Paradoxical Position Research Articles

A “Popular,” “Private” Lecturer?: Kant’s Theory and Practice of University Instruction

In this article I explore Kant’s theory of the scholar through the dual lens of his own lecture practice and his writings about scholarly speech. Along with analyzing two of Kant’s wellknown works on the public sphere and the university (the 1784 “Enlightenment” essay and the 1798 Conflict of the Faculties ), I examine a transcript of one of Kant’s lecture courses to test out his programmatic account of university instruction. I show that Kant strategically aligns his own lecture practice with a “popular” mode of discourse in line with contemporary Popularphilosophen but not with his transformative paradigm of “public” scholarly speech in the print public sphere. I argue that the lecture takes on a conflicted, almost paradoxical position in Kant’s thought as a popular, but not fully public mode of discourse.

Emotions behind Bars: The Regulation of Mothering in Argentine Jails

This article considers how the contemporary Argentine nation is produced through the regulation of mothering in the federal penitentiary system. The analysis is based on legal narratives of mothering and on women’s social exchanges with female guards. To explore the emotional dimensions of social justice, this article understands prisons as objects of public feelings and as affective economies where emotions circulate. It argues that, through the regulation of mothering in institutions of social control, the nation-state disciplines particular modes of emotional life to foster gendered illusions of belonging for young migrant women and girls. Penal legislation splits mothering into two periods: Until children are four years old, women are regarded solely as biological reproducers of the nation, and mothering is allowed in prison yet exclusively defined as a biological exchange between the bodies of mother and child. However, after the child reaches age four, the fear of moral contamination incarnated in these women constructs them as undesirable agents of cultural transmission to the next generation. The effect is the removal of their children from prison. These two models conceive the future generation’s well-being as dependent on women’s bodies until the children are four years old and, after that, on the fantasy of a nuclear, heterosexual family outside prison. The paradoxical position of incarcerated women vis-à-vis the nation is policed by guards who regulate prison’s affective economies, reducing women’s access to income and goods, shaping the technologies of punishment applied to them, and limiting the forms of agency and social transformation available.

Paradoxes of the Dance Dramaturg

ABSTRACT: In dance, the dramaturg’s duty corresponds for the most part to an ”art of watching.” The dramaturg’s process is part of a relationship that is at once intimate and distant. As an accomplice he/she is accompanying the choreographer in the development and structuring of the dance work. In fact, the dramaturg actively participates in its conception through his/her reflection, perception, and questioning. In this way, the dramaturg places himself/herself in a paradoxical position: at once outside and inside, both a stranger and partner, a critic and confidante. Although the dramaturg works from behind the scenes, his/her role is essential: he/she is interrogating the choreographer about intentions and artistic decisions with the purpose of helping him/her articulate (and accept) ideas that are often unconscious or intuitive.

Hilton jako "fekální dvůr": Socioprostorové aspekty bezdomovectví

This article sets out to analyse the social (re)production of an object inhabited by homeless people that is located on the periphery of a mid-sized Czech city. Drawing on Edward Soja's model of the trialectics of spatiality and Petr Vasat's empirically based concept of heterotopia, the author describes three spheres (or space-types) of the object: (1) a historical and physical description of the object; (2) the dominant actors' representations of the object (including politicians, municipal police, public authorities, and the local media); and (3) the object as a heterotopic 'Hilton' (the emic name of the object). He focuses mainly on the differences or junctions of these spheres/spaces. The empirical basis of this study is formed by data from ethnographic participant observation of the homeless, interviews, and various texts (e.g. media messages, public notices), which are processed in MAXQDA. There are some areas of contradiction between the three spaces: the negative descriptions by the dominant actors versus the social practices (e.g. pooling, borrowing) and strong social relationships in the Hilton, the seemingly irrational patterns of exploitation of the Hilton, the contrast between the filth outside the building and the clean state of the rooms, i.e. between chaos and order, the disparate views taken of dogs that live in the Hilton too, and ecological and hygienic problems, and so on. The negative view taken by local residents generates a fear of the homeless, which partly legitimises the ritual police inspects of the Hilton, and puts the public in the paradoxical position of both wanting to solve the problem, but rejecting the available tools to do so.

