bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Odysseus’ Changed Soul: A Contemporary Reading of the Myth of Er
Authors: Malabou Catherine
Published: January 2018

Catherine Malabou’s “Odysseus’ Changed Soul: A Contemporary Reading of the Myth of Er” examines the political and ontological meaning of Odysseus’ choice of a private life in the Myth of Er of Book X of Plato’s Republic. In this Myth, when it is Odysseus’ turn to choose the paradigm of his next life, he picks the life of a private person who minds his own business. This unexpected choice, echoing the philosopher’s return to the Cave in Book VII, gives a model for deconstructing sovereignty without assuming total impotency. Departing from Agamben’s discussions of the homo sacer, Malabou links together the departures and returns of Odysseus, Socrates, and Er. Malabou casts Socrates as the anti-Bartleby, who by means of φρόνησις‎ simultaneously rejects tyranny and complacent impotency.
“Adjust Your Dread”: Badiou’s Metaphysical Disposition
Authors: Bartlett A. J.
Published: January 2018

Adam J. Bartlett’s “‘Adjust Your Dread’: Badiou’s Metaphysical Disposition” is the final encounter with Plato. Bartlett considers how Badiou extends the Platonic gesture through his famously provocative ontological principle: mathematics is the science of being qua being. Beginning with a reflection on Parmenidean and Heraclitean metaphysical tendencies, Bartlett follows the trail of Badiou’s “Platonism of the multiple,” a “metaphysics without metaphysics,” which eschews post-Kantian philosophies of finitude. Against the anti-metaphysical dread of the failure to think being, Badiou returns philosophy to itself by showing that ontology is a condition of philosophy, rather than its own project. Since ontology per se is mathematics, philosophy regains the freedom to think again the complex of being, truth, event, and subject.
Science Regained [1962]
Authors: Aubenque Pierre
Published: January 2018

Pierre Aubenque’s “Science Regained” (1962; translated by Clayton Shoppa) was originally published as the concluding chapter of Le Problème de l’Être chez Aristote, one of the most important and original books on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In this essay, Aubenque contends that the impasses which beset the project of first philosophy paradoxically become its greatest accomplishments. Although science stabilizes motion and thereby introduces necessity into human cognition, human thought always occurs amidst an inescapable movement of change and contingency. Aristotle’s ontology, as a discourse that strives to achieve being in its unity, succeeds by means of the failure of the structure of its own approach: the search of philosophy – dialectic – becomes the philosophy of the search. Aubenque traces this same structure of scission, mediation, and recovery across Aristotelian discussions of theology, motion, time, imitation, and human activity.
Object and Ο‎ὐ‎σία‎: Harman and Aristotle on the Being of Things
Authors: Salem Eric
Published: January 2018

Eric Salem’s “Object and Οὐσία‎: Harman and Aristotle on the Being of Things” is the last encounter with Aristotelian philosophy. Salem shows that Graham Harman aims to revive realism by putting objects back at the center of metaphysical inquiry. Harman traces his own thinking back to Aristotle, whom he considers to be the first object-oriented philosopher. Yet Harman, by rejecting the ontological importance of nature, universalizing intentionality to all kinds of object-object relations, and defending the reality of objects that Aristotle would not consider to be genuine οὐσίαι‎, claims to provide a weirder version of Aristotle’s theory of substance. Salem finds that the ideas of each can temper the excesses of the other: the cosmos of Aristotle corrects Harman’s overly expansive ontology, while the carnival of Harman supplements Aristotle’s insufficient account of autonomy and unity. Further, both provoke us to again ask – what is a thing?
Plotinus’ “Reverse” Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem of Emanation Imagery
Authors: Zavota Gina
Published: January 2018

Gina Zavota’s “Plotinus’ ‘Reverse’ Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem of Emanation Imagery” attempts a radical rethinking of the Plotinian question of emanation through the lens of Deleuze’s account of ontological individuation and actualization. Zavota notes that, despite its widespread acceptance as a Plotinian concept, Plotinus himself acknowledges the inadequacy of the language of emanation. Rather, just as Deleuze’s virtual Idea does not impose order upon the plane of consistency but instead simply indicates divergent lines of generation, Plotinus’ One does not predetermine the organization of things from above. Instead, the variety of generated objects, from the Intellect down to the barest material particulars, self-organize through the inherently generative operation of contemplation or turning towards the One. Thus contemplation is an act of differentiation, and Plotinus’ philosophy can be read as a counter-Platonism or divergent-Platonism.
From Metaphysics to Ethics (with Bernard Stiegler, Heraclitus, and Aristotle)
Authors: Lampe Kurt
Published: January 2018

