bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Pentland Gordon
Published: January 2018

This book is a collection of essays that explore themes relating to liberty, property and popular politics in England and Scotland during the period 1688–1815 in honour of H. T. Dickinson. The first section deals with politics both inside and outside of the British Parliament and offers insights on the central theme of ‘the way in which elite politics and popular politics inform, influence and interact with each other’. The second section examines ‘the ideas, principles and assumptions of those engaged in the struggle to defend, amend or radically alter the political and social order’, including Edmund Burke, William Ogilvie, Thomas Spence and James Harrington. The third and final section focuses on ‘The Long and Wide 1790s’ and covers topics ranging from sedition and sedition trials in Scotland to naval networking, William Winterbotham's imprisonment for seditious libel, and three ‘citizens of the world’: Horatio Nelson, Thomas Paine and Thomas Muir.
‘The Wisest and Most Beneficial Schemes’: William Ogilvie, Radical Political Economy and the Scottish Enlightenment
Authors: Allan David
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines William Ogilvie's arguments about property, society and government where they actually originated: in the distinctive intellectual environment of the Scottish Enlightenment. While the ideas of the principal Scottish philosophers about the material aspects of human existence have most often been considered as having broadly conservative political implications, Ogilvie's sole publication, An Essay on the Right of Property in Land (1781), suggests that inquiries of that kind might also have provoked profoundly radical conclusions about the causes and consequences of social inequality. In Ogilvie's case, moreover, the revolutionary analysis that he constructed would go on to earn him an honoured place in the history of progressive thought. This chapter offers an account of Ogilvie's Essay, describing it as a unique amalgam of Scottish Enlightenment social theory and radical political speculation.
Thomas Spence and James Harrington: A Case Study in Influence
Authors: Lee Stephen M.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the evidence for the standard claim that the seventeenth-century writer James Harrington and his utopian text Oceana were the decisive influence on Thomas Spence's ideas about land. In his introduction to The Political Works of Thomas Spence, H. T. Dickinson noted that Spence ‘was much influenced not only by the Bible, but by the idealised societies of Thomas More's Utopia and James Harrington's Oceana’, and ‘accepted James Harrington's thesis that political power was derived from the possession of property, especially landed property’. Other scholars such as Malcolm Chase and Thomas R. Knox have also identified the influence of Harrington, although they have been divided over its extent. This chapter offers a more systematic account of the relationship between Harrington and Spence in order to understand the nature and extent of any possible influence of Harrington on the latter.
British Radical Attitudes towards the United States of America in the 1790s: The Case of William Winterbotham
Authors: Macleod Emma
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines British radical attitudes towards America during the 1790s by taking up the case of William Winterbotham, a Plymouth Baptist preacher who was jailed in Newgate prison for four years (1793–1797) for allegedly seditious content in two sermons he preached in November 1792. Winterbotham's most ambitious work was An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the American United States, published in four volumes in 1795. It demonstrates the fascination that America held for British radicals beyond Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley and Richard Price. Among his many concerns, Winterbotham was highly critical of the institution of chattel slavery. The chapter explores Winterbotham's political analysis of the new republic and shows that his imprisonment for seditious libel was bracketed by contemporaries with the more conspicuous 'martyrdom' of five men sentenced to transportation by the Scottish High Court of Justiciary.
Introduction: Transnational Film Remakes
Authors: Smith Iain Robert , Verevis Constantine
Published: January 2018

Film remakes are often dismissed within critical discourse as unoriginal, derivative and inferior to their source texts, yet this mode of critique takes on additional layers of meaning when films are remade transnationally as this process raises further issues surrounding national and/or ethnic identity and questions of cultural power. In order to investigate these kinds of complexities, this chapter focuses its attention on the phenomenon of transnational film remakes and the wider social and cultural issues that they raise. What happens when a film is remade in another national context? To what extent can a film embedded within one cultural context be adapted for another? How might a transnational perspective offer us a deeper understanding of a specific socio-political context, and of the politics underpinning film remaking more generally? Given the increasing emphasis on reworking existing material within global film (and screen) culture, there is a pressing need for scholarship to address this phenomenon in a rigorous and systematic way.
The Cultural Politics of Remaking Spanish Horror Films in the Twenty-first Century: Quarantine and Come Out and Play
Authors: Willis Andy
Published: January 2018

The 21st century revival in Spanish horror film production has seen both a resurgence of interest in the genre’s Iberian past and an interest in transnational film remakes for North American audiences. This chapter will consider the cultural politics of remaking Spanish horror through two case studies - Quarantine (2008), the US remake of [REC] (2007), and Come Out and Play (2012), the Mexican remake of Who Can Kill a Child? (1976). The chapter argues that Who Can Kill a Child? might profitably be read as an engagement with the legacy of Francoist Spain, and that [REC] could be productively understood in relation to Spain’s recent tensions surrounding immigration. Through a discussion of the potential political readings of these films, the chapter argues that the North American remakes are divested of the most urgent political aspects of their Spanish counterparts in an endeavour to create globally marketable horror films.
The Chinese Cinematic Remake as Transnational Appeal: Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
Authors: Chan Kenneth
Published: January 2018

