bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Race, Bodies and Altered Identities in Sleight and Us
Authors: Bloodsworth-Lugo Mary K.
Published: January 2024

This chapter traces philosophical and ethical questions concerning race and bodies in two films released in the United States in early 2017, Get Out (Jordan Peele) and Sleight (J.D. Dillard). Although the release of Get Out received greater critical attention than Sleight, this chapter argues that both films centre black male bodies to raise ethical questions about the position of those bodies within the past and recent history of the United States. This history has included the theft and manipulation of black bodies in an effort to enhance and improve white bodies.
A Planetary Whole for the Alienated: John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea Through Jameson and Deleuze 1
Authors: Nilsson Jakob A.
Published: January 2024

This chapter asks : How does one create a credible, convincing, and progressive sense of connection with a planetary whole in the era of the Anthropocene/Capitaloscene? A whole that critically maps causes and effects with a global reach and the scope of geological time, while also suggesting some outlines of new planetary modes of existence. That is, new senses of planetary belonging that may help make ecological imagination and action part of our everyday desires, rather than mostly necessary for survival in a dire situation. Akomfrah’s works are assessed through a framework of Jameson and Deleuze, as it is proposed that the many screens of the Akomfrah videos formulate a vast associative multiplicity-like conceptual frame, which is pointing towards what appears to be a different kind of whole.
Empathy Machines, Indifference Engines and Digital Extensions of Perception
Authors: Jones Nick
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores what the new digital visuality means in terms of screen ethics. . By contrast to claims that virtual reality (VR) offers an immersive “empathy machine” for its users, this chapter analyses VR projects like Carne y arena (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2017), alongside their promotion and reception, to illustrate how VR’s ethical potential is being overstated. VR may in fact only offer the illusion of such intimacy. Considering Google Earth and Google Street View, as well as drones used in warfare, this chapter illuminates the power asymmetries – reminiscent of colonial hierarchies and resulting lack of empathy which may in fact surround the new digital visuality.
Prelude
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

What surpasses the distinction between the systematic and the continuous, and the fragmentary and the discontinuous. The book and its readers; combinatory reading.
The Great Powers and the Elementary Forces of the World
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

Magic, myths, religion, poetry and art, politics, philosophy, sciences and technique reduce themselves to language and thought, work and struggle, love and death, play. What opens us to the world and opens it to us. History of thought: wild thought; Asia and the Orient; Greece and Rome; Judaism and Christianity; European modernity and the planetary era, Logos, poesis, praxis, techne: saying and doing. Their play and the play in the world.
God-Problem
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

Theos, the divine, the sacred, the gods and the Judaeo-Christian God, who creates and illuminates the world ‒ nature and human ‒ and dies by becoming human, before being killed by humans. Mythology, ontotheology and churches take it over. Religions order, vivify and moralise the life of humans. Judeo-Christianity, last religion, completed religion. Theism, pantheism, atheism. Their beyond.
Physis.
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

The universe, energetic matter in motion. The order of the cosmic world. Nourishing and resistant nature. The nature-problem. Cosmology, physics, natural sciences and other approaches and experiments. The human in nature.
The Human in the World
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

The being in becoming of the human. How to define it? Anthropology, psychology, human sciences want to elucidate it. The beginning era of the end of humanism. What to do with the human? Body-soul-spirit. The revolutionary accord of the human in the world and radical strangeness. Health and illness. Life, works, action ‒ ‘liberty’ ‒ the death of the human. The question of immortality and survival.
Being-Nothingness, Everything-Nothing, the Unworldly World
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: January 2024

Nihilism nihilises all and annihilates itself. Historic. Through the nullification of what is ‒ of its sense, of its truth ‒ it leads us to the play of the world.
Where Labour is Performed: The Public/Private Dichotomy and the Politics of Stigma in Bhumika and Mandi
Authors: Mathur Suchitra
Published: January 2024

This chapter uses the intersectional framework to study Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika (1977) and Mandi (1983), both of which deal with women’s performance of stigmatized labour in the public marketplace. While Bhumika, through its exploration of the personal life of an actress, foregrounds the public-private dichotomy in the relationship of ‘work’ with ‘respectability’, Mandi, with its focus on a house of prostitutes, problematizes the very distinction between domestic space and the ‘public’ marketplace in the performance of sexual labour. At the same time, both films also engage with the definition of ‘work’ itself by juxtaposing its economic exchange value with its potential for independent creative self-expression. And once again, while Bhumika shows the impossibility of any reconciliation between the two, Mandi appears to playfully celebrate the creativity that underpins sex-work. How are these differences to be understood? Are they merely a reflection of the very different source texts from which these films are adapted? Or can these differences be examined within a comparative framework to provide an insight into the ‘feminist’ vision of Benegal as a filmmaker? This chapter attempts to answer these questions through an analysis of the political economy that structures and shapes the performance of labour in the two films.
Adaptation and Epistemic Redress: The Indian Uprising in Junoon
Authors: Mendes Ana Cristina
Published: January 2024

