bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The ‘Russian World’ and Ukraine
Authors: Wawrzonek Michał
Published: May 2022

The chapter focuses on how the concept of the ‘Russian world’ gained currency in the Russian Federation during Vladimir Putin’s presidency, and how it generated a symbolic conflict in Ukraine through an amalgamation of spatial connections with historical memory and, above all, through linking the presence of the Russian language in Ukraine to questions of social and political identity. Discussing linguistic evidence of the Russian language’s persistence in the face of accelerating Ukrainization, the chapter discusses the clashes of Ukrainian and Russian state interests in the field of language promotion before and after the ‘Ukrainian crisis’ of 2013–14. It argues that, in the wake of the forced annexation of Crimea and armed intervention in the Donbas, Russia gambled and lost the social and cultural capital it had invested in Ukraine, and so unwittingly further depoliticised language policy.
Between Emotions and Pragmatism: The Russian Language in Kazakhstan and the ‘Russian Factor’
Authors: Kosmarskaya Natalya , Savin Igor
Published: May 2022

The chapter explores the present role and the future of the Russian language in Kazakhstan. It contrasts state language policies with the views of ordinary Kazakhstani citizens, recorded mainly in interviews and round-table discussions with students of national universities conducted between 2016 and 2019. Suggesting that the Russian linguistic-cultural space in Central Asia is largely a historically rooted phenomenon and has not been primarily dependent on Russia, the authors suggest that the Russian Federation should readjust its external language and culture promotion, which has so far been geared almost exclusively to the so-called ‘compatriots’, and should take the needs of non-Russian Russian-speakers into serious consideration.
Speakers of Russian in Ireland: ‘What unites us is language, but in all other respects we are different’
Authors: Denman Feargus
Published: May 2022

In the Republic of Ireland, some twenty thousand people speak Russian. A good fifth of this population is Irish-born, only 9% are Russian nationals. The majority of people who speak Russian in Ireland have arrived since 2000 from the Baltic EU member states and other former Soviet republics. This chapter analyses how these Russophones invoke, under the term “Russian”, multiple concepts of “the” language, like that of a Russian speaker, that of the Russian people, that shared by speakers of Russian (whether through Soviet-education or acquired in the home) and that of the state language of the Russian Federation. The chapter examines how gaps between the de facto community in conversation and a putatively general community of speakers of Russian within Ireland and in international diaspora are negotiated and how the links between them are alternately invoked and challenged.
Promoting Russian Higher Education
Authors: Mäkinen Sirke
Published: May 2022

Russian state authorities have emphasised the importance of promoting Russian higher education abroad, recruiting international students and taking part in the global education market. So far, the rationale for these actions has been political instead of economic. This chapter argues that the political rationale is closely linked with the language question, i.e., the promotion of the Russian language abroad and targeting the promotion of Russian higher education to those ‘markets’ in which there are Russian-speaking audiences, and in which Russian higher education is already well known and reasonably respected. The economic rationale would instead lead to increasing the use of English as a medium of teaching, which the new project for the Development of the Export Potential of the Russian System of Education’ (2017) encourages. Analysing documents, expert interviews and media materials, the paper further explores the role of language in higher education promotion.
Introduction
Authors: Peters Laura
Published: May 2022

The introduction acknowledges the important legacy of critics including Nina Auerbach and Laura Peters, to the analysis of the literary orphan and extends those discussions with reference to recent developments in kinship and family studies. This chapter argues that the extent to which orphan figures make visible the cultural role of inheritance, allied with their interest in self-invention and determination, locates them at a point of transition in many cultural exchanges. The collection explores the cultural and social ramifications of orphanhood and seeks to explore both the radical potential embodied in, and the shared problematic genealogy of being outside heredity. The specific focus on orphanhood, whether legitimate or illegitimate, emphasises one who is on the margins of familial and kinship structures and whose challenge is to develop relationships and an alternate family/kinship circle, in order to see themselves recognised as human. A reading of orphan figures consequently illuminates the cultural, legal, emotional and scientific taxonomies that require negotiation well into adulthood. The chapters also ensure the orphan is represented in larger current debates such as family law and inheritance, kinship studies, gender and writing, children’s literature, memory, ethnicity and national belonging, neo-Victorianism and posthumanism.
The Legal Guardian and Ward: Discovering the Orphan’s ‘Best Interests’ in Mansfield Park and Mrs Fitzherbert’s Notorious Adoption Case
Authors: Nixon Cheryl L.
Published: May 2022

