bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pudenda of the Psyche: Embarrassment in More Pricks than Kicks
Authors: de Villiers Rick
Published: May 2022

Chapter 2 explores the relation between embarrassment and pride in Beckett’s early works. Juxtaposing personal letters and selected stories from the 1934 collection, More Pricks than Kicks, embarrassment emerges as a marker of the superiority Beckett himself regarded as a symptom of his anxiety neurosis. After discussing certain pre-emptive strategies against embarrassment, the chapter proceeds to close readings of stories in which we see embarrassment being counteracted through Belacqua’s identification with Christ - a manoeuvre that does not confer humility but rather reinforces the character’s sense of proud otherness. Beckett’s early and incidental embarrassment is then briefly contrasted with the later work’s representation of an existential embarrassment. The latter is conceived as an aspect of humility in which the embarrassed human condition is accepted without recourse to self-protective reflexes.
Assuming the Double Part: Irony as Humility in East Coker
Authors: de Villiers Rick
Published: May 2022

Chapter 5 tests Eliot’s claim that ‘humility is endless’ against the parodic and ironic procedures of East Coker. It explores the ways in which the poetry can be said to question its own assumptions and undermine its own importance. Humility is thus closely allied with the poet’s self-ironizing confrontation with his own work. In particular, Eliot’s allusive relationship with Yeats configures as part of a master-apprentice dialectic that at once critiques Eliot’s early works and unsettles the late work as a basis for such critique.
Introduction
Authors: de Villiers Rick , de Villiers Rick
Published: May 2022

The introduction maps the literary, philosophical and theological contexts that make humility and humiliation mutually intelligible. Challenging the conception of humility in contemporary virtue ethics and social theory, it explores the performance and expressions of humility in Eliot and Beckett in relation to interpretations of humility that provide contrast or correspondence. Three theories are outlined: Aristotelian or ‘realistic’ humility; democratic humility; and religious humility.
Deindustrialisation as a Historical and Global Phenomenon
Authors: Phillips Jim , Wright Valerie , Tomlinson Jim
Published: May 2022

Contemporary discussions of deindustrialisation have emerged from long-standing concerns about structural changes in advanced economies. The term ‘deindustrialisation’ was used by economists in the 1970s, examining its negative macroeconomic impact, both for growth and the balance of payments. Britain’s alleged economic decline was linked to structural change. In the 1980s concerns were articulated about social costs, with the heavy loss of relatively well-paid and secure jobs. These were countered by an argument that structural change was desirable, reflecting market efficiencies. By the early twenty-first century, it was apparent that deindustrialisation was a global phenomenon, extending even to fast growing economies like China. These long-running debates are used to frame our understanding of deindustrialisation in Scotland from the 1950s onwards.
Fairfield, Govan: Shipbuilding and the Scottish Nation
Authors: Phillips Jim , Wright Valerie , Tomlinson Jim
Published: May 2022

Deindustrialisation threatened the employment culture of Clydeside shipbuilding workers, who valued their earnings and craft skill along with autonomy from managerial supervision and employer control. The Fairfield shipyard in Govan was host to a series of industrial crises, which strengthened working-class moral economy feeling on the Clyde, and the expectation that trade-union organisation and state intervention could advance economic security. The 1965-68 Fairfield ‘Experiment’ and the Labour government’s 1969 investment in Upper Clyde Shipbuilders fed the moral-economy basis of the victorious 1971-72 work-in. This preserved mass employment in shipbuilding, promoted popular support for Home Rule, and inspired other occupational groups in the long age of deindustrialisation to fight for their right to work.
Deindustrialisation since the 1990s
Authors: Phillips Jim , Wright Valerie , Tomlinson Jim
Published: May 2022

The establishment of Scotland’s Parliament in 1999; the election of a first SNP government in 2007; the Independence referendum of 2014; these political developments encouraged continued debate about deindustrialisation. Arguments about its damaging effects, notably in discussion of the ‘Glasgow effect’, illustrated that working-class moral economy understanding of industrial job losses was still influential. Employment standards continued to be measured against expectations of security, stability and workplace voice. The need for ‘reindustrialisation’ emerged, often linked to strategies for a more sustainable economy, such as the ‘Green New Deal’. The volume of employment in such new industry would likely be moderate, however. This perhaps buttressed interest in forms of ‘Basic Income’, to guarantee minimum economic security independent of employment status.
Conclusion:
Authors: Phillips Jim , Wright Valerie , Tomlinson Jim
Published: May 2022

This book has intervened in three related areas of historical debate: on the character and chronology of deindustrialisation, through detailed analysis of its employment effects; on the moral economy, focusing on working-class understanding of the legitimacy and fairness of industrial change; and on Scotland’s distinct political trajectory from the 1950s onwards....
The Crystal-image and Queer Ambiguity in Sous le sable
Authors: Kearney Peadar
Published: May 2022