The past two decades have witnessed the resurgence of Chinese cinemas on the global stage. As Chinese directors confront the notion of remaking American films, they do so with the assurance that there is a potential global market for their product, which in turn might foster a more creative reimagining of a Chinese version that can stand on its own artistic merits as transnational Chinese cinema. This chapter undertakes a close analysis of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (Zhang Yimou 2009) as a transnational film remake to demonstrate how the film confidently reinvents the Coen Brothers’ original film, Blood Simple (1984) as an original in its own right. The analysis demonstrates the way in which the remake is infused with Zhang Yimou’s brand of cinematic pragmatism and the way in which the cooption of a transgressive politics of gender and postcoloniality becomes a route toward transnational appeal.
‘Crazed Heat’: Nakahira Ko and the Transnational Self-remake
Authors: Desser David
Published: January 2018

Transnational film remakes present a variety of complicating issues – of geography, culture, translation, and temporality, among others. Directors have remade their own films, sometimes quite directly, other times by shifting genre, but the case of a director moving from one national situation to another and remaking an earlier film is rare. What makes such an auto-remake particularly interesting is that it calls into question issues of authorship. This chapter will look at the case of Nakahira Ko who made the influential Kurutta Kajitsu (Crazed Fruit,1956) and later in his career remade the film (under the Chinese pseudonym Yang Shu-hsi) as Kuang lian shi (Summer Heat, 1968). The case of Crazed Fruit and its transformation into Summer Heat is interesting, partly due to the stature of the Japanese original and also due to some of the more obvious transformations, such as from Ishihara Yujiro in the original to a more generic male star in the remake. More significantly, while Crazed Fruit was part of a cycle of Japanese films examining post-war disaffected youth, the Hong Kong remake is far less implicated in a cultural moment.
Servius, Cicero and the Res Publica of Justinian
Authors: Harries Jill
Published: January 2018

Cicero’s correspondence with Servius after the death of Tullia
justifies cultural attitudes  which denied legal agency to the
populus;Servius’ juristic successors also perpetuated the role of elite
legal thinkers as “procurators” and Pomponius’ history of jurisprudence did not acknowledge the transition from ‘Republic” to Empire, which removed constitutional agency from the populus.
Servius, Cicero and the successor jurists thus paved the way for
the res publica of the autocrat Justinian.
Some introductory thoughts
Authors: Millar Robert McColl
Published: January 2018

This chapter introduces the reader to a number of concepts central to our understanding of linguistic contact. The problematic nature of some of these concepts in relation to near-relative contact – contact between varieties which are at least borderline mutually intelligible – is flagged up as a central issue of the book.
Linguistic contact and near-relative relationships
Authors: Millar Robert McColl
Published: January 2018

In this chapter the reader is led further into the field of near-relative contact with greater time depth. Insights from the study of creole development are introduced, as is the concept of the creoloid. Greater depth is given to our understanding of koineisation. Varieties discussed include Bonin Islands and Pitcairn/Norfolk Island English, Fiji Hindi, Afrikaans and medieval Scandinavian (in relation to contact with Low German).
Thinking with the Heart: Sirk and Pictorial Reception
Authors: Evans Victoria L.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 1 ("Thinking with the Heart: Sirk and Pictorial Reception) analyses some of the still moments that have been built into many of this director's most arresting cinematic tableaux in relation to three different models of pictorial reception (two contributed by Michael Fried, one by the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl). Evans's discussion of Fried's divergent notions of "absorption" and "theatricality" (the two ways in which a contemporary painting may address its beholder, according to the American critic) and Riegl's more complex conception of the possibility of attaininga state of "sympathetic attention" isused to elucidate a crucial scene in Sirk's 1953 film All I Desire, before being correlated with current research on the film spectator's "affective" response to melodrama to some degree.
Final Chord and ‘Die Neue Welt’: The Mise-en-scène of Aufbruch1
Authors: Evans Victoria L.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 5 ("Final Chord and 'Die Neue Welt': The Mise-en-Scène of Aufbruch")examines the only film from Sirk's German period to depict twentieth-century urban life. In the prologue that the director added to the existing script, two antithetical aesthetics appear to underscore the philosophical and political disparities that distinguish a democratic New York from a Fascist Berlin. Because the architectural symbolism of each of these cities may be read both positively and negatively (from a Modernist and a National Socialist point of view), after outlining the main arguments on either side, the author then attempts to resolve the vexed question of which metropolis offers the most desirable "New World" of the future, based upon the formal and narrative evidence that is provided by the film.
Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows
Authors: Evans Victoria L.
Published: January 2018

