bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Gestus of Showing: Brecht, Tableaux and Early Cinema in Angelopoulos’ Political Period (1970–80)
Authors: Koutsourakis Angelos
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the work of Bertolt Brecht as a source of formative energy for Theo Angelopoulos. It reads Angelopoulos' 1970s films with an eye for Brechtian forms and tropes, focusing specifically on the Brechtian concept of Gestus and its application within the filmic medium. The chapter first considers Brecht's insistence that film should be seen like a a series of tableaux, which do not produce ‘wirkenden Handlung’ (plot development), but have a sense of autonomy. It then explains how Angelopoulos' cinema bridges the early and the late period of cinematic modernism, how he thematises the act of representation in his films, and his employment of a recurring theme in modernist cinema: the ‘circular trajectory’. It also analyses the Fabel, or collective narrative, in Angelopoulos' historical tetralogy (Days of '36, The Travelling Players, and Megalexandros).
Eric Ambler: Espionage Chronicler of the 1930s
Authors: Lassner Phyllis
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Eric Ambler's novels of the 1930s, including The Dark Frontier (1936), Background to Danger (1937), Epitaph for a Spy (1938), Cause for Alarm (1938), The Mask of Dimitrios (Also titled A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939). Detailing Ambler's use of a gothic expressionist style, the chapter shows how his anti-fascist stance led to narrative experiments combining popular genre conventions with polemical fiction to critique the more egregious stereotypes spy fiction had previously deployed and to create sympathy on behalf of Hitler’s targeted victims.
Leslie Howard: Propaganda Artist
Authors: Lassner Phyllis
Published: January 2018

This chapter is devoted to the wartime radio broadcasts and films of Leslie Howard, which include Pimpernel Smith (1940) and 49th Parallel (1941). Howard worked with the Ministry of Information and independently for two political purposes: to help build British popular support for the war and to encourage Americans to join Britain in defeating Nazi conquest and persecution. He became both a critical and popular voice advocating for Britain, its people and Hitler's targeted victims, rebutting negative connotations of propaganda. His personal voice and anecdotes on radio, combinations of satire, thriller and romance in Pimpernel Smith, and epic thriller in 49th Parallel were designed to forge a mutually sympathetic transatlantic community emanating from his very successful years in America as a Hollywood star.
The Bloomsbury Group
Authors: Heilbrun Carolyn G.
Published: January 2018

Heilbrun’s influential analysis of the sexual dissidence characteristic of the Bloomsbury Group first appeared in Midway in 1968, years before queer studies or even gay and lesbian studies gained momentum and legitimacy as scholarly fields. Heilbrun counters the ‘profound hostility’ directed towards Bloomsbury, arguing that this hostility stems from discomfort with members of the Bloomsbury Group’s acceptance, even flaunting, of homosexuality and disruption of normative expectations for masculine and feminine behaviour. For Heilbrun, the group combined the best attributes of stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, to embrace reason and rationality, and to eschew violence, but not passion. But their greatest legacy was their conversation, which was light and fun and serious at the same time. Ideas debated in those conversations inform their immense accomplishments in fields as various as economics and the fine arts, and leads Heilbrun to feel that conversation is ‘the apotheosis of human communication’.
Bloomsbury Bashing: Homophobia and the Politics of Criticism in the Eighties
Authors: Reed Christopher
Published: January 2018

Originally published in 1991, this essay explores the way citations of homosexuality as an (even as the) definitive aspect of the Bloomsbury Group were used by ideologically divergent critics in strikingly similar ways. Neo-conservative, Marxist, and feminist critics, united in little else, were similar in using homosexuality to totalize the meaning of Bloomsbury as the manifestation of what they were against. Homosexuality, in these arguments, signified, respectively, left-wing degeneracy, bourgeois privilege, and patriarchal power. Reed makes sense of this paradox by arguing that, for all of these critics, the spectre of the feminized man served as a powerful image of disorder, the ultimate taboo. Totalizing Bloomsbury as homosexuality, and homosexuality as male effeminacy, these critics fell into errors of both fact and logic. In a new introduction, Reed shows how many of these errors continue to be replayed in Bloomsbury criticism of the 2010s.
Making Sense of Wittgenstein’s Bloomsbury and Bloomsbury’s Wittgenstein
Authors: Pohlhaus Gaile , Detloff Madelyn
Published: January 2018

Ludwig Wittgenstein held a contradictory, queer position in Bloomsbury. He was in several homerotically-charged close friendships with men, including John Maynard Keynes, yet he was awkward in the cosmopolitan company of Bloomsbury and derided at Cambridge by second-generation Bloomsberry Julian Bell. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein was concerned with themes that occupied the Bloomsbury Group, such as the difficult process of making sense and the importance of aspectival perception in meaning-making – a key component of Bloomsbury thought from Roger Fry’s cubism to Virginia Woolf’s experimental fiction. Moreover, concern for the difficulties of making sense connect both Wittgenstein and Bloomsbury to contemporary queer theory’s concern for problems of intelligibility, such as Judith Butler’s. Detloff and Pohlhaus explore these themes and their importance for our perception of what Bloomsbury means today.
Introduction: The Contradictions of Peace, International Architecture, the State, and Local Agency
Authors: Richmond Oliver P. , Pogodda Sandra
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the four cornerstones in the relationship between different forms of conflict and peace. State formation describes the formation of the state through indigenous or internal violence between competing groups and their agendas which often turn the state into a criminal and predatory elite racket. Statebuilding is the resultant externalised process aimed at rectifying this situation. Peacebuilding focuses on external support for liberally oriented, rights-based institutions with a special and legitimating focus on norms and human rights, civil society, and a social contract via representative institutions embedded in a rule of law. Lastly, peace formation processes can be defined as the mobilisation — formal or informal, public or hidden, indigenous — of local agents of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, development, or peace actors in customary, religious, cultural, social, or local governance settings. The chapter then outlines the theoretical debates about state formation and statebuilding as well as the critique of liberal statebuilding/peacebuilding that has emerged.
Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo
Authors: Visoka Gëzim
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on Kosovo, in which similar dynamics as to the previous chapter pertain. It involves often ignored grassroots and civil society initiatives. Many have retained their distance from sensitive national political dynamics and take a longer-term perspective. Donors tend not to value highly such processes because their impact is not visible or immediate. Yet they have been instrumental in building networks and trust in local politics, particularly for the younger generation, for women, former combatants, and socially excluded groups. The chapter argues that this has had a limited impact on national politics, specifically with regard to ongoing European Union negotiations and with Serbia. It then concludes that peace formation has more potential than has so far been realised.
Introduction
Authors: Aitken Ian
Published: January 2018

This 18,000 word introduction outlines the writings of the four major realist film theorists, before exploring the issue of realist representation, and cinematic realism. The introduction then attempts to develop a coherent model of cinematic realism from the ideas of the major realist film theorists, and from other theorists and philosophers who influenced those ideas. Finally, the introduction concludes by exploring ways forward in future studies of cinematic realism.
Phenomenology, Theology and ‘Physical Reality’: The Film Theory Realism of Siegfried Kracauer
Authors: Wils Tyson
Published: January 2018

Siegfried Kracauer’s realist film theory incorporates a number of concepts and philosophical approaches. Among the key conceptual formulations is Jewish Messianism and among the key philosophical approaches is phenomenology. Kracauer first started to apply such concepts and approaches to cinema during the period in which he lived as an author, journalist and critic in Weimar Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. However, it is the last book he published during his lifetime, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), that fulfils his desire to establish a theory of cinematic realism, one which he started working on in the 1940s in parallel with his ongoing interests in phenomenology, Jewish Messianism, and other associated areas of thought. This chapter explores these issues and attempts to come to conclusions on them. In particular, the chapter will argue that religious metaphysics still informs Kracauer’s position on realism in Theory of Film, even if such metaphysics is not explicitly referred to or discussed.
The ‘Naturalist’ Treatment of Film in The Specificity of the Aesthetic (Georg Lukács, 1963) and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962; Caspar Wrede, 1970)
Authors: Aitken Ian
Published: January 2018

The distinction between progressive ‘narration’ and reactionary ‘description’, that is, between realism and naturalism, is one that Georg Lukács often made in his critical writings on literature, and is encapsulated in his 1936 essay ‘Narrate or Describe?’. This distinction, appearing in such an uncompromising essay, has also provided critics with reason to dismiss Lukács’ position on naturalism, and also on modernism, given that Lukács argued elsewhere that twentieth-century modernism was a regressive outcome of the alienating tendencies found within nineteenth-century naturalism. However, this chapter argues that the ‘Narrate or Describe?’ essay was related to the context of the 1930s, and that Lukács’ position on naturalism and modernism began to change from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. A key work here was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Lukács then revised his understanding of naturalism, and this found expression in his The Specificity of the Aesthetic (the Aesthetic) (1963). This chapter explores the account of filmic naturalism in the Aesthetic, and then compare that with Lukács’ response to Solzhenitsyn’s work, before applying both to an analysis of the 1970 film One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Post-Mexican Fugue1(Farewell to ¡Que Viva Mexico!)
Authors: Elhaik Tarek
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the watershed curatorial project Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico. Curated in 1998 by Jesse Lerner and Rita Gonzalez as a visual and conceptual probe into the post-Mexican condition, Mexperimental has had an enduring impact on the ethics of curation and pedagogy of moving images. One of the incurable-images of Mexican modernity and visual culture is the maguey plant, which has left an enduring impression on the anthropological, political, optical, and curatorial unconscious of post-revolutionary Mexico. The chapter examines three contemporary experimental documentaries that propose an alternative montage to nationalist and vanguardista uses of the maguey: Rubén Gámez's Magueyes (1962), Olivier Debroise's Un Banquete En Tetlapayac (2000), and Jesse Lerner's Magnavoz (2006).
Staging Laughter and Tears: Libanius, Chrysostom and the Riot of the Statues
Authors: Stenger Jan R.
Published: January 2018

The Riot of the Statues in 387 CE was a decisive moment in the history of Antioch in Syria. After the revolt, tears and public lamentations took over, as the inhabitants awaited imperial punishment. In the course of the crisis the rhetorician Libanius and the preacher John Chrysostom each tried to negotiate a settlement of the dispute between the authorities and the city. Their speeches depict dramatic scenes of collective weeping and lamentation and thus reflect not only emotional states but also the public use of tears. In doing so, they shine light on the theatrical qualities of emotional responses in social interaction. The analysis of the purposes for which both authors exploit the themes of laughing and wailing reveals two contrasting attitudes to urban society and oratory. While both recognise the vital role of laughter and tears in managing social relationships, Libanius’ representation of emotional expressions aims to eulogise the virtues of an imperial officer and maintain the traditional order of society. Chrysostom, by contrast, teaches his audience which emotions are acceptable in a Christian society and which are not. His aim is to implement an emotion management that is oriented towards the heavenly realm.
The Power of Amusement and the Amusement of Power: The Princely Frescoes of St Sophia, Kiev, and their Connections to the Byzantine World
Authors: Boeck Elena
Published: January 2018

The largest Orthodox church of the eleventh century, St. Sophia of Kiev, challenges the boundaries between the sacred and profane spheres. It unites under one roof carefully constructed representations of the sounds, movements, amusements and merriments of the Byzantine court and invocations of the stillness, silence and tears of Orthodox piety. These two irreconcilable realms were brought into dialogue for prince Jaroslav the ‘Wise’ (died 1054), a second-generation Christian who prevailed over his rivals after decades of fratricidal conflict. While in Byzantium these two spheres had long ago established a clear modus vivendi, in Iaroslav’s Rus’ their relationship was just being formulated. St. Sophia of Kiev had to adapt to its prince and Christian decorum had to accommodate to the princely patron.
‘Words Filled With Tears’: Amorous Discourse as Lamentation in the Palaiologan Romances
Authors: Agapitos Panagiotis
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines a particular way in which feelings of love are expressed in the Palaiologan romances (c. 1250–1350). This manner of expression is presented through the systematic use of an imagery and vocabulary of lamentation, that incorporates into these highly artful poetic narratives a discourse deriving from folk poetry. These amorous laments (moirologia), as they are sometimes called by the narrators or even the characters, are not direct quotations of actual folk laments or songs as folklorists in the early twentieth century believed. They are a way of presenting amorous feelings to Byzantine listeners or readers (initially within an aristocratic courtly milieu, later also within a bourgeois environment) in a manner attuned to their contemporary and specific socio-cultural context, yet structurally keeping to the conventions set by the ‘Hellenising’ novels of the Komnenian age. These folk-like songs reflect a new type of poetic and emotional sensibility in late Byzantium, partly in response to Old French romance as it was available in the thirteenth century (orally, at least), partly in response to a growing interest in ‘folk subjects’ as attested by the collections of vernacular proverbs and popular lore.
The Right of Philosophy and the Facts of History: Foucault, Derrida, Descartes
Authors: Rockhill Gabriel
Published: January 2018

This chapter proposes a counter-history of a seminal debate in the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism. It calls into question the widespread assumption that Derrida rejects Foucault’s structuralist stranglehold by demonstrating that the meaning of a text always remains open. Through a meticulous examination of their respective historical paradigms, methodological orientations and hermeneutic parameters, it argues that Derrida’s critique of his former professor is, at the level of theoretical practice, a call to return to order. The ultimate conclusion is that the Foucault-Derrida debate has much less to do with Descartes’ text per se, than with the relationship between the traditional tasks of philosophy and the meta-theoretical reconfiguration of philosophic practice via the methods of the social sciences.
What Is an Intervention? Metaphilosophical Critique and the Reinvention of Contemporary Theory
Authors: Rockhill Gabriel
Published: January 2018

The introduction distinguishes between two different modalities of theoretical practice: one that plays by the rules of an established discourse (an interpretation) and another that seeks to contest these norms in order to introduce alternative forms of intellectual practice (an intervention). Based on this distinction, it outlines the basic stakes of the book as a whole: to intervene in the discourse of contemporary continental philosophy. It then provides an overview of the methodological orientation of the various essays by detailing three different forms of intervention that are operative—to varying degrees—in all of them. To begin with, the essays contribute to a descriptive intervention that seeks to develop the broad lines of a counter-history of contemporary thought in which the dominant schematizations are called into question. Secondly, the chapters contribute either explicitly or implicitly to a metaphilosophical critique of contemporary theoretical practice by questioning many of the unspoken norms that govern philosophic work in the present. This form of critical or metaphilosophical intervention is closely intertwined with a discursive intervention, which consists in elaborating new discursive strategies for thinking and alternative models for doing philosophy.
Introduction: Questions of Female Stardom in British Cinema
Authors: Williams Melanie
Published: January 2018

This chapter provides an introductory overview to the book’s focus on female British stars, explains the parameters of the study and its principle methods, and provides some broader historical contextualisation of ideas of stardom in British cinema culture from the silent period to the present day.
A Plural Century: Situating Interculturalism and Multiculturalism
Authors: Meer Nasar , Modood Tariq , Zapata-Barrero Ricard
Published: January 2018

This chapter engages with some recent authors who believe that an alternative to multiculturalism must be sought in order to understand and live with diversity. These authors are not anti-diversity but they share the view that multiculturalism is no longer a persuasive intellectual or policy approach. For example, the Council of Europe's White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue (2008) included the finding that the majority of practitioners and NGOs across Europe had come to the conclusion that multiculturalism was no longer fit for purpose, and needed to be replaced by a form of interculturalism. Similar views were expressed in the UNESCO World Report Investing in Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue (2008). These statements invite the question of how interculturalism differs from multiculturalism.
Interculturalism and Multiculturalism: Similarities and Differences
Authors: Gagnon Alain-G. , Raffaele Iacovino
Published: January 2018

This chapter frames the merits of interculturalism as an explicit model for integration, in contrast to how Canadian multiculturalism is seen as being a product of nationbuilding efforts, rather than a genuine commitment to the main tenets of multiculturalism. It argues that a model of cultural pluralism along the lines of Quebec interculturalism makes a more serious effort to balance the requirements of unity with the preservation, recognition, and flourishing of minority cultures. At the same time, the chapter notes the enduring problem confronting the Quebec model, one that would have to be taken into account in any future attempts at empirical verification, namely the idea of competing interpretations of citizenship by those identified for integration in the first place.
The Transnational Film Remake in the American Press
Authors: Herbert Daniel
Published: January 2018

American film critics commonly deride Hollywood’s practice of remaking foreign films as an indication of the industry’s creative bankruptcy and imperialist tendencies. Such sentiments occur as early as the 1930s, just as Hollywood gained institutional cohesion and as various countries fostered their local “national” cinemas. This suggests that American critics have consistently held an ambivalent stance toward Hollywood, particularly when situated in relation to the world’s cinemas. Critics have participated in an enduring conflation of the “foreign” with artistic quality and Hollywood with crass commercialism and, concomitantly, reinforced simplistic notions about transnational cinematic flows. Yet within and alongside such reviews, American critics created a rhetorical space for a more nuanced approach to transnational cinema through their use of different critical keywords, points of analysis, and methods of evaluation. This chapter explores the historically changing criteria by which American film critics have evaluated Hollywood’s transnational film remakes as a means of uncovering how the “transnational” operated in popular American film discourse, even if it was not named as such.
Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena (2010)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

I demonstrate how subjectivities work to flatten such folds (as conceived in Deleuze’s work on Foucault and Leibniz) by examining Elena, the logic of which is underpinned by the notion of flatness. In his special attention to surfaces and patterns Zviagintsev elucidates a particular film philosophy which Zviagintsev’s cinematographer, Krichman, calls ‘visualisation’, or transference of meaning with the help of cinematic symbols. The symbolic modes instantiates a new plane of meaning, a surface on which meaning is inscribed, which, while alluding to the materiality of being, is elusive in its metaphysical construction. Cinematically, while the camera looks in both directions, it glides above these surfaces and in doing so creates meaning; it is in the gap between surfaces that the meaning is actualised. Krichman and Zviagintsev discuss non-representational strategies which they call ‘visualisation’. Zviagintsev compares film to a ‘magical mirror’ which enables a two-directional mode of operation: while viewers watch films, the films watch the viewers (Zviagintsev 2014). For him, film offers both knowledge and non-knowledge. The latter—a more powerful stance, according to the director—provides ‘freedom and emptiness’, that is, a temporal lack of signification, a void of meaning to be filled in the process of watching (2014).
Body in Crisis and Posthumous Subjectivity: Igor’ Voloshin’s Nirvana (2008)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

Symbolisation is not about providing symbols as naïve interruptions of the moving image but rather opening the cinematic production to pro-nomination, that is, meaning-making before all names and terms. This process is similar to ex-scription (from Latin ‘exscriptus’, meaning ‘a copy, a transcript’). According to Nancy, it means ‘that the thing’s name, by inscribing itself, inscribes its property as name outside itself’ (1993: 175), or what I called above, strategies of externalisation. Here cinematic work is about writing as ‘ex-scribing’, or working from another edge, or describing states while also pointing to another, metaphysical dimension, that of ex-scription. I explore the possibility of presenting the subject cinematically as a mode, that is, a system of gestures and emotions, and everything else that comes to pass: ‘waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 153). My analysis of Nirvana attests, the body without organs is first and foremost a performing body, a body that is performing itself by means of itself, whereby the boundaries between internal and external structures are blurred and the body becomes a continuous act of inscribing meaning.
Amplifications of Subjectivity: Aleksandr Zel’dovich’s The Target (2010)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

In the final chapter, I am concerned with the confirmation of the subject as a transcendent category in the moment of self-recognition whereby the finite identity is rejected in favour of the infinite Self. Zel’dovich’s The Target employs the sublime as a drama of subject-formation—both as a story of emergence and obliteration—whereby the limits of the self are conceived as a movement away from the self into the topography of solitary subjectivity confronted with open-ended being. The subject becomes an excess of discourse itself, that is, it centres on self-preservation which ensures infinity in stasis. The subject enters the divine state of amnesia after cataclysmic disruptions: the subject is no longer a tyrannous architect of the fallen world but a pre-eminent observer of the unfolding universe. I am particularly interested in the cinematic materiality of the sublime and the immateriality of subjectivity existing outside the temporal framework of history. I centre on issues of scale and amplification as matters of cultural vibration in a post-apocalyptic world. I conclude by demonstrating how Zel’dovich’s The Target with focuses on transient spaces and the epiphany of the universal monad. Thus, this chapter summates the key points presented in the book.
Introduction
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

I start by providing an overview of the major social, political and cultural changes that have occurred in Russia since Putin’s coming to power in 2000 and the Bolotnaya 2011 protests. I discuss Russian film market and industry, focussing on the emergence of new practices and a new generation of filmmakers. I zoom into particular film studios that have been responsible for the production of the most successful films and provide an overview of existing research on the Russian cinema of the period. I outline the methodological parameters and objectives of my research. I introduce the concept of the symbolic mode and explore the relationship between the symbolic mode and the ‘native’ traditions of representation. I consider the symbolic mode a critique of film semiology, polemicizing with mimetic theories and re-visiting poststructuralist thought concerning semiotics / signification. I argue the symbolic mode suggests a move away from the concerns of identity representations towards the problem of subjectivity construction. I introduce Badiou’s concept of film as a way of thinking and I identify how the film chapters develop the argument, pointing out that relevant concepts will be introduced in the film chapters.
Introduction
Authors: Plessis Paul J. du
Published: January 2018

The centre of gravity of legal development therefore from time immemorial has not lain in the activity of the state, but in society itself.

(Ehrlich 1962: 390)

In his 1995 book, The Spirit of Roman Law (Athens, GA 1995), Alan Watson included a chapter provocatively titled ‘Cicero the outsider’. By locating this chapter towards the end of the book, Watson hinted that any discussion of Cicero in the context of the spirit of Roman law (a difficult concept in itself) could only really form part of an appendix (in this case Appendix A) to a book of this kind. The gist of this chapter, following the then dominant Romanist view, is that ‘Cicero’s outlook [was] remarkably different from that of the Roman jurists’ (at 200)....
Imitation of Life and the Depiction of Suburban Space
Authors: Evans Victoria L.
Published: January 2018

After some discussion of the impact of the automobile on the shape of the twentieth-century American city, Chapter 4 ("Imitation of Life and the Depiction of Suburban Space") contrasts John Stahl's 1934 adaptation with Sirk's 1959 cinematic version of Fanny Hurst's best-selling 1933 novel. Among other things, this comparison shows how the director has inscribed the "color line" that divided African-Americans from whites after World War II into Lora Meredith's leafy suburb in the later remake. The historically informed interpretation of the built environment that supports this conclusion also establishes the general context for the final section of this book, which consists of two architectural case studies that are each devoted to one particularly significant film.
The Long Cold War
Authors: Beck John , Bishop Ryan
Published: January 2018

The central assumption of the essays collected here is that the historically bounded period known as the Cold War (1946–1991) does not fully capture the extent to which the institutional, technological, scientific, aesthetic and cultural forms decisively shaped during that period continue to structure, materially and conceptually, the twenty-first-century world. While it is not our intention to claim that the 1946–1991 period did not constitute a specific and distinctive set of historical, geopolitical and cultural circumstances, we are interested in extending the temporal frame in order to consider the intensifications, reversals and irreversibilities brought about by the politics and culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. In numerous ways, the essays gathered here insist that the infrastructure of the Cold War, its technologies, its attitudes and many of its problems continue to shape and inform contemporary responses to large-scale political and technological issues. The essays also explore the various ways in which the continued influences of the Cold War emerge in aesthetic and conceptual/theoretical engagements with contemporary geopolitical conditions. The introduction provides a theoretical and historical articulation of the notion of a 'long' Cold War that continues to shape the contemporary world.
‘The Very Form of Perverse Artificial Societies’: The Unstable Emergence of the Network Family from its Cold War Nuclear Bunker
Authors: Hollings Ken
Published: January 2018

Deleuze and Guattari's ‘perverse artificial societies’ were the random ones thrown up by Paris’s unstable telephone system in the 1960s and 1970s, where crossed lines, misdialed numbers and bad connections created an entire phantom network of voices: ‘a society of unknowns’. Just as the ‘nuclear family’ was seen as a strategic element in the Cold War, dispersed into suburban enclaves of self-contained domestic units, so the ‘network family’ of today, distributed across social media now finds itself being defined as a strategic element in a warring online cyber community: its elusive and fragmented presence regarded as both a threat and a defence position. What this shift reveals is that the nuclear family was not as stable as it seemed and that the networked family is more tightly defined and structured according to what is perceived to exist outside of it. From this perspective it is easier to understand today’s panics over online security and ‘whistle blowers’ against state intervention in private communication, who are frequently presented by the mainstream media as domestically unstable – the chapter ends with a discussion Edward Snowden, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange, together with the psychosexually aggressive language and imagery of Anonymous.
Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous Systems
Authors: Bishop Ryan
Published: January 2018

A legacy of the ‘Long Cold War’ can be found in the multiple large-scale interrelated remote sensing systems operative in the present. Smart dust, for example, constitutes the basis of polyscalar computer systems of remote sensing at micro-levels and relates to ubiquitous computing, ‘pervasive networks’ and ‘utility fogs’ as potentially transmitting endless streams of ‘real time’ or stored data. Developed initially for DARPA, Smart Dust started with work by Kris Pister's team at UC Berkeley, who refer to the project as ‘autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimetre.’ The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 pushed nuclear testing underground, forcing innovations in modes of remote sensing for purposes of verification. Because so much of teletechnological development depends on the understanding of the subject as an agent enacting its will upon a world of objects (including other subjects), the means of imagining extensions of that sensing and acting self invariably fold into and influence the interpretation of that self. The chapter provides a meditation on 'the auto-' and ‘the nomos’ as they pertain to autonomous sensing systems and the immaterial worlds that helped them come into being as well as their continuation into further systems of control at a distance.
Introduction
Authors: Dwyer Tessa
Published: January 2018

Detailing the intimate relationship that cinema and related screen media enjoy with foreignness and language difference, this introductory chapter argues that language and translation have been systematically overlooked within Screen Studies, yet are set to become major areas of interest as online technologies reshape the global mediascape, affecting modes of access and engagement, redirecting content flows and challenging copyright regulations.
Dubbing Undone: Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)
Authors: Dwyer Tessa
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores how dubbing has been deployed as a mode of deliberate, self-reflexive mistranslation. Can Dialectics Break Bricks? flaunts translation dysfunction as a deliberate strategy of political or aesthetic intervention, challenging the authority of authorship and ‘originals’ in the process. Engaging extensively with the notion of ‘abusive translation’ developed by Derrida and updated by Abe Markus Nornes, it demonstrates how errant forms of screen translation evade theoretical containment, and indicate a path for revaluation firmly grounded by the ‘practical’. Parodic mistranslation or deconstructive dubbing, it proposes, presents an overly abusive example of screen translation that indicates how quality considerations are insufficient for engaging with improper modes of practice. It also introduces issues relating to translation censorship and media piracy foreshadowed by the parody dynamics at play in Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
Ātman and its transition to worldly existence
Authors: Bailey Greg
Published: January 2018

The central concept of atman was acknowledged to be 'ungraspable and unthinkable'. This problem is related to the contrast between the ontological completeness of atman and the ontological incompleteness of the physical world of the senses and mind. In order to understand the entrance of atman into the world of imperfect existence, there is a need for precise philology, and in particular the meanings of the verbs as ('being') and bhu ('becoming'), and the prefix vi-. The ontological issue is then related to socio-economic structure.
New riders, old chariots: poetics and comparative philosophy
Authors: Forte Alexander S. W. , Smith Caley C.
Published: January 2018

The genealogy of chariot imagery in India and Greece is best explained not by influence between the cultures but by understanding the place of each text within its own cultural tradition. The chariot journey described in the prologue of Parmenides is influenced by the chariot race in Iliad book 23, which also influenced Empedocles and Socrates. In the Katha Upanishad the chariot is a metaphor for sacrifice and fire altar, and a redeployment of the chariot imagery and narrative setting used in the earlier Katha Brahmana.The metaphysics of the Katha Upanishad should be contextualised as the component of a hieratic canon.
“A Vicious Circle”: Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward no. 6
Authors: Burry Alexander
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores Karen Shakhnazarov’s 2009 film of Chekhov’s “Ward no. 6,” which combines the story’s plot with “mockumentary” features, as the director includes interviews with patients from an actual mental institution. It is argued that the focus of these interviews on childhood trauma underscores the same theme in the story. This theme can be traced back to Dostoevskii’s depiction of suffering children in The Brothers Karamazov, and also reflects Chekhov’s knowledge of the degeneration theory circulating in the 1890s. Shakhnazarov’s depiction of the same tragic plot in contemporary times implies that the “hereditary taint,” with its violence and abuse from generation to generation, continues to affect Russian society today.
Plato’s Protagoras: The Authority of Beginning an Education
Authors: Price Daniel
Published: January 2018

Daniel Price’s “Plato’s Protagoras: The Authority of Beginning an Education” follows Derrida’s re-reading of Hegel’s framing of philosophical history through to Plato’s Protagoras. Price, seeking an alternative to the Hegelian frame, inquires into the place of the virtuous subject in Plato. In the Protagoras Price finds that the unity and goodness of virtue claims our subjectivity, not vice versa. This claim on our subjectivity orients us to the task of providing a ground for the unity of virtue. This does not concern the authority of a teacher, who demands that we reject any thought that is not owned, that does not pass through the lens of self-conscious self-appropriation. Instead it signifies the emergence of subjectivity through the claims that are made upon us by language.
Univocity, Duality, and Ideal Genesis: Deleuze and Plato
Authors: Bova Paul M. , Livingston Paul M.
Published: January 2018

John Bova and Paul M. Livingston’s “Univocity, Duality, and Ideal Genesis: Deleuze and Plato” elaborates an unorthodox yet powerful dualism in the writings of Plato. This dualism accounts for the structural origin of both supersensible ideas and the sensible particulars which participate in them. Further, this duality extends to the reflexive level of theory itself, recognizable in the incompatible metalogical demands for consistency and completeness. Bova and Livingston connect this formal dualism to Deleuze’s discussions of ideal genesis and the paradoxes of becoming. They show a presence of a proper “Platonism” of the Idea in Deleuze, and establish thereby the potential for a recuperation of Platonic dualism in the context of the Deleuzian univocity of being.
Contingency and Skepticism in Agamben’s Thought
Authors: Heiden Gert-Jan van der
Published: January 2018

Gert-Jan van der Heiden’s “Contingency and Skepticism in Agamben’s Thought” articulates an encounter between Sextus Empiricus and Giorgio Agamben. Contrary to the usual epistemological reading of ancient skepticism, van der Heiden points out the ontological import of skeptical problems. Van der Heiden focuses especially on how skeptical and quasi-skeptical terms (such as ἐποχή‎ and οὐ μᾶλλον‎, the Platonic εὐπορία‎, and the Pauline καταργεῖν‎) underlie Agamben’s ontology of contingency and potentiality. Thus van der Heiden uncovers a peculiar potentiality of the skeptic. The skeptic has the power to withhold assent, to refuse to affirm or to deny any particular belief; this is the habit of skeptical thinking itself, a power that is not subordinated to any sort of actuality.
Everyday Moments
Authors: Taylor Alison
Published: January 2018

Chapter two seeks to reframe the way in which we approach the affective potential of extreme cinema by investigating an implicit dynamic at work in its reception: the distinction between an immediate visceral response, and a more pervasive enduring kind of affect. Arguing that the triangulation of disturbing affect, the violent, and the everyday is not purely a recent phenomenon, chapter two traces two lines of continuity between past and recent extreme cinema. The first thread is a “discourse of immediacy”: the tendency of critics and scholars to privilege immediate visceral responses such as shock, outrage and disgust when articulating the kinds of affect extreme films produce. Secondly, the chapter reveals that the aesthetic tension between the extreme and the everyday is observable in films prior to the new extremism, albeit in more discreet ways. This latter argument is demonstrated through detailed studies of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985). Significant not only for their notoriety as extreme, but because despite their seeming incongruence with the everyday, their subtle gestures towards it at key moments is crucial to their affective quality, these films signal that the distinction between the extreme and the everyday is not necessarily clear cut.
Everyday Structures/Everyday Language
Authors: Taylor Alison
Published: January 2018

Chapter four expands on both the aesthetic tendency to refuse guidance in relation to depictions of violence, and the need in the critical discourse that surrounds extreme cinema to impose coherence on violent representation. Where the films in chapter three stylistically equate moments of extreme violence with the banal, chapter four considers films in which the intrusion of violence into the everyday is marked as a definite rupture. Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (2001) and Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003) establish familiar patterns and worlds only to break them with paroxysms of violence in their final minutes. Disoriented by these seemingly illegible shifts, critical and scholarly responses tend to interpret them in terms of a shift in genre, or dismiss them as an authorial misstep. Unpacking these responses, and considering issues of authorship, genre, and aesthetics, chapter four argues that it is the films’ broader orienting structures that pave the way for disturbing affect. This chapter considers the ways in which Breillat and Dumont’s films involve us by establishing proximate and alienating structures congruent with the theoretical distinctions between positive and negative conceptions of the everyday.
Introduction
Authors: van Lit L. W. C.
Published: January 2018

The first two, very short sections introduce the questions this book aims to answer and outlines how the answers are distributed over the chapters. The next section is for those unfamiliar with Suhrawardī and the world of image, giving a primer on what scholars have been able to figure out so far. The latter half of the chapter explains the methodology. Next to conventional close reading, this book also utilizes a form of ‘distant reading’. In general, this approach uses automated searches through a large corpus of texts to detect patterns that would go unnoticed for a normal reader. For this book, it means that especial attention is paid to the intertextuality of all texts within a commentary tradition. By tracing the very same sentence in dozens of texts and mapping their mutations, a genealogy can be established which is a proxy for the trajectory through history of an idea.
Neither Analytic Nor Dialectic I: Horizon
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

The second chapter contains an exposition and critique of Garcia’s definitions of analysis and dialectics, again tying his discussion to canonical discussion in analytic and continental philosophy. ‘Analysis’ is explicated via a discussion of G.E. Moore’s canonical arguments as well as more recent work on Ramsey sentences, Ramsifying the George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art in the Process. Recent criticisms of Ramsey Sentence Functionalism support Garcia’s contention about analysis. For dialectics Garcia’s tragic aporetic dialectics is contrasted with traditional explications of Hegel.
Introduction
Authors: Wånggren Lena
Published: January 2018

The introduction outlines the main concern of the book: the crucial role of technology in configuring notions of female emancipation in the late nineteenth century. Drawing attention to specific New Woman writings from fiction and the periodical press, the chapter introduces an understanding of how certain technologies of the time come to work as ‘freedom machines’, as visual emblems connected to the New Woman and thus signifying female emancipation. Briefly discussing New Woman writers’ engagements with modern technologies of transport, media, and communication not included in the monograph (such as the railway, omnibuses, photography, the telegraph, and the telephone), the introduction concludes with an outline of the following chapters and an explanation of the structure of the book.
The New Woman in Technological Modernity
Authors: Wånggren Lena
Published: January 2018

This first chapter places the New Woman figure in the literary and historical context of the late nineteenth century, as well as outlines the theoretical and methodological premises of the book. Defining along the way key terms such as modernity, technology and gender, the chapter asserts that in order to describe fin de siècle modernity, one must take into account not only the technological changes or advances specific of the time, but in addition the role played by contemporary notions of gender, and the cultural work of literature in changing these. Just as literature gains significance first in connection to other agencies – such as a reader – so technology also takes on specific meanings first when considered in a social context.
The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle
Authors: Wånggren Lena
Published: January 2018

The third chapter examines the specific technology most commonly associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. When the safety bicycle first came into widespread use in the late 1880s it became connected with the New Woman and her ‘unsexing’ potential, with the loosening of social restrictions and with geographic mobility. Engaging first with medical as well as public debates around the perceived physical and social effects of the bicycle, along with guidebooks for female cyclists, the chapter moves on to consider how the bicycle through literature becomes a symbol of emancipation. Reading H. G. Wells Wheels of Chance (1897) and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), the chapter complicates the notion of the bicycle as a democratising ‘freedom machine’, by insisting on the class specifics of the New Woman and the commercialism of the late-Victorian literary market.
Chaste Selfhood: Ben Jonson’s Critique of Urban Chastity Tropes
Authors: Gillen Katherine
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the bourgeois subjectivity articulated in city comedy. It begins by addressing the tendency of city comedies such as Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange to juxtapose chaste women with desiring, fragmented male characters so as to critique an ineffectual masculinity that flounders in the urban marketplace. The chapter then turns to Ben Jonson, whose treatment of chastity—and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and commerce more generally—has been underexplored. Jonson satirizes conventional deployments of chastity in Epicoene, rendering chaste integrity impossible in early capitalist environments and rejecting the queer implications of a model of male subjectivity that defines itself through theatrical chastity. Bartholomew Fair, by contrast, invokes chastity’s commodity status in order to present—and largely embrace—a queer, contingent form of early capitalist subjectivity. Furthermore, Jonson applies this model of commoditised subjectivity to the condition of the commercial playwright, indicating that his own agency as an author lies in the ability to negotiate the strictures of the commodity markets to which he is subjected.