Our contemporary interest in the Victorian age has resulted in a continued investment in ventriloquizing Victorians themselves, as in the case of the various ‘faithful’ adaptations of Victorian novels and afterlives of Victorian literature in contemporary settings, as well as via neo-Victorian renditions. This chapter will discuss Shyam Benegal’s Junoon (1979), produced by Shashi Kapoor, as a screen adaptation of A Flight of Pigeons (1978), a neo-Victorian novella by Anglo-Indian author Ruskin Bond, set during the first war of Indian independence (1857-8). In particular, the focus will rest on how screen adaptation involves a double process of translation, one which is simultaneously trans-temporal, even anachronistic, and intermedia. Concurrently, this chapter will advance an argument about creative practices of trans-temporal ventriloquism as a way of dealing with conflicted pasts.The use in this chapter of the concept of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’ aims to assess the extent to which, as a concrete socio-cultural object, Benegal’s screen adaptation of Bond’s neo-Victorian novella can be seen as an instance of postcolonial re-mediation involving issues of archive, memory, and trauma.
Cause and Kin: Knowledge and Nationhood in Kalyug
Authors: Mukherjee Somak
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues the use of the epic plot and narrative strategies in Kalyug, a modern-day Mahabharata which tried to negotiate with the challenges of corporate modernisation and the traditional structures of societal and familial kinship in Indian society.Benegal’s attempt is not merely to adapt the epic form to manifest how it travels well across time, but rather to underscore the anxieties that arise out of this time-travel of medium and narrative. Kalyug is not about the time-tested truth of why brothers hate one another over their rights on inherited legacy, but rather that potency in kinship ties are not even sufficient for agency, leave alone integrity. The foreknowledge of kinship, Kalyug demonstrates, is about mistaking singularities of choices for singularities of commitments.
The Ascent in Arohan
Authors: Sen Partha Pratim , Ray (Chowdhury) Arunima
Published: January 2024

In the late 1970s and 80s, a handful of Indian filmmakers forged an alternative philosophy of cinema that was markedly distinct from run-of-the-mill Bollywood romances. As the founding father of this realistic ‘new wave’ cinema, Benegal consciously engaged with urgent political matters, such as class struggle, in his films. Arohan (The Ascent, 1983) is one such filmic experiment in which he faithfully documents the triumph of class struggle, assisted by a state government committed to Marxist-Leninist ideology.The objective of this chapter has been to analyze the resilience of the Indian proletariat class, namely the sharecroppers (bargadars) and landless laborers, to overcome the impediments to land rights laid both by the landlords (jotedars) as well as the cumbrous administrative and judicial systems. Set in rural West Bengal between 1967 and 1980, the film charts the journey of a poor peasant, Hari Mondal, caught in a predicament where his options are either to accept the brutal conditionality of the jotedar or to get embroiled in the violent anti-establishment Naxalite movement, to establish his land rights. In this connection, the chapter draws references to institutionalized peasant empowerment through the policy of Operation Barga launched by the Left Front Government in 1977.
Subversive Heroism and the Politics of Biopic Adaptation in Bose: The Forgotten Hero
Authors: Chaudhuri Sneha Kar
Published: January 2024

Shyam Benegal’s Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005) is a celluloid tribute to one of the most controversial political leaders of India during the fight for independence against the British in the 1940s. It foregrounds the qualities of leadership, courage, honesty and wisdom in Subhash Chandra Bose’scharacter and tries to create a space for him in the popular imagination. It belongs to those films Benegal made in the recent past that negotiated the boundaries of mainstream and art house cinema. This chapter thoroughly critiques how Benegal appropriates the tropes and conventions of political celebrity biopics in Indian cinema and makes a film that highlights the goodness of Bose even as a subversive hero who challenges the British by creating his own army, the Indian National Army. It uses the theoretical dimensions of biopic adaptations articulated by adaptation studies critics like Deborah Cartmell, Christine Geraghty, Imelda Whelehan and others and critically analyze Benegal’s cinematic attempts to salvage Bose’s ambiguous political image. It focuses on how the complexities and contradictions of Bose’s life depicted in this war film both challenge and reinforce the popular perceptions about him in the Indian cultural imaginary.
The Rural in the Glocal Intersection: Representation of Space in Welcome to Sajjanpur and Well Done Abba
Authors: Viswamohan Aysha Iqbal , Chatterjee Sayanty
Published: January 2024