Kurt Lampe’s “From Metaphysics to Ethics (with Bernard Stiegler, Heraclitus, and Aristotle)” serves as the postscript to the volume, the final encounter of this collection. Lampe considers Stiegler’s appropriations of Greco-Roman philosophemes to think together the metaphysics-ethics doublet, linking first philosophy with the cultivation of the self. In particular, Lampe focuses on the classic fragment of Heraclitus, φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ‎ (“nature loves to hide,” or, with Stiegler, “physis loves to withdraw”), and on Aristotle’s determination of the divine as the thinking of thinking. Through these, Lampe showcases Stiegler’s philosophy of technics, which otherwise seeks to overturn the transcendent and originary regimes of being and truth known as “metaphysics.”
Introduction: Modern Print Artefacts
Authors: Collier Patrick
Published: January 2018

The materiality of print objects took on increased significance with the explosion of print culture in the late nineteenth century, as artists from Henry James to the modernists sought to differentiate themselves from the mass of print culture. The pursuit of distance from commoditized print culture—whether it took the form of theories of aesthetic autonomy or the creation of specialized micro-markets—necessarily involved writers, editors, and other print professionals with the materiality of texts. This setting produced widely divergent attempts to gain symbolic capital through the creation of material print objects—from expensive editions de luxe to egalitarian political gestures such as Harold Monro’s poetic broadsides and cheap periodicals. This chapter surveys the field of material texts and the problems of literary value in the early twentieth century, which it elucidates using theories of cultural value ranging from Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu to Barbara Herrnstein-Smith and cultural anthropologist David Graeber.
Mapping Literary Value: Imperial/Modernist Forms in the Illustrated London News
Authors: Collier Patrick
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that the Illustrated London News and its imitators in the 1890s evolved a new and particularly apt system for representing the empire, the city of London, and the literary marketplace—all arenas that were expanding in rapid and disorienting fashion. By manipulating a nexus of space and value—indeed, by valuing its own page space according to an imperial spatial logic—the Illustrated London News traded on the comforting fiction that a vast and changing world could be ordered and comprehended on a weekly basis. The chapter traces these dynamics in text-and-image packages surrounding news from the empire, advertisements, and fiction by Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Reactionary Materialism: Book Collecting, Connoisseurship and the Reading Life in J. C. Squire’s London Mercury
Authors: Collier Patrick
Published: January 2018

The London Mercury attained popularity and notoriety as the leading anti-modernist voice of the early 1920s. It reached more than 10,000 circulation by presenting itself as a voice of reason in an age of critical anarchy, and its material form communicated seriousness of mission, tasteful restraint, and allusion to the great Victorian quarterlies. This chapter argues that, through a combination of economic necessity and editorial eccentricity, the Mercury went on to posit solid, material objects—particularly fine and rare books, but also collectible furniture and historic churches—as loci of stable value. The Mercury shored up its readership by appealing to rare and fine book enthusiasts and the businesses that catered to them. Combined with its literary partisanship, which began to appear increasingly reactionary, this emphasis on high-end textual materiality implicitly but powerfully posited reading as an activity of the leisured and educated, book-buying as a hobby for those with ample disposable income. Its ethos of value-in-the-object reached its reductio ad absurdum in the early 1930s, in two special issues on book production and typography, in which the magazine effectively became an advertiser-cum-trade-journal for London’s high-end printing concerns.
Harold Monro, Poetry Anthologies and the Rhetoric of Textual Materiality
Authors: Collier Patrick
Published: January 2018

This chapter meditates upon the role of the poetry anthology and its claims on literary value at the turn of the twentieth century. By sorting the output of poets, the anthology might seem to stabilize literary value; but like all print artefacts in the period, the anthology was overproduced, and therefore could also be seen as positing multiple, competing canons. The anthology form was in flux in these years as well, with such familiar conventions as tables of contents and the grouping of poems by poet not having emerged as norms. In this context, the textual materiality of anthologies became a complex system for intervening in debates about value. The chapter revisits the most popular anthologies of the era—Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse—to sketch out the emerging codes of the anthology form. Poet and publisher Harold Monro, the chapter argues, pursued a more egalitarian textual politics than these popular anthologies, particularly his underappreciated 1929 anthology, Twentieth Century Poetry. The chapter reads the content and the metatexts of Twentieth Century Poetry as asserting a catholic vision of modern poetry as vital to everyday life.
Postscript: Against ‘Modernist Studies’
Authors: Collier Patrick
Published: January 2018

Monro’s anthology is an especially resonant artefact on which to conclude this inquiry. In an attitude common in his time but relatively rare in ours, Monro valued the materiality of texts, with their stunningly various ways of making meaning and asserting value. If, for us, a kind of sceptical humanism informs our continuing investments in imaginative literature, few of us would assert that the early twentieth century’s highly segmented, commercial print culture is a monument of that humanism, or celebrate its variegated residue of cheap, material texts as one of the great achievements in human history. And yet this commercial culture made literature available to virtually everyone in the west in the years covered in this study. (I define ‘literature’ as writing of value – value asserted, contested, argued over.) Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, modern print artefacts not only gave virtually everyone who wanted it access to literature: they gave virtually everyone who wanted one a voice in arguments ...
Coleridge: Lectures on Shakespeare (1811-1819)
Authors: Coleridge Samuel Taylor
Published: January 2018