Since every stage of Ron Kirby and Carey Scott's relationship is marked by alterations in their domestic environments, Chapter 6 ("Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows") explores some of the conflicting social and cultural connotations that have been encoded into their respective dwellings. For instance, Ron's progressive renovation of the Old Mill recapitulates the history of twentieth-century Modernist architecture in reverse. The final incarnation of this structure evokes Le Corbusier's Machine Age villas of the 1920s rather than Frank Lloyd Wright's more organic mid-century Modernist aesthetic, which dissents from the dominant 1950s American view of the ideal home by suggesting a less materialistic way of life. By contrast, Carey's suburban Colonial Revival residence represents the negation of the freedom from traditional conventions that Ron's living space ultimately implies.
It is Not Amiss to Speak of His Beard
Authors: Ford Talissa J.
Published: January 2018

Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pirates had the difficult task of balancing the revolutionary ideology of piracy with the fact of its recent demise and the undeniable triumph of colonial power. This difficulty is distilled in the story of Captain Misson, which shows the idealization of pirate life fall apart in its physical execution. The pirates on Misson’s ship, who establish a colony (Libertalia) rooted in the egalitarianism of pirate ships, eventually devolve into precisely the imperial practices against which their colony was founded. The story of Misson demonstrates the dangers of the imposition of an imagined space on a physical space and seems to insist on the impossibility of such practices. This chapter argues, however, that Misson’s colony, in its delineation of the forces that threaten such utopian settlements, simultaneously imagines an alternative society that manages such forces.
Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts
Authors: Satz Aura , Parikka Jussi
Published: January 2018

Stemming from their common interest in media archeology and the idea of the air as a medium of encrypted signals, Satz and Parikka explore the themes emerging from Satz's film installation 'Impulsive Synchronisation' (2013). Satz has used various technologies as the subject of her work, including the Chladni plate, mechanical music, phonograph grooves and optical sound, looking at how such objects tap into ideas of knowledge and communication in their use of notation systems, languages or codes. Satz is also interested in bringing to the fore key female figures largely excluded from mainstream historical discourse in an ongoing engagement with the question of women’s contributions to labour, technology and scientific knowledge. The starting point for ‘Impulsive Synchronisation’ was a 'Secret Communication System' patented during World War II by Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr and American composer George Antheil. This invention of 'frequency hopping', designed to protect radio-controlled torpedoes from enemy disruption by distributing the signal over many frequencies and synchronising the transmitter and receiver in rapidly changing patterns, has become the basis for today's spread-spectrum technology. In Satz’s work, these technologies are referenced to explore visual, musical and data notation, as well as its encryption, synchronisation and decipherment.
The Signal-Haunted Cold War: Persistence of the SIGINT Ontology
Authors: Parikka Jussi
Published: January 2018

This chapter addresses a non-linear signal archaeology that connects Cold War architectures to current politics of global surveillance. In the wake of the NSA/PRISM/Snowden revelations in June 2013, it was discovered that Britain still has a “secret listening post” in the heart of Berlin. The story about Britain’s involvement in Berlin is indicative of some continuities in the Cold War narratives that persist, and some media technological practices that never disappeared: from the Teufelsberg listening post in Berlin to the current NSA culture, we are forced to admit the significance of what Thomas Elsaesser referred to as the S/M perversion of cinematic media: the centrality of technical media in Surveillance and Military. Indeed, excavating “signal architecture archaeologies” means looking at those non-human spaces built for signals – a preparation for the war conducted over signals, or what nowadays is referred to as “cyberwar”. This theme haunts the abandoned buildings and remnants of the Cold War like Teufelsberg, which is approached poetically as a haunted signal space: the ghosts that characterise military architectures are not dead souls of humans, but the non-human pings of massive infrastructures of signal processing.
Overt Research
Authors: White Neal , Beck John
Published: January 2018

One of the major consequences of the Cold War and the commingling of scientific and military interests by world powers was the increasingly secretive nature of scientific research. From the Manhattan Project onwards, the free exchange implicit in the collective enterprise of scientific knowledge production became regulated and increasingly clandestine. Neal White's artistic research is explicitly engaged in interrogating both the investigative procedures of science as method and the ways in which these procedures can be turned toward an investigation of secrecy itself. In their discussion, Beck and White explore the ideas and practices that inform White's conception of art as a mode of experimental research. Central to this project is what White calls 'overt research,' whereby the spaces of techno-scientific and military-industrial enterprise are explored through the documentation of physical sites and material evidence. In the exhibition Dark Places (Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 2009), White and others explored the ways in which such places are both embedded and imaginatively narrated as part of a contemporary UK landscape. White’s projects are discussed in relation to issues shaped by Cold War research: secrecy, surveillance, accountability, participation, and the power relations implicit in knowledge production.
Speaking in Subtitles
Authors: Dwyer Tessa
Published: January 2018

