Particular Forms Of Life Research Articles

Giving an Epistolary Account of Oneself: Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

This article reads the decades-long correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy as an account, following Judith Butler. Specifically, it argues that an epistolary subject emerges through the shared act of durational witness enacted in letter writing. Reading the correspondence as a Butlerian account clarifies why subjects choose a relational form like letter writing for the self-representation of trauma. It observes how particular forms of life writing—letters and the eulogy, among them—provide occasions for the reciprocity on which the account depends, even as they unavoidably fail to make selves more knowable to an other than they can be to themselves.

Endless History: Hegel's Flawed Account of Amerindians

Abstract In this article, I argue that Hegel's treatment of Amerindian peoples is rooted in an exclusionary perspective of Reason, which establishes a particular form of life as its defining standard-bearer. This stance results in a distinct form of epistemic misrecognition and injustice that disregards the potential contributions of Amerindian resources and worldviews to the lexicon stablished throughout the modernity. To present an alternative viewpoint, I examine the insights of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, whose pluriversal conception of reason and history challenges one-sided portrayals of rationality. My aim is not to ‘fit’ Amerindian concepts into our familiar modern philosophical vocabulary. Instead, I wish to consider Hegel's philosophy through the lens of encounters and epistemic recognition with those who have been denied it. In particular, the application of an ‘ethnographic pact’ as a mode of translation constitutes a valuable contribution to ongoing decolonial discussions. I assert that this approach calls into question Hegel's notions of progress and universal reason, suggesting that his philosophy of history might have taken a divergent path if it had not been entangled in a self-centric epistemic framework. While these considerations remain subject to further development, they offer a fresh perspective for comprehending Hegel's argument beyond his own epistemic limitations.

Perceptions of Race Among “Sunni” Black Muslims in Laudium, Pretoria: Applying Insights of Talal Asad in South Africa

A number of black Muslims have joined the Barelwi, locally called “Sunni”, networks in South Africa and it is their experiences of race that we wish to examine in this essay. We shall analyze experiences relating to race among three Black “Sunni” (Barelwi) Muslims in South Africa. Given South Africa's tumultuous apartheid past, race continues to play a determinative role in personal, social and political relationships in the country. In exploring the question of race in the Sunni environment, we are guided by the work of Talal Asad. For Asad, following Wittgenstein, it is important to appreciate a particular form of life (Sunniyat in South Africa in this case) and then structure one's questions of race in the light of that appreciation. Hence, we find that the answers proposed by our interviewees to combat racism proceed not so much from the well-known “political” solutions, but from a deeper existential and spiritual understanding of reality.

Self-determination and “the Right to Specificity”. Concerning Hegel’s Theory of Modern Freedom

In this paper, it will be shown that Hegel’s philosophical thematisation of subjective freedom has given a fundamental contribution to the historical innovation of modernity, which regards not only human rights, but also norms and values. Besides, it played an important role concerning the cultural transformation, i.e., the process of the realization of the historical innovation oriented towards the ideals of modern freedom. To show this, the author will focus on some passages from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right of 1820, in which Hegel regarded subjective freedom as universally-normative and, at the same time, as socially and historically contextualized (situated, respectively). Hegel, namely, explicates modern freedom in its ideality and moral normativity, addressing its realization in particular forms of life. Marriage, for instance, as it will be shown towards the end of this contribution, exemplified as the right to particularity, is the normative basis of modern subjective freedom. Tensions and collisions will permanently challenge this type of freedom and also require permanent (and self-defeating) efforts invested in striving for a (too contextualized and situated) „reconciliation“ (in Hegel´s terms Versöhnung).

Contagiousness as a Problem in Social Epistemology

The theory of infection, although it arose in parallel with the advance of positive knowledge, has never embodied only the logic of the laboratory, in which a “clean” experiment can be devised in order to expose the true causes or symptoms of a disease. To the contrary, both the advent of laboratories and the way they work have come about as the result of a clash between the old paradigm for infection (miasma) and the new one (particular forms of life). The structure of an infection is primarily a structure of social relations, in which the history of an infection and the factors that contributed to its spread are reconstructed. The uncertainty about how an epidemic spreads led to the vindication of the autonomous knowledge which arrived at original ways of representing itself and could prove the soundness of its approach. Any discursive accuracy was regarded as questionable and unable to result in a treatment that would be superior to letting the infection run its course. The efforts of such leading epidemiologists in the modern era as Justus von Liebig, Carlos Juan Finlay, Patrick Manson, and the staff of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg brought about a reconstruction by professionalizing the stages in handling epidemics. It is argued that laboratories asserted their autonomy from universities not because of anything distinctive in their nature, but more because of a general understanding of cause and effect relationships in matters of need and famine. That counted for much more than any shortcomings in the previously established logistics and expansion of production. In addition, the development of forms of colonial, industrial and scientific expansion coupled with new types of enterprise, such as the Panama Canal or Germany’s trade with its colonies, fostered a new vision of epidemics not as natural disasters, but as a complex situations that can be managed and neutralized.