This book comprises a freshly composed edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton and 1818–19 Lectures on Shakespeare. Coleridge is a foundational figure in Shakespeare criticism, and remains to this day one of the most incisive and best. The book provides a background context into Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare, and looks into Coleridge's life and career, giving special attention to his position as a lecturer as well as the general content of his lectures. The book also explores Coleridge's relationships with August Wilhelm Schegel and William Hazlitt and their own scholarship on Shakespeare's oeuvre.
Roland Penrose
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

As an artist, an impresario, a biographer and a collector, Roland Penrose (1900–1984) is a key figure in the study of modern art in England. This book explores the intricacies of Penrose's life and work, tracing the profound effects of his upbringing in a Quaker household on his values, the early influence of Roger Fry, and his friendships with Max Ernst, André Breton and other surrealists, especially Paul Éluard. Penrose's conflicted relationship with Pablo Picasso, his tireless promotion of surrealism and the production of his own surrealist art are also discussed. Penrose's complex professional and personal lives are handled with a deftness of touch, including his pacifism, his work as a biographer and art historian, as well as his unconventionality, especially in his two marriages — including that to Lee Miller — and his numerous love affairs.
A Heretic in Training (1919–1922)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1919 to 1922. On 18 January 1919, a mere ten days after returning to England from the war, Roland enrolled at Queen's College, Cambridge. Roland's creativity was stimulated in his new environment but the effects of the war lingered on. Although he labelled the large charcoal drawings of men and monsters he had begun to draw as expressive of ‘romantic yearnings’, they really ‘came struggling out of darkness, symbolic but with that urgent yet forbidden aspect of sex, still too incomprehensible and dangerous for me to admit except in naïvely veiled appearances’. As a respite from academic study, Roland and his brothers joined the Marlowe Society, which, he claimed, ‘provided a release from puritanical taboos’.
Born Again (1922–1931)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1922 to 1931. Roland travelled to Paris in 1922. He visited museums, art galleries, the flea market in Saint-Eustache and the Jardin des Plantes by day; by night he was awestruck by the glamour of Pigalle and Montparnasse. He attended at the studio of André Lhote, whose work had become cubist after a stint as a Fauve. Lhote, a native of Bordeaux, learned wood-carving and sculpture from the age of 12, when his father apprenticed him to a local furniture maker to be trained as a sculptor in wood. Through Lhote, Roland became aware of the monumental contributions made by cubism's inventors: Gris, Braque, and especially Picasso. He would marry the mysterious, illusive Valentine Boué on 21 December 1925.
‘Let’s Do Something’ (1935–1936)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1935 to 1936. In Paris, in June 1935, Roland and Paul Éluard chanced upon precocious, intense nineteen-year-old David Gascoyne, who had recently completed his Short Survey of Surrealism. Éluard introduced the two Englishmen, who ‘got talking’ about the fact that in London, little is known about the excitement going on in Paris [in contemporary art, especially surrealism]. They then decided to organise the International Surrealist Exhibition, which marked a decisive turn in Roland's life, in that he began to allow his role as an apostle of modernism to overshadow his career as an artist. For the remainder of his life, these two sides would struggle to co-exist.
Aphrodite in Blue (1936–1938)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1936 to 1938. In late 1936, Roland and Valentine went their separate ways. After Valentine left for India, Roland had brief affairs, but he was certainly not prepared to encounter a goddess who would sweep him off his feet. On 21 June 1937, Roland was invited to a surrealist fancy dress party at the home of the Rochas family in Paris. In order to be as surrealist as possible, Roland had dyed his right hand and left foot blue, wore paint-encrusted trousers and a filthy old coat. Costumed in this scruffy way, he met American photographer Lee Miller. From the outset of their affair, Roland and Lee agreed that neither would prevent the other from having sexual relationships with others. For them, true freedom meant a lack of possessiveness. True love obviously transcended sex. Back in London, Roland would continue to have liaisons with a number of women; back in Egypt Lee would see other men. The couple recounted their adventures to each other.
Introduction: Can Empiricism Have a Transcendental Aspect?
Authors: Rölli Marc
Published: January 2018

The central focus of Deleuze’s thinking is on a necessary reversal of the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical. Sense-data are no longer to be taken as the fundamental givens of empiricism, but as transcendental singularities which structurally define and actualise themselves. A life consists entirely of virtuals that actualise themselves in a consciousness to which they attribute themselves. Difference must be prevented from being spread over the ‘surface of the identical’ and concepts should be constructed in a way that they are not subjugated to a thinkng that seems inevitably intent on making identifications.
Hume’s Logic of External Relations
Authors: Rölli Marc
Published: January 2018