With over 6000 languages in the world today, media speak is far from universal, yet the complexities of translation are rarely acknowledged by the industry, or by audiences and scholars. Redressing this neglect, Speaking in Subtitles aregues that the oddities and idiosyncrasies of translation are vital to screen media’s global address. Examining a range of examples from crowdsourced subtitling to avant-garde dubbing to the growing field of ‘fansubbing’, Tessa Dwyer proposes that film, television and video are fundamentally ‘translational’ media. The case studies in this book explore areas of practice that lie beyond the parameters of professional, ‘quality’ practice and are consequently identified as ‘improper’, such as anime fandom, crowdsourced translation, censorship and media piracy. They demonstrate that in many contexts, issues of speed, access, commerce and control take precedence over considerations of quality. These errant modes of screen translation are becoming increasingly paradigmatic of the current translation and media environments, as they become less controlled and more communal in response to new digital technologies and the decentralising impulses of globalisation. By focusing on lines of ‘errancy’ rather than fidelity, this monograph highlights elements of screen translation that are regularly passed over by other studies in order to re-conceptualise questions of cultural value.
Sub/Dub Wars: Attitudes to Screen Translation
Authors: Dwyer Tessa
Published: January 2018

Focusing on the polarising nature of sub/dub debates, this chapter provides an overview of attitudes and approaches to screen translation both within and beyond screen culture. Dominating the little attention paid to translation within Anglophone Screen Studies, and shaping much research within Translation Studies, sub/dub wars encapsulate the entangled prejudices and value politics that beset the field. This chapter revisits insightful arguments posed by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther during his anti-subtitle campaign, before expanding the frame of reference for this debate by turning to Translation Studies and national screen translation preferences beyond the Anglo-American context.
Media Piracy, Censorship and Misuse
Authors: Dwyer Tessa
Published: January 2018

This chapter proceeds by detailing two important fields of subtitling and dubbing practice that involve deliberate mistranslation and/or misuse, where quality concerns are overshadowed by politics and policing. Censorship and piracy deploy subtitling and dubbing to radically different ends, intersecting with errant value politics in both unregulated and over-regulated contexts. Together, they indicate the excessive and far-reaching impact of errancy on everyday practices of screen translation. Focusing on pragmatic considerations, this chapter explores how censorship regularly infiltrates professional audiovisual translation operations, and how pirate subtitling and dubbing violates copyright laws, industry regulations and professional translation norms alike while drawing attention to non-Western and non-English speaking contexts as sites of geopolitical contestation. It concludes that screen translation practices associated with censorship and piracy are particularly prevalent within global media flows, as distribution, access and engagement become increasingly decentralised and/or communal.
Fansubbing and Abuse: Anime and Beyond
Authors: Dwyer Tessa
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the emergent, participatory practice of fansubbing (‘fan subtitling’), examining its origins within anime subculture and its ongoing evolution. Fansubbing is examined as an informal translation practice that emerged as a subset of media piracy with its own ethical standards and rules of conduct. Much early anime fansubbing focused on redressing the domesticating tendencies of professional services, and in this sense highlighted the gatekeeping, controlling function of translation. Hence, this case study further demonstrates links between piracy, censorship and subversion introduced in the previous chapter. It also demonstrates how fansubbing’s intervention into screen media points to the growing significance of translation as a mode of cultural participation responsive to the intensifying multilingualism of global media and technologies. Fans are discussed as ‘lead-users’ of new technologies that trial functionality and uncover emergent uses, demands and desires along the way—exemplifying the increasingly active and unruly ways in which people currently consume and engage with media. Proposing that fansubbing’s communal, errant tendencies are vital to its re-evaluative function, this chapter identifies a point of difference between the reconceptual program of this book and the notion of ‘abusive subtitling’ (Nornes 1999).
Plato and yoga
Authors: Bussanich John
Published: January 2018