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an orphan from a wealthy or landed family would typically be cared for by a legal guardian. An examination of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park demonstrates how the novel overtly criticizes the legal structuring of guardianship. In Mansfield Park, the child’s emotional needs are emphasised by recreating Fanny as an orphan and dramatizing her mistreatment by her surrogate family. A turn to Seymour v. Euston (1803-6), a scandalous case that involves the Prince Regent (later King George IV), his illegal wife Maria Fitzherbert, and her claims to the custody of an orphaned girl, reveals the radical nature of arguing for the emotional care of the child. Unable to rely on the clarity of biological bonds, the guardian/ward relationship forces the law to define the foundations of the family: is the best family for the child the one that emphasises, legal protocol, bodily maintenance, economic trusteeship or emotional care? This chapter argues that Mansfield Park advocates for new understandings of the orphan and her best interests—new understandings that the law gradually adopts. In both law and literature, the orphan becomes an important testing ground for new definitions of the family.
Orphanhoods and Bereavements in the Life and Verse of Charlotte Smith Richardson (1775–1825)
Authors: Binfield Kevin
Published: May 2022

Poems Written on Different Occasions (1806), the first volume published by Charlotte (née Smith) Richardson (1775-1825), is her subjective record of losses, lamentations, and attempts at consolation; her second volume, Poems Chiefly Composed during the Pressure of Severe Illness (1809), continues some of those themes among poems that mark Smith Richardson’s expanding social sphere and perspective. Both volumes, supplemented by archival materials (parish records, charity school records, wills, and friendly society records), afford a chance to consider the ways in which orphanhood or bereavement may be understood not only as a material status but also as an affective and social process, a standpoint, and a trope constructed within a larger series of losses that, in Smith Richardson’s case, also includes bastardy, widowhood, and parental bereavement. Far from jealously guarding her bereavement and distinguishing her own case as unique, Smith Richardson’s poetry indicates that bereavement became a lens through which she viewed others, seeing in them, as in herself, bereavements that were actual, feared, or conjectured. Read alongside her verse, the totality of records of Smith Richardson’s life also demonstrates her attempts to navigate social relations and, eventually, redefine her orphanhood through her adult actions.
Adoptive Reading
Authors: Hager Kelly
Published: May 2022

Consider these characters: Oswald Bastable (and his five brothers and sisters), Sara Crewe, Tom Sawyer, Anne (of Green Gables), Rebecca (of Sunnybrook Farm). Orphans all, at least in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, and also voracious, impressionable, and, to use the parlance of our day, interactive readers. Acting out scenes from their favourite novels and poems and ‘tak[ing] them to illuminate the world’ (the phrase is Jonathan Culler’s) is not in these novels, quixotic behaviour they need to grow out of but rather a reading strategy that allows them to find a kind of family, a community and a sense of belonging. What is more, their ‘active, invested, adoptive reading’ (Stauffer 95) enables them to survive in both domestic and economic terms. This chapter therefore seeks to shed light on the way that childhood reading was constructed and construed in the period we celebrate as the Golden Age of children’s literature and to uncover the connection between that kind of reading and the way these classic texts for and about children contributed to the era’s valorisation of the nuclear family, even as they depict and celebrate decidedly non-normative forms of family.
The Limits of the Human? Exhibiting Colonial Orphans in Victorian Culture
Authors: Peters Laura
Published: May 2022

On the 24th of June, 1848, the Examiner covered an exhibition in Egyptian Hall: one of many which exhibited indigenous peoples from around the world. It had at its centre two Bushman orphans, a fifteen year old boy and an eight year old girl described as: ‘pathetic elf-like creatures with triangular-shaped faces and slant eyes that gave them a foxy expression’ (p 403). People paid to see the orphans: they were a commodity. But their presence, exhibited alongside a baboon from the ‘MONKEY TRIBE’ from Port Natal, challenged the boundaries of humanity. Were these children human or were they the missing link? These questions were posed by the newly formed Ethnological Society and the paying public alike and more exhibits of orphan children followed. This chapter explores how the exhibited orphan child in Victorian times highlights the need for posthumanism to navigate issues of race and the historical legacy of racism. The orphan, at the intersection of contemporary discourses of race, science and childhood, spoke to emerging discourses of civilisation, racial superiority and the human/non-human/sub-human divide. As an exhibit, the orphan embodied the commodification of orphanhood and race which simultaneously challenged key mythologies of the family, kinship, community and humanity.
Getting the Father Back: The Orphan’s Oath in Florence Marryat’s Her Father’s Name and R. D. Blackmore’s Erema
Authors: Merchant Peter
Published: May 2022

