment, which can be the object of intellectual property legal relations, in particular copyright. Based on the application of methods of analysis and synthesis, it has been determined that modern subjects of intellectual property law are divided into primary, derivative and auxiliary.
 It has been proven that the development of cyberspace has a direct impact on the formation of new subjects of intellectual property law. The author in cyberspace has the right to: create their own virtual identity, which will be the object of intellectual property legal relations; to place their own results of creative, scientific, intellectual work. Derivative subjects of intellectual property rights are persons who acquire property rights to the already created, existing result of creative, intellectual, scientific work in a material and/or virtual environment. Auxiliary subjects of intellectual property law perform an auxiliary function regarding the implementation of state intellectual property policy, creation of an object of intellectual property law, registration of property rights to these objects, stimulation of creative activity, and more.
 The results of the article can be used in scientific works in the field of intellectual property law, as well as by lawyers when identifying the subject structure of intellectual property legal relations.
 It has been concluded that there is an actual problem of identification of the virtual author, the relationship of virtual identity with a real person, the place of digital law research in the legal system, in particular, it is proposed to determine it by the institute of intellectual property law.

The New Humanities: In Search of Boundaries

"The New Humanities: In Search of Boundaries"
 This article attempts to discuss the philosophical contexts and meaning of the new humanities in the context of the philosophy of subjectivity. At the foundation of the new humanities, as it is argued, is not enlightenment, but Heidegger’s thought, with his excoriating critique of modern subjectivity and its Machenschaft. The article points to the foundational hubris that the new humanities oppose, and to the attempt to reinstall the subject within fixed boundaries. The new humanities, and posthumanism in particular, might backlash with violence against civilisation, comparable to that they endeavour to renounce. In order to manoeuvre through these convoluted figures of subjectivity, the article supports its theses with insightful readings of Hölderlin and Adorno.

‘Languages are so like their boots’: Linguistic Incompossibility in Flush

Reading the 1933 biography Flush alongside Woolf’s translation theory and Braidotti’s nomadic ‘multilinguism’, this paper argues that Woolf’s modernist dislocation of English both informs and is informed by her relationship with non-English languages. Using the Deleuzean idea of the ‘incompossible’ as a way of considering a world made up of multiple co-existing yet contradictory relations, I trace the presence of a ‘linguistic incompossibility’ throughout Woolf’s oeuvre. As a writer, publisher and translator, Woolf articulates a mode of being in and relating to the world that is positively constituted through the multilingual, and which in turn often constitutes the monolingual as static, ineffective, and even impossible. From the contradictory etymologies of ‘Spaniel’ offered in Flush, to the process-orientated relationship with languages in Woolf's non-fiction writing, the old idea of a closed, objective and monolithic language is inadequate for communicating the nomadic movements of modernist subjectivity. Linguistic incompossibility becomes a way of figuring the affirmatory possibilities of difference across, between and within languages to reveal the fluidity and multiplicity of language itself.

The Crisis of Modern Subjectivity: Rethinking Muhammad Iqbal and the Islamic Tradition

Despite the numerous books and articles on the thought and legacy of Muḥammad Iqbāl (d. 1938), hardly any significant academic studies exist that critically evaluate his philosophical thought in relation to his Muslim predecessors. The present article thus intervenes in the field of Iqbāl studies by challenging current scholarly assessments that present Iqbāl as a heroic reformer of Islam. This article is composed of three parts. It begins by providing a critical review of various scholarly treatments of Iqbāl's reformist thought and draws attention to problematic aspects of the current state of such scholarship. The article then proceeds to examine the ways in which Iqbāl's works frequently misconstrue or misrepresent various premodern Islamic texts and doctrines. It does so in two ways. The first of these involves an examination of Iqbāl's Eurocentric reading of premodern Islamic intellectual traditions and demonstrates that this is not only methodologically problematic but moreover undermined by Iqbāl's own limited grasp of modern scientific theories, such as evolution and the theory of relativity. This is followed by an examination of the concepts of selfhood (khūdī) and annihilation of the self (fanā'). Prominently featured in Iqbāl's thought and writings, his treatment of these two concepts illustrates the problematic aspects of his particular mode of interpreting premodern Islamic philosophy and Sufism. Overall, this article demonstrates that Iqbāl's status as a heroic reformer of Islam is misleading, as his interpretation of the premodern Islamic tradition is not as credible as it has often been presented to be over the past century.