Plato, classical Vedanta, Yoga and early Buddhism all promote - on the basis of homologies between cosmos and inner self - cognitive and affective practices that remove external accretions to the self and the delusion and suffering they bring, thereby seeking to achieve transcendent wisdom and liberation from the cycle of births and deaths. There is evidence in the Platonic dialogues for analogies to South Asian meditative praxis. This raises the question of whether the highest states of knowledge in Plato are conceptual, or whether there is anything in Plato corresponding to the interdependence, in South Asian yoga, of intellectual insight and non-cognitive 'cessative' meditations.
Does the concept of theōria fit the beginning of Indian thought?
Authors: Pinchard Alexis
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues against the common distinction made between the theoretical aim of Greek philosophy and the primary concern for salvation in Indian philosophy. Greek philosophy sometimes linked the intimate experience of eternity, which breaks the power of death, with true theoria in order to define a complete way of life (esp. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics X 7, but also in some presocratic thought). And in India wonder (as in Aristotle Metaphysics A 1) was sometimes viewed as the first motive leading to the disinterested search for truth about metaphysical principles. Brahman is not just a thing, but desire - for itself. And so to unite personally with the brahman implies keeping the desire for truth alive.
‘Sprinkled Among your Ears’: Ben Jonson, John Marston and the Cultivation of the Listening Connoisseur
Authors: Deutermann Allison K.
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that Ben Jonson, John Marston, and others positioned city comedy as a sophisticated sonic alternative to the booming (in every sense) revenge plays of the 1580s and 90s. To hear and appreciate city comedy was said to require a more selective ear, being able to tune out unwanted noises while making sense of the sounds that matter. Listening well becomes in these plays one of the social skills that must be mastered in order to participate fully in city life -- in short, it becomes the stuff, or the subject matter, of city comedy. Ultimately, city comedies train men and women to hear in the very ways they suggest only the privileged few could, introducing playgoers to new auditory practices that could fundamentally transform their experience of London’s soundscapes.
Across the Russian Border
Authors: Leitch Thomas
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the concept of “border crossing” in American films about Russia and the Soviet Union. Such Hollywood productions reflected the cultural and political concerns of each particular period of Soviet-American relations. Filmmakers took the approaches of exoticism, universalism, defection, and seduction in their appropriation of Russian culture and Soviet politics. The author explores the different ideological approaches these films display, from pro-Soviet films during World War II to Red-baiting thrillers during the McCarthyite period, many of which curiously portrayed the “Red Menace” without actually mentioning the Soviet Union by name. Along with this survey of Cold War depictions of the USSR, the chapter explores several prominent adaptations of literary works, which – like many more politically-oriented films – celebrate the Russian cultural heritage in an effort to “colonize” the Soviet Union by presenting Russians in universalist terms.
Stealing the Scene: Crime as Confession in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket
Authors: Orr S. Ceilidh
Published: January 2018

Noting the difficulty of interpreting Bresson’s use of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in The Pickpocket as an adaptation per se, this chapter argues that the director takes part in the generic tradition of confession. Pickpocketing becomes not just a crime but also, through Bresson’s disruption of the psychological cause and effect that the viewer expects, a repeated attempt at confession. Because of Bresson’s hero’s inability to explain the motivation for his crime, he resembles not only Dostoevskii’s hero Raskolnikov, but also Meursault of Camus’s The Stranger. By creating these gaps, Bresson forces viewers to negotiate the borders not only between genres but between disconnected acts.
‘Potentia Ordinata’ vs ‘Potentia Absoluta’
Authors: Castrucci Emanuele
Published: January 2018

In the third chapter the metaphysical concept of potency is further investigated in its inner relationships, which concern the opposition between potentia Dei absoluta and potentia Dei ordinata, and the theoretical result reached is to point out, in direct disaccord with the canonic system of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, a substantial difference between the “jurisprudential model” of potentia Dei absoluta in Duns Scotus and the “logical model” of the same potentia Dei absoluta in William of Ockham.
Political Theology Reconsidered
Authors: Castrucci Emanuele
Published: January 2018

All this leads, in the fourth chapter, to a re-examination of the problem of a “Political Theology” (see also Corollary II of this book), mainly regarding the link between “creation (ab aeterno)” and “political constitution”, the latter being considered in its profound ontological basis. The chapter shows how the Spinozan-Nietzschean hypothesis of “potency” cannot but exclude any modern form of “theological-political constitutionalism”, namely any modern mode of limitation – largely determined by ethical motivations, or by the primacy of ethics over ontology: ethics of will over ontology of potency – of actions exerted by potency itself. Here Spinoza and Nietzsche come into play as a team against Kant and against all of Enlightenment natural law, revealing the weaknesses of the latter.
Genealogies of Constituent Potency: Schmitt, Nietzsche, Spinoza
Authors: Castrucci Emanuele
Published: January 2018

Another theorist joins here the game: the German jurist Carl Schmitt, who – from the standpoint of an ultra-mature modernity – interprets the array of forms inherited from classical metaphysics, allowing us today to establish an unexpected link between the ontological dimension of potency and the juridical concept of “constituent power”. The ways in which this concept, with its various theoretical issues, is reflected in our contemporary world, and precisely in our present historical period, which preludes the end of the West, understood as a horizon we have inhabited until now, is the subject of the fifth (and last) chapter of this essay. A finale short on hope but anchored in a solid, realistic analysis of what has become our contemporaneity.
Threshold
Authors: Castrucci Emanuele
Published: January 2018