Orphan narratives are often closely concerned with ensuring a sound inheritance or refurbishing a damaged one. In 1876, two orphaned heroines were created for whom such refurbishment becomes the defining duty of their teenage years and the main substance of each novel, namely: Her Father’s Name (Florence Marryat) and Erema; or, My Father’s Sin (R.D Blackmore). Both Blackmore’s Erema and Marryat’s Leona are deprived of their fathers twice over: first through death and then, since each father is at that point made out to have been a murderer and a fugitive from justice, through character assassination. The need to expunge these false accusations transforms both heroines into ‘cold case’ investigators. Transported back in time, Leona and Erema respectively reconstruct the events of twenty-five and fifty years ago. They turn into globetrotters too, following trails that lead to Britain from Brazil and California. With the ballast of family ties cast off, the orphan is empowered to roam free. As they cross continents, so these two leap over the boundaries of gender. In both desire and deed, they emerge as two of the most emancipated protagonists of this period. Each is an intriguing telescope through which to view Victorian orphan narratives.
Girlhood and Space in Nineteenth-Century Orphan Literature
Authors: Carroll Jane Suzanne
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the relationship between orphans and liminality in children’s literature. Focusing on girls’ fiction and female protagonists who are on the cusp of growing up, I argue that female orphans are socially, spatially, and spiritually liminal in the latter part of the long nineteenth-century. While the orphan figure has been a standard in children’s literature since its modern inception with texts like Newbery’s Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), the orphan girl comes to new prominence in children’s books in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate that this new prominence coincides with the rise of new concepts of ‘girlhood’, and in particular, with the identification of girlhood as a liminal phase of life. Building on Beth Rogers’s work on 19th century girlhood, I argue that female orphans in popular children’s literature of this period are presented – and indeed celebrated – as liminal figures. Using the work of five popular female writers: Johanna Spyri; Frances Hodgson Burnett; L.M. Montgomery; Eleanor Porter and Charlotte Brontë, whose works focus on female experience, I consider the orphan girl as a socially, spatially, and spiritually liminal figure.
Orphans, Money and Marriage in Sensation Novels by Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman
Authors: Nelson Claudia
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers Philip Pullman’s neo-Victorian Sally Lockhart narratives (1985-90, 1994) alongside a Victorian sensation novel, Wilkie Collins’ No Name (1862). Juxtaposing these oppositional texts from different moments reveals what they share. Both examine standard notions of family by focusing on a young female orphan, who learns that she can achieve and maintain domestic security only if she also has financial security and vice versa. Both fictions depict domestic ties as commodities, and the law as incapable of keeping pace with a domesticity represented as contingent and fluctuating in value and values. Both protagonists respond to their unusual family circumstances by becoming resourceful entrepreneurs who direct their energies towards the acquisition of money in a way that illustrates money’s connection to family. Both texts ultimately erase their protagonist’s earning power, replacing this with a happy marriage, recalling Thiel’s analysis that ‘as late Victorians we have […] implicitly inherited and internalized various ideologies spawned during the nineteenth century’. If the Lockhart trilogy uses the figure of the orphan and the context of the earlier century to illuminate problems of the past, it also demonstrates that the fiction of our more recent memory may not have devised satisfactory solutions to these problems.
The Ideology of Democratic Athens
Authors: Barbato Matteo
Published: May 2022

The debate on Athenian democratic ideology has long been polarised around two extremes. A Marxist tradition has propounded a negative view of ideology as a cover-up for Athens’ internal divisions. Another tradition, sometimes referred to as culturalist, has provided a neutral interpretation of ideology as the fixed set of ideas shared by the members of the Athenian community. This book draws from the New Institutionalism in political science to remedy this dichotomy and provide a unitary and comprehensive approach to Athenian democratic ideology. Through four case studies that compare different versions of selected myths in Athenian social memory, it demonstrates that Athenian democratic ideology was a fluid set of ideas, values, and beliefs shared by the Athenians as a result of a constant ideological practice influenced by the institutions of the democracy. This process entailed the active participation of both the mass and the elite, and enabled the Athenians to produce multiple and compatible ideas about their community and its mythical past.
The Discursive Parameters Of Athenian Democratic Institutions
Authors: Barbato Matteo
Published: May 2022

This chapter argues that Athenian democratic institutions were characterised by discursive parameters which conditioned the behaviour of political actors and the construction of democratic ideology. The state funeral for the war dead led orators to produce an idealised image of the city to construct an imagined community. The litigants in the lawcourts were bound by the Heliastic Oath to couch their arguments in accordance with justice and specific legal charges. The speakers in the Assembly were expected to address issues of advantage and discuss the best policy for the city, while in the Council the focus on justice and advantage coexisted in accordance with the Bouleutic Oath. The dramatic festivals enabled the tragedians to pose questions on and reaffirm shared values and beliefs. The discussion of the discursive parameters of Athenian institution in this chapter also illuminates some characteristics of Athenian democratic ideology, most notably its constructive (rather than negative) function, its normative value, and its bidirectional nature which actively involved both the elite (as orators, playwrights, or chorēgoi) and the mass (through participation in ritual, voting, clamouring, providing councillors, or manning choruses).
Conclusions
Authors: Barbato Matteo
Published: May 2022