Balizamentos éticos para o trabalho em saúde mental: uma leitura psicanalítica

Propõe-se uma reflexão teórica sobre balizamentos éticos para a prática clínica nos serviços substitutivos de saúde mental e apresentam-se conceitos da psicanálise freudiana e winnicottiana, discutindo-os à luz de depoimentos de sujeitos com diagnóstico de psicose. Ressalta-se a necessidade de que os profissionais sustentem uma posição paradoxal, marcada pela presença implicada na relação com seus pacientes e a suspensão de seus próprios desejos, posição esta que requer a existência de espaços coletivos no serviço, propiciando apoio e análise das relações intersubjetivas.

Traces of Lurianic Kabbalah: Texts and their Histories

Traces of Lurianic Kabbalah:Texts and their Histories Morris M. Faierstein Joseph Avivi . Kabalat ha-AR"I, 3 volumes. Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2008. Pp. 1563. Isaac Luria (1534-72), the most influential figure of the sixteenth-century kabbalistic revival centered in Safed, was at the same time the best known and least understood figure of this important turning point in Jewish religious history. The religious practices that emanated from Safed transformed how Judaism was practiced. New rituals created in Safed and esoteric concepts buried in the Zohar became the centerpieces of Jewish religious life. Kabbalat Shabbat, hakafot on Simhat Torah, ushpizin in the sukkah, and numerous other practices that are universal today were either created in Safed or found in the Zohar and popularized by the Safed kabbalists. At the same time, the mystical theology that animated and explained the mystical significance of these new customs and practices, which came to be known as Lurianic Kabbalah, was the preserve of a select group of elite mystics who went to great lengths to keep these teachings secret and from being disseminated. Thus, we find ourselves in a paradoxical position. On the one hand we know a great deal about the life and activities of Isaac Luria. His personal religious practices and those of his circle formed the basis for the new practices that were so widely disseminated. At the same time, we know very little about the mystical theology that Luria taught his disciples and was the mystical underpinning of these practices. The ban on the public teaching of Lurianic Kabbalah and the copying and publication of Luria's mystical teachings made the accurate transmission of these teachings close to impossible. An illustrative example of this problem is the literary legacy of Hayyim Vital, Luria's most important [End Page 101] disciple. Vital was a graphomane who took copious notes on Luria's lectures and later organized them into longer treatises. During his lifetime he kept these writings in a locked chest and would on rare occasions allow important scholars to read some of his manuscripts for a brief period of time. The scholars who were granted this privilege would try to memorize as much as they could and immediately rush home to copy as much as they could remember. Once, when Vital was very ill and fell into a coma, Joshua Bin Nun, the richest Jew in Safed, gave Vital's brother a hefty bribe for access to Vital's trove of manuscripts. Bin Nun hired as many scribes as he could find and over the three days that Vital was in the coma managed to have six hundred pages copied. Other pieces of Luria's teachings made their way into circulation through other means. It took more than two hundred years before systematic treatises of Luria's teachings were published and made widely available. In contrast, significant portions of the writings of Moses Cordovero, the most important Safed kabbalist before Luria, were published by the end of the sixteenth century. This aura of secrecy gave rise to the myth that Isaac Luria wrote very little and what we have of his teachings was refracted through the biases of his disciples, making it virtually impossible to know with any degree of certainty what Luria actually thought and taught. The stealthy and fragmentary nature of the early transmission of Lurianic teachings also contributed to the corruption of texts and misinterpretations. There were also teachings attributed to Luria by close disciples that seemed to contradict each other. The differing interpretations of Luria's teachings by Vital and Joseph ibn Tabul are the best-known example of these differences. Joseph Avivi has devoted many years of scholarship to answering the basic and seemingly elusive question What did Isaac Luria teach? That is, what was Luria's theory of Kabbalah as he himself wrote and taught it? His attempt to answer this question spans three volumes and more than fifteen hundred pages. It is pursued through three lines of inquiry: First where are Luria's teachings, as he taught them and wrote about them, to be found? Second, what is the process of divine emanation that Luria taught? and finally, what is the...

Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, and Posthumanist Ethics

This article examines the figure of the dog in Samuel Beckett’s fiction and Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, demonstrating dogs’ special capacity to confound humanist subject formation. Scholars have noted how Beckett’s depictions of animal suffering collapse the Cartesian distinction between the human as rational animal and the animal as living machine, yet for Beckett and Levinas, the dog does not merely represent “the animal” in this generic sense. Analysis of human/dog encounters in Beckett’s Watt and Molloy and Levinas’s essay “The Name of a Dog” reveals dogs’ paradoxical position within what Derrida deems the sacrificial structure of Western humanism. As animals, dogs define through negation the humanist subject, yet their participation in systematized violence against other animals complicates humanism’s ethical quandary vis-a-vis “the animal.” Through the dog, Beckett and (more reluctantly) Levinas expose the need for a posthumanist ethics that abandons the myth of rational autonomy and responds to animals in their radical alterity and heterogeneity.

Aesthetics, Ethnography, and Exhibition at the Quai Branly

A common thread linking the essays in this collection suggests that the surrealist movement's interest in non-Western art and artifacts often placed them in a paradoxical position: Their political opposition to colonialism was at times undermined by their fascination with the opportunity such unfamiliar objects afforded them to interrogate the limits of human experience. In this essay, I explore the extent to which such surrealist aesthetics, encouraging an erosion of the boundary between art and ethnography, have influenced the display of non-Western art in France. In examining specific examples illustrating the tendency of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris to treat non-Western art and artifacts as “aestheticized commodities” symbolizing difference, I argue that this approach, no doubt conditioned by surrealist flirtations with “primitive” art, has persisted until the present day, leaving an indelible mark on the design and exhibitionary practices of what was touted to be France's first “postcolonial museum.”

A Study in Sufi Poetics: The Case of ʿAṭṭār Nayshābūrī

Throughout his poetic oeuvre, Shaykh Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār Nayshābūrī (d. ca. 618/1221) repeatedly addresses the question of the relationship between literary-poetic and religio-mystical pursuits. ʿAṭṭār vacillates between denouncing poetic composition as inconsistent with religious orthodoxy, and embracing poetry as the very apex of spiritual practice. This essay explores ʿAṭṭār’s fluid poetics through a comprehensive examination of his stated positions in his four authentic mathnavīs. It concludes that ʿAṭṭār’s contradictory statements regarding the poetic enterprise exemplify the paradoxical position of a Sufi mystic-poet grappling with the tension of literary self-affirmation in the face of spiritual self-annihilation.

Contested cartographies: Maïssa Bey's Bleu, blanc, vert

This article analyses Algerian-language politics in Bey's Bleu, blanc, vert [2006. Paris: L'Aube], a novel that tracks the 30-year period following independence (1962–1992) through the lives of two Algerians. Drawing on Rafael's theorisation of the interplay of ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ in the language of Filipino nationalism, I show how French – at once embraced by the post-independence education system and reviled by revolutionary political rhetoric – placed a generation of Algerians like Bey's characters in the paradoxical position of both incarnating and betraying a nationalist future. I suggest that the ‘return’ to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) – championed to different ends by the Front de Libération Nationale-dominated state and those with ‘Islamist’ sympathies – refused to recognise the foreignness of the so-called native (MSA) for many post-independence Algerians, eliding the impact of over 130 years of colonial history. By exposing the disjunction between ‘language’ as theorised in post-independence Algerian politics (whether by the state or Islamists) and ‘language’ as lived by average Algerians, I argue that Bey's novel refuses collective amnesias that ignore the rich and dissonant complexity of Algeria's past, confounding and productively complicating any reimagination of Algeria's future through a poetics of inclusion.