The human mind has phased out its traditional anchorage in a natural biological basis (the «reasons of the body» which even Spinoza’s Ethics could count on) – an anchorage that had determined, for at least two millennia, historically familiar forms of culture and civilisation. Increasingly emphasising its intellectual disembodiment, it has come to the point of establishing in a completely artificial way the normative conditions of social behaviour and the very ontological collocation of human beings in general. If in the past ‘God’ was the name that mythopoietic activity had assigned to the world’s overall moral order, which was reflected onto human behaviour, now the progressive freeing of the mind – by way of the intellectualisation of life and technology – from the natural normativity which was previously its basic material reference opens up unforeseen vistas of power. Freedom of the intellect demands (or so one believes) the full artificiality of the normative human order in the form of an artificial logos, and precisely qua artificial, omnipotent. The technological icon of logos (which postmodern dispersion undermines only superficially) definitively unseats the traditional normative, sovereign ‘God’ of human history as he has been known till now. Our West has been irreversibly marked by this process, whose results are as devastating as they are inevitable. The decline predicted a century ago by old Spengler is here served on a platter....
On the Origins of Conventionalist Political Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Castrucci Emanuele
Published: January 2018

At the basis of any consideration about the modern state of experience lie concepts of great theoretical and practical import, such as the dialectic between private and public, ‘internal’ and ‘external’, essence and appearance, which only a historiographic-philosophical investigation into the origins of the new conventionalistic concept of political order allows us to clarify. I will endeavour, therefore, in the following notes, to focus on the theoretical elements that the new political anthropology injected into the circuitry of sixteenth-century Europe, thanks especially to key thinkers such as Montaigne and Charron, convinced as I am of their thematic relevance in the context of a closer analysis of that phenomenon of primary importance now called, to use Benjamin’s term, the ‘crisis experience’....
The Problem of a Political Theology
Authors: Castrucci Emanuele
Published: January 2018

– We may say, as an initial, broader approximation, that political theology poses the problem of the relationships between the dimension of ‘political’ and the transcendent Veritas. In Hobbes – as Schmitt’s interpretation claims1 – allowance is given (or even postulated) for an exceptional ‘opening’ of the political system towards the ...
An Outline for a Foucauldian Interpretation of Modern Law
Authors: Martire Jacopo
Published: January 2018

In the first chapter, the author provides a picture of the current state of contemporary Foucauldian interpretations of law. The author claims that Foucauldian scholars – notwithstanding recent important contributions – have not been able to properly debunk the thesis that Foucault “expelled” law from the locus of power. The author proposes to overcome this impasse by considering law as a proper sui generis apparatus of subjectivation and by undertaking a geneaology of the modern discourse of law in order to discover its generative syntax. The author’s goal is to demonstrate that in developing towards its modern form, law moved from being an order based upon the paradigm of sovereign commands to one based on the paradigm of socially constructed norms (understood in a Foucauldian way). The author identifies the formal features of generality, abstraction, and the substantive features of equality and freedom as key for this purpose.
A Genealogy of Modern Law I: The Political Truth of the Individual
Authors: Martire Jacopo
Published: January 2018

In the present chapter the author develops his genealogy by taking in consideration law as a means of political legitimation. Developing his thesis that the discourse of law moved from the paradigm of the command to that of the norm, the author analyses various key scholars ranging from Aquinas to Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. By tracing the evolving meanings of generality, abstraction, equality, and freedom, he demonstrates that the discourse on the nature of law shifted from being focused on law as a metaphysical system – reflective of the paradigm of command – to the idea of law conceived as a legitimizing force only if formed by secular, socially generated rules – reflective of the paradigm of the norm. Building on his analysis, the author claims that modern law came to be structured like a (Foucauldian) norm: it is, at the same time, both the product and the ordaining principle of the rational societal order.
The Modern Aristotle: Michael Polanyi’s Search for Truth against Nihilism
Authors: Hoinski Ronald , Polansky Ronald
Published: January 2018

David Hoinski and Ronald Polansky’s “The Modern Aristotle: Michael Polanyi’s Search for Truth against Nihilism” shows how the general tendencies of contemporary philosophy of science disclose a return to the Aristotelian emphasis on both the formation of dispositions to know and the role of the mind in theoretical science. Focusing on a comparison of Michael Polanyi and Aristotle, Hoinski and Polansky investigate to what degree Aristotelian thought retains its purchase on reality in the face of the changes wrought by modern science. Polanyi’s approach relies on several Aristotelian assumptions, including the naturalness of the human desire to know, the institutional and personal basis for the accumulation of knowledge, and the endorsement of realism against objectivism. Hoinski and Polansky emphasize the promise of Polanyi’s neo-Aristotelian framework, which argues that science is won through reflection on reality.
On the Surface: The Deleuze-Stoicism Encounter
Authors: Johnson Ryan J.
Published: January 2018