This chapter reviews the main findings of the book. The key features of Athenian democratic ideology are summarised, while the book’s contribution to other fields in the study of ancient Greece and Athenian democracy (institutional history; social memory; Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric) is illustrated. The book’s findings are then contextualised within the broader scope of the research on ideology within the social sciences, with particular emphasis on their complementarity with van Dijk’s theory of ideology.
Stuttering, Nonsense and Zeroth Voice
Authors: Newland Jane
Published: May 2022

Traditional approaches to children’s literature attempt to position the child within ideological discourses and focus on the creation or silencing of the child’s voice. This chapter addresses the paradox of children’s literature in which an adult author must write in their capacity as a child and focuses on the child in children’s literature which succeeds in minorising language and making language stutter. This chapter considers the surfaces of sense on which nonsense words are created and concludes with a call to recognise the zeroth voice of the molecular child: a voice called out of the reading of texts which forms as (non)sense is created.
Painting the Imperceptible: Deleuze in Picture-book Form
Authors: Newland Jane
Published: May 2022

This chapter consider the unusual representation of Deleuzian thought – the picture book, L’Oiseau philosophie, illustrated by Deleuze’s long-time friend, Jacqueline Duhême. The first part of the chapter examines the recurring image of the bird in the text before moving on to the image of the indefinite molecular child-figure. This chapter then sheds light on a little-discussed yet deeply important friendship in Deleuze’s life, that with Jean-Pierre Bamberger. The chapter concludes with the concept of the imperceptible and how the illustrator is able to paint the imperceptible in this work.
Speculative Verses of Islam in Singapore Malay Literature
Authors: Bahrawi Nazry
Published: May 2022

The discourse of Islamic thought should not be confined to the normative fields of fiqh, usuluddin, shari’ah laws and tafsir. It can also be seen in literature, even though this discipline has been marginal to Islamic studies. This chapter aims to address this gap. It begins from the acknowledgment that literary fiction channels and shapes Islamic thought if we consider the well-known cases of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Naguib Mahfouz’s Awlad Haritna. Like their peers in Muslim cultures elsewhere, Malay/Muslim writers in Singapore, too, have engaged deeply with Islamic thought in their works. What are their sensibilities? This article will explore their works as aspiration and critique of the state of Islamic practices in the Republic. It considers Malay literature produced in both Bahasa and English. First, it will situate Singapore Malay literature within the region of Muslim Southeast Asia by tracing its responses to ideas such as Sastera Islam in Malaysia and Sastera Profetik in Indonesia. Then, it will consider selected contemporary works from Malay writers in Singapore in order to arrive at a sense of the evolution and trajectory of Islamic thought in contemporary literature.
Islamic Populism and Identity Politics of MUI: Islamic Leadership, Halal Project and the Threat to Religious Freedom in Indonesia
Authors: Hasyim Syafiq
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the role of MUI (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, Council of Indonesian Ulama) in stimulating the emergence of Islamic populism and identity politics in Indonesia. It focuses on MUI’s discourse and activism in using Islam as the main argument for attracting the interest of the Indonesian Muslim community and surveys its effect on recent general elections and society at large. Specifically, it addresses MUI’s promotion of Islamic leadership during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial elections and the 2014 and 2019 presidential elections, as well as the Islamic lifestyle that MUI has been fostering through halal certification for the past three decades. This chapter argues that MUI produces fatwas and religious advice that cherish illiberal attitudes towards religious freedom. Through its strategic positioning as the guardian of the ummah and its shari’ah agenda, MUI has become the main proponent of Islamic populism and identity politics in the post-reform era of Indonesia. As a result, the democratic principle of the Pancasila state that treats all citizens as equal regardless of their religion is under threat.
The Making and Unmaking of the Rohingya
Authors: Islam Imrul
Published: May 2022

Around the world, the mosaic of Muslim identity is under attack from institutions that benefit from portraying Muslims as a homogenous community uniquely susceptible to violence. In China, the Chinese Communist Party has labelled Islam a ‘contagion’, necessitating the internment of one million Uyghur Muslims in ‘re-education camps’; in the United States, former President Trump’s Muslim ban was set into place ‘to protect the nation from foreign terrorist entry’ (Bridge Initiative 2018). Myanmar continues to whitewash the Rohingya genocide as a counter-terrorism operation against alien insurgents (International Court of Justice 2019). This chapter shows how the transmutation of Muslim identity led to – and retroactively allowed the state to justify – genocide in the state of Rakhine. The chapter consists of three parts: first, it situates the history of the Rohingya within the history of Burma, showing how the continuity of colonial traits culminated in a violent contestation of Muslim identity in the country. Second, it traces how political dissent in Rakhine was weaponised to redefine Rohingya identity in antithesis to the identity of the Buddhist majority state. Third, it reflects on the crisis of 2017, framing genocide as a project of anachronistic remembering mediated by structural and epistemic Islamophobia.
Towards a Political Order
Authors: Caporali Riccardo
Published: May 2022