From Auschwitz to mandatory detention: biopolitics, race, and human rights in the Australian refugee camp

This article draws on Agamben's concept of homo sacer (bare-life) and his examination of the Muselmänner – the most de-humanised inhabitants of the Nazi concentration camp – to illuminate the ways that the policy and system of immigration detention in Australia signifies a continuation of the biopolitical paradigm that both created and supported the atrocity of Auschwitz. The article argues that the notion of race occupies a paradoxical position in the concept and body of the refugee in Australia today because while racism brings about and justifies the refugee's incarceration in the camp, the biopolitical processes of the camp create a subject within whom race becomes inevitably subsumed within and transcended by the ontology of bare-life. In this scheme, the question of human rights becomes ever more relevant but even less applicable. The article concludes with a critique of Agamben's key ideas as well as my application of them in light of Foucauldian and other interpretations of his work.

New Labour's ‘Paradox of Responsibility’ and the Unravelling of its Macroeconomic Policy

New Labour staked much politically on its ability to enact a trouble-free shift in underlying economic subjectivities so as to nurture responsibly self-sufficient welfare citizens. This policy began merely as the requirement for benefit claimants to become active worker subjects in the interests of enhanced employability. More problematically from the perspective of its own macroeconomic policy, it ended as the requirement for as many people as possible to become much more tension-prone active worker-saver-investor subjects in the interests of enhanced private pension insurance. The article charts the collapse of New Labour's reputation for economic governing competence as these latter subjects’ accumulated asset wealth threatened to implode during the recent financial crisis. In its last days the Brown government inadvertently placed itself in the paradoxical position of being able to defend either the financial interests of responsibly self-sufficient welfare citizens or its own reputation for macroeconomic responsibility, but not both.

Shostakovich, the Waldorf Conference and the Cold War

The purpose of this article is to examine Shostakovich’s trip to the United States in 1949: why he went, why he experienced such extreme discomfort— ‘‘I still recall with horror my first trip to the USA’’ —and what it suggests about the paradoxical position of the creative artist from a Communist country during the early Cold War. Using Shostakovich as its primary focus, this article will reveal the contradictions between his officially sanctioned role and his private doubts and misgivings. Because the first subsumed the second, the costs were considerable: his creative work diminished and his self-respect suffered. This public/personal disjuncture was most acute from February 1948, associated with the ideological assault on his music led by Soviet functionary Andrei Zhdanov, until the death of Stalin in March 1953. In March 1949 it reached its apotheosis.

From Peregrinations of a Pariah

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsFlora TristanDrawn from chapter X, “The Republic and the Three Presidents,” this selection shows Tristan's self-fashioning as a historian who documents the eruption of civil war in January 1834 as a result of a contested presidency. The conflicted nature of Spanish American nationalism is reflected in Tristan's paradoxical position as an “insider/outsider” in Peru. This passage also reveals Tristan's inner struggle. While, on the one hand, her ironic commentary sheds light on the weaknesses of the Peruvian oligarchy, on the other, it shows her ardent desire to involve herself in public affairs, which fuels her ambition to seize power to compensate for a failed journey of legitimation. It ends with Tristan's image of the rabonas and of the military establishment in early republican Peru

The Democratic, Anti-Racist Genome? Technoscience at the Limits of Liberalism

The opening decade of this millennium witnessed genome scientists, policy makers, critical race theorists and world leaders standing together to pronounce the anti-racist democratic potential of human genomics. Understanding and assessing this rise of ‘anti-racist, democratic genomics’ requires distinguishing between two problems of power and science: the first characterized by what Michel Foucault labeled states of domination; the second by what he described as relations of power. When states of domination exist, as in the case of Nazi science, liberal efforts to extend new powers of participation and autonomy to research subjects may play important roles in redressing power imbalances between researchers and their subjects. However, when distinctions between scientist and research subject blur, as in the case of much human genomics, efforts to extend liberal rights to subjects of genomic studies—or genomic liberalism—may produce novel problems, including: (1) human genome scientists' loss of capacity to describe their objects of study; (2) disruption of research subjects' abilities to define themselves; and (3) lack of accountability for the unintended effects of efforts to democratize genomics. In these ways genomic liberalism may foster, at the same that it impedes, the co-constitution of knowledge and democratic subjects. It may create new forms of racism at the very moment that it explicitly seeks anti-racist ends. Addressing the problems created by this paradoxical position will require more sustained attention to and critique of the anti-racist and democratic imaginaries that increasingly animate technoscience.

The Disappearing--but Still Important--Swing Voter

Swing voters are persuadable voters: voters who are not so solidly committed to one candidate or the other as to make all efforts at persuasion futile. This article examines the paradoxical position of swing voters in contemporary presidential elections. On the one hand, the number of swing voters in the U.S. electorate has been declining since at least the 1970s. Yet those that remain play a critical role in determining who gets elected president. Since neither party’s base vote constitutes a majority of the voters, and since the number of each party’s identifiers in the electorate has become increasingly equal, presidential general election campaigns will continue to be a struggle to win over the swing voters.

Mechanistic Explanation in Social Contexts: Elster and the Problem of Local Scientific Growth

Jon Elster worries about the explanatory power of the social sciences. His main concern is that they have so few well-established laws. Elster develops an interesting substitute: a special kind of mechanism designed to fill the explanatory gap between laws and mere description. However, his mechanisms suffer from a characteristic problem that I will explore in this article. As our causal knowledge of a specific problem grows we might come to know too much to make use of an Elsterian mechanism but still lack a law. We might then find ourselves in the paradoxical position of knowing more relevant causal truths about the phenomenon we are interested in than we did before, but being able to explain less. If this possibility is realized in social science settings, as I argue it might well be, Elster’s mechanistic account is threatened. Moreover, even if the possibility is rarely realized in that way, it raises, simply as a possibility, a conceptual problem with Elster’s mechanistic framework.

Impotence and Making in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable—and How It Is by Joanne Shaw

Bellay and Ronsard, and Katherine Maynard relates satire to the theme of sickness in Ronsard’s Discours des misères de ce temps. The fifth and final section, “La satire militante au temps des guerres civiles,” has four contributions: CharlesAntoine Chamay and Bernd Renner on the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale, Guy Poirier on satire of Henri III and his mignons, Tom Conley on religious images and early map-making in France, and Martial Martin, who sees a newly emerging concept of satire between De la vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne and the Satyre ménippée. I hope this unforgivably brief summary has at least indicated the breadth of subject matter in this volume, and the many different definitions of satire involved here. Any seiziémiste will find plentiful stimulating material for discussion—and, of course, refutation—in this volume. Vanderbilt University (TN) Barbara C. Bowen SHAW, JOANNE. Impotence and Making in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—and How It Is. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. ISBN 97890 -420-2973-6. Pp. 200. 40 a. The title of Joanne Shaw’s new study promises to unravel the knot of Beckett’s aesthetic of the “unword,” or of “failing better.” Arguing that impotence and making comprise a unified concept that forms the fundamental thematic of Beckett’s major novels, Shaw sets out to delineate how Beckett and his narrators engage with making and its opposite as elements in a dialectical relationship. The study promises to trace Beckett’s conception of making, while warning that making for Beckett “can never be isolated from not-making” (7). To move beyond this impasse, however, proves to be no easy task, and Shaw’s five densely argued chapters do not easily lead her reader out of this paradoxical position. The first two chapters analyze, respectively, bodies and words in Beckett’s trilogy, while the next two explore more closely the dialectical relationship between impotency and making that governs the Beckettian creation of words and bodies. In the last chapter, Shaw unites her various strands and offers a close reading of how “words and life [...] are bound together” (123) in How It Is, finding there the most explicit portrait of Beckett’s “cyclical” (160) pattern of making and “unmaking.” In Shaw’s analysis, Beckett’s narrators impossibly produce, out of their own persistent impotency, not only texts, but bodies, both their own and those of their narrated characters. Central to Shaw’s argument is her thesis that words and bodies, like making and impotency, are in an essentially interdependent relationship with one another. This is not to say simply that words create characters (as they certainly do in any fiction), or that the subject is always already enmeshed in language, an idea which has been elegantly and thoroughly analyzed by dozens of Beckett’s best critics from the past three decades. Instead, Shaw goes one step further and explores “the idea that, through an impregnation , words fertilize Beckett’s narrators to produce the foetus that will develop into their bodily offspring” (15). Thus, despite the fact that Shaw finds Beckett’s world to be one seemingly “without reproduction” (27), she can conclude her first chapter on “trilogy bodies” by claiming that “it is through his thought that the Unnamable creates, in a biological way, a bodily other” (47). On the question of how thought, or any fictional text for that matter, is to perform creation “in a biological way,” Shaw does not clearly elaborate. Reviews 761 Shaw posits that Beckett, in a “quasi-deconstructive move,” “seeks to contradict , undermine and complicate any simple binaristic opposition of making and impotence” (8–9), and she situates Beckett as a thinker of Derridean différance avant la lettre. Structured according to the same logic, her study follows a sometimes bewildering back-and-forth movement, analyzing tropes of fecundity, fertility , and performativity alongside, and in supposed connection with, images of decay, scatology, and failure. This pattern leads to such puzzling statements as the claim that in Beckett, “words (whether written or spoken) are both impotent and yet able to create bodies and texts” (16). Shaw’s study is not without its highpoints ; some of her...

Oil and Unbalanced Globalization

Oil-exporting states occupy a paradoxical position in the international system. Economically, they are highly globalized, as large flows of goods, services, capital, people, and information travel across their borders. They are also the source of the world’s single most valuable commodity, and hence influential. Yet politically, they are strikingly unglobalized: they are exceptionally reluctant to participate in international institutions that require binding commitments. We demonstrate empirically that oil wealth is associated with both high levels of economic and social integration and low levels of political integration ‐ a condition we call “unbalanced globalization,” in contrast to more balanced globalization of other countries. We also develop an explanation for it, based on the unique advantages in trade and finance of the oilexporting states, and their tendency to export an unusually narrow range of goods.

The contemporary contradictions of egalitarianism: an empirical analysis of the relationship between the old and new left/right alignments

This paper deals with the often-observed complex relationship between the so-called old, ‘economic’ left/right alignment (egalitarianism) and the new, ‘cultural’ alignment. Many authors have observed that the less educated members of society occupy an apparently contradictory position, combining a leftist stand in favor of more equality and government intervention, with a rightist stand on minority rights, the treatment of criminals, and other aspects of democratic citizenship. Various explanations have been offered for this paradox. This paper proposes an explanation in terms of vulnerability and the way in which it is culturally processed. Less educated people are often vulnerable and long for more equality. The stronger their desire for equality, the greater their frustration when feeling vulnerable, and the greater the need to cope with that vulnerability. They do so, using particular narrative-coping strategies that create an affinity with the attitudes that form the new left/right alignment. One such coping strategy is based on feelings of relative deprivation. In the empirical part of the paper it is shown that relative deprivation completely explains the paradoxical position of the less educated, and that, when taking feelings of deprivation into account, the two left/right dimensions are in fact independent of each other at all levels of education, creating a situation that leads to tensions within parties that pursue egalitarian policies. The mechanism uncovered in this analysis reveals a tension at the heart of egalitarianism: the stronger the longing for equality among the vulnerable members of society, the more likely they are to opt for right wing positions on the new left/right dimension.