bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Possibility of Political Thought and the Experience of Undecidability
Authors: Gormley Steven
Published: May 2022

This chapter responds to two arguments concerning the possibility of a deconstructive politics. The first, offered by critical theorists such as Dews, Fraser and McCarthy, I call the withdrawal argument. The key claim is that deconstruction, as a matter of principle, rejects the empirical realm and withdraws into a politically disabling transcendental reflection. The second, offered by poststructuralist thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau, I call the mere openness argument. While Laclau insists on the political usefulness of deconstruction, he argues that, as a matter of principle, no ethico-political injunction guides the quasi-transcendental reflections of deconstruction. This chapter shows why both arguments are mistaken. The final section sets out a novel reading of Derrida’s concept of ‘experience’ and ‘ordeal’ to show that the ‘experience of undecidability’ – central to Derridean deconstruction - is normatively structured.
Introduction: Agamben, Nothingness and Existentialism
Authors: Norris Marcos Antonio
Published: May 2022

An introduction to the volume that summarizes the overall stakes of the volume and introduces each chapter.
Kierkegaard and the Figure of Form-of-Life
Authors: Frost Tom
Published: May 2022

Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialist writings inform Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy, and specifically his figure of form-of-life. Agamben’s work is driven by a desire to explore a politics exemplified by the figure of form-of-life, a figure of the coming politics which seeks to deactivate those modes of power that create and sustain bare life. Form-of-life is an existentialist figure, and Kierkegaard’s own writings can shed light on this elusive concept. Through living a life of contemplative use, form-of-life deactivates the appropriative biopolitics that constantly divides and separates life. It is a new interpretation of Kierkegaard’s claim that the human being is a synthesis through which its existence is defined. In an existentialist reading of form-of-life, I illustrate how form-of-life is subject to a continual process of repetition, an existential process that is always already happening.
Whither the Divine? Nietzsche, Heidegger and the End of Metaphysics in Agamben’s Thought
Authors: Dickinson Colby
Published: May 2022

The critique offered by both Nietzsche and Heidegger concerning the death of God and the end of metaphysics is one that stresses the role of the will in overcoming the sheer contingency of existence. Agamben’s discussion of the will, however, opens up toward critiques of a particular nominalist strand of thought, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the will to power and various forms of nihilism in the modern period alike. Agamben develops a modal ontology by pushing beyond the duality of God/no God in order to posit a division of the death of God itself. By doing so, he responds to existentialism through an embracing of the death of God through the act of profanation in order to locate the zero point of sacrality beyond dualistic thought.
Endless Ontology: Agamben and Sartre on Death
Authors: Welch Andrew
Published: May 2022

Agamben’s engagements with Heidegger attempt to revise the latter’s notion of death as the formative condition of life. For Heidegger, Dasein’s distinctive mode of life is shaped by awareness of death and orientation towards death, but this teleological structure threatens to limit potentiality - a key concept for Agamben, concerned especially with the self-generating and self-contained capacity of thought. Accordingly, Agamben instead positions death as Dasein’s beginning rather than its end. This revision of Heidegger finds a precursor in the work of Sartre, who sought to develop an idea of radically spontaneous consciousness, unconstrained by any narrative logic  or sense of self. Though engaged in a different context and reliant on a different vocabulary, Sartre’s proposals concerning consciousness can help elaborate Agamben’s as conceptual tools for the maintenance of potentiality.
Dis/Belief in Agamben and de Silentio
Authors: Norris Marcos Antonio
Published: May 2022

According to Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaad’s Fear and Trembling, Abraham forms a direct relationship with the absolute “by means” of the universal, and so suspends the universal. That both tasks are accomplished by means of the universal is typically unaccounted for. The standard reading is that Abraham chooses a direct relationship with the absolute over against the universal, not by means of the universal, and, likewise, it is through a teleological suspension of the universal that Abraham circumvents rather than travels through the universal in order to access the absolute, which cannot be mediated, de Silentio asserts, by means of the universal. Agamben’s reading of the Abrahamic faith in The Time That Remains explains how Abraham forms a relationship with God by means of the universal, and suspends the universal as the means through which Abraham forms a relationship with the absolute. Agamben’s insights explain what Kierkegaardian scholarship cannot, opening a path into Fear and Trembling that transforms how we understand de Silentio’s treatment of the Abrahamic faith.
The Existential Situation and Christian Experience: Messianism and Eschatological Salvation
Authors: Minch Daniel
Published: May 2022

Giorgio Agamben has drawn heavily on the letters of St. Paul and other Christian sources in order to develop his own unique interpretation of ‘messianism’ and messianic time. His reflections and use of Christian sources, however, often overlook important contextual elements and the theological developments since the Second Vatican Council. This chapter places Agamben’s understanding of messianism and messianic time in a constructive dialogue with the existentially oriented theologies of Johann Baptist Metz, Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx. Their perspectives on temporality, apocalyptic, and the ‘existential situation’ form a hermeneutical framework that has commonalities with Agamben’s work but also maintains a fundamental orientation towards eschatological salvation. The chapter presents a critique Agamben’s ‘messianism’ from a hermeneutical-eschatological perspective, while also demonstrating where the integration of Agamben’s insights regarding messianic time could prove to be constructive for contemporary theology.
INTRODUCTION: ON THE SCALE, QUANTITY AND MEASURE OF IMAGES
Authors: Parikka Jussi , Dvorak Tomas
Published: May 2022

The introduction chapter summarises the current state of research, introduces the contents of the book and its aims and scope. The introduction links the books’ chapters with existing photographic and media studies research and provides the core synthetisising approach for the texts. Here the key focus is in outlining how to theorize questions of quantity, scale, and measure in ways that acknowledges earlier theoretical body of work in photographic and visual theory but also demonstrates how these terms are key to understanding the so-called mass image.
3 BEYOND HUMAN MEASURE: ECCENTRIC METRICS IN VISUAL CULTURE
Authors: Dvorak Tomas
Published: May 2022

The chapter outlines a genealogy of the history of photography seen through issues of scale and measure; it asks how this history is entangled with questions of perception and aesthetics such as scales of the sublime. Moving in and out of specific genres (e.g. scientific photography), the chapter relates the implications of the gigantic, the immeasurable and the disproportionate to practices such as astronomy but also as ways to re-narrate the media archaeology of photography. The chapter argues that establishing measures across seemingly incommensurable scales (the astronomically distant, the gigantically large, or the subatomic small) is logistically possible thanks to established standards where also the role of the visual persists as a connective glue across such scales of impossible, or indeed eccentric comparisons.
7 Photography's Mise en Abyme: Metapictures of Scale in Repurposed Slide Libraries
Authors: Annebella Pollen
Published: May 2022

Long abundant, photography’s ubiquity and multiplicity has undoubtedly intensified in recent years. Photographs proliferate in the digital domain at an unprecedented scale, offering the partial realisation of many longstanding desires from a global encyclopaedic mapping of the visual world to a museum without walls. Photographic multitudes, however, also embody multifarious fears: of visual noise and mindless repetition, of metaphorical promiscuity and overpopulation. To engage with the apparently unmanageable excess of images is, it seems, to gaze into the abyss. This chapter considers the photographic abyss through an examination of the visual and literary device of mise en abyme and through WJT Mitchell’s concept of the metapicture. Through an exploration of contemporary artists who explore photographic enormity as their subject matter, particularly in relation to works that utilise obsolete photographic materials – in the form of 35mm slides from deaccessioned art history slide libraries – this chapter examines how such works and such materials employ and embody metapictorial strategies. As the works constitute images of images of images, this chapter argues that they offer a productive metapictorial site for surveying desires and anxieties about image abundance and excess.
The Failed Photographs of Photography: On the Analogue and Slow Photography Movement
Authors: Michal Simunek
Published: May 2022

This chapter addresses the contemporary analogue and slow photography movement and its often-claimed potential to oppose the triviality of the mass image and mainstream digital photographic culture. The argumentation is theoretically grounded in debates on counter-practices of photography, particularly conceptions of meta-pictoriality, aesthetic of imperfection, and failed images, which are all considered promising ways to answer Flusser’s call for play against the programme of the apparatus. Empirically based on auto-nethnographic participant observation, the chapter takes the so-called Lomography community and its photography practices as a case study. It is demonstrated that the frequent Lomography tactic against the digital image is based on producing photographs of photography, that is, meta-photographs. However, the detailed analysis of selected practices of Lomography, specifically the LomoWall exhibition strategy and Lomography’s imperfections, reveals that the potential of resistance against the networked digital image apparatus failed to be realised. Lomography suffers the same malaises of digital visual culture, which it intends to resist.
10 On Seeing Where There's Nothing to See: Practices of Light beyond Photography
Authors: Jussi Parikka
Published: May 2022

This chapter addresses urban environments of digital imaging with a special focus on lidar pulse based techniques and 3-D modelling in the work of artists and designers such as Scanlab projects and Liam Young. The digital image is seen in conjunction with emerging practices of environmental mapping, where the environment is understood through the complexity and dynamics of the urban city. Hence, the multiple contexts of the complexity of the “mass image” (to refer to Sean Cubitt’s opening chapter in this book) become ways to tap into current discussions about large-scale autonomous AI systems and the speculative design discourse. But the chapter is also interested in how the pulsating image of lidar is connected to longer histories of the doppler effect discovered in the 19th century and its subsequent media technological applications such as radar. Hence the image in question is not merely a still or a moving image, but a pulse-image that sends and captures millions of rays of light in a second in its array of operations. Hence, questions of scale relate not only to particular image but to the constitutive practices and manipulation of light which can then also include practices such as laser scanning.
How It Is and the Syntax of Penury
Authors: de Villiers Rick
Published: May 2022

Chapter 6 asks how a ‘syntax of penury’ is operational in How It Is. Broadly, this question pertains to Beckett’s engagement with his own writing and delineates a scepticism in How It Is about old foundations and new turnings. The chapter considers three aspects of the novel: its impoverished style, its self-critical appropriation of earlier works in the Beckett canon, and what we are to make of the text’s endless cruelties. The chapter argues that the novel’s textual penury facilitates humility in its resistance to a totalising poetics of impotence.
Scotland and the Age of Deindustrialisation
Authors: Phillips Jim , Wright Valerie , Tomlinson Jim
Published: May 2022

Deindustrialisation in Scotland was prolonged, phased and policy-shaped. Three distinct periods are identified, mapping from the moral-economy transition points examined in chapter 2. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s policy-makers enabled the shrinkage of traditional staples and promoted new manufacturing enterprises through regional policy and inward investment. From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s this restructuring slowed. Working-class security was protected with reinvestment in coal, steel and shipbuilding. From the election of Thatcher’s first government in 1979 to the mid-1990s there were heavy employment losses across all industrial sectors. The phased process is illustrated through analysis of the changing coalfield economies of Lanarkshire, West Lothian and Fife, with emphasis on the employment experiences of women.
Linwood, Renfrewshire: Car Manufacturing and Scotland’s Political Divergence from England
Authors: Phillips Jim , Wright Valerie , Tomlinson Jim
Published: May 2022

The Linwood car plant, which opened in 1963, encapsulated the modernisation of Scotland’s industrial base. The distinct labour and production practices of the motor industry, coupled with US ownership under the Chrysler Corporation from 1967 to 1978, clashed with the Clydeside workers’ moral code, transmitted to Linwood through migration. Intermittent redundancies frustrated moral economy expectations of employment stability and financial security. Craft culture was nevertheless asserted, and workers constructed a strong trade-union organisation. In new communities around Linwood there was only limited evidence of the home-centred social life associated with the ‘affluent’ workers of assembly-goods manufacturing in southern England. Linwood’s closure in 1981, accelerated by the Conservative government’s macro-economic management, contributed to widening political divergence between Scotland and England.
Blueprint for Murder
Authors: Martin-Jones David
Published: May 2022

This chapter begins by exploring Columbo‘s genesis. Firstly, by rehearsing the well-known story of the show’s development, its initial iterations on small screen and stage, and production by Universal for NBC. Secondly, an alternative version is offered, by situating the show’s commissioning in the context of the US television industry’s chief concerns of the 1960s and 1970s: feature length made-for-television films; the level of investment appropriate for them; the eschewal of violent content; and target audience demographics (ratings, market shares, advertisements). This new perspective is informed by historical sources, and makes it possible to both acknowledge the importance of Columbo’s origins in the work of Richard Levinson and William Link, and yet to realise it as a product of the industrial conditions within which its commissioning was possible.
The book’s argument is then situated in relation to existing scholarly fields in which the issue of attention is of growing interest, Television Studies especially. The chapter concludes by exploring how Columbo’s “inconsistent” narrative world throws up challenges to some of the seminal theories which define cult television. These challenges to our understanding of how cult television programmes usually “work”, reveal much about the memory game which Columbo encourages us to play.
Pay Strict Attention
Authors: Martin-Jones David
Published: May 2022

This chapter firstly outlines two complementary dimensions through which Columbo negotiates the shaping of attention: textual, and, socio-historical. Initially, how television attracts attention is outlined, enabling an exploration of how the unique narrative structure of Columbo (which functions like a game) works to attract and shape viewer attention. Theories of attention, especially those which focus on it being historically determined, are introduced - including the idea of the attention economy, indicating the continued relevance of how attention is increasingly monetized in the late Twentieth/early Twenty-first Century.
Secondly, a brief analysis of the episodes ‘Identity Crisis’ and ‘Columbo Cries Wolf’ illuminate Columbo‘s engagement with how attention is channelled societally during these decades, whilst neoliberalism emerged to prominence from the ashes of the Cold War. What Columbo does – paying attention in order to solve a crime – does not change. How he performs, learns, polices and locates himself, are equally evident across both episodes. The ingredients for being a good attentive labourer were thus already evident in the early 1970s as the world turned towards neoliberalism. What changes is the backdrop, revealing the historical transformation in how (as in, to what ends) attention was channelled during the end of the Twentieth Century.
Learning: Columbo vs Modernity
Authors: Martin-Jones David
Published: May 2022

The key question addressed in this chapter is, why are there so many machines in Columbo? Technology is often integral to the crime itself, and knowledge of how it works is vital to Columbo’s ability to solve the murder. Columbo’s proactive engagement with the rapid technological advances of modernity – his learning about new machinery – indicates the perpetual labour needed to avoid obsolescence in a hi-tech world. Columbo, constantly “upgrading” his technological knowledge to pay attention productively is an ‘entrepreneur of the self’ (Lazzarato 2014: 52), a mode of work-engaged subjectivity which neoliberal ideology advocates. Alongside the complex memory game which Columbo provides to hone viewer attention, this supplementary concern is one of realising how best an individual can learn such that they maximise attentive labour.
Columbo’s engagement with modernity reassures that if lower middle-class “everyman” Columbo can master new machinery, anyone can. Screen media are key here. Those busily engaged in watching – paying attention, especially to film and television – are typically innocent figures. Those who misuse technology to give the impression of such “innocent” adherence to attentive labour (in fact, using technology to cover-up that they are engaged in criminality), attempt to “get away with murder”.
Locating: Bare Life in LA
Authors: Martin-Jones David
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers where (in the world) is Columbo‘s L.A.? The answer is that Columbo subtly engages with the reshaping of Los Angeles in the late Twentieth Century. That is, the city’s transformation from Western outpost of the nation (integral to the US defence industry) to global gateway city (connecting trade with the Pacific Rim). This urban transformation is evoked across Columbo‘s lifespan as part of a broader exploration of the city’s attention industries. In this way, Columbo indicates that a parallel transformation is taking place in the entertainment industry – the movies giving way to the power of television – as is occurring in L.A.’s urban reorientation from nation to globe.
Although Columbo mingles with the elite, it is those at the lower end of the wealth divide with whom Columbo is aligned. Columbo is an unlikely defender of those reduced to the most meagre existence under neoliberalism. Columbo defends those who, for Giorgio Agamben, are brought down to the position of ‘bare life’ by globalization ([1995] 1998). Thus, whilst playing Columbo‘s complex memory game the attentive labourer is also involved in the supplementary process of locating themselves within the globally polarised society of late capitalism which L.A. starkly manifests.
Queer Tyranny and Intertextuality in Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes : François Ozon Pays Homage to Master Fassbinder
Authors: Bertram Amy
Published: May 2022

This chapter tackles the connection and influence of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder on Ozon’s 2000 feature film. Bringing forth the stylistic components of Ozon’s queer cinema, it engages in more detail than previous studies with some Fassbinder source material, thus offering a new understanding of Gouttes d’eau/Water Drops as a complex and evocative piece. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s theory of cinematic scopophilia, this study underlines the way Ozon’s style augments the queerness of the narrative and the visual pleasure. Indeed, the use of high-colour saturation of the production design and costumes, in addition to the campy overtones, give way to queer cinematic pleasures.
Queering the Trenches: Homoerotic Overtones in Frantz
Authors: Duffy Helena
Published: May 2022

This chapter provides an extensive analysis of the 2016 drama and one of Ozon’s most recent and successful films. An unusual film within his oeuvre, given its setting outside of France, for the most part, and the use of black-and-white, Frantz, this chapter argues, interrogates hegemonic masculinity – with the help of Kaja Silverman’s conceptualisation of historical trauma and overall work on marginal masculinities – and the notion that it should be crystallised by war. In doing so, the director unsettles heteronormative conventions. Further, this analysis pays particular attention to Édouard Manet’s Le Suicidé to identify connections between homosexuality and the death drive (established by the painting).
Female Creativity, Selfishness and Monstrosity in François Ozon’s Angel
Authors: Handyside Fiona
Published: May 2022

Drawing on Lisa Downing’s Selfish Women (2019), this chapter posits the lead character, Angel, and her commitment to fantasy life as a perfect case study of female selfishness. While the 2007 film may not be as radical and anti-patriarchal as Ozon’s earlier films, it does make room for a deliberately unsympathetic female figure who prioritises her instincts and interests over the kind of self-sacrifice that women have been trained to perform (as Downing explains). Along the way, this chapter explores Ozon’s use of pastiche and highlights the self-referential dimension of the film, thus reflecting on Ozon’s approach to filmmaking.
From Faits Divers to Grandes Affaires : Giving Voice to Sexual Abuse Survivors in Grâce à Dieu
Authors: Reis Levilson C.
Published: May 2022

This chapter offers one of the first studies of Ozon’s 2018 production and contends that Grâce à Dieu/By the Grace of God illustrates Ozon’s evolution both in terms of aesthetics and representational politics, rather than a sudden change of direction. Cinema, as a tool, asserts its ability to transform the secretive and the unspeakable. By making these stories of abuse seen and known, Reis argues, Ozon has created a social justice film.
Outside History? Stevie Smith, Women Poets and the National Voice
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

This essay from 1994 takes issue with the largely masculine account of poetry to date and its view of who counts within national and literary history. It re-reads Stevie Smith’s so-called eccentricity as a distinctive voice very much within English society and history; it then broadens into a discussion of women and poetry across the centuries, the strategies and forms they have chosen, the bias of male criticism and recent feminist approaches. It argues for more generous and inclusive re-readings of the literary and national past.
The Figure of the Servant
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

A review of an exhibition of servant portraits, this is a wide-ranging discussion – one of the first – of the absolute centrality of domestic service in British society. It explores the ways in which servants are represented literature and art, from the domestic novel of the 18th and 19th century to the present day, and the history of the relationship between mistress and maid. It suggests that service is still crucial in the making of class difference and fostering racial assumptions, especially today when those doing society’s dirty work are often low-paid migrants.
Fascism, Fear and Feminism: Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas
Authors: Light Alison
Published: May 2022

This is a review essay exploring Woolf’s pacifist text, its place in her work, and the complex components of her denunciation of fascism. It looks Woolf’s ambivalent relation to aggression and anger and her disavowal too of feminism – ‘an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete’. It also takes issue with the more celebratory American edition of the text, insisting on its British context and on the class-bound nature of Woolf’s polemic. It argues that without accepting Woolf’s desire to be ‘immune’, to be outside professions, and to ‘have no authority’, her commitment to writing makes no sense, disabling though those positions can be.
Monopolizing the Future: Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Schmitt’s Exception
Authors: Sorensen Eli Park
Published: May 2022

What happens politically if we can predict the future? Drawing on Schmitt’s notions of the political and the state of exception, I argue that Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) envisions the stage at which it has become possible to predict a violent future. The film implies that if the state could eliminate that future via advanced technology, a new situation would emerge in which there would no longer be any need for a sovereign. To Schmitt, state sovereignty must preserve the right to identify a future event that poses an existential threat. Once the possibility of Schmitt’s radically unpredictable future has been eliminated, the need for the political, and hence the sovereign, disappears. I argue that in Spielberg’s film, the sovereign returns when the technological precog system is most vulnerable—that is, the moment the system cannot protect itself. The film thus ends with the collapse of technology and a return to the present—in other words, a return to the political. Overall, the film suggests that in the encounter with the disruptive future event, the political ultimately will reassert itself in the form of a state of exception to preserve the present.
The Anomalous World: Elysium and the Invention of the Med-Bay Machine
Authors: Sorensen Eli Park
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores Schmitt’s notion of the exceptional and its relation to a normative situation. Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013) presents a scenario that constitutes the future because the emergence of a radical new technological invention has disturbed the political coordinates of the present; with the invention of the so-called Med-Bay machine, it is now possible to cure everything. In such a society, the political collapses, but it restores itself by devising a pre-modern political construction: the city gate in the form of Elysium’s architecture as a floating space paradise, physically distanced from Earth. This distance prevents access to the Med-Bay machines, transforming Earth (where no one has access to the Med-Bays) into a gigantic concentration camp, an anomaly that turns into the norm. Elysium has become the exception, even if its politicians stubbornly (perhaps hypocritically) adhere to a liberal-humanistic norm that in peaceful times allows them to keep believing that they still represent civilization. That this civilized world can only exist by elevating itself to an exception—which thereby turns Earth’s miserable and lost population into the norm—constitutes a political conundrum that the film never fully manages to resolve.
Escaping the Production of Bare Life: Blade Runner 2049 and the Miracle of Birth
Authors: Sorensen Eli Park
Published: May 2022

If Scott’s Blade Runner centered on the right of the traditional sovereign to kill when it is no longer possible to clearly distinguish human from non-human, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) is primarily about the right to create life. The central incident in the sequel is in a sense a natural development from the events that unfolded in the first film; namely, the two lovers (Deckard and Rachael) having a child together. It is an event that even more radically than in the first film questions the distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the human and the replicant. In the 1982 film, the replicant represents the absolute culmination of the biopolitical production of bare life, and thereby the ultimate expression of sovereign power. I argue that Blade Runner 2049 attempts to articulate something that escapes this sphere of sovereign power: the miracle of birth. Birth is the most radical questioning of sovereign power precisely because it once again brings together life and its form in a way that prevents the production of bare life. Overall, the film envisions a future scenario in which the individual life may articulate itself beyond or even in defiance of sovereign power.
The Resurgence of the Baghdad Caliphate
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Studies the military, palatial, and religious architecture of the later Baghdad Caliphate, with special emphasis on the Abbasid Palace and the Madrasa al-Mustansiriyya. Also discusses briefly the calligraphy and book painting produced in this period.
The Muqarnas Dome: Its Origin and Meaning
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

One of the earliest historical studies of muqarnas vaulting, this article locates the development of the muqarnas dome in Baghdad and its spread in the 12th century to Syria and North Africa. It offers an interpretation of this fragmented dome in relation to contemporaneous Occasionalist theology.
Andalusian Roots and ʿ Abbasid Homage in the Qubbat al-Barudiyyin in Marrakech
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Building up on earlier investigations of muqarnas vaulting in the central and eastern and Islamic world, this article examines the singular early twelfth century Qubbat al-Barudiyyin in Marrakech, concluding that its blended forms and unusual inscriptions reflect its rootedness in Cordoba and its assimilation of Abbasid symbolic forms.
The Medieval Islamic Garden: Typology and Hydraulics
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Discusses garden types, hydraulic machines, and decorative fountains that found their way from Samarra and Baghdad to North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Examines the diminution of gardens and the increasing elaboration of pools and fountains, both celebrated in contemporary poetry.
Control and Abandon: Images of Water in Arabic Gardens and Garden Poetry
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Studies the elaboration of water in the gardens of Samarra and Spain and its celebration by both Abbasid and Ibero-Islamic poets. Highlights the fruitful interaction between garden poetry and the small but elaborate gardens and fountains that developed in the 14th century, in particular the Alhambra.
Invented Pieties: The Rediscovery and Rebuilding of the Shrine of Sayyida Ruqayya in Damascus, 1975–2006
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Surveys the prodigious rise of Shi’i shrines in Syria during the past three decades due largely to Iranian patronage. Focuses primarily on the complete rebuilding and expansion of the shrine of Sayyida Ruqayya in Damascus at the end of the 20th century and examines the early opposition to this shrine and its ultimate success and popularity as a pilgrimage site.
The Functional Aspects of Medieval Islamic Hospitals
Authors: Tabbaa Yasser
Published: May 2022

Examines the rise and of the Islamic hospital (bimaristan or dar al-Shifa’) in Abbasid Baghdad; its transmission to Syria, Palestine, Anatolia, and Egypt in the 12th and 13th centuries; and the various factors contributing to its prodigious spread and those that ultimately hindered its progress and continuity.
1 Figure, Discourse: To the Abstract Concretely
Authors: Radman Andrej
Published: May 2022

The chapter makes a case for the concept of multiplicity that premises a radically new relationship between the one and the many with no primacy of either. What we have is one world with two modes of reality: the actual and the virtual, in constant chiasmic eventful interaction. While actuality is about what happens, of the order of percept, virtuality is about what is going on in what happens, of the order of affect.
5 Architecture of Immanence
Authors: Radman Andrej
Published: May 2022

The chapter lays out the expectations from the machinic or eco-logical architecture, not as a reactive and thus reactionary, but a positive determination beyond ex-futurism and neo-archaism. It might just hold the secret of how to go beyond the totality derived from the parts and the totality from which the parts emanate, to produce an architecture of immanence.
7 Space Always Comes After: It Is Good When It Comes After; It Is Good Only When It Comes After
Authors: Radman Andrej
Published: May 2022

The chapter argues that the royal road to the understanding of space is through the non-intentional, non-reflexive and non-conscious. It is through population thinking that we will undergo a biopolitical apprenticeship in spatialisation.
Between Art and Opinion
Authors: Cross D. J. S.
Published: May 2022

Having established the continuity of Deleuze’s ambivalence from Difference and Repetition to What Is Philosophy? in chapter 2, in chapter 3 I delve into the ambivalence of the latter. According to What Is Philosophy?, all disciplines combat opinion. Because art and opinion both originate in sensibility, art has a both privileged and precarious position in the struggle against opinion: privileged because it alone fights opinion at the source; precarious because the provenance it shares with opinion constantly exposes it to the risk of collapsing into opinion. The result, once again, is a systemic ambivalence. Three propositions in What Is Philosophy? allow me to develop this ambivalence and relate it to multiple works and contexts: (i) art constitutes ‘Life’ when it creates affects; (ii) opinion is essentially ‘majoritarian’; (iii) art needs ‘style’ to create the affects. A rigorous development of each proposition reveals that the common provenance of art and opinion in sensibility renders their distinction porous. Sensibility thus constitutes the possible impossibility of not only art but also, in the same stroke, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘thinking’ in general.
The word of the year
Authors: Prozorov Sergei
Published: May 2022

The Introduction discusses the way the question of post-truth has been addressed in the extant literature, addresses the specificity of the biopolitical perspective developed in this book, and briefly outlines the structure of the argument.
The truth won’t tell itself
Authors: Prozorov Sergei
Published: May 2022

Chapter 4 addresses acts of truth-telling as a form of affirmative biopolitics, a politics of bringing truth into life or living life in truth. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of Cynic parrhesia in his final lecture course and the experience of East European dissident movements that he actively supported in the early 1980s, the chapter reconstructs truth-telling as a practice of political subjectivation and constructs a model of truth-telling that would be adequate for the post-truth era, which differs from both the Antiquity and socialist authoritarianism in no longer even pretending to practice what it preaches, since it no longer preaches anything at all. In this new condition, truth-telling cannot be content with living in accordance with the truth, but must forcefully restore truth to existence, giving it surplus illocutionary force in one’s speech acts that, as it were, speak both the truth and one’s very act of speaking it. We shall analyze the statements of environmental activist Greta Thunberg as precisely such parrhesiastic acts that add to the semantic content of established scientific truths the force of their affirmation as truths rather than opinions. The chapter concludes by demonstrating the centrality of such affirmation to a genuinely democratic biopolitics, in which the principles of freedom, equality and community are not merely retained as transcendental conditions but enter our very experience of, and experiment in, living.
Sound Poetry in France: A Neo-Avant-Garde?
Authors: Théval Gaëlle
Published: May 2022

Sound poetry, as it was invented in the 1950s under the impetus of Bernard Heidsieck and Henri Chopin, maintains a relationship with the historical avant-garde that Heidsieck describes as a rediscovery. Publishing the phonetic poems of Raoul Hausmann and Albert-Birot, working on writing the long history of sound and phonetic poetry from its avant-garde roots in the review OU, and then publishing the book Poésie sonore internationale (1968), Henri Chopin made himself the historian of these forms and a major player in this rediscovery. This work of historicizing went hand in hand with a refusal of the group logic associated with the historical avant-garde and with an acceptance of its experimental techniques. The article links sound poetry to this dynamics and in so doing makes it possible to study sound poetry as a neo-avant-garde whose specificities are analysed through the study of historical, theoretical and manifesto texts.
Surrealism Old and New in Three Generations of Prose Poets: The Case of the Low Countries
Authors: Vandevoorde Hans
Published: May 2022

This chapter argues that there is no reason not to view the many neo-surrealistic trends in post-war literature as the legitimate heirs of the avant-garde. It is thus fitting to apply the label of neo-avant-garde to them. Using the prose poem as a case study, the text demonstrates firstly how surrealism has been continually reinvented to this day through a series of movements deriving from it. Secondly, it shows how prose poems from those derivative movements are often more disruptive in content and form than the many restorative literary impulses of their time. In Dutch literature, it was the experimental generation of the fifties that bridged the gap with surrealism and dada. It is no surprise, then, that many writers of prose poems emerged at that time. After that, it was not until the nineties that we encounter a new wave of prose poems, produced by a second, postmodern, generation of prose poets. That wave led to such a proliferation that the prose poem became mainstream in the next generation, who are still publishing today. Some authors belonging to this latest generation, however, are writing audacious prose poems in the wake of their great predecessors.
Uneven Developments: Bande Dessinée , Rear-Guard and Neo-Avant-Gardes
Authors: Crucifix Benoît
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the irruption of avant-gardes in the context of twenty-first-century bande dessinée in French-language Europe. In particular, it considers their asynchronous and uneven development in comics: the emergence of avant-garde claims in the late twentieth century makes of bande dessinée an interesting and yet overlooked medium in the context of the neo-avant-gardes, complicating all too simple observations of their appropriation by the cultural industries. The chapter surveys different discourses and works, and focuses more in depth on La Méthode Bernadette as an example of montage that emphasizes tensions between rear-guard and neo-avant-garde dynamics.
Sycorax’ Revenge: Kamau Brathwaite and a Caribbean Version of the Neo-Avant-Garde
Authors: Pagnoulle Christine
Published: May 2022

Brathwaite would have rejected any connection with any literary school or trend. However, several features in his writing clearly partake of the general characteristics of the neo-avant-garde, with an obviously political commitment in all of his word experiments. He embraced the fate of the ignored and the dispossessed and conveyed this position through his unique use of language and typography, which he called his Sycorax video style and which includes challenging plays on words and sounds, and through the subjects he chose to write about – slave trade and its consequences, Haitian refugees, Afro-Caribbean spirituality.
‘Belonging nowhere?’: Labelling British Experimental Women’s Fiction of the Long Sixties
Authors: Hove Hannah Van
Published: May 2022

This chapter focuses on the ways in which a range of relatively neglected British women writers (including Ann Quin, Anna Kavan, Eva Figes, Christine Brooke-Rose and Brigid Brophy) have been labelled, both during and after the long sixties. By giving an overview of the various categorisations attributed to women’s experimental fiction in Britain and the ways in which they have been employed, it interrogates the reasons for the critical neglect of British experimental women’s writing whilst at the same time teasing out to what extent the categorisation ‘neo-avant-garde’ might be a useful term in exploring the influences and persisting concerns of their innovative novels.
Constraint and Rule: Oulipo and the Neos
Authors: Puff Jean-François
Published: May 2022

This article looks at the Oulipo movement, created in the 1960s, from the perspective of the neo-avant-garde. The Oulipo group launched the notion of constraint in the literary field, which is a reason why the group was sometimes considered as neoclassical. Moreover, the group presented itself as an anti-avant-garde unit. At the same time, however, Oulipo is mainly concerned with experimentation and formal invention, which is why it could be linked to the neo-avant-garde. It is precisely this contradiction which is examined in this chapter, in the light of Jacques Rancière’s concept of representative and aesthetical regimes of the arts.
Images of the Real: Generic and Medial Hybridity in Peter Weiss’s
Authors: Arteel Inge
Published: May 2022

This chapter looks at Peter Weiss’s experimental short novel The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman, which was written in the early fifties but not published until 1960. The chapter situates the novel in the context of Weiss’s aesthetic and political engagement and analyses its narrative, generic and medial characteristics. Departing from moments of failure and impediment that the novel addresses, the chapter then shifts the focus to its generic and medial hybridity and the images this produces. The chapter argues that with their formal instability and cognitive irritation these images resist integration in a predictable epistemological grid of reality. Instead, they are presented as real images that confront the reader with the bits and pieces of modernity.
Nietzsche’s ‘Wild’ Phenomenology
Authors: Daigle Christine
Published: May 2022

This chapter explain how Nietzsche embraces a phenomenological method of inquiry that amounts to a wild phenomenology – a phenomenology that is not conscious of itself as phenomenological. The chapter discusses fundamental phenomenological concepts that are articulated in a variety of ways by thinkers from that movement. The concepts of intentionality and lived experience as an embodied consciousness in the world emerge as central core ideas. As the later chapters of the book make clear, those are also Nietzsche’s focus. Additionally, this chapter clarifies the issue of what influence Nietzsche may have exercised on phenomenology and illuminates methodological issues. Nietzsche’s philosophical position is presented as a pursuit of truth conducted in the Enlightenment spirit. The chapter also discusses the particular method Nietzsche embraces, namely that of aphoristic writing and historical philosophizing, explaining how these are atypical of phenomenological inquiries, but are possibly better tools to achieve phenomenological aims.
Being-in-the-World—Being-with-Others
Authors: Daigle Christine
Published: May 2022

This chapter focuses on the being-in-the-world and being-with-others of the multi-layered embodied consciousness. It proceeds to show that consciousness needs the world to exist: it cannot be conceived without it. The analysis appeals to Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world and demonstrate that Nietzsche anticipated it. This also entails, as it does in Heidegger, that consciousness is ontologically dependent on others, that it is fundamentally a being-with-others. Intentional consciousness constitutes itself and its world but it is also constituted by the world it is in and the others with whom it interacts. This leads to a discussion of whether there is a form of structuralism in Nietzsche. The chapter disambiguates the tension emphasized in Nietzsche studies between the hard determinism supposedly embraced by Nietzsche on the one hand and his emphasis on self liberation on the other. This is done via an examination of Foucault’s later inquiries into the subject and power and the notion of relation to oneself (rapport à soi) and care of the self (souci de soi). This serves to illustrate that the descriptive work of phenomenology, which unearths the workings of consciousness, the self, and world constitution necessarily extends into ethical and political reflections
From the Ethical to the Political
Authors: Daigle Christine
Published: May 2022

The conclusion offers considerations on the political ramifications of Nietzsche’s ethical positions as grounded in his wild phenomenology. The claim is that Nietzsche is not a political thinker per se – that is he is not offering an elaborate and sustained analysis of political systems and institutions nor does he offer us a clear proposal for what he considers to be the best organization of the political – but he still has some views on the political insofar as the political impacts our individual and collective flourishing and insofar as those are intertwined. Nietzsche’s views are therefore useful for democratic thinking. The conclusion explains that he is interested in an anti-identitarian perfectionist democracy that forwards the conditions needed for individual and collective flourishing that may arise out of agonistic relations. Such a democracy would be radically different than any of the democratic systems we have experienced.
Desire and Ethics
Authors: Buchanan Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter asks the question, how would one decide what the right thing to do is in any given situation if one were to follow Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking? It argues that since Deleuze and Guattari were explicitly concerned with matters to do with injustice (Deleuze wrote about the injustices faced by Palestinians), then they must necessarily be able to state what they consider to be the right thing to do in a given situation. So even though they do not address this question themselves it should be possible to triangulate an answer to it all the same. This chapter thereby attempts to develop a practical ethics using the work of Deleuze and Guattari.
The Structural Necessity of the Body without Organs
Authors: Buchanan Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter argues that the best way to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s notoriously difficult concept of the body without organs (BwO) is to start by thinking about its function in the overall schema of their work. It argues that we cannot arrive at an understanding of the concept solely by returning to the work of Artaud. This is because the concept does not exist in isolation, but is part of a network of interlocking concepts that together constitute the basic conceptual apparatus of schizoanalysis.
The Disappearance of Boredom
Authors: Buchanan Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter makes a paradoxical plea for the importance of boredom. It argues that since the advent of the smart phone, the empty time we associate with boredom, but used to fill with contemplation, has now been thoroughly captured by digital platforms. As such, the space for daydreams has been colonised, leaving humanity the poorer for the loss of empty time. It also argues that the experience of smart phones is inherently similar to that of a schizophrenic episode: we invite the voices into our heads, we invite the intrusion of constant surveillance, and so on.