The category of space is not confined to the territorial understanding of a landscape. As argued by Henri Lefebvre, the concept of space is constituted by an array of factors like ‘representations, ideology, knowledge bound up with power’ (Lefebvre, 1978). To further Lefebvre’s argument, this chapter will explore the production of a social space as it is closely intertwined with the topographical and the political space in the satiric films Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) and Well Done Abba (2009). Here, Benegal paints a picture of two fictional villages, Sajjanpur and Chikatpally respectively, as they constantly negotiate their terms with globalization.As Mahadev Kushwaha’s lair of letter-writing under the banyan tree becomes the locus of Sajjanpur’s political and social activities, similarly the space of Arman Ali’s bavdi (well) assumes the position of centrality in the crisis-ridden rural life in Well Done Abba. The several ramifications of globalizing modernity on the traditional spheres of a rural existence has been explored through the mise-en-scene, the formation of a common space, language, attire and so forth. The chapter also invests in unraveling the relationship between the space and the hegemonic structure of the state machinery, as the space poses a challenge to the corrupt functioning of the government.
On the charge that moral goodness is arbitrary.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

Leibniz argues against those—implicitly Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes—who seem to claim that the rules of morality are subject to God’s will and power, rather than to God’s reason. He argues that their views characterize God as a tyrant, whereas God ought to be admired for his wisdom, since his goodness consist in this. It is shown that Leibniz is drawing from Socrates’ argument in Plato’s Euthyphro, on whether God wills what is good and just because they are so, or whether the good and the just are so because God wills them so. The first supposition expresses a rationalist, intellectualist view of moral foundations, whereas the second expresses a voluntarist, tyrannical view. The differences between and problems contained within these two positions are explained in detail. While the voluntarist thinks that God’s goodness and freedom are preserved, the rationalist, Leibniz, maintains that God must always have a sufficient reason for his goodness. He strikes a balance between the two positions by arguing that God’s will, which forms part of God’s essence, is thereby both rational and good.
The love of God requires our complete satisfaction in him; but this does not imply we should not strive to act for the best.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

Again, following from God’s perfection, God acts in the most perfect way, which is the foundation of the love we owe to God. This does not mean, however, that we must accept the world as it is and do nothing, like a quietist or those who follow the ancient ‘lazy reason’ argument. Instead, we must endeavour to follow the ‘presumptive will of God,’ (borrowing the notion of presumption from jurisprudence), that is, our best estimation of God’s goodness and purpose. Also discussed is the meaning of love, which Leibniz defines elsewhere as ‘finding happiness in the perfection of another’. From this, the love we have toward God arises when we contemplate his perfections, and this in turn gives rise to our own happiness.
On the complete notion (concept) of an individual substance: the principal motive for the doctrine; the philosophical conception of substance; the problem of individuation; Leibniz’s early conception of individuation; the complete notion of an individual in the Discourse .
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

This article provides intensive detail on one of the most important philosophical concepts, that of substance, and on Leibniz’s account of the ‘complete notion (or concept) of an individual substance’ as constituting the identity of an individual human. Leibniz’s main purpose for establishing this notion is so that God’s actions can be distinguished from those of his creatures. The subheadings for this article are: ‘the philosophical conception of substance’, which outlines the background history of the concept of substance; ‘the problem of individuation’, outlines the historical problem of individuation; ‘Leibniz’s early conception of individuation’, shows how that conception contributes to his account of the ‘complete notion’ in the Discourse; ‘The complete notion of an individual in the Discourse’ then defines the complete notion as an ordered set of all its predicates, including its accidents. Two problems arise: it is not clear how such individuals are supposed to be unique, distinct from every other, including God; secondly, it appears that just one complete notion, say, of Adam, would subject God to the sort of fatalism that would deny freedom to God as well as to all other humans—as Antoine Arnauld will point out in article 13.
The Scholastics, who upheld substantial forms, are not to be despised entirely.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

Leibniz argues for the ‘rehabilitation’ of the ‘nearly banished substantial forms by claiming, again, that they have their proper use. He is obliquely referring to Descartes’ effort to ban final causes from mechanical explanations, to the exclusive focus on efficient causes. While Leibniz does not directly address those causes in this article, nor does he say why substantial forms should be revived, he recalls his own prior rejection of them, and that certain Scholastics, like St. Thomas Aquinas, had very sound reasons for appealing to them. Notably, Leibniz strikes from his draft the claims that substantial forms can be admitted ‘on the hypothesis that bodies are substances’. While he is not ready in the Discourse to accept this hypothesis, he will find other ways to appeal to incorporeal principles as necessary to explain the unity and action of bodies.
Critique of Descartes’ conception of extension: that extension involves imaginary notions and therefore cannot constitute the substance of body.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