The second chapter reconstructs in a synthetic and preliminary way the essential points of Spinoza's anthropology and political philosophy. The definition of the relation between nature and things, as put forward in the Ethics, already has in itself a political significance, because it opposes every possible form of transcendence of the imperium, as is evident from the demolition, repeatedly argued by Spinoza, of the symmetry – recurrent in the history of political thought, from the Bible to Bacon – between "kings" and "gods". But Spinoza also distinguishes himself from the prevailing theoretical constructions of early modernity, from Hobbes to Kant, in its various variants. He adopts the language and categories of modernity (starting with the idea of conatus and natural law), but with the objective of proposing an alternative solution to the political problem to the "representative" one (and therefore always "eminent", transcendental, if not transcendent) mostly hypothesised by the moderns. Political power remains within the natural relations between human beings, who appear inevitably related by their common nature as "modes", that is, as expressions of the one nature-substance. Apart from any classical finalism, it is these relations, under the banner of the identity of law and power, that mark out the modes of politics.
Introduction: Serial Genders, Gendered Serialities
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

The introduction critically explores the two paradigms underlying this study: gender and seriality. It assembles an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for the following readings and terminology that the book develops. The work of Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler, and Judith Roof figures prominently, especially their understanding of gender as an interactive, serial process. Secondly, the introduction provides an overview of the emergent field of seriality studies, its chief interests and methodologies and begins to explore how the analytical category of gender can add a productive further dimension to this field.
Palimpsest: Gendering Through Accountability
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

As a model by which to explore the The Walking Dead’s gender performances, the palimpsest can capture how the comic series of the same name reverberates in the show’s storytelling, which paradoxically both draws on the comic and seeks to overwrite it. Palimpsestic re-inscriptions are not purposefully layered characterizations but rather demonstrate how unintentional textual echoes continue, even if the show aspires to learn from previous controversies the comic caused. Specifically, in the case of unpopular characters, palimpsestic echoes do not appear to be envisioned by the show's production. Here then, criticism of the zombie narrative’s essentialist gender roles becomes a significant reception practice. The chapter strategically provides readings of characters relatively consistent with the comic book (Michonne, Lori), of ones widely divergent from it (Carol, Andrea), and of an original creation without a comic book precedent (Daryl). The respective position of characters as either fan favorites or much proclaimed ‘worst characters’ serves as a lynchpin for the chapter’s readings.
Repair and the Irreparable in Contemporary Aboriginal Art
Authors: Best Susan
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers the representation of trauma in Australian Indigenous art, focusing in particular on contemporary art that directly or indirectly addresses Australia’s shameful colonial histories. I analyse art that moves beyond the familiar repertoire of postmodern political art, which dominated identity politics art of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. That language is effective for the registration of anger, but less effective in conveying the damage caused by annihilating narratives about race and historical atrocities such as massacres. I consider how the work of Brisbane-based Indigenous artists Judy Watson and Robert Andrew occupies the deeply ambivalent space of reparative aesthetics articulated by queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Sedgwick frames the reparative position as one that can hold in tension both negative and positive feelings. In contrast, the work of artists, such as Gordon Bennett and Vernon Ah Kee, underscores the irreparable and the deep marks of trauma. I examine how these different strategies memorialise traumatic experiences that normally escape capture.
The Look of Silence and the Ethics of Atonement
Authors: Caze Marguerite La
Published: May 2022

Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Look of Silence, follows The Act of Killing, which filmed perpetrators re-enacting their crimes in the genre of their choice. This second film undertakes a process of atonement for the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide, the chapter contends, by considering how the survivors might confront the killers and build relationships with the next generation. The film focuses on the attempt of one survivor, Adi Rukun, to discover the truth of what happened to his murdered brother and to confront those responsible. The chapter discusses the presentation of his search for atonement in relation to the concept of communal atonement. A puzzle about atonement is how it is possible if the individuals who committed the wrong do not atone. Thus the process of making the documentary, participating in it, and the screenings in Indonesia and elsewhere is considered to contribute to atonement despite the generally unapologetic response from the killers.
Introduction
Authors: La Caze Marguerite , Nannicelli Ted
Published: May 2022

In the era of fake news, truthiness, reality creation and widespread cynicism and disaffection about images and how they are presented, an examination of the role of visual media of all kinds and their relation to truth is timely. This collection traces continuities between the aesthetic, ethical, and political questions raised by traditional visual media and shows how new visual media have reshaped these questions and raised new ones for spectators, artists, and theorists, as well as different aesthetic affordances, ethical challenges, and political potential. The chapters investigate the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics in a variety of visual media forms ranging across art installations, Facebook Live, film and television, both narrative and documentary, Instagram, painting, photography, video games, and interactive documentaries. They explore how different ethical questions, political implications, and aesthetic pleasures arise and shape one another in particular ways in distinct visual media. The themes include the use of cinema as a medium for ethical and political thought, how documentary subjects and artworks both conceal and reveal truth, how art can work to enact and further reparation, new ethical questions arising from interactive media, such as documentary, the role of images in responding to political events and trauma, and the particular manifestations of political relationships as a result of recent transformations in the production, distribution, and reception of various media forms....
Wadiʿ Saʿadeh and the Third Generation of Prose Poets: An Arabic Poetics of Translation and Exophony
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