Reading blank space from an ecopoetic perspective in selected poems by E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams

Sorrow is perhaps the usual response to the disappearance of things into ‘nowhere’. The use of blank space in the poetry of E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams indicates an alternative response: to accept and even celebrate this. With a view to exploring this alternative response to disappearance, appearance, and nowhere, the article reads blank space in the little man poem and air poem (Cummings), as well as the obsolete rose poem and red wheelbarrow poem (Williams) – I use these labels because the poems are untitled. The article closely examines the tensions that these poems create between their printed black fragments and the blank space within which these are located. It finds that the former mimes being, existence, and ‘something’, whilst the latter mimes unbeing, nowhere, and nothing. The poems present the latter condition as vibrant, embodying the place from where being emerges, ablaze with itself. The blank space embodies this vibrancy in the poems examined; the poets use various devices to heighten the perception of this. For instance, Cummings’ little man poem signifies the reconnection of a modern subject, a little man, and the huge and dynamic earth by rejuvenating an acute sense of now-here in terms of nowhere, as mimed by breaking a phrase across the poem’s final two stanzas, inviting blank space into the poem on an accentuated level. A similar textual event occurs in the tracing of a rose petal’s paradoxical line between something and nothing within Williams’ obsolete rose poem, where the determiner ‘the’ is followed abruptly by the fecund nothingness of blank space. At its conclusion, the piece synthesises these and other findings to argue that the use of blank space in these poems boils down to a node of modern ecopoetic maturation: the poems orient themselves to and within the dynamic earth anew, marking radical acceptance of being on the earth in terms of unbeing.

Producing Scientific Motherhood: State-led Neoliberal Modernization and Nannies' Subjectivity in Contemporary China

AbstractThis paper uses the perspective of “state-led neoliberal modernization” to explore the collusion of the state and the market in the construction of scientific motherhood and its effect on rural nannies in China. It claims that the state and the market work together to shape rural nannies’ modern subjectivity in the neoliberal economy through the commercial training programme of scientific motherhood. Based on a case study in Shanghai, this paper argues that the training for scientific motherhood attempts to transform rural women into modern care workers through two mechanisms: reconstructing recognition and mobilizing emotion. Rather than passively receiving the training, nannies use their agency to adjust the knowledge and practice of scientific motherhood to suit their complicated working situation. Their strategies include deploying scientific knowledge flexibly and instrumentally, practising self-restraint in limited intimacy, and paying attention to their own familial investment.

Falling in and Out of Love with Stuff: Affective Affordance and Horizontal Transcendence in Styles of Decluttering in Japan

The last decade has seen the rise of Japanese methods of decluttering, adding everyday stuff to the increasing number of things that the modern subject must manage to gain a sense of wellbeing. This article examines Danshari by Yamashita Hideko and the Konmari method by Kondō Marie. Using the ‘affective affordances’ of objects as an analytic lens, I will argue that paying attention to everyday practices of decluttering reveals a close connection between material landscapes, gendered subjectivities and competing ethics of personhood. These connections only become visible when we put the decluttering methods in the context of the gendered expectations regarding attachment towards objects and their care in domestic work. Objects serve as an integral part of the affective regulation of everyday life; their careful or wasteful treatment is closely linked with ethical consumption and moral personhood. Attachments to objects and injunctions against wastefulness make ridding a morally fraught task. By contrasting a close reading of the two methods with insights gained from fieldwork on everyday disposal, I will trace the ways in which affect is mobilized in order to get rid of things and put this in the broader context of consumer capitalism in twenty-first century Japan.

Led Around by the Nose

Led Around by the Nose

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Another Image of Existence

Since 2015/2016, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri have been engaging in a joint practice of so-called Poethical Readings, a device that engages the poetic and the ethical at the limits of the epistemology and ontology of the modern Subject. In this interview, Ferreira da Silva and Desideri provide insight into the singular and theatrical dynamics of Poetical Readings, as well as The Sensing Salon, a format for the collective exercise of Poethical Readings. They consider their practice with respect to the issue of power and the image of existence that undergirds modern politics, suggesting that Poethical Readings partake in the construction of a different image of existence no longer founded on the violent operations of the Subject. Having taken place in the autumn of 2020, that is, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the interview is framed by and addresses these issues through the discussion of the social ramifications of the corona crisis.

On Condemning Whom We Do Not Know: Confession of Sins, Plea Bargains and Apophatic Anthropology

ABSTRACT This essay claims that the American plea bargain, figured as an inheritor of Christian confession practices, constructs racialized criminal subjects. It further argues that an apophatic anthropology confounds this legal practice and enables new forms of confession to be imagined. The first section utilizes Michel Foucault’s genealogies of confession in order to show that shifts in European religious and legal confession practices contributed to the emergence of the modern self-possessed subject. The second section utilizes Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve’s sociological account of the courthouse to highlight the role of the plea bargain in constructing racialized criminal subjects. The third section challenges the underlying anthropological assumptions of the plea bargaining. Drawing on Judith Butler, Catherine Keller, and Critical Race Theorists, it insists that an apophatic anthropology prevents the construction of racialized criminal subjects through plea bargains. The final section mobilizes this apophatic anthropology to envision new confession practices in abolitionist settings.