Leibniz’s implicit target in this article is Descartes’ famous conception of body as extended substance. His criticism comprises an attack on the mechanical philosophy as a whole. Descartes’ conception of the essence of body as extension (as consisting of spatial dimensionality only) and the motion of extended parts as the principle of distinction of body, is explained in detail. Leibniz’s criticisms are that extension and motion cannot account for the unity and distinction of bodies, nor can extended properties, however clearly and distinctly perceived, account for the difference between primary and secondary qualities, nor can extension account for the identity of bodies undergoing change. Leibniz also indicates, again in a struck passage, his reluctance to assert that bodies are substances. His criticisms of Cartesian extension given in this article make this reluctance quite clear.
That God produces diverse substances, each of which uniquely expresses God’s view of the universe, thus increasing the glory of God. That substances do not enter into causal relations, but God makes all of their actions correspond.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

The article outlines how God creates and sustains distinct substances through emanation, and that he creates them as expression of his own likeness. Thus a portion of God’s power ‘conserves’ each substance, while each substance expresses the predicates of every other. Since each substance is unique and depends only on God, it is like a world apart from every other, while because of its expression, it is related to every other. This relation is described as ‘correspondence’ (which later came to be called ‘pre-established harmony’). Accordingly, the perceptions of each substance correspond with each other as if a causal relationship held between them. However, the relationship is only coincidental, not causal. It is shown how a deleted passage attempts to explain the relationship among substances in terms of the Aristotelian categories of activity and passivity.
God’s ‘extraordinary concourse’ is included in each individual notion, thus accounting for the compatibility of miracles with natural laws.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

Leibniz attempts to complete the account of miracles in article 7 by including them within the complete notion of an individual substance and by retaining the sense in which a miracle results from a supernatural cause, namely, God. Accordingly, a portion of the power to perform an extraordinary act is included within the individual substance, and yet God gives that act a supernatural power to contravention natural laws.
God conserves the same quantity of force in the universe that he originally put into it, not the same quantity of motion, against Descartes.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

This article deals with Leibniz’s most penetrating and influential criticism of the mechanical philosophy, specifically Descartes’ theory of force, according to which the total amount of force that God put into the universe is conserved and measurable in terms of ‘quantity of motion’ (the size times speed of bodies in motion). Leibniz shows that the Cartesian measurements are mistaken. Through appeal to Galileo’s law of falling bodies, Leibniz shows that conservation of force must be estimated by size times the square of the speed of a falling body. The Cartesian assumptions, far from conserving force, lead to perpetual motion, which is impossible. Leibniz goes on to assert that force is thus a metaphysical notion, like substantial form, that cannot be explained in terms of extended bodies in motion, and that while the quantity of force is conserved, it is a consequence of the principle of the equality of cause and effect. This results has consequences not only for physics, but for theology, as a metaphysical force implies God’s agency. Extensive detail is provided to facilitate a clear understanding of these arguments, the nature of force, and its implications for Leibniz and subsequent thinking on the nature of force.
The passage in Plato’s Phaedo explaining the difference between efficient and final causes.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

In the Discourse Leibniz had indicated that a passage from Plato’s dialogue, Phaedo was to be included as an illustration of why final cause explanations are needed to compliment efficient causal explanations of natural phenomena. Unfortunately, the passage failed to make it into the final draft. However, two versions of the passage that Leibniz himself translated have now been included. These versions show that an explanation of why Socrates is sitting in a prison cell is not exhausted by appeal to his bodily motions and position (efficient causes). Rather, his situation makes little sense without including Socrates’ reasons for remaining in his cell, as well as the reasons of the Athenians who prosecuted him. These reasons stem from final causes, that is, the judgments of intelligence that decided (rightly or wrongly) that Socrates was guilty, and the reasons Socrates decided to remain in jail rather than take the opportunity to escape. Anaxagoras, the pre-Socratic philosopher, first postulated that a divine mind created the universe; however, he neglected to consider the reasons of intelligence that gave the world its character and determined its events, restricting himself to efficient causes only. Socrates, however, did not neglect them.
If the laws of nature depended solely on Cartesian mechanics, without Metaphysics, the phenomena of nature would be entirely different.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

Leibniz continues his advocacy of final causes, against the Cartesian, mechanical philosophy, by arguing that the natural world would appear and act very differently without final causes shaping its laws. His argument is that the Cartesian principles of extended body and motion simply multiply disorder, for example, where a smaller body would impart its motion to a larger body without any loss of motion imparted to that second body. Yet no system of laws could operate through a continual increase in the motion of parts. Another problem is that the force of inertia (as postulated by Descartes) cannot be accounted for by the principles of extension and motion. For these reasons, something of a metaphysical, non-extended, nature must be postulated, i.e., forms or forces. For example, the speeds of bodies in collision must be adjusted to the force brought to bear by their magnitude; but as he has shown, force cannot be accounted for by extended magnitude alone. This “adjustment” therefore implies final causes, for the right amount of force needs to be maintained to preserve the character of the phenomena we observe. Extension alone cannot explain why this adjustment must occur and thus how natural laws preserve order.
The nature of ideas; how God acts on the understanding; and how ideas can be illusory: a critique of Descartes’ supposed proof for God’s existence.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