Chapter 7 turns to poetry that attempts to escape the hold of language in the works of Wadi Saʿadeh (b.1948), a Lebanese émigré poet who has lived in Australia since 1988. Saʿadeh represents a stage in which the prose poem becomes less an oppositional poetic practice accompanied by a simultaneous theorizing effort and more of a space for free writing. This chapter traces a thread from Saʿadeh to a host of young contemporary prose poets whose poetic investments increasingly exceed the bounds of one language; such as the Lebanese Joumana Haddad (b. 1970) and Nazem al-Sayed (b. 1975), the Palestinian Samer Abu Hawwash (b.1972), and the Syrian/Kurdish Golan Haji (b. 1977). This later generation’s posture towards the poetic engagement is divests from Arabic as a singular linguistic stratum.
Deliberative Theory and Deconstruction
Authors: Gormley Steven
Published: May 2022

What does it mean, and how can we respond to the demand, to do justice to the other? This book answers that question by developing a critical, but productive, dialogue between deliberative theory and deconstruction. Two key claims emerge: doing justice to the other demands that we maintain an ethos of interruption; and, such an ethos requires a democratic form of politics. The deliberative approach is key for thinking through the procedures that can help institute and maintain an ethos of interruption (an ethos that itself inspires the deconstructive approach). The deconstructive approach is crucial to the task of revealing the unavoidable aporias generated by trying to do justice to the other, and identifying the forms and codes that prevent certain voices from making it onto the deliberative stage. In developing this account, this book places deliberative theory and deconstruction into critical conversation with the work of Mouffe, Aristotle, Rorty, Laclau and different traditions of critical theory.
Introduction: Doing Justice to the Other
Authors: Gormley Steven
Published: May 2022

The equal respect for everyone else demanded by a moral universalism sensitive to difference thus takes the form of a nonleveling and nonappropriating inclusion of the other in his otherness.

Jürgen Habermas (IO, 40)

Justice is not the same as rights; it exceeds and founds the rights of man… It is the experience of the other as other, the fact that I let the other be other …...
Blind Spots and Insights: Between Deliberation and Agonism
Authors: Gormley Steven
Published: May 2022

The first half of this chapter argues that Jürgen Habermas’s two-track model of democratic politics avoids the two charges Chantal Mouffe raises against his deliberative approach, namely, rationalism and individualism. Habermas’s account of an ‘anarchic’ public sphere of informal opinion-formation does not require the elimination of the passions, nor is it blind to collective actors. Quite the opposite. The second half argues that Mouffe’s agonism is beset by internal difficulties. First, her account of the affective dimension of collective identifications insufficiently theorises the role of the passions and fantasy in democratic life. Second, her claim that a universal ‘we’ is a conceptual impossibility is not sufficient defended. Third, there is a continual slip between a possible and a necessary antagonism that is no mere slip: rather, it reveals an unresolved dilemma at the heart of her project.
The Demands of Deconstruction
Authors: Gormley Steven
Published: May 2022

After outlining a series of injunctions that flow from the ordeal of undecidabilty, the first half of this chapter argues that these injunctions are best thought of not in terms of an ethics of openness to the other, but as a demand to maintain an ethos of interruption. This better explains Derrida’s insistence on the necessity of laws, calculation, deliberation, and the need to recognise and close off the arrival of those who close off the possibility of the coming of the other. It is precisely here, in the tension between interruption and closure, that we can make sense of Derrida’s emphasis on the ordeal of undecidabilty. The normativity of deconstruction, it is argued, is best understood as a form of epistemic and meta-ethical negativism (which is not to be mistaken as pessimistic). While this deconstructive ethos points towards a democratic form of politics, the second half identifies two problems. First, the characterisation of democracy in terms of différance is overly abstract. Here the ‘politically disabling’ worry re-emerges. Second, Derrida’s account of democratic autoimmunity not only identifies an essential pervertibility in democracy, but seems to abandon us to this pervertibility. Here a form of the ‘mere openness’ worry returns.
Introduction: Why is Spinoza an Epicurean?
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

The chapter examines the three major ways in which Epicureanism has been defined in the history of thought, that is, as sensualism, physicalism and naturalism. Vardoulakis explains that Spinoza has a different understanding of Epicureanism, one that is more political and which arises in early modernity in the aftermath of the rediscovery of significant Epicurean texts.
Freedom as Overcoming the Fear of Death: The Dialectic of Authority and Utility in the Preface
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