Ryan J. Johnson’s “On the Surface: The Deleuze-Stoicism Encounter” investigates Deleuze’s reworking of Stoic ontology and the theory of incorporeals. Contrary to the traditional interpretation, Johnson argues that there are three, not four, primary incorporeals: space, λεκτόν‎, and time. Deploying Deleuze’s thinking of the intensive-extensive ontological distinction, Johnson shows that each of the three incorporeals are paradoxically structured by the slight Stoic surface-without-thickness separating and connecting their respective extensive and intensive dimensions (place/void, verb/noun, Aion/Chronos). It is through this strange ontology of the incorporeals that the Stoics become the initiators of a new image of philosophy that generates a lineage of thought leading, eventually, to Deleuze himself.
‘Quite Ordinary Men and Women’: John O’london’s Weekly and the Meaning of Authorship
Authors: Collier Patrick
Published: January 2018

John O’London’s Weekly saw its mission as bringing literature to a demos whose appetite for reading had increased significantly during the Great War. Its treatment of questions of literary value and canonicity evinces conflict about the nature of authorship and its own status as a popular, but not prestigious, print artifact. Addressing, in part, an audience of aspiring writers, the newspaper simultaneously posits writing as a craft that is learned and accessible through hard work and as a talent that one is born with; it depicts writing both as a means of making a living and as a sacred, inspired condition. The chapter examines the newspaper’s treatment of H.G. Wells—its avatar of the writer as the upwardly striving work-a-day writer—and Thomas Hardy—its representative of authorship as sacred calling. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the paper’s careful, equivocal treatments of an ascendant modernism in the late 1920s. The newspaper’s cheap, disposable materiality—it cost 2d weekly and was printed on thin, friable paper—underscored its difficulty in accruing any lasting cultural authority.
On the Brink of War (1937–1939)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1937 to 1939. The year 1937 was a joyous one for Roland. In addition to meeting Lee he had exhibited in the Surrealist Objects and Poems show at the London Gallery, and at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He had made his first postcard collages, and also created a number of sculptures. Then a new opportunity presented itself. The London Gallery had been founded in 1936 by Lady Noel (known as Peter) Norton, the wife of a diplomat. When her husband was posted to Poland, Lady Norton withdrew her financial support, and the gallery was in danger of closing. In 1938, Roland and E. L. T. Mesens entered into a partnership. Roland would provide most of the funding for the London Gallery in Cork Street as a showcase for contemporary, especially surrealist, art, and Mesens would manage it.
Grim Glory (1939–1945)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1939 to 1945. On 1 September 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland, Roland and Lee drove north to Saint-Malo, where the next day they caught the boat to England. They arrived at Waterloo station on 3 September to hear the first air-raid sirens and see silver-gray barrage balloons in the sky; England had declared war on Germany. The Hitler War put Roland into a deep-seated conflict. For almost a decade he had been actively engaged in combating Nazism in a variety of activities. He may have no longer considered himself a practising Quaker in the fullest meaning of that word, but he had been born such, and he could not simply shrug off that inheritance. The Air Raid Protection Corps provided his first involvement with the war effort.
Re-defining Modernism (1946–1953)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1946 to 1953. Before the war, there had been a great deal of discussion about the establishment of a museum of modern art in London. Herbert Read had attempted to start one in co-operation with Peggy Guggenheim. Roland and Mesens had made counter-moves. However, nothing had happened, largely because of the approaching war. By 22 January 1946, the differences between Read and Mesens had been sufficiently mended for them — together with Roland — to send a letter inviting ‘interested parties’ to attend a meeting on the creation in London of a centre from which a Museum of Modern Art could ultimately be planned.
A Pastoral Retreat (1949–1953)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1949 to 1953. By 1949, Roland felt the ‘urge to live closer to nature’. After the war, London seemed a place of muted glory. The sad state of the metropolis reminded him that his native land had moved down several notches in the world's estimation. Harry Yoxall, the founder of English Vogue, alerted the Penroses to the availability by auction of a small dairy farm and accompanying house in the Downs. They acquired 200 acres, the house, cottages, and farm buildings for twenty-nine cows for £22,500. Roland was delighted to be able to divide his life between the city and the country. Lee, a more urban person, had grave doubts.
Everyday Style
Authors: Taylor Alison
Published: January 2018

Where chapter two deals with ordinary moments in extraordinary films, chapter three explores another aspect of the spectrum of the everyday in cinema: the concept of the everyday as a film style, and its relationship to the everyday as subject matter. This chapter examines the way the everyday as film style has been theorised—predominately as an aesthetic sensibility that privileges the undramatic and routine as a conduit to the profound or transcendent. Chapter three asserts that while this scholarship has been useful in illuminating positive representations of the everyday, its attempts to quarantine the everyday from the dramatic are problematic and ultimately reductive. Instead, through detailed case studies of Bresson’s Money (1983) and Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), the chapter presents an alternate approach that allows for a more nuanced appreciation of everyday aesthetics, allowing for films which do not treat the everyday as strictly positive. These films are unsettling precisely for their lack of authorial guidance on how to respond to horrific narrative events; film style is pared back in such a way that moments of violence are afforded the same aesthetic weight as the representation of ordinary and mundane routines.
Return to the Everyday
Authors: Taylor Alison
Published: January 2018

In contrast to the films examined in earlier chapters, which tend to culminate in events of violence, and end abruptly thereafter, chapter five turns to films which draw attention to the endurance of the everyday, and the persistence of violence within it. Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (1998) and Markus Schleinzer’s Michael (2011) offer insight into what a return to the everyday following violent disruption might look like. What is potentially most troubling about these films is their implication that violence and the everyday are perhaps not mutually exclusive. In varying ways, both films depict violence as something that might be absorbed into the very fabric of the ordinary. Drawing on theoretical conceptions of everyday time as both measured and perpetual, eventful and repetitious, this chapter argues that these films frustrate our desire for coherence by making explicit the fallacy of the narratives we construct to make the everyday meaningful. Chapter five posits that by undermining our attempts to understand on-screen violence with legible meaning, these films extend their potency by calling attention to the meaning we project on life outside the cinema; I Stand Alone and Michael challenge us to question just what is at stake in acknowledging the everyday as indeterminate.
Inventing the National and the Citizen in Palestine: Great Britain, Sovereignty and the Legislative Context, 1918–1925
Authors: Banko Lauren
Published: January 2018

This chapter investigates whether the structures put in place by Great Britain for the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship favoured Jewish immigrants in any way, and demonstrates how and why Great Britain felt the dual administration structure necessary to preserve its own sovereignty from 1918 through 1925. It focuses on the history of British legislation in Palestine and the main actors — and tensions between these actors and their departments — involved in making that legislation, including the mandate's first attorney-general, Norman Bentwich. The aim of British legislation, however, was to simply create a legal citizenship for the mandate's inhabitants, and to provide the means by which this citizenship could be acquired.
The Notion of ‘Rights’ and the Practices of Nationality and Citizenship from the Palestinian Arab Perspective, 1918–1925
Authors: Banko Lauren
Published: January 2018

This chapter shifts focus from the British aspect of nationality and citizenship legislation to the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, in order to analyse the development of the civic and political community during the early years of the mandate administration. The new types of spaces and institutions introduced by the new administration in Palestine challenged traditional, Ottoman-style ways of understanding identity, community, and nationality. The challenges and disruptions wrought by the incorporation of Palestine into a new imperial system reconfigured social relations and communal and national boundaries. These disruptions strengthened the Arabs' sense of communitarian belonging to Palestine, allowed for the formation of new civic and political associations and laid the foundation for engagement of Arab society with particular notions, ideologies and claims frequently discussed in a plethora of press articles. These would later constitute a series of demands and appeals for citizenship rights. At its core, the chapter traces how citizenship and nationality took on a specifically political and rights-based understanding of Arab civic belonging in Palestine.
Institutionalising Citizenship: Creating Distinctions between Arab and Jewish Palestinian Citizens, 1926–1934
Authors: Banko Lauren
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes the ways in which Palestinian citizenship became bureaucratised after the 1925 Citizenship Order-in-Council through the early 1930s. This process of bureaucratization allowed local and imperial officials to use nationality and citizenship as tools to classify, categorize, and discipline the citizenry, immigrants, and non-habitual residents. These tools served different purposes for the British officials in London, for those in Jerusalem, and for the leadership of the Zionist Organisation in relation to its activities in Palestine. The division of control between Whitehall and the Palestine Administration meant that, overall, the creation of legislation was de-centralized in nature. The division of control was not always balanced, however: within Whitehall the Foreign and Colonial Offices disagreed over the application of policy and so too did local administrators in Palestine.
Neither Substance Nor Process I: Anti-Reductionism
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

The first chapter focuses on Garcia’s arguments against reductionism, with (i) an explanation of Garcia’s affirmation of ontological liberality, and (ii) a discussion of Garcia’s important supplementary arguments against the view that some putative entities are not things. The first few sections of the chapter contain an analysis of Garcia’s argument against what Graham Harman calls overmining and undermining. Both philosophers’ efforts are tied to contemporary work concerning reductionism in analytic philosophy. This discussion motivates (i) a brief presentation of Harman’s account of Heidegger’s “readiness-to-hand”, (ii) a discussion of capacity metaphysics, and (iii) Garcia’s differential ontology of objects. In this manner, Garcia’s central motivation and broad picture are situated with respect to recent trends in continental philosophy, particularly speculative realism and object-oriented ontology.