This article initiates the epistemology section of the Discourse, which will continue through article 29. It begins with a definition of ‘idea’, found elsewhere, as ‘something which is in our mind.’ An idea is not necessarily the object of thought while we are thinking since we can have many ideas in our mind without thinking about them. But Leibniz’s main assertion in this article is that the idea of God, namely, that of a being having all perfections, which Descartes uses as a premise in his version of the so-called ‘ontological argument’, has not be shown to be a possible idea. That is, the idea of a being having all perfections has not been shown to be clear of internal contradiction. It is then shown, from an earlier work, how Leibniz proves it is possible for no contradiction to occur in the idea of a subject, namely God, possessing all perfections, where ‘perfection’ is defined as a simple, positive, maximum quality. Leibniz can then go on to claim in the Discourse that since the idea of God is possible, God’s existence is necessary. The particulars of Leibniz’s proofs are explained in detail.
Symbolised ideas require contemplation.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

As a follow-up to the preceding section, Leibniz examines the peculiar case of symbolic ideas which gives us “suppositive cognition” or simply the use of language. Since we can think with symbols without thinking about the meaning or reference, we are highly susceptible to being misled or to reason with nonsense. Thus contemplation is required, which consists in clearing any idea of possible contradiction (as seen in the idea of God, above) and in checking the compatibility of the content with other content. For example, justice can be incompatible with happiness, but does not contradict it. We can infer from this that we rarely possess certain knowledge, as long as we have neglected to thoroughly examine our symbolized ideas.
That we already have all ideas in us; and on Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

The idea that we already have all ideas in us is consistent with the complete notion of any individual substance—which contains everything true of the individual and does not permit—based on denial of the influx theory—the entry of any new predicates into the substance. This does not entail, however, that we are aware of these ideas, although we may be able to discover them through ‘recollection’. Socrates shows how recollection may occur through the example of the slave boy in the Meno, who makes inferences based on information given to him about the area of a square, as well as based on innate knowledge of ideas like ‘equality’. Thus, innate ideas may be brought to conscious awareness. Leibniz thinks that the theory of recollection is fine, so long as it does not imply reincarnation, which is inconsistent with Christian theology. It is also shown how Leibniz’s innateness hypothesis anticipates Chomskian linguistic theory, which postulates an innate structure, formal as well as semantic, that enables us to learn language and construct more complex ideas.
The sense in which we think immediately through our own ideas.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

In this article Leibniz takes up Arnauld’s side of the debate; for, due to the metaphysics of substance, it must be the case that the soul thinks its own thoughts. This is a move closer to Arnauld, who maintains that the perception of anything must be occur first through our own ideas. Leibniz also borrows from Aristotle’s On the Soul the idea that the souls contains both active and passive powers of perception. Accordingly, based initially on the soul’s passive power to receive perceptions, the soul can then employ its active powers to form ideas of the essences and qualities of things. In respect of the Malebranche-Arnauld debate, Leibniz’s position could by summarized this way: While God is the source of all our perceptions, we must still operate on them by means of our own passive and active powers.
The utility of metaphysics for piety and religion; on the accommodation of all substances; on the immortality of the soul.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

In these last articles, Leibniz is increasingly drawn to theological themes. Here is it shown how Leibniz has sought throughout the Discourse to assert the compatibility of religious piety and metaphysics. Whether considering morality, free will, individual substances, the laws of nature, epistemology, or the metaphysics of sin and grace, Leibniz indicates how these ideas are compatible with a God conceived as perfect in every way: omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, loving and deserving of praise. It has been important to establish both our dependence on and independence from God. God is responsible for our correspondence or communication with all other substances; but it is up to us to act rightly in respect of them. On the side of independence, the soul is independent of everything but God, as St. Theresa of Avila observed. For Leibniz, this serves as evidence for the immortality of the soul, since God sustains us and nothing worldly can corrupt us.
The excellence of minds and that they express God.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

This main point of this article is to assert that the excellence of minds consists in their ‘moral quality’, that is, in their capability for being moral subjects, and subjects in a quasi-political sense. Leibniz depicts the relationship between God and humans as a benevolent monarch ruling over a republic of minds. It is a vision of a heavenly city, as Augustine depicted in his City of God. But it remains an earthly city in which minds clearly (more or less) express the attributes of God. The lower animals also express God’s attributes, but only as a mirror reflects whatever strikes it, unlike us who are capable of reflecting on God’s wisdom, our moral quality, and the happiness that ensues from such meditations. In this way, the metaphysics of expression, perception, substance, and mind can be likened to metaphysics of morals.
God is the monarch of the most perfect republic of minds, and their felicity is his principal purpose.
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

