bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Four Principles of Traditional Theories of Rights
Authors: Singer Beth J.
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter provides a critical analysis of the central features of traditional and contemporary theories of rights as well as criticisms of those theories. Even as human rights come under attack in one part of the globe after another, various bodies are trying to extend the protection afforded by rights to peoples—even to nonhuman animals and the environment—and also to widen the scope of rights to cover such diverse entitlements. Concurrently, especially in the United States, the concept of rights is being subjected to intensive scrutiny, and new understandings of the nature and ground of rights are emerging. Contemporary rights theory has three main sources: (1) the Christian tradition of natural law; (2) the Enlightenment theorists Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant; and (3) the American legal theorist Wesley N. Hohfeld. Theories in this tradition assert or assume, inter alia, the following interrelated principles: Individualism; A priorism; Essentialism; Adversarialism.
An Alternative to the Dominant Tradition
Authors: Singer Beth J.
Published: May 2019

This chapter suggests an alternative theory of rights. Instead of saying that there are duties correlative to rights-entitlements, the author prefers to say that there is a correlative obligation to respect them, binding upon all. It is this obligation that distinguishes an entitlement that is a right from other entitlements. Apart from the obligation of all to respect it, which entails implementing this respect in action when one is in a position to do so, the entitlement would not be a right. Therefore, the norms making respect for it obligatory are constitutive of the right. To put it another way: the rights-entitlement and the obligation to respect it are constitutive of each other. The chapter then examines the ramifications and implications of this view.
Introduction
Authors: Fontinell Eugene
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter discusses how the emergence of Christianity out of the Hellenistic context moves the dialectic to a new stage. Very early on, the tension and outright conflict between reason and faith appear. This faith/reason dialectic has continued down to the present. Within the culture at large, there are two simple and clear positions: faith alone is sufficient; reason alone is sufficient. For most of Western history, however, the dominant views have made attempts to account for both. The chapter suggests that no formal expression of the relation between faith and reason can ever be permanent or definitive. At best these expressions can serve as guidelines, as regulative ideals.
James: Self and God
Authors: Fontinell Eugene
Published: May 2019

This chapter analyzes how a plausible belief in personal immortality depends upon a self open to continuing existence beyond the spatial and temporal parameters of what is usually referred to as the “present life.” A key step in the direction of supporting this hypothesis has been taken through the establishment of a field-self that participates in and is constituted by a range of fields, some of which can be designated “wider” in relation to the identifying center of the individual self. The chapter describes these wider fields in terms of a superhuman consciousness or consciousnesses, delaying till now a more detailed specification of such wider consciousnesses.
Conversion in American Philosophy
Authors: Ward Roger A.
Published: May 2019

This fresh, provocative account of the American philosophical tradition explores the work of key thinkers through an innovative and counterintuitive lens: religious conversion. From Jonathan Edwards to Cornel West, the book threads the history of American thought into an extended, multivalent encounter with the religious experience. Looking at John Dewey, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Richard Rorty, Robert S. Corrington, and other thinkers, the book demonstrates that religious themes have deeply influenced the development of American philosophy. This innovative reading of the American philosophical tradition will be welcomed not only by philosophers, but also by historians and other students of America’s religious, intellectual, and cultural legacy.
Reconstructing Faith: Religious Overcoming in Dewey’s Pragmatism
Authors: Ward Roger A. , Ward Roger A.
Published: May 2019

This chapter follows the structure of the three essays that comprise John Dewey’s A Common Faith. The first section examines Dewey’s notion of the transformation to the religious attitude in “Religion versus the Religious.” The second section focuses on the content aspects of “Faith and Its Object” that make this critical advance possible. Dewey wants to stabilize the sources of authority in human practice to enhance the products and consciousness of intelligent control. The third section follows Dewey’s ascending polemic against the supernatural in “The Human Abode of the Religious Function.” Conversion completes Dewey’s thought here in the sense that the religious function is necessary to produce a material effect on practice that manifests intelligent control of the sources of authority in common life.
Dwelling in Absence: The Reflective Origin of Conversion
Authors: Ward Roger A. , Ward Roger A.
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores the absence that emerges in each account of the four philosophers in the previous chapters (i.e., Jonathan Edwards, C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James). First, it describes the ways Peirce and Dewey discover the limits of their efforts toward philosophical transformation. They represent distinct methods of locating and handling this limit, and they both face the failure of reflection that is part and parcel with discovering truth. Second, it shows Edwards’s orientation toward the failure of transformation in his inquiry into the religious affections. This orientation toward failure, his failure, humanizes Edwards’s otherwise monstrous image. The last step is to bring these three thinkers together in terms of an American response to the limit of transformation in order to understand why conversion remains such a powerful and complicated feature of our religious and philosophical lives.
“Come Suck Sequoia and Be Saved”
Authors: Wallace Mark I.
Published: May 2019