The focus is on the most famous sentence of the Preface of the Theological Political Treatise: Spinoza asks why people “fight for their servitude as if they are fighting for the salvation.” Vardoulakis contextualizes this statement with reference to La Boétie’s anti-authoritarianism. He demonstrates why both Deleuze’s and Lordon’s discussions of “voluntary servitude” are limited because neither understands sufficiently the materialist implications of Spinoza’s Epicureanism. And he explains the agonistic democratic politics that arises from Spinoza’s critique of voluntary servitude. All this leads to a determination of Spinoza conception of freedom as the ability to form practical judgments or the freedom to calculate one’s utility.
The Power of Error: Moses, the Prophets and the People (chapters 1, 2 and 3)
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

Vardoulakis explains why Spinoza treats the prophets and Moses in particular as the exemplary figures of authority. Through an analysis of the figure of Moses, he demonstrates a radically new understanding of the well-known distinction between the two senses of power (potentia or natural power, and potestas or instituted power). He argues that the first three chapters of the Theological Political Treatise show how figures of authority derive their potestas (their political and theological power within the community) because of a series of misunderstandings about their potentia and the potentia of god. This makes possible to understand Spinoza’s project not only as an early account of ideology, but also as providing the basis of a critique of nationalism, colonialism and identity politics.
Philonomianism: Law and the Origin of Finitude (chapter 4)
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

This chapter notes for the first time that Spinoza provides two distinct definitions of the law in chapter 4 of the Theological Political Treatise. Vardoulakis explains how the second definition of the law relies on Epicurus’ determination of justice in sections 31-38 of the Principal Doctrines. The Epicurean conception of the law relies on the principle that the laws ought to serve the utility of the people, which implies that the laws can and ought to be changed when they fail to do so. Vardoulakis contrasts Spinoza’s Epicurean conception of the law to Arendt’s determination of authority and the violence of modernity. The chapter also contains a detailed reading of Spinoza’s account of the Fall as the putative starting point of history, an account that is diametrically opposed to the Christian understanding of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
Political Monism: The Primacy of Utility over Authority (chapters 5 and 6)
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

The chapter starts by examining the account of the formation of society in chapter 5 of the Theological Political Treatise. This account is compared to the political anthropology of Pierre Clastres. It further demonstrates how Spinoza explains the move to the formation of political communities. Vardoulakis distinguishes between the concepts of natural and agonistic democracy in Spinoza. The chapter also includes an analysis of chapter 6 of the Theological Political Treatise, in which Spinoza argues against the possibility of miracles based on his conception of monism. Vardoulakis contrasts Spinoza’s Epicurean version of monism that is political through and through to Leo Strauss’ presentation of Spinoza’s supposedly apolitical Epicureanism. Vardoulakis situates the idea that monism lacks a politics in the initial reception of Spinoza, especially in Pierre Bayle’s entry on Spinoza in his Dictionary.
Love your Friend as Yourself: The Neighbour and the Politics of Biblical Hermeneutics (chapters 7 to 13)
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

This chapter focuses on Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutics paying particular attention to how the Reformation forces a reconsideration of the concept of authority. This leads to Spinoza’s definition of “the authority to teach” as the key feature of his notion of “true religion.” In this context, Spinoza uses of the principle of charity (caritas) or the love of one’s neighbor. Neighborly love is used by Spinoza as a polemical tool to distinguish his Epicurean position from the Christian conception of charity. Vardoulakis explains the source of Spinoza’s conception of charity in the discussion of Epicurean friendship in Cicero’s De finibus. This also allows for a new consideration of Spinoza’s critique of Maimonides.
The Freedom to Philosophize: The Two Paths to Virtue (chapters 14 and 15)
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

This chapter presents a more nuanced account of Spinoza’s concept of freedom as distinct from the free will. This adds a social and political dimension to the earlier determination of freedom in ch. 1 as the capacity to calculate one’s utility. Vardoulakis demonstrates how Spinoza understands the freedom to philosophize as the capacity to make practical judgments. This suggests that Spinoza’s conception of freedom prefigures the notion of the transindividual as developed by Etienne Balibar. Vardoulakis also pays close attention to Balibar’s argument that Spinoza offers two paths to virtue or the good. According to Spinoza’s Epicureanism, the first path relies on the emotions and adherence to authority, and the second on the calculation of utility based on practical rationality. These two paths substitute the more traditional distinction between faith and reason while also offering a radical political philosophy through the figure of what Spinoza calls the “necessary rebel.”
Fear and Power: Natural Right and Authorization in Spinoza and Hobbes (chapter 16)
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores the contrast between the liberal and the radical democratic interpretations of Spinoza’s assertion that “right is co-extensive with power.” To break the opposition between these two interpretations, Vardoulakis uncovers evidence to suggest that Spinoza wrote ch. 16 of the Theological Political Treatise in response to Hobbes, especially the account of state formation in De Cive. This suggests that both Hobbes and Spinoza employ an epicurean notion of the calculation of utility. The difference is that Hobbes privileges one emotion, namely, fear, whereas Spinoza regards all emotions equality important in how they impact the way that humans calculate their utility. The comparison between Hobbes and Spinoza yields an unexpected result. The notion of “natural democracy” that Spinoza develops in ch. 16 is grounded in the social contract, but the notion of the social contract itself is open and democratic.
Theocracy: On the State of Authority (chapters 17 and 18)
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