Reason as an a priori function belonging to an already constituted transcendental subject is wishful thinking. Following Hume, subjectivity is a passive construct, not a given. Self-resembling yet different ideas (representations) can only be associated with each other if they pass through a synthesis exterior to them that is based on habit. Associations are fortuitous, resulting in questions of fluctuating belief, not fixed truth.
The Paradoxical Nature of Difference
Authors: Rölli Marc
Published: January 2018

In this short chapter Deleuze formulates the thesis that no philosophy begins without presuppositions. He questions the presumably natural tendency of thought to seek truth. He makes visible, beneath the natural empirical habits of perception, the transcendental experience of signs and simulacra. In this sense, the difference that subtly influences everything lies between the transcendental and the empirical and relativises truth claims.
Subjectivity and Immanence
Authors: Rölli Marc
Published: January 2018

Repetition expresses difference. What we live empirically as a succession of different presents (Chronos) from the point of view of active synthesis is also the virtual storage of the past in passive terms and is simultaneous with it as Aion or Augenblick, so that the past is subject to constant structural modification. Leibniz and Nietzsche supply Deleuze with micro-differences of intensity as the genealogical element of force or will to power within a Bergsonian-Riemannian manifold.
Introduction
Authors: Banko Lauren
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to present a new understanding of the Arabs' reactions to colonialism and Jewish immigration into Palestine by framing resistance to mandate policies and the early stages of the development of the political project of Palestinian nationalism through the articulated appeals, discussions, ideologies and demands for a political, as opposed to simply legal, identity. The book aims to trace how, and to what extent, citizenship became politically linked to nationality and civic identity as a reaction to the legal parameters of the British-created citizenship status in the post-1918 period. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Whose Rights to Citizenship? Expressions and Variations of Palestinian Mandate Citizenship, 1926–1935
Authors: Banko Lauren
Published: January 2018

By the latter half of the 1920s and the early 1930s, British and Arab misunderstandings of each other's intentions with respect to identity and citizenship status encouraged even stronger claims by the Arabs to the bundle of rights that they felt entitled to in accordance with their own particular understandings of nationality and citizenship. This chapter ties the discussions of citizenship that circulated in the territory from 1918 through the mid-1930s to the projects of belonging that the nationalists, populists, and the Arabic press attended to and actively worked towards. The active engagement of the press and social groups in political actions with the aim of changing mandate institutions fostered a new vocabulary of rights, political, and civic identity and citizenship belonging in the years just before the start of the Palestine Revolt in 1936. The chapter frames certain discourses on citizenship and national identity as more dominant and others as more subaltern during the latter half of the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter includes a case study of the Palestinian Arab Istiqlal (Independence) Party, whose policies aimed to redefine citizenship and access to rights under the mandate.
Conclusion – The End of the Experiment: Discourses on Citizenship at the Close of the Mandate
Authors: Banko Lauren
Published: January 2018

This chapter offers further insight on citizenship in Palestine after 1939 and until the end of the mandate in 1948, and the changing levels of the Arabs' political subjectivity. The differences between the multiple doctrines, vocabularies, expressions, and concepts of citizenship during the first two decades of the mandate administration are reflected in the legislation on citizenship passed by the British administration and in the reactions by the Arab citizens to that legislation. It explores the immediate reactions of Great Britain and the Palestine administration to the increased Jewish immigration to the territory and the changes made to the mandate's citizenship legislation in the wake of the Peel Commission's recommendations.
From Ibn Sīnā to Suhrawardī: The Contested Idea of Using Imagination after Death
Authors: van Lit L. W. C.
Published: January 2018

The chapter knows three sections. First, Ibn Sīnā’s thinking on the role of the imagination in the afterlife is discussed. He works from the paradigm that only philosophers who have fully actualized their intellectual capacities will enjoy what can be called Heaven, that is, will join the intelligible world. To allow for more people to have a somewhat enjoyable experience after death, he allows for the possibility that the imagination is used to imagine the delights and punishments as predicted in in the Koran. In the next section, it is proven that no other Muslim intellectual took a liking to this idea; it was universally repudiated. In the last section, the sole exception is discussed, which is Suhrawardī. In his Partaw-nāme and al-Lamaḥāt, he mentions the idea approvingly. In al-Talwīḥāt he discusses it in-depth, openly adopts it, and continues Ibn Sīnā’s train of thought in several regards.
Suhrawardī’s Lukewarm Commentators
Authors: van Lit L. W. C.
Published: January 2018