Chapter 4 keys on John Muir’s ecstatic wilderness religion as a paradigm of the dialectic between Christianity and animism at the center of this book, namely, Christianimism. Muir’s nature evangelism came at the price of rhetorically abetting the forced removal of Native Americans from their homes within the fledgling national parks movement. Notwithstanding this stain on Muir’s legacy, his thought is notable for rethinking the full arc of Jesus’ life—John the Baptist, departure into wilderness, temple money-changers, and crucifixion—in deeply personal terms that are environmental and biblically sonorous. Muir advocates a two books
theology in which the Bible and the Earth are equally compelling revelatory “texts.” His Yosemite spirituality reaches its apogee in his 1870 “woody gospel letter,” a paean to a homophilic, orgasmic religion of sensual delight: “Come suck Sequoia and be saved.” In Muir’s spirit, the chapter concludes that Christianity is still not Christianity because of its erstwhile hostility to embodied existence.
Envisioning Civilian Childhood
Authors: Adelman Rebecca A.
Published: May 2019

“Envisioning Civilian Childhood” focuses on a collection of scandals related to the exposure of civilian children to militarized violence. These scandals are fueled by the affects of apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and anger, and all of them unfold in classrooms. In every case, a range of stakeholders—including parents, administrators, and journalists—rush to the defense of the children’s senses, especially their sight, to insist that they deserve a view of the world unclouded by violence. To contextualize the anxieties reflected in these scandals, the chapter begins with a brief history of the construct of ‘childhood’ in America, from the Colonial period to the present. This history demonstrates that predominant beliefs about childhood innocence are not simply natural responses to their vulnerability. Instead, these beliefs are historically variable, socially constructed, and unevenly applied to different types of children. Here, they are activated around the civilian child encountering the graphic realities of war. An analysis of the resultant scandals reveals that these affects become overwhelming when the vision of the innocent, apolitical child is threatened, insulted, or troubled.
Affective Pedagogies for Military Children
Authors: Adelman Rebecca A.
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores how a range of institutions, both state and non-state, negotiate the instability latent in the term ‘military child.’ Focusing on internet resources for military children, the chapter analyzes how the websites represent the emotional experiences of military childhood back to that very audience. The chapter begins with the story of Omar Khadr, illustrating the politics of recognizing the militarized political subjectivities of young people. It then turns to a genealogy of the so-called military brat and an overview of the various ways that the U.S. military has interfaced with children, and how these histories inform the investments of affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and anger circulating around military children today. The core of the analysis is a comparison of two websites, Sesame Street for Military Families (SSMF) and Military Kids Connect (MKC). Military homes on Sesame Street are characterized by warmth, intimacy, and intense focus on children’s needs. By contrast, Military Kids Connect presumes a military household marked by varying degrees of stress, constraint, and dysfunction. In disparate ways, both of these websites acknowledge and deny the impact of militarization on children, while also instrumentalizing their emotional well-being and transform coping into a child’s patriotic obligation.
Economies of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury
Authors: Adelman Rebecca A.
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores the mediation of combat trauma and the reshaping of the people who have experienced it into receptacles for gratitude, pity, and anger. Building from a brief history of PTSD and TBI as diagnostic categories and objects of administrative calculation, the chapter explores how these conditions have become sites of affective investment. Reflecting on the ubiquitous mandate to ‘say thank you to the troops,’ the chapter historicizes the militarization of gratitude. This informs the subsequent analysis of the work of various charitable organizations for veterans. The chapter then analyzes the exacting standards by which the Department of Defense awards Purple Hearts for Traumatic Brain Injury (but refuses them for PTSD). In contrast to the DoD’s decidedly unsympathetic approach to PTSD, David Finkel’s bestselling non-fiction account Thank You for Your Service tracks how PTSD plays out, often violently, in domestic spaces. That book makes PTSD visible through intensely emotional scenes, while research efforts to make TBI clinically legible search for specific signs of the injury on posthumously donated brain tissue. The concluding section offers a different vantage on TBI, reflecting on veterans’ own efforts to make their brains visible to others.
A Radical and Unsentimental Attention
Authors: Adelman Rebecca A.
Published: May 2019

This conclusion posits ethical anger as an alternative to the forms of affective investment critiqued in the preceding chapters. It notes that none of the figures described in this book are permitted to be angry, a prohibition that sustains militarism by making it easy to imagine that no one objects to it. This ethical anger is distinct from that which is felt vicariously for suffering others, or on their behalf, as forms of second-hand feeling that short-circuit the possibility of the other’s anger and subjectivity. The form of anger that this conclusion endorses is a way of registering the suffering of others without making any kind of epistemological or affective claim on it. This anger notes what is unknowable about the suffering of others, and it is a frustration not with that unknowability (rooted in a greed for experience and sensation) but with the efforts to make it falsely intelligible. Consequently, such anger has the potential to serve as the foundation for a more meaningful ethical response to the suffering that militarism engenders.
William Blake and the Time of Ontogeny
Authors: Goldstein Amanda Jo
Published: May 2019

Romantic biology and aesthetics are frequently said to converge in the ideal of “organic form”: the organism, or the artwork, as “organized and self-organizing” cause and effect of itself. Reconstructing the foundational, early modern, bio-philosophical controversy between epigenesis and preformation through the lens of William Blake’s graphic poems, however, this chapter argues that epigenesis was not synonymous with Kantian organicism or the vitalist insistence on the ontologically exceptional status of the living. Instead, Blake joins contemporary zoologists Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in casting epigenesis as a work of acute historical and circumstantial dependency, rather than of autotelic power. Here living bodies are those that tend, for better or worse, to make an organ of experience, their morphologies presenting compound archives of interactions with their physical and social milieu. It is this sense of “epigenesis,” which eludes the stale alternative between autonomy and determination, that is making a selective return in the “epigenetic” research that has transformed evolutionary, ecological, and developmental biology since the millennium.
The Hero Takes a Fall: Gravity, Comedy, and Darwin’s Entangled Bank
Authors: Campbell Timothy C.
Published: May 2019

This chapter aims to measure the biopolitical stakes of Darwin’s thinking of variability and natural selection in a historical ontology of ourselves today. When most contemporary ontologies point to catastrophe and mass extinction, what kinds of aesthetic and political strategies does a biopolitical reading of Darwin make available? One possibility, the chapter argues, is through a reconsideration of comedy and its associated pratfalls, the result of the law of gravity having been exiled from Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Blanchot of Quain
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Describes the circumstances of Maurice Blanchot’s birth, and looks into the background of his family in rural France. Ends with discussion of Blanchot’s key text on his childhood, the ‘primal scene.’
The Walking Stick with the Silver Pommel
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Blanchot’s university years, including which courses he took, with which professors. Students and the university of the time are contextualized socially, philosophically, and politically.
“Mahatma Gandhi”
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Looks in detail at one of Blanchot’s very first journalistic pieces, on Gandhi. Details its critical reading of this figure, which takes place in the light of Western intellectual and spiritual tradition.
Journalist, Opponent of Hitler, National-Revolutionary
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Looks at Blanchot’s journalistic activities writing for a range of newspapers. These publications are contextualized historically, and a taste of Blanchot’s writings is given, notably concerning Germany and the rise of Hitler.
The Escalation of Rhetoric
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

This chapter focuses on the launch of the publication Combat. Its circumstances and aims are unpacked, and Blanchot’s editorial and journalistic roles explored.
Patriotism’s Breaking Point
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

The weekly publication L’Insurgé (the Insurgent) is presented, including Blanchot’s political and literary writing for it. We are taken through invectives against the condition of France and against Prime Minister Blum, including some instances of anti-semitism.
These Events Happened to Me in 1937
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Looks at the death of Blanchot’s colleague Claude Séverac and his written homages to her. Relates these to his later writing, notably Death Sentence, and reflects more broadly on changes in Blanchot’s thinking around this period.
On the Transformation of Convictions
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Recaps the discussion of Blanchot’s journalistic activities in the 1930s, and reflects on their relationship (or otherwise) to any underlying, rigorous mode of thinking.
From Revolution to Literature
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Opens the discussion of Blanchot’s long career as a literary journalist, by setting the scene for his work on French and non-French literature. Various writers who would be key to his thinking are touched on, as are the relations between literature, philosophy, politics, and experience.
Murderous Omens of Times to Come
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Looks at the two early short narratives “The Idyll” and “The Last Word,” both on their own terms, and in relation Blanchot’s wider creative writing at the time (Thomas the Obscure). Picks up on the possible traces of a political experience and language in these works.
Night Freely Recircled, Which Plays Us
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Looks at Blanchot’s first novel Thomas the Obscure, including its long genesis throughout the 1930s. The influence of various writers on the novel is evaluated, and the characteristics and importance of fiction for Blanchot are discussed.
The Universe Is to Be Found in Night
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