In this chapter, Vardoulakis explains how Spinoza uses the Hebrew state as the exemplary path of obedience that leads to the political good. Spinoza analyses the function of obedience in the Hebrew state as a means of achieving the utility of its citizens. Critical in this regard is the notion of theocracy that Spinoza derives from Josephus and which is linked to the anti-monarchist movement in the 16th and 17th centuries. Spinoza defines theocracy as the coincidence of civil and religious law. Vardoulakis explains how Spinoza’s account of obedience prefigures theories of ideology that were developed in the 1960s, while also demonstrating the reasons why Spinoza thought the Hebrew state was stillborn, namely, because of Moses’ order to the Levites to punish those who venerated the Golden Calf.
The Authority to Abrogate: The Two Paths to Virtue and the Internal Enemy (chapters 19 and 20)
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

Vardoulakis argues that the heart of Spinoza’s conception of democracy are the two final chapters of the Theological Political Treatise. The reason is that it is here Spinoza presents how it is possible, even on occasion necessary, to cross over from the political path that relies on the emotions and obedience to the political path that relies on rationality and equality. Such a crossing over is not free of friction, whereby Vardoulakis argues that Spinoza offers an agonistic conception of democracy. At the same time, the presentation of Spinoza’s conception of democracy is related back to its historical context, especially Erastianism and its Dutch offshoot, the Collegiants.
Conclusion: The Limitation of Spinoza’s Epicureanism
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

Vardoulakis makes a series of suggestions about how Spinoza’s political philosophy can be extended and augmented today.
Death and the Negative in Agamben and Beauvoir
Authors: Marovich Beatrice
Published: May 2022

Heidegger’s theory that Dasein is a being-toward-death exerted a significant influence on existentialism. Agamben marks a break with the sacrificial, nihilistic dimensions of Heidegger’s negative orientation. And yet Agamben is no vitalist. He does not offer figures of life as a curative to soothe this negativity with an affirmation. Instead, the negative dimensions associated with death are differently arranged. There is a resonance between Agamben’s figurations of life and death, and those that appears in Simone de Beauvoir. Both Agamben and Beauvoir think death within a site of suspension—as if imbricated with the embryonic or the infantile. For both thinkers, death appears alongside life; a figure that not only evokes decay and destruction but also germination and fermentation. In both, neither the powers of life nor the powers of death are ascendant. Instead, in figures such as the homo sacer, these powers are held in a form of suspension.
Online Weak and Poor Images: On Contemporary Feminist Visual Politics
Authors: Tereza Stejskalova
Published: May 2022

This chapter uses the example of the Instagram account of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez as a point of departure to elaborate on feminist visual politics that makes a breakdown of technology and human bodies its message and its medium. The aim is to understand the power of encounter between Ocasio-Cortez and her mostly anonymous Instagram followers against the conditions of algorithmic manipulation and explain why the imperfect and amateur visuality of Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram stream should be considered as an example of the way in which the algorithmic, mass image can become a meaningful, political image. Finding power in figures of weakness, the chapter draws from works by feminist artists and theorists, who place the breakability of both the human body and technology on center stage. It is also to show how the history of resistance of the oppressed can play a significant role in finding ways to navigate the ambiguous landscape of online platforms.
11 Planetary Diagrams: Towards an Autographic Theory of Climate Emergency
Authors: Likavcan Lukas , Heinicker Paul
Published: May 2022

This paper deals with planetary visualisation processes that are theorized as autographic visualisations, elaborating on the work of Dietmar Offenhuber. The term 'planetary diagrams’ is used in the paper to distinguish these visualisations from representations and operational images, and the paper provides an account of a history of thinking about natural self-diagrammatizations. After that, it looks into how climate emergency can be described as an autographic process, as well as what infrastructures are complicit in its unveiling. The analysis leads to identification of the planet Earth with a non-human archive of slow violence witnessed by apparatuses of planetary-scale computation.
Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism
Authors: de Villiers Rick
Published: May 2022

Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal, or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. In ascetic traditions painfully aware of humanity’s quintessence – ‘dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ – humiliation cultivates humility. Like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between affect, ethics, and aesthetics, Low Modernism demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation.