bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Looking for a Few Good Men
Authors: Gray White Deborah
Published: September 2017

This chapter compares the men of the Promise Keepers and Million Man March for what they wanted from and achieved at the gatherings. It describes the revivalism and spiritualism of the marches. By exploring the way white and black men experienced manhood historically, and in the 1990s, it explains why they marched separately though for many of the same reasons. By exploring the anger and anxiety that motivated their respective gatherings, it demonstrates how the new economy, multiculturalism, and feminism affected them and their respective communities differently, even though their adaptations were paradoxically similar. The marches provide the context for learning about and comparing the way these men approached emotionalism, male bonding, male dependency, patriarchy, homosexuality, and fatherhood.
Things Fall Apart; the LGBT Center Holds
Authors: Gray White Deborah
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the lgbt marches of 1993 and 2000. It shows that the marches visibilized sexual minorities; made them feel whole and spiritually renewed, and helped people “come out.” It explores how the postmodern consumer economy led to increasing acceptance of lgbts in the 1990s; how the marches expanded the political movement spawned by the HIV/AIDS epidemic; and how lgbts came to express identities beyond sexuality. Ultimately, growth and greater freedom deepened the fault lines in the lgbt community including those between blacks and whites, lesbians and gays, normals and queers, conservatives and liberals. It shows how the special rights campaign mounted in the 1990s by homophobes put pressure on lgbts to assimilate, and how respectability politics prevailed at the 2000 march.
Introduction
Authors: Hong Yu
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces the post-2008 historical context of crisis and restructuring, where communications have become a new epicenter of political-economy transformation and a crosscutting tool for economic recovery and industrial upgrades. It also introduces the themes of this book, that is, the centrality of communications to Chinese-style capitalism, the state’s constitutive role in the evolving networked economy, and, lastly, the relationship between the state-dominated communications system and the global digital economy.
Driving Capitalism to Western China
Authors: Hong Yu
Published: September 2017

Chapter 1 introduces the ICT-dominant export-processing economy from the perspective of western fringe areas and outlines its historical trajectory, spatial features, and new territorial units in western China. After explaining why western China missed the growth opportunity bestowed by the opening-up policy from the outset, the chapter examines the post-2008 measures of westward industrial relocation, with Intel Sichuan and Foxconn Chongqing as two case studies, focusing on the dynamics between state policy and transnational capital. It argues that this new trend of spatial rebalancing is likely to disperse and even deepen the structural crisis emanating from cross-border production that sustains today’s labor exploitation and electronic consumerism at once.
Recasting the Media System
Authors: Hong Yu
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that the 2008 global economic crisis and the economic restructuring that followed have accelerated state-led digitization, corporation, and capital accumulation within the state media system. After contextualizing media reforms as part of the state’s cultural-system reform program, the chapter examines the case of digital TV, tracing the bumpy process of using convergence as a cover to corporatize cable networks and content production while revealing the leading role of state-owned digital media companies exemplified by Shanghai Media Group and Zhejiang Wasu in this process. It also underscores the inherent contradictions of the corporate digital-TV enterprise, especially demand deficiency resulting from systematic socioeconomic inequality and the contingency of public service left to the discretion of state companies that manage digital TV.
Queer Incarcerations
Authors: Fojas Camilla
Published: September 2017

Orange Is the New Black is part of the archive of white women’s prisons writings. It captures many of the features of earlier memoirs on the topic that set the precedent and terms for a version of the prison narrative of the white woman and her departure from the law-abiding mainstream. The Netflix series based on Kerman’s memoir partakes in a mediated culture of women’s prison stories as homosocial spaces of queer desire. Women in prison stories garner popular attention for the way that they symbolize dire and unfree conditions during cultural moments of disorder, economic freefall, and persistent social inequities; symbolized biopolitically, the inmate pays her debt to society with her trapped and caged body.
Man in Motion
Authors: Oates Thomas P.
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter describes how a culture of white, male grievance has combined with a new economic orientation to create the ideological context in which the NFL reached unprecedented heights. It locates the current moment within a larger history that views football as central to the shifting cultural politics that aim to secure white male power.
“A Wife in Waiting”
Authors: Zanoni Elizabeth
Published: September 2017

Family reunification provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarran-Walter Act) allowed ethnic women, for the first time, to sponsor the migration of their alien husbands and children outside the limited quota slots for Southern and Eastern Europeans. This chapter explores advice columns in New York’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano to examine the gendered implications of the 1952 act on postwar Italian migration. The 1952 act granted Italian women a new and controversial visibility in the Italian-language press and in the larger ethnic community as instigators of immigration. During the 1950s, this chapter argues, advice columns about the 1952 act turned into platforms for both exalting and policing Italian women’s roles in initiating postwar migrations, marriages, and families.
New Second-Generation Youth Culture in the Twilight of Italian American Ethnicity
Authors: Tricarico Donald
Published: September 2017

This chapter views the Italian American youth culture known as “Guido” as a collective ethnic adaptation by young people whose immigrant parents settled in New York City, most notably Bensonhurst, after 1945. The ethnogenesis of second-generation youth blended thick Italian ethnicity with styles referenced to popular American culture like disco. New second-generation youth identity constitutes an ethnic agency according to a constructionist model of ethnicity that cannot be subsumed within the narrative of assimilation keyed to the older, mass immigration. Instead, a pronounced turn to consumption style invites a comparison to the new second generation children of post-1965 immigration from outside Europe featured in segmented assimilation theory which recognizes variable patterns as ethnic groups assimilate into different segments of a highly stratified society.
Afterword
Authors: Gabaccia Donna
Published: September 2017

New Italian Migrations to the United States, Vol. 1: Politics and History since 1945 is an important work of history written by scholars from many disciplines. Because it is being published in two volumes—with history and politics dominating this volume and cultural expressivity the other, titled ...
Colored No More
Authors: Lindsey Treva B.
Published: September 2017

Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. examines the expressive culture of African American women in Washington, D.C. during the early twentieth century. Honing in on the intellectual and cultural strivings of African American women communities in New Negro era Washington, I unveil a city in which African American women sought to configure themselves as authorial subjects. Between 1860 and 1930, the population of black women in Washington increased from 8.402 to 69,843. Over the course of seventy years of African American women’s migration to the nation’s capital, numerous institutions, organizations, and political, social, and cultural arenas emerged in Washington that catered to the specific needs, desires, and interests of a rapidly growing population of black women. African American women established spaces for contesting political, social and cultural currents and conventions that limited black women’s participation in the public sphere. Many of these women defiantly entered into public cultures such as higher education, literary activism, and local and interstate commerce. New Negro women challenged racial, gender, and sexual ideologies and norms that often relegated African American women to subordinate political, social, and cultural statuses. Colored No More reveals the significance of Washington, D.C. as a New Negro city. The African American women who inhabited the nation’s capital were integral to African American freedom and equality struggles of the early twentieth century.
Make Me Beautiful
Authors: Lindsey Treva B.
Published: September 2017

This chapter closely engages African American beauty culture. Advertisements for beauty products such as hair pomades and skin bleaches comprised a significant portion of advertisements in African American newspapers throughout the early twentieth century. The advertisements for beauty products targeting African American women unveil a discourse and an industry that were instrumental to the materialization of a New Negro culture. Through advertisements and open discussions about African American beauty, self-presentation and adornment shifted from an individual/private sphere issue to a formidable public culture site of individual and collective expressivity during the New Negro era. African American beauty culture thrived as a site of reinvention and re-imagining for New Negro women. It also offered multiple authorial roles in which these women could partake, including: producer, consumer, and manufacturer. In Washington, this black women’s beauty culture was a thriving industry as well as a battleground and playground for black women actualizing themselves as New Negro women.
Saturday Night at the S Street Salon
Authors: Lindsey Treva B.
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces one of the most understudied communities of New Negro writers. Commencing in the 1920s, African American writer Georgia Douglas Johnson invited writers to her home on Saturday evenings to encourage the development of a cohesive and supportive community of black writers. With a particular emphasis on the writing of African American women, the S Street Salon evolved into a viable space for African American women writers to workshop their poems, plays, short stories, and novels. Many of the New Negro era literary works produced by African American women participants of the S Street Salon tackled politically significant and contentious issues such as racial and sexual violence and women’s reproductive rights. Most of the well-known New Negro writers participated in a Saturday session at the S Street Salon. The S Street Salon was arguably one of the most significant intellectual, political, and cultural communities of the New Negro era. This community pivoted around African American women’s expressivity. The women of the S Street Salon inserted their stories and their voices into black public culture through creating an African American women-centered counterpublic.
Battle of the Blogosphere
Authors: Murphy Patrick D.
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines how the multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto has attempted to re-brand itself from a chemical company to a food company through the elaboration of a highly interlaced, multi-platform on-line media strategy. This image enhancement operation is a response to its many critics—from citizen-based groups in India and Mexico to prominent food security activists like Michael Pollan and Vandana Shiva. At the center of analysis is how Monsanto has used the trope of “sustainability” to craft a proactive profile that is responsive to the challenges that the planet is facing. Foregrounding the issue of environmental agency, the chapter provides an assessment of what kinds of environmental discourses the company privileges through its media operations, and how these have been produced as a means to combat those who have challenged Monsanto’s vision of food production and “responsible” environmental stewardship.
Conclusion
Authors: Murphy Patrick D.
Published: September 2017

The conclusion digests the main issues explored in the previous chapters. The core argument put forward is that the global media landscape that materialized at the end of the twentieth century has become a central mediator of eco-consciousness around the globe. This landscape is defined primary by the Promethean discourse, which assumes that growth is perpetual and that individuals operating within the market have the agency to solve any and all environmental problems. This discourse is problematic when considered in the face of anthropogenic climate change and declining natural resource reserves. However, even powerful discourses co-produced and are hence not immune to challenges. This means that alternative environmental discourses can be found within market driven media, suggesting that while the contemporary media commons is the domain of non-ecologically responsive normative trends, its also offers openings for more progressive environmental thought and action.
Verbum in Corde
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

Early Christian theologians such as Justin Martyr and Theophilus of Antioch borrowed the philosophical idea of internal discourse as a useful wordly comparison for understanding the engendering of the Son by the Father in the divine Trinity. Occurring first in apologetic and polemical writings, this recourse to philosophy became controversial among theologians themselves. Augustine, however, systematically developed the concept of ‘mental word’ in the context of Trinitarian theology and promoted the notion that human thought is a kind of internal speech underlying natural languages and prior to them.
Ockham’s Intervention
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

This chapter is dedicated to William of Ockham’s full-fledged theory of mental language. It shows how it was first developed on the basis of a reflection on what the objects of knowledge are, Ockham’s answer being that they are mental propositions composed of concepts. The ontological status of concepts is then examined—a question over which Ockham importantly changed his mind over the years. It is then shown how the technical apparatus of grammar and semantics was systematically transposed by Ockham to the fine-grained analysis of thought, with the result that thought itself could now be seen as a compositional semantic system. And finally the Ockhamistic idea that concepts are natural signs is discussed.
Conclusion
Authors: Panaccio Claude
Published: September 2017

The Conclusion briefly summarizes the book and provides a list of thirty-six different appellations for mental language in Ancient and medieval philosophy (e.g. logos endiathetos, verbum in corde, verbum intellectuale, oratio mentalis, etc.). It then suggests a number of contemporary philosophical discussions for which this historical enquiry could be relevant, over the compositional structure of thought, for example, the ontological status of intellectual representation, or the connection between thought and language.
Spenser’s Unhappy Ends
Authors: McEleney Corey
Published: September 2017

Chapter Four furthers the previous chapter’s examination of how the ironies of romance interfere with claims of intention and utility. It argues that Edmund Spenser’s stated intention to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline” unravels in the Legend of Courtesy, the final completed book of his romance The Faerie Queene. The chapter analyzes how the Legend of Courtesy not only betrays ambivalence toward the virtue of courtesy, but also puts extreme pressure on poetry’s reputed ability to supply any “vertuous and gentle discipline.” Through its investment in passivity over action, errancy over linearity, and misconduct over self-discipline, the Legend of Courtesy reveals the limits of the demand that poetry should inculcate askesis, or self-discipline. Like the texts of Ascham and Nashe, the Legend of Courtesy is marked by forms of parabasis: interruptions and digressions that inhibit the teleological flow of the text. The chapter demonstrates that these parabases are the source of romance’s distinctly unsettling pleasure, which ironizes Spenser’s virtuous intentions in ways that Spenser scholars have failed to address.
Light and Death
Authors: Anderson Judith H.
Published: September 2017

Death, light, figuration, and, especially, analogical expressions of figuration are the primary subjects of this book. They generate associated interests: the relation of literature and science, the methodology of thought and argument, and the processes of narrative, discovery, and interpretation. Creativity, optics, and rhetoric come into focus as well. Anderson’s book begins as an intellectual process that employs mathematical science, semantics, rhetoric, grammar, and major poems inclusively as a single culture, not as C. P. Snow’s cultural opposites. It explores the figuration of Sin and Death in Spenser, Donne, and Milton, then turns to light because of its inseparability from the figuration of life, death’s other. Accordingly, Anderson examines the history and structure of analogical figuration and the bearing of analogy on light in physics and metaphysics. Analogy, a type of metaphor also called proportion, has always been the connector of the known to the unknown, the sensible to the subsensible and infinite. The perceptual opposites of light and its intermediating forms are likewise focal: blackness, darkness, shade, twilight, and night. Traditionally, light also implies vision and imagination, light being essential to optics, creation, and the figuration of Being. Chapters on Kepler’s studies of light and optics, on Donne’s epic Anniversaries of personal death and cultural loss, and on analogy, night, and light in Paradise Lost conclude the book.
“The Body of This Death”
Authors: Anderson Judith H.
Published: September 2017

In Romans 7:24, Paul utters a cry that has echoed down the centuries: “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Paul’s moving outcry attracted the sustained attention of poets in early modern England, among them Spenser, Donne, and Milton, not only because of Paul’s anguish but also because of his unusual phrasing and figuration. The Bible carefully specifies “this death,” which suggests that the death at issue is spiritual and that it results from sin, not simply from the physical constitution of humankind. Yet physical death is implicit in the Adamic sin that human beings inherit and is thus embedded in their fallen nature. Donne’s sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, and Milton’s figures of Sin and Death explore the inextricability of spirit and flesh in the body that is this death.
Mutability and Mortality in The Faerie Queene
Authors: Anderson Judith H.
Published: September 2017

Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos engage the subjects of sin and death from start to finish—from the introduction of Mutability herself through the end of her pageant—but Spenser’s Mutability is neither a simple mirror of the Fall nor a metonymic encoding of it. The Cantos open with a staged construction of Mutabilility’s figure, and her story draws on numerous renderings of change, including the Bible, Ovid, Lucretius, and Boethius, without merely repeating any one. Related passages on sin and death in The Faerie Queene, books I and II, have particularly relevant, significant ties to the subjects of time and mortality in the Cantos, as well as to questions of narrative and figuration. Mutability’s pageant explicitly engages with mortalism, the death of the soul, or the individual soul, along with the body, a concern that makes sense as an offshoot of Spenser’s engagement with materialism elsewhere in his epic. (This is another preview of Milton as well.)
Milton’s Twilight Zone
Authors: Anderson Judith H.
Published: September 2017

This chapter begins with the setting of hell and the viewpoint of its demons, which are fundamental to what follows and not merely a conventional beginning in medias res. These opening books provide the contrast so important to wisdom and choice and, more exactly, the initial, experiential sight and locus of evil and death in the poem: here blackness and the sunlight figured in epic similes are focal. Concentrating next on Light in Book III and moving out to make connections with Night, twilight, and darkness in heaven and Chaos, the argument focuses on the relation of Night to Milton’s God. Both the cave in the mount of God and the deep of Chaos and Night not only figure womb and tomb but do so bi-sexually. This chapter ends with God’s analogy of redemption, the analogy of Edenic being, Satan’s parody of it, and the analogical reading of history.
I Speak in the Third Person
Authors: Tran Ben
Published: September 2017

Focusing on Khái Hưng’s Nửa chừng xuân [In the Midst of Spring], Chapter 4 examines how the author addressed the cultural translation of Europe’s first-person grammatical category, a significant marker of modern Vietnamese literature, into Vietnam’s Confucian sociolinguistic order. The chapter suggests that the cultural translation of Western individualism into the Vietnamese language was a site of gendered discrepancies and differences. In particular, the chapter examines how the colonial government’s implementation of a French educational system in place of the preexisting mandarin exam system affected women, a social group that had been excluded from the precolonial educational system.
Queer Internationalism and Modern Vietnamese Aesthetics
Authors: Tran Ben
Published: September 2017

Chapter 5 argues that the origins of Vietnam’s critical and socialist realism were not founded in class politics, as scholars have thus far suggested, but rather in queer internationalism. As the erosion of the male literati gave way to a female literary public, post-mandarin intellectuals were drawn to André Gide’s idiosyncratic synthesis of same-sex politics with socialism and his belief in individual literary expression and national particularity. The chapter argues that Gide’s influence in Vietnam during the 1930s underwrites the emergence of socialist realism. These claims challenge the historiography of the Vietnamese anticolonial revolution and its privileging of class determinism, leading to one of the main tenets of this book: that the disruption of gender and sexual relations set off by the post-mandarin rupture proves to be one of the crucial factors in Vietnam’s literary and cultural production during the era of colonial modernity.
Forms of Life in a Milieu of Biopower
Authors: Campbell Timothy C.
Published: September 2017

This chapter, the most philosophical of the book, sketches the relation of biopower to fear and violence through a reading of mythic violence as it emerges in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” Reading Adorno as well as Benjamin against himself, the chapter seeks to find in generosity and gratitude a response to biopower’s dependence on and use of fatedness. In place of the negative, tragic biopolitics that characterizes neoliberalism, a more affirmative perspective is proposed that forgoes mastery and holding in favor of non-possession and generosity.
“Dead Weight”: Visconti and Forms of Life
Authors: Campbell Timothy C.
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, the first of three dedicated to films from post–World War II Italy, Luchino Visconti’s The Earth Trembles becomes the locus for a reflection on the relation among gesture, generosity, and landscape. The visual weight of the Cyclops Islands as destiny in the film’s frame is noted along with the difference in how members of the Valastri family touch and hold objects, especially the women of the household. An affinity between how objects are held on screen and how the spectator is urged to hold what she sees on screen is discussed, along with the importance of the long shot in Visconti’s aesthetic realism as a mode of creating attention.
Playful Falls in a Milieu of Contagion
Authors: Campbell Timothy C.
Published: September 2017

Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero is the subject of this chapter, in which the relation of the generous form of life to play is analysed in a milieu of ingratitude and mythic violence. The central figure of the film, the boy Edmund, is read as a limit case of the generous form of life in a context of massive envy. Here parricide and suicide become the only possibilities when gratitude has been reduced to year zero. The chapter includes a reading of Melanie Klein’s Gratitude and Envy and ends with a reflection on how the film turns gratitude inside out; in lieu of good and bad objects, there is law and guilt.
Conclusion: Attention, Not Autopsy
Authors: Campbell Timothy C.
Published: September 2017

This brief chapter summarizes the book’s argument as essentially the following: in a number of films from Italy, a drama is played out between the camera’s power to make visible forms of life and those filmed who are able to play with the cinematic apparatus as if it were a transitional object. By noting the creative tension between the generous mancus without hands and the apparatus, the book makes an argument for a creative and attentive spectatorship able and willing to forego mastery.
The Rebirth of Poetics
Authors: Hui Andrew
Published: September 2017

This chapter traces the genealogy of the immortality of poetry topos from antiquity to the sixteenth century. It argues that the Renaissance poetics of ruins’s yearning for timelessness is accomplished through the strategy of a temporal multiplicity, a process that transmutes the past and in turn open its own transformation, from author to author, reader to reader. In other words, Renaissance poetry, implicitly or explicitly, hopes to transcend its temporal and spatial horizons (aspiring to be a monument), yet finds its survival in the immanent world, by being recycled, cited, and transformed by successors (living as a ruin). This tension—to be within or without time—drives much of the discourse surrounding ruins. Architectural destruction always compels poets to create works that rise above the sublunary world, while at the same time it inevitably leads them back into the thickets of exchange and mediation. The chapter ends with close-reading of several sonnets of Shakespeare.
Petrarch’s Vestigia and the Presence of Absence
Authors: Hui Andrew
Published: September 2017

Any study of Renaissance ruins must begin with Petrarch, for he was one of the first thinkers to recognize that the signs of antiquity were scattered, dispersed, mutilated, which necessitated their reconstruction and renovation. This chapter argues that Petrarch’s existential encounter with the past can be conceived of as an investigation, a search for vestigia. The poetics of ruins for Petrarch is one in which his reflection on the ruins of Rome broadens into a meditation of lost time; this discourse then prompts him to compose fragmentary works that attempt to recollect his scattered self. I give a brief semantic history of vestigium; it explores Petrarch’s search for Laura’s footprints in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as guided by a dissembling imitation of Dante’s work; in his epic, the Africa, Rome as a city is textualized and made whole through a careful reworking of its predecessors, Aeneid and Pharsalia; there is a kinship between contemplating ruins and writing letters in Petrarch’s epistles, which are modeled after Cicero’s. The chapter finally offers some thoughts on the relationship between gathering the fragments of Petrarch’s self in the Secretum and collecting the fragments of ancient manuscripts in his epistolary collection.
Coming
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Van Reeth Adèle
Published: September 2017

Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French notion of jouissance. How did jouissance evolve from referring to the pleasure of possessing a material thing (property, wealth) to the pleasure of orgasm, from appropriation to dis-appropriation, from consumption to consummation? The philosophers Adèle van Reeth and Jean-Luc Nancy engage in a lively dialogue touching on authors as varied as Spinoza, Hegel, Saint Augustine, the Marquis de Sade, Marguerite Duras, and Henry Miller, and on subjects ranging from consumerism to video games to mysticism. Four additional essays were added to the American edition: “The Body of Pleasure,” a philosophical examination of the body and the senses; “Rühren, Berühren, Aufruhr (Moving, Touching, Uprising),” on the nature of touch; “Neither Seeing Nor Having,” an essay on the philosopher Gérard Granel’s meditations on the obsessive love of Paolo and Francesca in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno; and finally a lyrical and evocative prose-poem called “Nude Enumerated.”
Rühren, Berühren, Aufruhr (Moving, Touching, Uprising)
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Van Reeth Adèle
Published: September 2017

A poetic yet strangely practical examination of our most intimate sense—touch. Touch is both the most dangerous—sentimentally and legally—of our senses, yet curiously the least examined.
The Banlieue Has a Gender: Competing Visions of Sexual Diversity
Authors: Mack Mehammed Amadeus
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the various ways journalists and activists who purport to fight for sexual diversity have actually reified sexual conformism through two processes: the demonization of the banlieue’s racialized, non-normative sexualities and the willful denial of the banlieue’s queer potential. In journalism, investigative reports, and interventions on the ground, commentators purporting to represent gay and feminist interests have focused on an uncommonly sexist banlieusard virility, with alleged roots in Islamic cultures. This process fits into a larger, more familiar one, in which immigration from the former colonies has been sexualized, with concerns articulated around men’s machismo and women’s subjugation. In recent years, respect for sexual minorities has constituted a new frontier for campaigns targeting banlieue attitudes and behaviors. In this vein, some campaigns purporting to “defend” have taken the form of attacks. Rhetoric about “saving” banlieue women and homosexuals has exoticized the banlieues as inhospitable and lawless zones worthy of human rights intervention. At the same time that it defines the homosexual victim, this rhetoric also determines the “appropriate” expression of homosexual identity or practices.
Constructing the Broken Family: The Draw for Psychoanalysis
Authors: Mack Mehammed Amadeus
Published: September 2017

From the early days of colonial ethno-psychiatry and the Algiers school to the current era of media interventions by French psychoanalysts, commentators with backgrounds in psychoanalysis have often been called upon to lend their expertise to the discussion of cultural and ethnic difference. This chapter looks at how these sciences, with their particular attentiveness to sexuality, have approached issues of immigration, Islam, and the place of minorities in French domestic affairs. At the core of this chapter is the argument that psychoanalytical commentators have conceptualized these issues through the lens of a (broken) family unit that updates, in dystopian fashion, the Freudian family unit of bourgeois Vienna for contemporary circumstances. United in their “pathologized” status, the “juvenile delinquent,” the “veiled woman,” and the “impotent father” are figures that together make up a symbolic family unit, drawn up by psychoanalysts who write about urban France, immigration, and/or North Africa. Reading about this dysfunctional family, one quickly gets the sense that Muslims’ continuing influx into Europe will have “dire” psycho-sexual consequences on the continent, due to their psychoanalytically aberrant views on the public-private distinction and patriarchal law.
Uncultured Yet Seductive: The Trope of the Difficult Arab Boy
Authors: Mack Mehammed Amadeus
Published: September 2017

This chapter surveys representations of the Arab male in contemporary French and Francophone literature. It argues that Arab men, especially those who show signs of ethnic affirmation, are often cast outside privileged circles of “gay” space just as they are eroticized. This can happen in narratives about sex tourism, about the mixing of classes and ethnicities in metropolitan France, or in those that concern the French cultural elite, wherein Arab men are posited as threats and nuisances to gay cultural, esthetic, and philosophical sensibilities. This is especially the case at moments of literary collaboration between Arab and white authors, or when Arab partners try to assert themselves in a literary or intellectual sense. There is of course a backlash against this intellectual belittling, both from a subsequent generation of white gay writers as well as from emergent Franco-Arab voices. This chapter pays special attention to how post-colonial resentment about past inter-ethnic belittling is portrayed via the historical motif of the “Arab boy,” transplanted from an exploited status in colonial settings to an un-assimilated status in contemporary France.
Introduction
Authors: Lim Jeehyun
Published: September 2017

Based on the premise that the growth of bilingualism in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century is a consequence of post-1965 immigration, the chapter presents the book’s dual objective of tracing the effects of the social changes to bilingualism in cultural representations of bilingual personhood and of querying how these representations illuminate the social lives of bilingual persons. Crucial to the book’s discussion of bilingual personhood is the two poles of good and bad bilingualism, of bilingualism as asset and liability, which emerges in the social perception of language difference as it intersects with racial difference. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, but also supplementing it with ideas of symbolic capital that emerge in the debates on bilingualism, the introduction makes a case for how the idea of bilingualism as human capital shows the assimilation of Asian Americans and Latinos into racial capitalism. The story of bilingual personhood shows that the economy of liberal personhood allows for a split between desirable and undesirable bilinguals. The introduction suggests a structure of feeling in Asian American and Latino literature around this polarizing economy of language difference through which dimensions of a liberal subject’s life, such as inclusion, belonging, rights and entitlement, are contemplated and questioned.
In Defense of Argument
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: September 2017

The chapter further develops the present situation as a time of nihilism and ideology. We are in a crisis of reason. Instead of demonizing modernity or ignoring it, we must be more reasonable, namely by unfolding the logic of Revelation. Marion considers and then refutes a communicational model of rationality, which is unable to produce ethical norms. He argues that there is no shame in speaking from a minority position, as long as it is rational. Catholicism can present a prophetic call to the larger culture, precisely through a defense of rigorous rationality in the kind of apologia that the martyrs displayed in their witness to Revelation.
The Formal Reason of the Infinite
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: September 2017

Proceeding from the realization of a kind of universality of the infinite present in most sciences, Marion develops a notion of the infinite as incomprehensibility, which he shows to be a defining and positive feature of the infinite. The infinite absolutely surpasses us. But this applies not only to the divine, but also to humans: humans are gods inasmuch as they bear the divine image and as a painting is called after the master who executed it. Christians have a responsibility to preserve this incomprehensibility of the other. We should never objectify the other, but instead defend the irreducibility of humanity as essentially incomprehensible and inexpressible in concepts.
On the Eminent Dignity of the Poor Baptized
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: September 2017

Marion criticizes the distinction between clerics and laity, which turns the layperson into a militant defender of the faith and ignores the priestly function they already have in virtue of their baptism. It turns clerics into officials dependent on the laity instead of the ones who administer the sacraments. The two kinds of priesthood (baptismal and presbyteral) are linked. We must convert ourselves and the world. The priest calls the assembly together only in the Name of Christ. The priest is in service of the community, helping the baptized to grow into Christ. We become Christian only through imitation of Christ. The proper role of the baptized Christian is to communicate Christ to the world by converting himself.
Nothing Is Impossible for God
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: September 2017

In this chapter Marion speaks of the miracle as what we think to be impossible although it actually takes place. The miracle is about what really occurs but seems impossible, not about a logical contradiction, but about an event (it is hence about faith in the event). Christ’s death is the end of any possibility; his resurrection the miracle of the event of the impossible. The miracle puts faith into play. Metaphysics excludes possibility (and sees it as opposed to actuality). Phenomenology frees the possibility of phenomena. The Resurrection becomes the paradigm for any miracle. It appears outside the horizon and displaces or suspends it by saturating our gaze. This saturated phenomenon constitutes the I.
The Recognition of the Gift
Authors: Marion Jean-Luc
Published: September 2017

The truest and most important phenomena remain invisible but are given phenomenologically as gifts. The gift requires a phenomenology of the invisible. To know God is to receive the gift of love, as the experience of the Samaritan woman who encounters Christ at Jacob’s well illustrates. The gift is always unconditioned and recognized only in and through Christ. Thus, the Eucharist is the very paradigm of the gift, a perfectly given gift, and Christ the gift par excellence.
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Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

Heidegger’s discourse in the Black Notebooks is banal in the sense of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” This discourse absorbed the doxa of anti-Semitism circulating in Europe from 1920–1940. Heidegger thus transfers the banality of anti-Semitism into philosophical thinking.
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Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is “historial” because it attributes to the Jewish people a task that is both world-historical and philosophically significant, having to do with the uprooting of beings. Why, according to Heidegger’s logic, must this be attributed to the Jews, since the process described involves multiple agents? Because the Jews are the racialized people that brings about a “deracialization” of humanity, a levelling and equivalence in indifference. This process can be compared by analogy with Marx’s analysis of money as the general equivalent, and of the proletariat as the agent and figure of revolution. For Heidegger, the new beginning of humanity requires a figure, a type, embodied in a people capable of hastening the end. For every singular beginning requires a people, as does every end.
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Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

For Heidegger, the first beginning is Greek. The beginning is thus brought about by a people, whereas the decline is brought about by the mixing and indistinction of peoples. But this too is for Heidegger brought about by a figure-people, a caricature of a people, drawn from the vulgarity and banality of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose proximity to Heidegger’s language on calculation, democracy, manipulation and internationalism is clear enough as to leave no doubt. This is the case regardless of whether Heidegger read the Protocols or not, for he very clearly absorbed its language, as had his age more generally. Heidegger believes he is collecting banalities for the sake of higher ends, by way of a deconstruction/destruction of metaphysics which, for Heidegger, also points toward the necessity of a destruction of the West that will liberate it from its own destructive elements: a destruction of destruction. Could this be the sign of a constitutive self-rejection at the heart of the West?
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Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

Heidegger’s thought, insofar as it is organized in the 1930s and 1940s by the motif of the beginning and the historial in its uniqueness, had recourse to anti-Semitism in ways that betray its share in the self-detestation that profoundly characterizes the West. While being in Heidegger arguably exceeds any thinking of a self, in the Black Notebooks he turns it into a kind of Self that is the enemy of every Other, and in turn he conceals this in his published texts. His fixation on a unitary schema of historiality played a part in his refusal to acknowledge the singularity of the extermination of the Jews. The an-archic quality of Derrida’s notion of destinerrance shows that Heidegger’s thinking also points in a different, non-unique form of destining. But Heidegger rather gave in to a rage for the initial and the archi-, though he was equipped to see this trap for what it was. An age-old hatred of self, a rancor of the West against itself, occluded this knowledge.
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Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2017