This chapter tackles what many critics and scholar note about Ozon’s work, that is his blending of fiction and reality. Here, the chapter brings forth the film’s singular treatment of subjectivity, the blurring of the distinction between diegetic reality and fiction and the overall sense of ambiguity that pervades the narrative. Adding to the scholarship on Sous le sable/Under the Sand (2000), this contribution turns to Gilles Deleuze’s crystal-image and queer theory and reminds us that ambiguity, ambivalence and indiscernibility are crucial to deciphering Ozon’s films and open up concepts of space, time and identities.
Sex Wars in Potiche : Womanhood Then and Now
Authors: Bourdeau Loïc
Published: May 2022

This chapter seeks to analyse Ozon’s strategy to represent French womanhood and to bring forth his criticism of gender expectations and the political and queer dimension of the film. It argues that Ozon manages to empower the ‘trophy wife’ with the very means of her submission: credulity, candour and maternal responsibilities. Adapting a 1970s Boulevard play and drawing on the 2007 presidential elections, Ozon relies on the ghost of the past, of women’s liberation, to comment on contemporary matters.
Indexicalism
Authors: Bensusan Hilan
Published: May 2022

Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox provides an account of what is real as being ultimately indexical. As a consequence, substantive descriptions have an implicit indexicality to them. This situated metaphysics emerges from a reading together of Emmanuel Levinas and Alfred N. Whitehead informed both by work on demonstratives in the philosophy of language and by some tenets of Amerinidian perspectivism. The recommended indexicalist metaphysics of the others is a paradoxico-metaphysics which is simultaneously a metaphysics – according to which things are ultimately indexical – and a critique of metaphysics – no substantive account of reality is possible. In contrast with images of reality aimed at a totality, an indexicalist account is one where there is an incompleteness that enables an active role for the Great Outdoors. Indexicalism is thought through in contrast with some forms of Speculative Realism and understands speculation as something that needs to be mended by the interruption of the exterior. Taking the deictic category of “other” seriously, the book provides an account of receptivity as hospitality that contrasts with most post-Kantian approaches to perceptual experience. The concern with the others have resonances in the discussions concerning the post-colonial and the debates concerning thought and action as being unescapably situated. In contrast with relational ontologies, indexicalism takes the asymmetry that places the others outside as a point of departure.
The Hospitality of Perception
Authors: Bensusan Hilan
Published: May 2022

Chapter 3 argues that perceptual experience is the key to make a move from the Levinasian Other to the Great Outdoors. It proposes a notion of receptivity as hospitality where integration of what is perceived into an articulation of concepts emulate the tension between hosts and guests. The risk of the myth of the Given is then considered and dismissed through an analysis of McDowell’s positions in some debates in the last few decades and through the very postulates of indexicalism. The claim that the others are exterior that are part of an indexical co-ordination of experience connects with a broader notion of the equivalent of Kantian spontaneity that revolves around the notion of importance as put forward by Whitehead. As a consequence, the account can be expanded beyond the limits of human perceptual experience.
Coda: The Circumscription of Potosí
Authors: Bensusan Hilan
Published: May 2022

The Coda discusses some consequences of indexicalism and the metaphysics of the others that touch issues in the debates around the post-colonial. After considering the connections between exteriority and epistemic abundance, the Coda analyses the impact of Potosí, where the book was (partially) elaborated, in the situated metaphysics that emerges and in the notion of proximity that is recommended. The Potosí principle – the idea that the extraction of silver in the mountain of Sumaq Urqo was crucial for the development of modern practices – and Rivera Cusicanqui’s notion of ch’ixi – that each way of thinking is tainted by others that are never fully integrated – are then discussed in the indexicalist context. The Coda and the book closes with some remarks about absolute deixis in its connection to contingency, situatedness and plurality.
Alison Light - Inside History
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism since the 1970s: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women’s relation to ideas of national identity, especially Englishness, and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors including Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, and Caryl Churchill. It also explores genre fiction by authors such as Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier, and offers reflections on the writing of memoir, biography and the lives of so-called ‘ordinary people’.
Chronologically arranged, the essays and short ‘think-pieces’ chart Alison Light’s own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is contextualised in an autobiographical introduction.
Introduction: Reading Oneself Backwards
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

An introduction like this one, looking back over nearly thirty-five years of work, is bound to be deceptive. Thought does not travel in a straight line; ideas are seeded and gestate or lie dormant for decades; others fall by the wayside or on stony ground. Work is always work in progress. Realising too, as I get older, how much I am always ‘inside history’, has meant acknowledging that my work, however much it feels original, is also representative, forged in the crucible of time, fashioned in a culture and a place, owing much to others. One’s self is only ever known in social relations and such relations, like time, do not stand still. ‘I’ am a crowd. If the self is a kind of flow, the knowledge of one’s own historicity, accrues like silt....
‘Returning to Manderley’: Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class
Authors: Light Alison , Light Alison
Published: May 2022

A now-classic essay, published in 1984, exploring the nature of romance, and the appeal of romance fiction for women readers. A close reading of Daphne du Maurier’s romantic thriller, the bestseller, Rebecca, it places the novel’s literary strategies in the historical context of the late 1930s and explores the meaning of class and sexuality in the novel. The piece then broadens out to a wider discussion of ‘romance’ – ‘the heart of a heartless world’- in women’s lives and the challenge it offers to feminist critics.
Young Bess : Historical Novels and Growing Up
Authors: Light Alison , Light Alison
Published: May 2022

This essay explores British historical novels read by the author in girlhood and the pleasures they offered. It looks at the nature of the popular history presented, especially the ambiguous role of Elizabeth I as a key figure, with whom a girl might identify, and the problems with the idea of ‘becoming a heroine’. It locates these novels as national fictions in British society post-1945, imagining particular versions of national identity, and women’s place within them.
Women Writers and Conservative Sensibilities
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

Three short pieces examine different kinds of conservatism in the work of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anita Brookner and Joanna Trollope. Reviewing the television versions of Christie in the 1990s, I argue that they played down her modernity, opting instead for a nostalgia absent from the novels. Sayers’s far more Tory visions of England are then discussed. By way of a contrast, I raise two cheers for the liberalism of Merchant Ivory films, often accused of conservatism. And in the final piece, I take issue with the limitations of class sensibilities in the novels of Brookner and Trollope.
The Mighty Mongrel: on Biography
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

This is a brief piece discussing the nature of biography, its history in the search for the exemplary, whether religious or secular, and, in its most conventional forms, its romantic individualism: the celebration of the self and faith in agency. The question of ‘psycho-biography’ and the centrality given to the inner world of the unconscious is raised. How far does the growing hybridity of biographical forms and their increasing cultural diversity suggest that the old shorthands around which biography has revolved - the – ‘private and public’, ‘inner and outer’, ‘life and times’- are out of date?
Hitchcock’s Rebecca : A Woman’s Film?
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

This essay is a brief close reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel. It concentrates on the ways in which Hitchcock reacted against the idea of a ‘woman’s picture’, introducing wholly new elements and scenes, and prioritising the man’s point of view, avoiding the more threatening parts of the novel which had engrossed female readers, including unruly female desire. It touches briefly on Hitchcock’s own career and du Maurier’s far more nostalgic relation to an idea of England.
Re-reading Great Expectations
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

This re-encounter with Dickens’s novel is a personal one. It contrasts my reading of the novel in my teens when snobbery and bullying were uppermost in my mind, to a later reading of its analysis of the pathology of class and the problem of ‘social mobility’ in an unequal society. It also relishes the puerile humour of the book and its power as a rejuvenating read.
Experiments in Memoir-writing
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

Four short personal pieces which conjure the author’s past but also question the role of memory and our idea of what pastness is. How far does memory undermine our version of history? The first concerns the ‘postmemory’ of the Second World War; the second details a visit to Portsmouth and to the author’s parents, and the beginnings of family history; the third what makes ‘A Child’s Sense of the Past’? The final article is a reflection on the nature of mourning in the wake of widowhood and the rituals of commemoration.
Addicted to Diaries: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

A discussion of the diaries of an unknown woman, unpublished in her lifetime, begun in 1925 and kept until she died in 1986. What did diary-keeping mean to Pratt and why did she do it? The review explores the nature of diary-keeping as a practice and how it forms the self it details. It looks at the changes to the diaries over time in the context of Pratt’s own life, including the period when she kept two diaries for the Mass Observation project in Britain during the Second World War, and how the diary recounts and re-fashions Pratt’s experience and her longings for another life. The essay also asks what kind of historical evidence diaries might offer; and the essay is itself an experiment in life-writing.
Introduction
Authors: Sorensen Eli Park
Published: May 2022

Science Fiction Film discusses a range of sci-fi films addressing specific aspects of the political dimension in the post-political age such as the end of liberalism (and ideology), politics-as-administration, security, the state of emergency, totalitarianism, and biopolitics that, insofar as one can talk about a demarcated genre paradigm, situate these films apart from their predecessors. These films, in different ways, reactivate political potential through plots that involve envisioning a radically unpredictable future at a time when we perhaps more intensely than ever before have become aware of the limits of our imagination, of our ability to think beyond ourselves. If the collective imagination of the present can no longer think beyond the notion of a post-political society, the sense of the political, albeit in deferred form, may be resuscitated precisely through a genre that intensely explores political images of our future and thus allows us to rediscover the possibility of moving beyond the post-political malaise. What this late version of the sci fi film genre ultimately attempts to articulate is the impossible: to predict the political implications of a future that remains radically unpredictable in the present.
Between Friends and Enemies: Ridley Scott’s Alien
Authors: Sorensen Eli Park
Published: May 2022

In a political sense, what happens to our understanding of the political if we no longer need it? Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Alien (1979) has often been read through feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, but such approaches essentially draw attention away from the literalness of the film’s political dimension, which comes close to the problem Carl Schmitt used to explain his concept of the state of exception. During the state of exception, the sovereign may legally suspend the social contract or the constitution in order to protect, defend, and preserve them. However, in the absence of danger, the state becomes increasingly depoliticized and irrelevant. Thus, the state must establish a relation to the anomaly (the enemy, Behemoth, or the state of nature) in order to reassert itself. Alien tells the story of Ripley, a loyal citizen fighting against power’s sinister attempt to restore fear and terror. She simultaneously comes to personify both the absolute unlimited sovereign and the alien; Ripley is both the outlawed, banned life and the hero of the state, both friend and enemy at one and the same time. Read against Schmitt’s thoughts, the film traces and explores the tensions between sovereignty and citizens in a post-political age.
Blade Runner and the Right to Life
Authors: Sorensen Eli Park
Published: May 2022

This chapter reads Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner alongside the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality in order to investigate the notions of “human” and “rights”. Foucault’s concept of sovereignty in many ways extends Schmitt’s notion of the sovereign’s right to declare the exception. Foucault develops a series of arguments on what he describes as the right to life. This right to life is one of the main themes in Blade Runner, which tells the story of a group of replicants (human-like robots) returning to Earth in search of more life. On Earth, however, they are outlawed, and most of the film’s plot consists of Deckard, the main character, hunting down and killing the replicants. I argue that Blade Runner explores what one could call the culmination of biopower, the imagination of a life whose absolute perfection is simultaneously the expression of absolute monstrosity, a threat to life that legitimizes the death penalty. Questioning and exploring the notions of “human” and “rights” in a sci-fi context, Blade Runner develops some of the implications of what sovereignty means when the border between natural life and artificial life erodes.
Terminating the State of Exception: Oblivion and the Problem of Exceptional Being
Authors: Sorensen Eli Park
Published: May 2022

The main character in Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion (2013), Jack Harper, believes that humans survived an alien attack by using nuclear weapons, which made Earth uninhabitable. However, he doesn’t know that the hostile aliens won the war, and he himself is a human clone. I argue that the film addresses the challenges of the state of exception, in which everything is potentially turned upside down to the extent that it is no longer possible to fully comprehend the scale, implications, or consequences of this upheaval. In Oblivion, the war continues—we just don’t know it; we no longer understand which side we are on or in the end who we ourselves are. The film thus articulates a paradoxical self-consciousness that is born and shaped within the exceptional situation. To Schmitt, the sovereign identifies the exceptional situation and decides what to do about it. However, once we are in the state of exception, Kosinski’s film suggests, it is difficult if not impossible to recognize it, much less terminate it and return to normality. The film thus highlights the dangers of declaring the state of exception, especially when it comes to defending the present against a transformative future event.
Conclusion
Authors: Sorensen Eli Park
Published: May 2022

The overall aim of this book has been to explore the political potential of sci-fi film from the late twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Sci-fi is perhaps the aesthetic genre most insistently devoted to exploring the potential of the future, and more specifically the collective future. It is the latter that links the sci-fi genre eminently to the specifically political. From a political perspective, the individual future is relatively insignificant. How we live together is a profoundly political question, a balancing act between collective security concerns and individual freedom—now and later, in the future. Political philosophy is essentially the history of how such a balance may be reached in any given present, and how such a present may be prolonged; the genre of sci-fi more specifically asks important questions about how and under what circumstances such a balance may be preserved in the future.
Monuments with a Message: Propagation of Jihād under Nūr al-Dīn (1146–1174)
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Examines the inscriptions Nur al-Din (1146-74) that deal with his jihad against the Crusaders in relation to the monuments on which they were inscribed. The article concluded with an analysis of the unique jihad inscriptions on the famous pulpit that Nur al-Din endowed for the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
Survivals and Archaisms in the Architecture of Northern Syria, c. 1080–1150
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Reviews the prevalence of archaizing and classicizing features in the architecture of northern Syria and argues that these features should generally be seen as survivals of Late Antiquity in a very distinctive phase of Islamic architecture.
ayfa Khātūn, Regent Queen and Architectural Patron
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Examines the patronage of Ayyubid women of the court and highlights the patronage of the notable regent queen Dayfa Khatun (r. 1237-1244). Her two most important buildings, Khanqah (Sufi convent) al-Farafra and Madrasa al-Firdaws, signal her patronage of Sufis, in particular women Sufis, and her support for Sufi transcendental piety as an alternative to Shi’i rituals, which were quite prevalent in Aleppo at the time.
Originality and Innovation in Syrian Woodwork of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Examines a coherent group of medieval Syrian woodwork, highlighting the contributions of Syria woodworkers in advancing a style of geometric strap work during the 12th and 13th centuries. The article further discusses the transfer of this geometric style to Cairo in the form of the two Ayyubid casekts in the shrines of Imam al-Husayn and al-Shafi’i .
The Mosque of Nūr al-Dīn in Mosul, 1170–1172
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Utilizing contemporary sources and hitherto unpublished photographs from the early twentieth century, this article reconstructs the original plan of Mosque al-Nuri in Mosul and presents a new chronology for its main phases. It remains the only scholarly study in English of this mosque, which was completely destroyed in recent years.
Canonicity and Control: The Sociopolitical Underpinnings of Ibn Muqla’s Reform
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Expands on the social status of early calligraphers and their increasing dependence on the royal patronage of the Abbasids and later sovereigns.
2 Architecture’s Awaking from Correlationist Slumber: On Transdisciplinarity and Disciplinary Specificity
Authors: Radman Andrej
Published: May 2022

The chapter opposes the scientific point of view that regards architecture as not rigorous enough. It is a bias that has tangible consequences for research and education alike. However, this perceived weakness may turn out to be architecture’s main strength, a result of the symbiosis between its beaux-arts and polytechnic traditions (aberrant nuptials). Yes, it is possible to be both anexact and rigorous. What distinguishes architecture from other disciplines and makes it the material-discursive technicity par excellence is the interplay between the abstract means and concrete ends. Architecture requires both intellectual and practical tools to work effectively in a paradoxical environment that is immersed in the incorporeal world of images and abstract notations, yet intimately connected to the corporeality of material and forces.
11 Involutionary Architecture: Unyoking Coherence from Congruence
Authors: Radman Andrej
Published: May 2022

The Chapter is devoted to the involutionary relation of the forces from within with the forces from without. It starts from the premise that the interior as a given needs to be set aside until the issue of how the given is given has been addressed. Only then will it be possible to make sense of the superfold’s (eternal) giving. When the explanatory ladder is turned upside down, what has figured as an explanation – namely interiority as a datum – becomes that which begs the question.
Spinoza, Socrates of Deleuze
Authors: Cross D. J. S.
Published: May 2022

Before tracing the importance of Spinoza for Deleuze’s conception of affect, I trace his importance for Deleuze’s philosophy in general. While Deleuze’s critics and his disciples tend to stress his definition of philosophy as ‘the creation of concepts’, the invention of ‘conceptual characters’ is equally indispensable to philosophy as Deleuze defines it. Hence, although he never says so, Deleuze needs a conceptual character, as well. Spinoza, I argue, constitutes the ‘conceptual character’ of What Is Philosophy? and of philosophy as Deleuze defines it in general. The conceptual character, however, is always distinct from its namesake, and I demonstrate Deleuze’s characterisation of Spinoza by emphasising evolutions in his reading. While Deleuze proclaims Spinoza to be the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence in What Is Philosophy?, he argues two and half decades earlier in Difference and Repetition that Spinoza is only a step toward absolute immanence. When one insists upon the earlier critique, which Deleuze never redresses, one begins to suspect that Deleuze and Guattari invent the Spinoza of What Is Philosophy? to operate philosophy as they define it there.
Affectus Becoming l’Affect
Authors: Cross D. J. S.
Published: May 2022

Chapter 5 specifies the precise but silent moment in which Deleuze breaks with Spinoza. For Spinoza, affectus refers to an individual’s passage or (in Deleuze’s terms) ‘becoming’ between two states. Deleuze generalises and radicalises this idea of becoming such that it no longer takes place between two states of one individual but, rather, between two heterogenous individuals. The gesture makes Deleuze both more and less traditional than the tradition. As what takes place between individuals, on the one hand, Deleuze gives affect an autonomy that would be unthinkable in the philosophical tradition according to which sensations derive from and belong to a pre-existent being. On the other hand, however, the same affective autonomy remains complicit with the tradition in a way neglected by Deleuze and influential commentators: Deleuze dematerializes and disembreduces, affect ends up suppressing the bodyodies affect in order to render it autonomous. In light of which, however, I do not simply unearth grounds on which to question Deleuze’s materialism. It is not even enough to say Deleuze is less materialist than the most ideal philosopher. Purely idealist readings miss a more brutal consequence. Namely, because Deleuze also recognizes the irreducibility of the materiality that he reduces, affect ends up suppressing the body again and again ad infinitum.
Deleuze and the First ‘Ethics’
Authors: Cross D. J. S.
Published: May 2022

Chapter 6 addresses affect in Deleuze’s final encounter with the Spinozist system in ‘Spinoza and the Three “Ethics”’. In the ‘Three “Ethics”’, his most refined reading of Spinoza’s system, Deleuze associates ‘affects’ with what Spinoza calls the first genre of knowledge in the Ethics, ‘concepts’ with the second, and ‘percepts’ with the third. By conceiving the three genres as a progression, Deleuze privileges affect as an irreducible origin. This privilege, however, is at the same time cause for mistrust. Not only because the percepts of the third genre of knowledge remain the final goal but also and above all because the affects upon which the entire chain depends remain unreliable and even obstructive. My final chapter thus comes full circle by demonstrating that what I call ‘the sensible hitch’ in my first chapter on Deleuze’s early philosophy still structures and jeopardises philosophy in his late reading of Spinoza.
The regime of equivalence
Authors: Prozorov Sergei
Published: May 2022

Chapter 1 locates the problematic of post-truth in the context of the relation between democracy and biopolitics. It takes its points of departure from Alain Badiou’s critique of contemporary ‘democratic materialism’ that only recognizes the existence of bodies and language rather than truths and Michel Foucault’s discussion of the doubly paradoxical relationship between democracy, governance and truth in Ancient Greece. From its very inception, democracy has had a problematic relationship to truth, enabling both the generation of true discourses underlying rationalities of governance and their continuous contestation on the basis of the equal right to speech. However, the post-truth condition introduces a new twist to this problematic relationship, insofar as it erases the distinction between parrhesia and isegoria, true speech and free speech. We then proceed to elaborate this condition in terms of a move from an argumentative to an expressionist logic (post-proof), which valorizes free, unconstrained and undistorted expression of one’s self, identity or interest (post-shame) that no longer seeks to persuade one’s interlocutor (post-consensus). The result of this transformation is the regime of equivalence, which renders all statements equivalent (but not equal) as opinions that could not possibly be adjudicated in terms of truth and falsity.
Subject to truth
Authors: Prozorov Sergei
Published: May 2022

The chapter elaborates the notion of regime of equivalence by addressing it in a more philosophical context. Firstly, it discusses the attempts to present postmodern or post-structuralist philosophers as somehow complicit in the rise of post-truth due to their sceptical or relativist approach to truth. We argue that the philosophical problematization of particular truth claims or entire theories of truth must necessarily presuppose their existence, which differentiates these approaches clearly from the post-truth disposition that renders truths indistinct from opinions. Moreover, we shall demonstrate how the philosophical critique of truth, undertaken by such authors as Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben actually helps us understand what is at stake in the post-truth condition. In their own different ways these authors are concerned less with the epistemological questioning of truths than with illuminating their ethico-political functioning in our subjectivation. If the meaning and function of truth consist primarily in the way it participates in the subjectivation of speaking beings, then the effects of the post-truth disposition are even more thoroughgoing than we have hitherto imagined, since they destabilize the very core of our subjectivity.
The Russification of the West
Authors: Prozorov Sergei
Published: May 2022

The chapter reconstructs a particularly important episode in the genealogy of post-truth politics: the emergence of the regime of equivalence in the Russian postcommunist society and culture during the 1990s and its subsequent consolidation and weaponization by the Putin regime. The discussion of Russia’s ‘hybrid war’ on the West after 2014 has largely ignored the fact that this strategy was only deployed in Russia’s foreign policy after being successfully applied domestically for over a decade. The optimistic expectations of the Westernization of Russia in the post-Soviet period have given way to the fears about the Russification of the West, which turned out to be just as receptive to post-truth strategies and technologies as the Russian postcommunist society was since the late 1990s. The chapter retraces the emergence of the post-truth disposition in the late-Soviet period, marked by ideological disenchantment and societal disengagement from the political space, the intensification of this disengagement during the reform period of the 1990s, marked by the rise of a cynical and conspiracist mindset, and the eventual adoption of this disposition by the Putin regime as its quasi-ideological foundation, permitting the consolidation of authoritarianism and the marginalization of all opposition. The chapter concludes by addressing what is perhaps the most famous instance of resistance to this regime, Pussy Riot’s 2012 ‘punk prayer’.
Theodor Adorno, Peter Bürger and Oswald Wiener, or How to Apply Neo-Avant-Garde Theory to Neo-Avant-Garde Texts
Authors: Eder Thomas
Published: May 2022

This article confronts two very influential theoretical texts related to neo-avant-garde with one of the most important manifestations of literary neo-avant-garde: Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1968) and Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Neo-Avant-Garde (1984) are applied to Oswald Wiener’s the
improvement of central europe, a novel (1969). The article considers Wiener’s novel as a constitutive artwork that defines the neo-avant-garde’s theoretical and aesthetic presuppositions, outcome, and future. That becomes clear in the confrontation with Adorno’s and Bürger’s theoretical reflections. Adorno seems to idealise artworks as ontological objects in their own right. Contrary to Adorno’s notion of aesthetic form as “sedimented content”, Wiener develops a more sceptical stance towards the scope of artworks, conceiving of his postmodernist novel as the “suicide of an artwork”. Wiener’s novel and his subsequent works do away with the importance of signs and forms, and with their relation to the things expressed. While Adorno endorses a dialectic relationship between form and content, Wiener aims at a functional description of lively thinking, conceiving of neo-avant-garde or experimental art and literature not as an insightful means to gain a better understanding of the human mind. Bürger’s claim that “avant-garde could gain a renewed relevance in a future that we cannot imagine” may be re-formulated with regard to Wiener’s development, transforming his impetus from art and literature into a psychology of thinking which nevertheless retains its artistic basis.
Multi-faceted Images of Reality: Montage in Documentary Literature from the Long 1960s
Authors: Taeye Lieselot De
Published: May 2022

This chapter reflects on one of the techniques typically associated with the (neo-)avant-garde, namely montage. The text focuses on how this technique surfaced in Dutch documentary prose from the long 1960 and it argues that, in comparison to most of the literary montages written during the historical avant-garde, these montages were often more radical in their movement away from the novel. As the documentary tendency centred around a quest for a more ‘direct’ relation to reality, and as it cultivated an engaged relationship to society, it provided a welcoming space for experiments with montage technique. The possibility of including heterogeneous pieces of text within the montage was used as a way to democratise literature and the gaps between the different sections in a montage were activated in order to spur critical thinking and provide more structural analyses of society. In reading Praag schrijven (‘Writing Prague’, 1975) by Daniël Robberechts, a book in which the Prague Spring plays a central role, the chapter demonstrates how montage evokes an ever-changing multidimensional reality, as well as the impossibility of fully grasping it.
Differentiating the Return of the Real: Towards an Interdisciplinary Concept of the Neo-Avant-Garde
Authors: Müller Sabine
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores the potentials of an interdisciplinary dialogue between neo-avant-garde research in literary and art history in three stages. The point of departure is a re-reading of the history of avant-garde theory, which recalls the specific German and literary-historical context, in which the term “neo-avant-garde” was coined by Peter Bürger. Understood as forgotten origin of the debate, this context sheds new light on central premises of current avant-garde research in the visual arts (Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster), such as trauma, shock, deferred action, culture industry, and commodification. Against this background the chapter argues that the specific characteristics of the political, intellectual and literary history of Germany and Austria open up particular opportunities towards a reassessment of these premises and towards an approach to avant-garde history, which incorporates the expertise of literary studies. This line of thought is developed in two further stages, which turn to selected works by Friedrich Achleitner, H. C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm (members of the Vienna Group), and Eugen Gomringer. The analyses of the intergeneric, intermedial and multimodal devices of the chosen texts work out, which premises of art-historical avant-garde research ought to be further developed for a genuinely interdisciplinary concept of the neo-avant-garde.
‘A riot is the language of the unheard’: Neo-Avant-Garde Poetic Uprisings in the Era of the Black Arts Movement
Authors: Rigaud Antonia
Published: May 2022

This article looks at the poetry of the Black Arts Movement as a response to the first avant-garde’s poetry of experimentation. It analyses how Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks borrow from these poetic gestures, through collage, in order to respond poetically as well as politically to the urgency of the fight for Civil Rights. These responses rely on loudness and dissonance, adopting aesthetic codes from the first avant-garde in order to re-signify them with political force. At stake for these poets is the difficulty of writing politically forceful poetry while remaining experimental. In doing so, they reflect on their position as African-American poets in relation to the white avant-garde canon.
The Neo-Avant-Garde in Latin America: The Case of Mario Bellatin
Authors: Logie Ilse
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses the resurgence of avant-garde aesthetics in El Gran Vidrio (The Large Glass) by the Mexican-Peruvian author Mario Bellatin. Taking as its departure point this unsettling trio of apparently autobiographical stories published in 2007, the essay deals with the way in which Bellatin takes up the legacy of dadaism. More broadly, the contribution interrogates how this artistic project from Latin America ties in with the historical avant-garde, how it is situated within the contemporary and how this double positioning has been interpreted differently by various critics.
Flemish Hybridity: The Magazine Labris (1962–73) and the Neo-Avant-Garde
Authors: Geest Dirk De , Vervaeck Bart
Published: May 2022

This contribution deals with the Belgian neo-avant-garde journal Labris, published between 1962 and 1973 as a forum of the so-called ‘sixtiers’. The name of the journal refers to the double-bitted ax from Greek mythology, but also – at least in the minds of the editors – to the term ‘labyrinth’. The latter association links Labris with the hermetic and mannerist tradition; the former one epitomizes the journal’s ambiguous poetics and its equivocal institutional position vis-à-vis the national and international avant-garde. Indeed, it presented two conflicting poetics, an objective one infused with the international neo-avant-garde of concrete visual poetry and Fluxus, and a subjective one, permeated by jazz and by the American beats. In terms of the historical avant-garde, surrealism and dadaism were the main points of reference. The article discusses authors of the objective and subjective type and concludes with a case study, an experimental novel by Labris editor Hugo Neefs, which presents the two strands in a text that hovers between experimental word play and love story, between lyricism and narrativity. It is symbolic of the paradoxical and eclectic position Labris held for more than a decade.
Reading Nietzsche
Authors: Daigle Christine
Published: May 2022

The introduction provides a context for analysing Nietzsche as a phenomenologist. The introduction discusses the lack of attention to the middle period texts and demonstrates their importance by drawing affinities between the concepts within these works and phenomenology. The introduction argues that we must move beyond comparative work between Nietzsche and phenomenologists and read him as constructing a phenomenology avant la lettre. The introduction also provides a breakdown of chapters content.
Becoming Overhuman
Authors: Daigle Christine
Published: May 2022

This chapter closely examines the ethical ideal that supersedes that of the free spirit: the Overhuman. It explains that the agonized subject, the one that embraces itself as dynamic becoming by itself and in its agonistic relations with others, is the Overhuman. When Nietzsche refers to the Overhuman as the meaning of the earth, he is pointing to the radical immanence of his ethical ideal. The dynamic becoming is a this-worldly endeavour: it is as being-in-the-world and being-with-others in this world that one may become what one is. This amounts to an incorporation of truth which necessitates a transformation of oneself. The chapter offers a close analysis of “Of the Vision and the Riddle” and “Of the Three Metamorphoses” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra along with aphorism 341 of The Gay Science to show what is involved in the ethical transformation Nietzsche is seeking. Affirmative ethical becoming, the overcoming of oneself and the affirmation of oneself as the being one is, is only possible if one rejects alienating moralities and asceticism. Only then may the phenomenologically grounded ethical ideal of becoming oneself emerge. The chapter explains that Nietzsche’s ethical perspective is that of a virtue ethics that shares with ancient virtue ethics a focus on the good life – an attention to small things and to one’s flourishing in the immanent realm of being.
Introduction: Before Deleuze and Guattari Studies
Authors: Buchanan Ian
Published: May 2022

[If] it is a question of rediscovering at the end what was there in the beginning, if it is a question of recognising, of bringing to light or into the conceptual or the explicit, what was simply known implicitly without concepts – whatever the complexity of this process, whatever the differences between the procedures of this or that author – the fact remains that all this is still too simple, and that this circle is truly not tortuous enough....
Five Theses for an Actually Existing Schizoanalysis of Cinema
Authors: Buchanan Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter starts from an acknowledgement that Deleuze did not pay attention to blockbuster films, or exploitation films, or any of the standard B films that make up the bread and butter of Hollywood. By focusing almost exclusively on the ‘great’ directors and their artistic achievements Deleuze neglects both the audience and the industry that enables cinema. This chapter argues that if one approaches cinema from the perspective of the books he wrote with Guattari, it is possible to imagine a version of cinema studies that could be considered schizoanalysis.
Schizoanalysis and The Birds 1
Authors: Buchanan Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapters starts from the observation that Hitchcock’s films have been extensively written about from a psychoanalytic perspective. Zizek is only the latest in a long line of psychoanalysis scholars to direct their attention to Hitchcock. This chapter then argues that if we are to follow Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of several key precepts of psychoanalysis, particularly its representational approach to texts, then we would need to rethink a large body of work devoted to Hitchcock. It then proposes a way forward for beginning to think about Hitchcock’s work from the perspective of schizoanalysis. The chapter uses two examples from Hitchcock’s oeuvre: The Birds and North by Northwest.
Occupy without Counting
Authors: Buchanan Ian
Published: May 2022

The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 tried to set in motion a new way of signalling and enacting global dissent. Protesting against the iniquities of global capitalism, particularly its disproportionate distribution of wealth, the Occupy movement confounded critics by not making any demands beyond that of being noticed. Many critics said this was a fatal flaw, while others recognised that the dominance of global capitalism is so complete that demands would be futile. This chapter uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth space and nonpulsed time to find a new critical vernacular adequate to the events of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Schizoanalysis and Postmodern Space
Authors: Buchanan Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter uses Deleuze’s work on post World War Two cinema has a framework for understanding so-called postmodern space, that is the space of late capitalism, e.g., malls, freeways, motels, airports, and so on. It argues that these spaces can be thought of as ‘any-space-whatevers’, a notion drawn from Deleuze’s account of cinema because they lack the feeling of distinctiveness we typically associate with place. These types of spaces rely on producing simulacras of real places and invite us to enjoy the non-real as though it were an improvement on the original.