Leibniz continues the theme of the City of God by adding that God’s purpose in the end of is the felicity or all. Felicity is happiness, but of a sort that issues from satisfaction with one’s moral character and the peace of mind that comes with knowing the world has been created in the best possible way. Leibniz again speaks of combining metaphysics and morals, and here this is understood as combining the principle and cause of all being with the rule of a benevolent monarch, whose final cause is the felicity of minds. To understand God is to love him, and to love him is to be happy.
Context I: Two Years of The Life and Work of G. W. Leibniz: January 1685 to December 1686
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

As the chapter title indicates, this chronicle of Leibniz’s activities covers the year prior to his writing of the Discourse (1685) to the year after he wrote it—from Feb. 1686 to Dec. The chronicle consists largely of a translation of the Chronik published in 1969 by Müller and Krönert. The chronicle focuses on Leibniz’s travels, often to the Harz mountains to design and test windmills and water pumps for the mining operations. Leibniz took an extensive trip through the Harz, with companions, ostensibly to observe archaeological and geological cites. The chronicle also highlights Leibniz’s writing activity, in which he composed significant works and on a wide variety of topics, such as calculus, theology, mathematics, geometry, logic, engineering, including, of course, the Discourse and correspondence with Arnauld.
Context II: Translations of Letters Selected from 1685
Authors: Johns Christopher
Published: January 2024

The final chapter in this volume consists of six letters previously untranslated in English that provide evidence of Leibniz’s thought and activity during the year prior to his having written the Discourse. The letters feature philosophical discussions with his friends Seckendorff and Landgrave Ernst Hessen-Rheinfels, remarks about other philosophers and books, a letter to Duke Ernst August boasting of his many abilities and accomplishments, and a long letter to his Landgrave conveying his thoughts and recommendations for the reconciliation of the Protestant and Catholic confessions.
Introduction
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: January 2024

This Introduction explains the author’s longstanding fascination with abstraction as a keyword both in critical thought and as a mode of modernist art. In posing the question, ‘what do we want from abstraction?’, it explains the need for an approach that collapses the conventional distinction between abstraction as thought and as art, and that is informed by the logic of the case study and juxtaposition rather than that of a linear intellectual history. To examine abstraction in modernism and modernity, it proposes, is to observe the term’s ceaselessly shifting and contradictory work, and a dialectic between reproach and affirmation. The Introduction proceeds to survey the aims and contents of each of the succeeding chapters as they move towards delineating abstraction’s mediation of the values of human and inhuman, and its figuring through modernism of a mode of intellectual work beyond existing inequalities of class, literacy and education.
‘The Proustian Equation is Never Simple’: Samuel Beckett
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: January 2024

This chapter links Samuel Beckett with the allure of an abstraction of the impossible in Stein and Stevens, by focussing on three of Beckett’s writings on other modernist artists: Joyce, Proust, and the painters Tal-Coat, Masson and Van Velde. While Beckett’s earliest criticism offers a conventional reproach of abstraction as the principle of over-sophistication in language, a turning-point is identified in his adoption of Proust’s ‘equation’ for involuntary memory, ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’, in the long essay on Proust (1931). The chapter explains that involuntary memory in Proust is itself the embodiment of a new abstraction, an intense mode of lived experience that eludes humanist definitions of time, space and intellect. This abstract inhumanism is then connected both to the appeal of the inorganic in modernist painting for Beckett (Kandinsky, Cézanne, Jack Yeats), and to the work of the three painters discussed with Georges Duthuit in Three Dialogues. Following the critic Garin Dowd, the chapter concludes that the writing of Three Dialogues is an instance of what Deleuze and Guattari termed an ‘abstract machine’, a mode of writing-as-becoming that embodies Beckett’s aspiration towards a new literary abstraction of the ‘non-word’.
Writing Lived Abstraction: James, Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: January 2024

Building on the refashioning of abstraction in the writing of Stein, Stevens and Beckett, this chapter identifies the semantic inversion by which, for Gilles Deleuze, abstraction becomes ‘lived experience’. It traces the approach to this inversion in philosophical writing through William James, Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead. Anti-intellectualism in James’s pragmatism and in Bergson’s intuitionism is a way of attributing abstraction to the inhuman and inorganic modes of cognition that humans also participate in, a line of thought continued by the role of feelings and ‘prehension’ in Whitehead’s process philosophy. To underline the paradox that to thus free abstraction from language requires the most scrupulous attention to language and writing, the chapter revisits the Proustian formula ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’, to show how this formula is persistently echoed and re-written until it emerges as a close association of the abstract with the virtual. The chapter closes by illustrating Deleuze’s conception of Francis Bacon as a ‘Cézannean’ painter, challenging limited humanistic readings of sensation and of the Figure in Bacon by pointing to the artwork itself as the locus of affect.
Staging Modernist Abstraction: Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall
Authors: Wallace Jeff
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the role of painterly abstraction in three plays of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: ‘Art’, Red, and The Pitmen Painters. Each play, it is noted, dramatises the scenario of looking at an abstract canvas and asks what happens in this encounter, a question that, as the chapter also explains, preoccupied modernist painterly aesthetics. The modernist legacy of the three plays, this chapter suggests, is to keep alive and open the question of what abstraction is, and to propose that abstraction in modernism and modernity is never merely a matter of definition but also one of access: who is abstraction for and who may or may not use and reflect upon it? As is indicated in the adoption of abstraction by the Ashington miners in Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, these questions not only take us back to the emancipatory potential of abstraction for Marx, but suggest ways in which a philosophical understanding of the inhuman within the human might form part of a more equal and inclusive educational and social contract.
Introduction
Authors: Kwan Roberta
Published: January 2024

This chapter introduces the book’s central argument and gives an initial account of the framework underlying it. This framework is the book’s contention for a hermeneutic tradition spanning early modern (Protestant) theological hermeneutics and modern philosophical hermeneutics, a tradition that configures humans as ‘interpreting selves’: interpretation as ontology. The chapter raises a key question of the book: what is it to inhabit hermeneutical situations, that is, to be an interpreting self? The chapter directs this question to ask how present-day interpreters should read texts of the past, especially Shakespeare’s and the Protestant Reformers’, and spotlights the issue of human agency as a notable sticking point for critics of the Reformers’ model of selfhood. Discussing genre, the chapter addresses the book’s focus on Shakespeare’s so-called ‘problem plays’ before it sketches out the main elements of the Reformers’ hermeneutics and their resonances in these plays. Lastly, the chapter situates the book in relation to other approaches in the increasingly busy field of Shakespeare and religion.
A Hermeneutic Revolution
Authors: Kwan Roberta
Published: January 2024

This chapter shows the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers’ formative role in the evolution of the interpreting self whose desire to understand is inseparable from her acts of interpretation. Building to some extent on the work of Renaissance humanists, Luther, Calvin and company’s doctrines of sola scriptura, justification by grace through faith alone, and the priesthood of all believers reconfigured individuals’ relation to how they can attain knowledge of first importance – knowledge of God and oneself – and seeded a ‘hermeneutic revolution’. To Gadamer, this Protestant approach ‘really risks itself’ by situating interpreters as sitting under, rather than standing over, the other they seek to understand and by presuming a living relationship between interpreter and text. Act 4, Scene 1 of Much Ado About Nothing exemplifies Shakespeare’s absorption of this entwining of subjectivity and hermeneutics. This chapter engages with Gregory’s and Simpson’s (different) historiographies that each censure the Reformers’ hermeneutics, especially for its impacts on modernity, before elaborating on how the Reformers’ recovery of Augustine’s emphases on humanity’s fallen condition and the gratuitousness of divine salvation contests these recent narratives.
Hamlet , The Fall and Hermeneutical Tragedy
Authors: Kwan Roberta
Published: January 2024

Is Hamlet responsible for the misjudgements and unknowing that drive Hamlet to its tragic end? Or is he, like the heroes of the ancient Greek tragedies, powerless in the face of determining forces? Chapter Two examines how influential theological doctrines of Shakespeare’s day – the Fall and divine grace – bear upon the much-discussed question of Hamlet’s subjectivity, especially his agency. This chapter argues that the dialectic of freedom and necessity inherent in the Protestant Reformers’ conceptions of human fallenness, including the controversial notion of original sin, shapes Hamlet into a distinctly early modern dramatization of the ‘tragedy of hermeneutical experience’, as Bruns (expanding on Gadamer) terms it. So too do parodies, refusals and misreadings of divine grace – hints of transcendent light that could, but do not, illuminate the play-world’s hermeneutic darkness. As the protagonist in Shakespeare’s theologically inflected tragedy of hermeneutical experience, Hamlet embodies a complex subjectivity. Shakespeare’s interpreting self challenges readings of him which invoke Protestant ideas to absolutize either his agency or his fatality.
Seeing Mercy, Staging Mercy in Measure for Measure
Authors: Kwan Roberta
Published: January 2024

Recent critical history interprets Measure’s Duke sceptically. His theatricality and questionable distribution of mercy seem to quash both justice and others’ freedom. Suspicion of Shakespeare’s character mirrors objections to the Reformers’ uncoupling of divine mercy from human merit in their flagship doctrine of justification by faith alone. Some critics contend for Shakespeare’s opposition to Protestantism by reading Measure’s authoritarian Duke as representative of this doctrine. In contrast, this chapter draws on a popular Renaissance trope – theatrum mundi – to frame its argument that the Reformers’ ideas about mercy, justice, law, and human agency (alluded to throughout Measure) critique the Duke. Shakespeare’s protagonist scripts actions for himself and others that provoke playgoers to question his interpretations of himself and suggest his disconcerting likeness to his egregious Deputy. Both are frail, yet self-justifying religious pride and hypocrisy (play-acting) so blind them that neither judge sees himself clearly. In consequence, neither can enact the genuine free mercy, reminiscent of the Reformers’ theology, that Isabella calls for and embodies. Even as Measure’s gestures to this unsettling doctrine prompts audiences to doubt its Duke, the play turns the tables to ask uncomfortable questions about modernity’s self-determining, self-justifying self.
All’s Well That Ends Well ? Knowing in Part
Authors: Kwan Roberta
Published: January 2024

In Shakespeare’s England, the doctrine of last things – eschatology –influenced individuals’ interpretations of their temporal existence. An eschatological hermeneutic engendered belief interpolated with doubt: belief in Scripture’s promise that, beyond this life, fallen people can fully know (God) and be fully known; doubt as one does not yet know. The Reformers connected eschatology to ethics, encouraging virtuous interpretations of and being-towards others ‘now’ that anticipate a transcendent ‘then’. Chapter five takes its cue from All’s Well’s many eschatological allusions to show how an eschatological hermeneutic elucidates audience’s interpretive dilemmas. Should playgoers believe or doubt that All’s Well achieves the comic end its title signals? Helen embodies the (eschatologically resonant) events adumbrating this end: marriage, miracles, pilgrimage. An eschatological hermeneutic sifts other characters as they interpret Helen. Belief in Helen indicates self-understanding and virtue; doubt betokens their antitheses. Meanwhile, Shakespeare stokes theatregoers’ doubt by problematising Helen’s intents, then making them opaque. Like eschatology, Gadamer situates the self at the limits of her knowing (‘ignoramus’) in the borderlands, finite yet open to transcendence. As All’s Well interests present-day audiences in what lies beyond its characters’ and our knowing, it may suggest that a ‘desire for transcendence’ remains ‘secretly present’ in today’s West.
Introduction
Authors: Walker Victoria
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers the ways that Anna Kavan’s writing has been read during and after her lifetime and sets out a case for reading her work as mid-century experimental fiction. Interrogating the ways that her mental illness and her status as a woman writer have inflected the reception of her work and refuting a dominant critical narrative that has interpreted her writing as thematically autobiographical and stylistically sui generis, it argues thatKavan’s work is exemplative of experimental trends in mid-century fiction which disrupt the relationship between reader, character and author and reflect wider shifts in the perceived relationship between life and fiction.
Realism and Reality: Helen Ferguson to Anna Kavan
Authors: Walker Victoria
Published: January 2024

This chapter looks at Anna Kavan’s interwar writing as Helen Ferguson, taking its frequent designation as ‘conventional Home Counties novels’ as ground from which to consider her representations of rural tradition and urban modernity; war; British colonialism and social conventionality. Closely examining her direct reworking of her 1930s writing in the 1960s to assess the continuities and discontinuities between these phases of her writing, it tracks the development of her distinctive narrative voice and considers how her work intersects with changing understanding of realism and reality in the mid-century. It offers close readings of some of her Helen Ferguson texts, and a comparison of Let Me Alone (1930) and Who Are You? (1963).
Experimental Fictions: Ice and the Anthropocene
Authors: Walker Victoria
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how Anna Kavan’s mid-century experimental writing, at its peak in her final novel Ice (1967), anticipates the later concept of the Anthropocene. Maintaining that the novel continues the experimental strategies and concerns of her early writing while absorbing new influences, it considers how she experiments with, and subverts, genre. Closely examining the novel’s troubling depictions of sexual violence, its narrative temporality and its use of the trial as a formal device to explore postwar culpability, it draws on Kavan’s own thoughts on the ethical significance of experimental fiction.
Remapping Adaptation: Race, Nation and Fidelity
Authors: Roberts Gillian
Published: January 2024

This book is interested in the stories that film adaptations tell about race and nation across the global cultural marketplace, about their contexts of production, and the position of their makers. It does not posit a singular model of postcolonial, settler-colonial, or Indigenous film adaptation. It draws on nineteenth-century narratives that address racial and cultural difference and those that hardly articulate those differences, with those subtexts amplified in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century film adaptations. It examines later texts that grapple with race and nation and their adaptations as well as texts that do not, only to be transplanted to tell the story of another place. It investigates literary texts by settler authors attempting to represent Indigenous people and their film adaptations by settler filmmakers. It attends to literary texts by Indigenous writers and their film adaptations by settler filmmakers. And it focuses on Indigenous-authored narratives and their film adaptations by Indigenous filmmakers. Whether or not a film is ‘faithful’ to its source text is far more complicated than the field acknowledges. A film’s ‘fidelity’ to or challenging of its literary source cannot be divorced from the authorship of each and concomitant questions of cultural property and cultural power.