Heidegger’s thought absorbed the lesson of a very ancient history: any true beginning always fails to be such, to truly begin, and must struggle to reinstantiate itself without going astray or breaking down. The thinking of the beginning is thus burdened with a banal metaphysical doxa of authenticity, originarity and properness. Christianity has an important role to play in the history of this thinking, as it is marked by the will to constitute a new beginning. Heidegger attempted to think another beginning that would be simultaneously in the image and in the place of the other beginning that Christianity wanted to constitute. Christianity’s rejection and exclusion of Jews and Judaism, as something that would compromise the former’s own claim to initiality, is part of a long history in which the West has made the Jew a figure to which it agressively turns to denounce at points of crisis. One such point occurred in Heidegger’s own time, and Heidegger, like so many in that time, absorbed the banalities of anti-Jewish messages. This banality does not lessen the gravity of Heidegger’s faults, on the contrary it aggravates them. It also demands that we interrogate the broader dimensions of these problems, that we lay bare the roots of anti-Semitism, that we investigate the sacrifical thinking which grounds so much political and social violence, that we break with a model given by this history in which progress is identified with the human conquest of the world, and that we withdraw from being any name and any demand for a destination. We must learn to live without being and without destination.
Partitions
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. It argues that each one thinks in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light, in the silence of the other's voice, in the emptiness of the other's plenitude. To think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought. It is precisely this “remainder,” this “boundary,” this “partition” that divides while joining and separates while combining that is the object of the present analysis. The chapter then turns examines the question for which the two thinkers appear to be most distant: the relation between action and work, between praxis and poiesis, between the political sphere and the social sphere.
Truth
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the importance of Arendt and Weil's interpretations of the Homeric world, and of The Iliad in particular. This is the case because it is a question to which they both return on a number of occasions, as if the return itself were decisive for the formulation of their own categories. But, above all, it is the case because their interpretations uncover the phenomenon of “concordant dissonance” or of “dissonant concordance.” Homer also evokes another word, which binds them in an affirmative sense. This is the question of the justice, impartiality, or equity of the poet who unites both victors and vanquished in light of the dignity of two adversarial peoples.
Beginn, Anfang, Ursprung
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on the two distinct and even contradictory readings of origin that lie in pursuit of each other in Arendt, alternating and intertwining throughout the entirety of her work. The first is of a deconstructive nature, while the second is constitutive. In order to identify them separately—and before turning to the antonymic point at which they converge—the chapter returns to two authors who were both very much present in Arendt's formative years. The first is Nietzsche and, more specifically, the “genealogist” Nietzsche, who was considered by Foucault to be the first to deconstruct the sacred conceptualization of origin. The second is Walter Benjamin, to whom Arendt dedicated one of her most forceful essays, the “Gnoseological Foreword” to Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama.
Forces
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that the Iliad constitutes the most perfect example precisely because nothingness can be perceived there in all its meaningful resonance. Weil's definition of the poem as the “picture of God's absence” (Notebooks, Vol. II-A, 405), as “misery of the man without God” (Notebooks, Vol. I- C, 229) should not be interpreted merely in terms of lack. It should be interpreted in the sense of the powers that fill and inhabit, of the plenitude that installs itself most optimally in the absence of God, or, rather, as that absence itself in its most terribly “positive” expression, as the content of Abandonment: “The Creation is an abandonment. In creating what is other-than-Himself, God necessarily abandoned it” (First and Last Notebooks, 103). It is in such abandonment that the dominium of force emerges and imposes itself. The Iliad gives the most complete expression to this dominium.
In the Grip of Love
Authors: Esposito Roberto
Published: September 2017

This chapter justifies a reading of Weil as a “combative” thinker not only because she has always considered war to be “the main engine of social life” (Intuitions Pré-Chrétiennes, 76), but also because of something more deeply rooted in her thought and in her life that transmits the tone and language of an uninterrupted battle directed primarily against herself. Even in her most passionate phase of pacifism, this is something that prevented her from “renouncing the struggle which, according to Heraclitus, is the condition of life,” therein revealing life's internal movement. Love is author of the most complete harmony since it unites the most contrary of contraries. This also allowed her to affirm that: “war itself, especially as conducted in the old days, stirs man's sense of beauty in a way that is vital and poignant” (Waiting for God, 106).