The corpus of Suhrawardī inspired dozens of commentaries, written all over the Islamic world, as early as half a century after him until as late as only half a century ago. Scholars have interpreted this to mean there is a ‘school of illumination’, made up of enthusiastic followers of Suhrawardī’s ideas. This chapter shows this is not the case, with regard to the notion of suspended images and the world of image. The first 150 years after Suhrawardī marks the first wave of reception. In this period, many thinkers mentioned Suhrawardī’s ideas without committing to it. The period closes with an anonymous epistle that offers many points of critique on Suhrawardī. The second period consists of thinkers associated with Shiraz around the turn of the 16th century. All of them bring forth criticism and in the end do not accept Suhrawardī’s thinking as their own position. The chapter closes with the way Mullā Ṣadrā, a thinker from the 17th century who was foundational for modern Shi’ism, uses Suhrawardī’s ideas in an entirely novel way.
The Reception of Shahrazūrī’s World of Image up until the Present Day
Authors: van Lit L. W. C.
Published: January 2018

The idea as Shahrazūrī interpreted it, denoted by the term ‘world of image’, received a reception much wider than the commentary tradition. Searching for this term, however, yields many false positives. Instead, it seems that all discussions that have to do with Suhrawardī and Shahrazūrī include a sentence which Shahrazūrī prominently used in his discussion. This chapter is divided by centuries, discussing the trajectory this discussion took. From the commentators, it went on to be discussed by a handful of philosophers and theologians. From there it enjoyed reception from Istanbul to Hyderabad, and notably entered into texts of Shiʿi traditional thinkers. Dozens of authors and their texts are discussed, with close attention given to how each author slightly alters the wording and thereby contributes to an evolution (as opposed to revolution) of the expression of the idea of a world of image. The chapter closes by discussing how Ibn ʿArabī and his commentators also use a notion called the world of image, but do so fully separately from Suhrawardī and his commentators.
Garcian Meditations
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

Tristan Garcia holds that what makes something some thing is its resistance to reductionism, the attempt to explain it in terms of its constituents and relations to other things. For Garcia, something just is the differentiation between those things that constitute it and the things that it helps constitute. Tristan Garcia and the Dialectics of Persistence situates Garcia’s systematic unfolding of this idea via both classical thinkers such as Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger, and Kant as well as modern and contemporary luminaries in analytic and continental philosophy such as A.J. Ayer, Alain Badiou, Jacque Derrida, Graham Harman, Paul Livingston, John McDowell, W.V.O. Quine, and Graham Priest. The metaphysics, differential ontology, and militant anti-reductionism from Book I of Form and Object are first charitably evaluated by the way Garcia dialectically moves through a series of seemingly incompatible oppositions concerning: substance and process, analysis and dialectic, simple and whole, and discovery and creation. After explicating Garcia’s general ontology, some of the regional ontologies of Book II, those involving intensity (events, time, life, goodness, truth, and beauty) and Garcia’s own tragic aporetic dialectics (gender, adolescence, and death), are presented. Tristan Garcia and the Dialectics of Persistence bridges analytic and continental philosophy and is moreover accessible to devotes of both traditions. The marriage of analytic and continental philosophy gives rise to original argumentation, including a new understanding of the process philosophical route to metaphysical holism, a new enclosure paradox concerning metaphysical explanation, and a new argument for the existence of an empty set.
Neither Analytic Nor Dialectic II: The World of Object-Oriented Ontology
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

In Chapter III contains an explication Garcia’s model of objects as differentiators between that which they comprehend and that which comprehends them. Garcia’s model is then contrasted with other canonical theories in the new continental metaphysics, showing how a defining feature is the manner in which metaphysicians can be interpreted as responding to an enclosure paradox concerning metaphysical explanation. This allows the foregrounding of Garcia’s dialetheist paradoxico-metaphysics, and also one to see clearly how Garcia’s achievement should be interpreted alongside related meta-metaphysical developments by Graham Harman and Graham Priest, as well as other recent speculative philosophers such as Alain Badiou, Markus Gabriel, and Paul Livingston. In addition, it allows one to begin to appreciate the fact that Garcia is contributing to contemporary analytic metaphyics.
No-Matter-What
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

Chapter IV contains a clarification one of Garcia’s major terms of art, ‘no-matter-what’. Interpreting Garcia correctly on this allows one to derive a new argument for the existence of the empty set.
Neither Matter Nor World: Thing
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

Chapter VI shows how Garcia’s triad of matter/thing/world leads to a novel rebuttal of Chapter V’s Putnam/Parmenides argument. For Garcia, the de-determined object, the entity-qua-thing, works as a solitary anchor, differentiating the object from those objects it comprehends and those which comprehend it. In this manner, Garcia’s Janus faced ontology is neither relational (since each entity is simultaneously a solitary thing) nor atomistic (since these things are merely differentiators between matter/no-matter-what and world).
Neither Discovered Nor Created I: Universe and Matter
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