The Inhumanities

This article proposes the inhumanities as an analytic to address the material confluences of race and environment in the epistemic construction of the humanities and social sciences. As the Anthropocene represents an explicit formation of political geology, from its inception as a means to frame a crisis of environmental conditions to the characterization of future trajectories of extinction, I argue that centering race is a way to reconceptualize and challenge the disciplinary approaches of the humanities, humanism, and the Anthropocene (e.g., the environmental humanities and geohumanities 1 ). Foregrounding the conjoined historic geographies of racialization and ecological transformation through the discipline of geology, within the context of colonial and settler colonial extractivism, sets the conditions for thinking materially about decolonization as a geologic process. I make three interconnected points about the Anthropocene and inhumanities. First, the Anthropocene names a new field of geologically informed power relations that focus attention on the geographies of the inhuman, geologic forces, and the politics of nonlife. Second, the framing of the inhumanities forces a reckoning with the humanist liberal subject that orders the humanities: an invisible and indivisible white subject position that curates racialized geographies of environmental concern, impact, and futurity. Third, the inhumanities makes visible the historic double life of the inhuman as both matter and as a subjective racial category of colonial geographies and its extractive afterlives. In conclusion, I consider the emergence of geopower as a political technology of racial capitalism and governance of the present. Geopower, I argue, is the product of historical geologies of race that subtend a particular form of life marked by extractivism enacted on racialized geosocial strata.

The Astrobiology of Alien Worlds: Known and Unknown Forms of Life

Most definitions of life assume that, at a minimum, life is a physical form of matter distinct from its environment at a lower state of entropy than its surroundings, using energy from the environment for internal maintenance and activity, and capable of autonomous reproduction. These assumptions cover all of life as we know it, though more exotic entities can be envisioned, including organic forms with novel biochemistries, dynamic inorganic matter, and self-replicating machines. The probability that any particular form of life will be found on another planetary body depends on the nature and history of that alien world. So the biospheres would likely be very different on a rocky planet with an ice-covered global ocean, a barren planet devoid of surface liquid, a frigid world with abundant liquid hydrocarbons, on a rogue planet independent of a host star, on a tidally locked planet, on super-Earths, or in long-lived clouds in dense atmospheres. While life at least in microbial form is probably pervasive if rare throughout the Universe, and technologically advanced life is likely much rarer, the chance that an alternative form of life, though not intelligent life, could exist and be detected within our Solar System is a distinct possibility.

Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit

Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit

Character and Person. John Frow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi+331.

<i>Character and Person</i>. John Frow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi+331.

Русская автобиографическая проза последних лет в зеркале литературного конкурса «Бунинская премия»

&lt;p&gt;В статье рассматриваются лучшие автобиографические произведения, выдвигавшиеся на литературный конкурс «Бунинская премия» за последние несколько лет, как часть современного литературного процесса России, а также выявляется их связь с традиционными произведениями русской литературы, написанными в данном жанре.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Теоретическим основанием исследования является современная концепция теории автора, на основании которой была выявлена тенденция к художественному обобщению частных форм жизни в современной российской прозе. Она проявляется в виде автобиографической «чувствительности» у автора, умноженной на широкие социоисторические и художественные обобщения в изображении народного бытия.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;В анализируемых текстах традиционные художественные элементы могут органично сочетаться с некоторыми новаторскими приемами и решениями. Так, различные документальные элементы, свидетельствующие о серьезной работе писателя с конкретными фактами, соотнесенные с художественными — вымышленными элементами-деталями, помогают создать иллюзию сопричастности судьбы читателя судьбам главных героев произведения (роман Ю. Полякова «Грибной царь» 2005 г.; «Чеченские рассказы» 2008 г. А. Карасева). Проблема взаимоотношения художественного языка и мышления находит у большинства авторов сложное полифоническое решение в диапазоне от экзистенциализма до постмодернизма (например, сборник «Маленькая девочка из «Метрополя» 2006 г. Л. Петрушевской). Новаторство проявляется также и в авторских экспериментах с жанрами, границы которых искусственно «раздвигаются» (например, «повесть ассоциаций», «роман ассоциаций» Е. Гаммера в сборнике «Один — на все четыре стороны» 2007 г.).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Авторы отмечают ведущую роль сложных полифонических и синтетических приемов и решений, формирующих идейно-нравственную и художественную природу современных прозаических текстов.&lt;/p&gt;

Gender, History, and Sovereignty

Gender history has a history proper to itself. This is not only to say that the study of gender as a scholarly and institutional practice is bounded by space and time, and that it has an archive of its own, but also that “gender history” as a relatively recent disciplinary innovation is properly gender history to the extent that it exists in relation to and distinct from other histories of becoming man, woman, trans, and so forth. In other words, gender history, regarded as a discursive formation in its own right, constitutes its object in ways that overlap but remain distinct from other conceptions of being and becoming gendered that are spatially and temporally diverse. Seen in this light, it can be said to map onto a history of sovereignty that has privileged particular forms of life and that acts as a limit on gender's analytical and critical value.

How older and younger people see technology in Northern and Southern Europe: Closing the generation gap

Background Mental representations of technology can be affected by many social and biological factors. The aim of this study was to test the effects of two of these factors, age and culture, on how people mentally represent and experience technologies by comparing the conceptions of old and young people in Spain and Finland. Both Spain and Finland are European countries, but they are historically, geographically, and culturally very different. Method The study is framed within the life-based design (LBD) paradigm, where culture and age interact to define particular forms of life in which technology might be used and perceived differently. We hypothesised that there are differences in the mental representations of technology of Spanish and Finnish people, but that those differences are mediated by age. Results Our results showed that technology conceptions between the two countries differ when considering older generations. However, when we consider younger generations, the gap between the two countries regarding technology is smaller.

Fodor’s Field Diary and the Writing of the Hungarian Imperial Self during World War I

In his article Field Diary and the Writing of the Hungarian Imperial Self during World War Steven A.E. Jobbitt analyses a field diary written by the Hungarian geographer and botanist, Ferenc Fodor, who took part in a two-week geobotanical expedition to Bosnia-Hercegovina in the summer of 1917. Sponsored by the Hungarian Academy of Science, the expedition was part of a much broader Austro-Hungarian imperialist project in the Balkans during World War I. Close scrutiny of Fodor's field diary as a particular form of life writing provides important insight into the masculineimperialist fantasies that informed Hungary's mapping of the Balkans as both a geopolitical and civilizational space, and in so doing points to the conceptual tensions and existential anxieties that lay at the center of Fodor's own conception and negotiation of self. Jobbitt's analysis suggests that although not obvious, Fodor's field diary written during World War I represents trauma in its both personal and extended perspectives. Steven A.E. Jobbitt, Field Diary and the Writing of the Hungarian Imperial Self during World War I page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.3 (2015): Thematic Issue Life Writing and the Trauma of War. Ed. Louise O. Vasvari and I-Chun Wang

„Przemija bowiem postać tego świata” (1 Kor 7,31). Dziewictwo i celibat znakiem królestwa

The present article is an analysis of 1 Corinthians 7:1-40. It presents the relevance of the choice of one’s way of life, either in marriage or in celibacy. Considering the passing away of this life, St. Paul showed the Corinthians the value of virginity as a testimony of the Kingdom of God. According to the apostle, this particular form of life is the best preparation for the eternal life. It enables a person to completely devote his/her life to the preaching of the Kingdom. St. Paul chose this way of living in order to commit himself to the proclamation of the Gospel. Celibacy freed him from all concerns related to the providing for the family. The teachings comprised in the analyzed text are particularly relevant for Christians living in the early twenty-first century. 1 Cor 7: 29-31 is utterly opposed to the models of life preferred in the contemporary world. In light of this utterance, it is worth asking where we can be led by this world that has chosen a completely different way of living. It is no wonder that modern man is not able to understand the value of virginity and celibacy which are a call to conversion and a sign of the Kingdom that will be opposed.

Europe: Is There a Case Against Nationhood?

What makes political self-determination distinctive? The answer given in this article is that it ultimately rests on seeing complete human lives as having their place, at least potentially, within a particular form of life. This focus represents the defensible core of nationality. It is argued that at its current stage the European Union has already come to embrace political self-determination in negative form. It may be crucial for the Union to overcome this negativity by affirming a cluster of forms of life that the Member States have already brought to the table. Contrary to what a contribution bearing this title might suggest in light of momentous current events, its point is not to explore whether the recently adopted financial rescue package reflects a degree of cohesion among Member States that would pave the way towards nationhood. Nevertheless, it will undertake to explain briefly the significance of the arrangements in terms of political self-determination.

Why liberals should not worry about subsidizing opera

Peter Jones has consistently defended the position that liberalism must maintain the distinction between the right and the good if it is to be qualitatively different from alternative political theories, and thus resist the charge that liberals are just like any other political theorists in wanting to impose their views on others. In this paper, I not only add my voice to the many who have already challenged the viability of that distinction, but also additionally argue that it is both unnecessary and undesirable to hold that so much of importance hangs on whether or not it can be sustained. I suggest that the dichotomy between neutralist or impartialist liberalism, on the one hand, and what Jones characterizes as the desire ‘merely to impose a favoured form of life upon others’, on the other hand, is too sharp, and hence at best misleading and at worst mistaken. This is because, or so I argue, not all forms of favouring some values or ideals over others can plausibly be presented as the imposition of a favoured form of life. Rather, we risk trivializing what is objectionable about imposing a particular form of life on people against their will if we treat every departure from strict liberal neutrality as necessarily instances of such an illiberal imposition.

Forming sexualities as judicial virtues

This article explores the formation of sexuality in the institution of the judiciary. Its object of study is an archive made up of the texts of swearing in ceremonies of newly appointed judges of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia. The texts, records of public events, demonstrate a remarkable consistency of general content and tone. They take the form of what might best be described as life writing (biography and autobiography). They have a strong hagiographic quality. Dedicated to writing the life of the newly appointed judge, they are a particular form of life writing devoted to the portrayal of state officials. As such they have a double function formulating and fashioning the subject not only as an exemplary individual life but also as a subject that embodies the virtues of the judicial institution. Each swearing-in document offers a textual portrait that makes and makes public the values and virtues of the institution of the judge. An important context for this study is an earlier empirical research project on sexual diversity in the judiciary. Key informants in that research advised me that sexuality was unlike the other strands of diversity. It was described as a personal and a private matter: strictly extra judicial. The primary objective of this essay is to explore how, if at all, sexuality is made in these public judicial ceremonies and texts, and more specifically, how the subject’s sexuality is figured as an institutional ideal, as a judicial virtue. In undertaking this task the analysis will also examine some aspects of the role of gender in the formation of the judicial subject as a sexual subject.

Initiation, not Indoctrination: Confronting the grotesque in cultural education

The goal of this article is to differentiate initiation from indoctrination, and to return a positive significance to the notion of initiation, as a pedagogy that contributes not only to the perpetuation of a particular form of life or community, but that provides the next generation with means to advance that knowledge beyond its existing boundaries. When we conflate the terms ‘initiation’ and ‘indoctrination’ or only mark a minor difference between the two, we lose meaning. The explanatory and predictive power of our statements is weakened by this failure to take seriously the difference between these two terms. By ignoring the progressive potential in initiation, and condemning that pedagogy as uncritical, educational theorists fail to recognize the intermediate steps that need to be taken in educating a student to be a creative and responsive thinker within a cultural, i.e. symbolic, context. Within the pedagogy of initiation crucial methods for teaching students to engage existing representations of truth, rules of practice, and principles of meaning‐making are employed. This article draws upon case studies and theorists in anthropology to offer a description of initiation that holds progressive potential, and explains the possible relevance of initiatory pedagogy for multicultural education.

Design Style: Changing Dominant Design Practice

Thirteen years ago in a rural Michigan town just south of a major university, I joined a group of revolutionaries. We were well-trained and generously funded. We were organized and had strong allies in major political parties. We used sophisticated tools and techniques that changed relationships of power and control throughout the United States. We did not organize marginalized social groups through solidarity, or catalyze emerging institutional crises, or lash out at figureheads who represented power imbalances. Instead, we designed industrial automation technologies. As a computer engineer on the front lines of workplace change, I helped develop control systems in various industries from California to Maryland that polished semiconductors, painted automobiles, processed and packaged food, and injected plastic molds. To describe the engineers that I joined as revolutionaries is not entirely accurate. We were not, for example, at risk ourselves. Our design work significantly reinforced relationships of power and control in the workplace rather than disrupted them. And yet, the term revolutionary is at least partly accurate. We often changed everyday work life for people we never met. Our design decisions were decisions about who did what work, and how that work was done. I use the term revolutionary not to exaggerate the importance of my work as an engineer, but to reinforce the idea that the design of common tools, machines, and artifacts is a political act. These technologies are not simply used and set aside, discarded, or forgotten. Their instrumentality is conjoined with patterns of social activity. Design processes and products are situated within social relationships, structures, and meanings, which can be resources for marginalized social groups or their representatives to improve their condition. If these resources play an important social role, then how does it come to pass that they enable particular forms of life over others? 1 In other words, if artifacts, tools, techniques, and machines provide texture for the fabric of everyday social activity-and if design is the process whereby they are configured-then the study of design is likely to reveal opportunities for creating better forms of life. In my own work as an application engineer of machine control products, I did not recognize these opportunities. Perhaps I did not look for them. Or, perhaps I did not imagine how the artifacts, tools, and machines I helped to design could be configLangdon Winner provides an alterna-

Multiple origins of life.

There is some indication that life may have originated readily under primitive earth conditions. If there were multiple origins of life, the result could have been a polyphyletic biota today. Using simple stochastic models for diversification and extinction, we conclude: (i) the probability of survival of life is low unless there are multiple origins, and (ii) given survival of life and given as many as 10 independent origins of life, the odds are that all but one would have gone extinct, yielding the monophyletic biota we have now. The fact of the survival of our particular form of life does not imply that it was unique or superior.