By this point in the book Garcia’s basic understanding of entities in terms of their two modes (qua object and qua thing) is explained well enough to allow for a critical evaluation of the Kantian sounding claims he makes with respect to the universe, scales, and limits.
Neither Discovered Nor Created II: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

Chapter IX explores how appeal to intensity and his basic metaphysical machinery gives rise to Garcia’s account of Aquinas’ basic trinity of beauty, truth, and goodness. For Garcia, beauty is an intensified object, truth is a form of intensified comprehension, and goodness understood in terms of relation to beauty. Garcia’s views are developed via comparison with A.J. Ayer and W.V.O. Quine on semantic underdetermination and Graham Harman on beauty.
Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle
Authors: Wånggren Lena
Published: January 2018

The second chapter examines the link between the New Woman and the typewriter, a technology which proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the offices at the Victorian fin de siècle. The chapter provides a historical and literary account of both the machine and its operator, through reading fictional works as well as trade journals and other periodical press of the time. As the typewriter came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, the New Woman typist became a recurrent literary motif. Reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903), the chapter emphasises a kind of secretarial agency formulated in these works, in which the New Woman typist figure appropriates the typewriter as a means of self-formation.
Taxes and Spending
Authors: Lecca Patrizio , McGregor Peter G. , Swales Kim
Published: January 2018

Scotland will soon have one of the most powerful devolved governments in Europe, measured in terms of the percentage of public spending and tax revenues under its control. This chapter sets out the new fiscal powers of the Scottish Government, and explores the likely impact of using current, and potential future, fiscal levers to stimulate the economy. The likely success of such policies is shown to depend upon: the structure of the Scottish economy; the attitudes of the Scottish people to tax and spending decisions, and on the ability of public spending to enhance the supply side of the economy.
Inequality in Scotland: Dimensions and Policy Responses
Authors: Bell David , Eiser David , Lisenkova Katerina
Published: January 2018

Inequality has different dimensions. This chapter focusses on standard measures of income differences between households at a point in time, but also considers inter-generational and spatial inequalities as well as inequalities of wealth. It discusses explanations of recent changes in inequality and the tools that sub-national governments have to influence local inequality levels. Finally, it extends the discussion to discuss inequalities in “social” income – how equally or unequally public services are provided.
The Rhythm of History
Authors: Das Saitya Brata
Published: January 2018

This chapter presents a reading of the posthumously published fragment The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) to show that the deconstruction of sovereignty demands a re-thinking of the question of history. Confronting Hegel's pantheistic-immanent philosophy of history, it attempts to reveal an eschatological vision of history at work in Schelling's The Ages of the World which radically puts into question the secularising theodicy formulated by Hegel in his lectures on the philosophy of history. He thereby opens up the possibility, later elaborated by Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin, of a messianic-eschatological critique of historical Reason. Such an eschatological-messianic conception of history, by withdrawing from the triumphal march of universal world-historical politics, gives voice to those who are oppressed by the irresistible demand of progress.
Pocketable Provocateurs: James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence in the Travellers’ Library and the New Adelphi Library
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: January 2018

In early 1926, the debate between the home secretary William Joynson-Hicks and the MP Joseph Kenworthy led to a series of articles on indecent books and plays. The Bookseller, the main magazine of the book trade, explored several solutions to the problem of “sex novels,” including putting these books out of the view of young and female readers. It is in this context that two publishers launched new series of modern, copyrighted texts, including titles by controversial authors. James Joyce’s Dubliners and D. H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy were among the first books that Jonathan Cape selected for his Travellers’ Library. Martin Secker also reprinted many titles by Lawrence in his New Adelphi Library – starting with The Captain’s Doll. Drawing on extensive archival research at the University of Reading, this chapter argues that the success of Cape’s and Secker’s series proved that there was a large market for the most contentious modern writers. The three-and-six-penny libraries used the modernists’ subversive reputation as a selling point to market Joyce and Lawrence to a wide public.
Chastity and Blackness: Racial Value and Commodity Potential in the Fair Maid of the West, Part I and Othello
Authors: Gillen Katherine
Published: January 2018

This chapter addresses the role of economic chastity discourse in determining thevalue and subjectivity of racial others. Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West draws out the racial implications of city comedy’s invocation of chastity to articulate subject status. Although foreign men are judged unfavorably against Bess’s virtue, her mode of chaste agency—grounded as it is in her negotiation of market forces—is ostensibly available to Moors who regard her as a model for moral rehabilitation. Othello supplants Fair Maid’s assimilationist paradigm with an alternate discourse, expounded by Iago, that asserts chastity’s commodity value and then assesses racialised men in similar terms. In contrast to Fair Maid, Othello invokes chastity discourse to address the status of people who may, quite literally, be regarded as commodities. Reading Othello in conjunction with Fair Maid, therefore, illuminates how conceptions of chastity-as-subject and chastity-as-object converge in English assessments of racial value, and how a prevailing emphasis on commodity status proves central to the development of racist ideologies.
Coda: Approaching Capitalist Modernity
Authors: Gillen Katherine
Published: January 2018

The coda argues that, in its use of chastity to explore questions of value, subjectivity and commoditisation, the early modern theatre anticipates many foundational aspects of modernity, including the rise of economic subjectivity, liberal individualism, and white supremacy. While early modern plays often align with this largely oppressive epistemological regime, they also offer compelling alternatives. In closing, the coda looks to Marina in Shakespeare’s Pericles as a model that legitimates the personhood of those who must sell their bodies and labour to survive in a market economy.
Sartre and the Instigation of Immanence
Authors: Gilliam Christian
Published: January 2018

This chapter investigates how Sartre instigates the first few moves of ‘pure’ immanence. Through following the progression of Sartre’s thought, there is shown a deepening engagement with immanence, which ultimately sets the foundation upon which the later thinkers build. In his early period, Sartre reworks Husserlian intentionality to bring about a repudiation of the transcendental ego. Following from this, in Being and Nothingness and the Critique, he develops a dialectic in which consciousness, while relating to an ‘outside’, is construed as also thoroughly embedded in that outside through the subject-body of the flesh and relations of desire. From this comes a conceptualisation of the In-itself and For-itself as simulacra or topological variations of a more primordial intertwining or fabric of univocal Being. In this sense, we are immediately taken away from the subject of social contract theory, insofar as this presumes an asocial self, and the notion of identity as the sine qua non of politics, insofar as this presumes the terrain of an inexplicable transcendent Other. This brings with it a new take on politics as an ethical practice – one that will be taken up and extended by the other three thinkers – in which we do not look for a transcendent outside or fracture/break in immanence through which to ground resistance, but rather work through and experiment with our situation or condition.
From Immanence to Micropolitics
Authors: Gilliam Christian
Published: January 2018

Taken together, the four thinkers of ‘pure’ immanence offer a new take on ethicality, political analysis and political practice; moving the centre of gravity of analysis and action away from the political traid, toward a subjectivity-without-a-subject, one where we no longer look for a transcendent Outside or rupture in/of immanence to ground resistance in spite of our condition (i.e. dialectical excess), but rather work through our condition and its entangled lines of immanence and ‘three’ folds of disjuncture, through an affirmative ethics of self-experimentation. When read within a contemporary setting and so within the context of post-industrial capitalism, it offers a unique critique of it, bested in its refreshing radicality only by its accompanying a-systematic (as opposed to anti-system, i.e. dialectical materialism) political praxis. A praxis that, very much in the vein of Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’, urges us to work throughcapitalism, in order to truly overcome it strictures and all that relates to it. What some might view as a self-indulgent Renaissance bourgeois concern of playing with one’s sense of self outside of politics, is in fact actually the site where the political is most at stake. Politics begins here.
Stolen Daughters and Stolen Idols
Authors: Coodin Sara
Published: January 2018

Chapter 3 continues the discussion of the Genesis Jacob cycle’s intertextual relationship to The Merchant of Venice, focusing intently on Shylock’s daughter Jessica. This chapter examines how Jessica’s character is informed by two key biblical figures from that cycle of stories: Dinah and Rachel. The story of Dinah’s abduction by a non-Jewish prince contains several notable ambiguities on the question of her consent, which is sometimes figured as rape, other times as a love affair. By examining a series of different translations of Genesis 34, this chapter discusses how our understanding of Jessica’s motivations can be developed and explored through contemporary Renaissance renditions of Dinah’s story. Then, through a discussion of the biblical Rachel who, like Jessica, steals valuables belonging to her father, the chapter discusses how Renaissance writers used Rachel’s story to address women’s moral education in 16th and 17th century English conduct manuals. By examining ways in which Rachel was figured as an agent of liminality and transgression, this chapter offers new contexts for interpreting Jessica’s absconsion from her father’s Jewish household, her romance and marriage to Lorenzo, and her longed-for conversion to Christianity.
Conclusion
Authors: Coodin Sara
Published: January 2018

The question that prompts this book – Is Shylock Jewish? – asserts that Jewishness represents a vital and sufficient category of inquiry into Shakespeare’s ‘Jewish play’. In prototypically Jewish form, the book answers that question with another question: What does it mean to be Jewish? Although I have not attempted to argue for a singular model of Jewish culture or identity in the preceding pages, I have outlined a series of hermeneutic strategies that identify particular modes of reading as recognisably Judaic, evoking a distinctive orientation to practical moral questions. By considering the question of what constitutes a Jewish reading of a shared set of biblical stories, I have discussed how midrashic reading strategies constitute a tradition that has remained both conventional and responsive over time. The tradition’s responsiveness arises from instances such as the one that Shakespeare scripts into his play, in which Shylock endeavours to find new meaning in a familiar biblical parable....
Portable Modernisms
Authors: Ridge Emily
Published: January 2018

Luggage is an overlooked detail in the stock sketch of the expatriated modernist writer from the valise-fashioned desks of both James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov to the lost manuscript-laden cases of Ernest Hemingway and Walter Benjamin. While the trope of modernist exile has long been spotlighted, little attention has been given to the material meaning of this condition. What things and objects do modernism’s exiles and émigrés carry with them and how does the act of carriage enter into the modernist picture more broadly? What are the implications and historical resonances of a portable outlook, particularly from the angles of gender, wartime conflict and character conception? Above all, how far does such an outlook impact upon artistic vision? Portability represents the simultaneous transportation and repudiation of domesticity and the home, those key frames of reference in the nineteenth-century novel. This book examines the multifarious ways in which the emergence of a modern culture of portability prompts a radical, if often problematic, departure from Victorian architectural conceptions of fiction towards more movable understandings of form and character.
Introduction
Authors: Ridge Emily
Published: January 2018

This introduction gives a critical and historical overview of the links between modernism and portability, situating the book’s concerns in relation to established work on mobility, material culture and modernist exile. It explains the book’s emphasis on the emergence of portable analogues for literary form in the twentieth century and draws a distinction between a modernist metaphorics of portability and a Victorian metaphorics of domesticity. It situates literary representations of a new portable culture in the context of developments both in architectural design and the evolution of transportation technologies and travelling goods. It further provides a detailed description of each of the four book chapters.
‘Living modernly’s living quickly’: Towards Travelling Light
Authors: Ridge Emily
Published: January 2018

The first chapter charts the emerging influence and impact of a travel light ethos from the Edwardian period to modernism. It pays particular attention to the transitional status of the house in Edwardian writing at a time when it was visibly beginning to lose its lustre. The chapter will begin by tracing the genesis of that now-prolific phrase 'house of fiction' to Henry James's belated 1908 Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and will argue that, contrary to popular usage, the 'house of fiction' originally referred to an amorphous structure on the point of abandonment. It will then look at two conflicting responses to the parallel rise of a culture of portability: Max Beerbohm’s ‘Ichabod’ (1900) and E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). The chapter will finish by turning to modernist delineations of a portable culture which has become well-established by the late 1910s.
‘Have you anything to declare?’: Portable Selves on Trial
Authors: Ridge Emily
Published: January 2018

The final chapter of the book directs attention to questions of identity and selfhood. If modernism witnessed the rise of a culture of portability, what did this mean for understandings of literary character, and how did such understandings alter over the course of the interwar period? This chapter documents the development of late modernist suspicion of portable otherness as this is conveyed through interrogative appraisals of portable property. Such a development coincides with the sudden pervasiveness of the literary figure of the customs official from the late 1920s. This is a figure shown to share the psychoanalyst’s eye for the repressed contraband: ‘Have you anything to declare?’ As the chapter shows, this question of self-declaration becomes a critical one in conceptions and re-conceptions of character from modernism to late modernism. The chapter culminates with a reading of Henry Green’s autobiographical Pack My Bag (1940) in conjunction with his fictional Party Going (1939), both published around the outbreak of the Second World War.
Filming Hegemony: Hollywood and the Manichean Script of Geopolitics
Authors: Löfflmann Georg
Published: January 2018

The chapter focuses on popular culture as key site for the production of constructs of geopolitical identity and practices of national security as common sense knowledge and conventional wisdom, examining popular Hollywood movies of the ‘national security cinema’ and the involvement of the Pentagon in the filmmaking process. Representations of geopolitical identity and national security are analyzed in some of the commercially most successful films in the United States released between 2009 and 2015. The chapter’s analysis testifies to the enduring popularity of key ideational themes and mythologies, such as American exceptionalism, military heroism, and external threats endangering the existence of the United States, its interests and values under the Obama presidency. The serial reproduction of these national security narratives, realized in multi-million dollar film productions, illustrates the cross-discursive leverage of American hegemony over alternative formulations of grand strategy under the Obama presidency and the popularity of a particular national security imagery of American geopolitical identity.
The American Grand Strategy Debate in International Relations
Authors: Löfflmann Georg
Published: January 2018

This chapter engages in a comprehensive analysis of the grand strategy debate contained in the pages of Foreign Affairs, which represents a leading elite publication that bridges scholarly debate and the policy oriented writing of experts and political practitioners. The chapter also examines how the main theoretical perspectives of mainstream IR have informed competing grand strategy visions, further detailing the concept of hybrid discourses of American grand strategy: hegemonic engagement and hegemonic restraint. These expert visions reproduced the dominant representation of American exceptionalism and military supremacy, while advocating political practices that partially reformulated and negated this hegemonic role, such as the liberal-institutionalist concept of ‘deep engagement’, or neorealist ideas of ‘offshore balancing’.