France under Occupation is the setting for a discussion of Blanchot’s activities during WWII. His literary criticism, his reaction to precise political events, his silence by comparison with previous periods, and the Resistance are all touched on.
A True Writer Has Appeared
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Concentrates on the reception of Thomas the Obscure, both positive (heralding the arrival of a talented writer) and negative (denouncing the work as formless and decadent).
Writers Who Have Given Too Much to the Present
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Investigates Blanchot’s relationship with Jean Paulhan, at an early stage in his career as a literary critic. Relevant work by Blanchot includes several articles, a first critical book, and collaboration on the Nouvelle Revue Française, a journal.
From Anguish to Language
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Focuses on Faux pas, a critical collection bringing together various journal articles in a format that would become familiar to readers of Blanchot. The texts look at literature, often from a philosophical perspective.
Are You Writing, Are You Writing Even Now?
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Turns to the next in Blanchot’s cycle of short narratives, The One who was Standing Apart from Me. The narrative’s links to the house in Èze are picked out, as are its concerns with dialogue, death, and the Neuter.
The Critical Detour
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

A brief chapter looking at various literary-critical articles produced in 1950-1951, looking at Malraux, Hölderlin, and others.
Of an Amazing Lightness
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Addresses The Last Man, a relatively short narrative by Blanchot whose influences and aesthetics are unpacked here. We are shown how the thinking of notions such as language, solitude, and death carried out in previous fiction and criticism is pursued further.
Refusal, II: In the Name of the Anonymous
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Details one of the early, explicit signs of Blanchot’s return to political discourse in the late 1950s: his participation in a short-lived review, and more importantly, his new links to a group of activists and friends.
Characters in Thought
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Reflects on the large conceptual role reserved by Blanchot for friendship—whether in the context of Levinas and Bataille, or in the 1960s context of his political colleagues such as Antelme, Mascolo, Duras, etc.
Act in Such a Way That I Can Speak to You
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Examines the part-narrative, part fragmentary work Awaiting Oblivion. The chapter looks at the setting of an interrupted or impossible dialogue between a man and a woman, and examines the experimental aesthetics of the work.
The Thought of the Neuter
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

A substantial chapter looking at the thinking behind Blanchot’s literary and philosophical writing of the 1960s. It focuses on notions such as the fragment and the neuter, as they inform a variety of his political and critical activities, not to mention works such as Friendship and The Infinite Conversation.
Between Two Forms of the Unavowable
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

Relates an episode concerning Heidegger scholar Jean Beaufret and an anti-semitic remark. Blanchot’s concern to protect his friend Emmanuel Levinas, and his recent links to Jacques Derrida, are in evidence.
Even a Few Steps Take Time
Authors: Bident Christophe
Published: May 2019

This final chapter by Christophe Bident takes in the final years of Blanchot’s life up until 1997; it touches on the deaths of friends and major intellectuals of the era, on his letter-writing (notably on the Holocaust), on the re-publications of his texts, and ends with a brief, fictionalized memoir of 1994, The Instant of My Death.
From the Burden of Death to Flight before Death
Authors: Falque Emmanuel
Published: May 2019

There are multiple ways of fleeing from death (for example those that derive from Epicurus and Epictetus), but Christ in his Passion did not take them, and did not want to take them. The question of the Passion is first of all philosophical and then theological. It is then through the weight we accord the Passion that we can measure the force of the Resurrection.
From the Affirmation of Meaninglessness to the Suspension of Meaning
Authors: Falque Emmanuel
Published: May 2019

It is not satisfactory for us simply to affirm a denial of meaning in life. Such affirmation still entails giving some meaning to the denial. The suspension of meaning is more significant than an affirmation of meaning or meaninglessness. It is in this sense that the believer is first of all a philosopher, and not a theologian. Anxiety over death reveals the “existential” aspects humankind, that is, “Dasein’s existence structure.”
The Fear of Dying and Christ’s “Alarm”
Authors: Falque Emmanuel
Published: May 2019

In the account of the Passion, Christ takes on the characteristics of anxiety over death described by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. He feels fear and anxiety. Experiencing fear regarding death, like all humankind, the Son of God sees “the cup” of the end of life, feels sorrowful to the point of death, and dreads the sleep of his disciples. Far from resigning himself to death, he feels the death of all the world (Péguy) and thus rejoins the life of all humankind, even including the fear of dying.
The Narrow Road of Anxiety
Authors: Falque Emmanuel
Published: May 2019

It is not enough just to remain fearful in the face of death, or to draw back before “the cup.” Christ, like all humankind, passed from fear to anxiety. From a recoil before what is imminent (fear), he goes on to pose the question of nothingness and of the possibility of meaning (anxiety). But he does not remain simply in this position of taking what is human in charge. Far from simply shutting himself up in his anxiety, he addresses the Father in a cry of dereliction. The Son is he who suffers from anxiety and passes it to the Father.
Epilogue: From One Triptych to Another
Authors: Falque Emmanuel
Published: May 2019

A triptych of books is completed, one that I have put together under the title The Philosophical Triduum; now another commences. I have already suggested in my preface to this Triduum that my “triptych on the Passion will be followed, or could be followed, by a triptych on the Recapitulation.”...
Leo Lowenthal and the Jewish Renaissance
Authors: Jay Martin
Published: May 2019

This chapter traces Leo Lowenthal's early intellectual life through a series of passionate engagements with traditional and modernist Jewish thought that continued to find expression in his work at the Institute for Social Research and, after 1933, in the United States. As a student in his twenties, Lowenthal was part of the community of young Jewish intellectuals surrounding Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel, an adherent of German philosophy and Orthodox Judaism. He was committed to the Weimar Jewish Renaissance, active in Jewish communal organizations, and joined the psychoanalytic group around Erich Fromm and Frieda Reichmann, an observant Jew whose sanatorium served kosher meals and observed Jewish holidays. The chapter then identifies the traces of Jewish identity in Lowenthal's reading of such traces in the life of Heinrich Heine. Ultimately, Lowenthal's Jewish visibility reflects both on Jewish sources in critical theory and the contributions of critical theory to the evolution of Jewishness.
The Palestinian Nakba and the Arab-Jewish Melancholy: An Essay on Sovereignty and Translation
Authors: Shenhav Yehouda
Published: May 2019

This chapter begins by discussing the efforts of the State of Israel to suppress both Palestinian assertion of state power and Palestinian spiritual renaissance. Much about these efforts can be understood from relatively recent Israeli legislation that prohibits certain types of discussion of the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophic exile of 750,000 Palestinians from towns, villages, and farms—quickly resettled by Jews—and the consequent uprooting of the social and cultural fabric of Palestinian society. These events, and the debate surrounding censorship of the Nakba, center on questions of Palestinian visibility analogous to those previously raised with respect to Jews. The chapter then analyzes the removal of Modern Hebrew away from its close linguistic ties to Arabic, demonstrating how political forces intervened to choose European languages rather than the linguistically closer spoken Arabic in modeling new vocabulary and grammatical structures.
The Jewish Animot: Of Jews as Animals
Authors: Geller Jay
Published: May 2019

This chapter addresses the famous joke on “the elephant and the Jewish question,” whose prominence is attested by its many iterations not only in collections of Jewish jokes but also in works of philosophy and theory. Drawing together two seemingly unrelated terms such as Jews and elephants and pointing at their close proximity, jokes do not merely comment on the preposterous character of the “rumor about the Jews” that there is an inherent relationship between Jews and nonhuman animals. The joke also points to what escapes theory and calls out its limitations, for theory takes the Jew as well as the animal as categories, singular as they might be, that can be comprehended only vis-à-vis universals. The chapter then looks at how Jewish authors have called into question the human-nonhuman animal divide in their struggle to think through European modernity.
Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty
Authors: Kamuf Peggy
Published: May 2019

This book pursues Derrida’s assertion, in The Death Penalty, Volume I, that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” The main question this book poses is: How does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind, a Christian-inspired death penalty in what professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? These are among the questions that guide the analyses of four literary works, each a depiction or an account of an execution, in the search for deconstructive leverage on the concepts that prop up capital punishment. Different pertinent features are isolated in these texts: the “mysteries” of literary or poetic witness; the publicness of punishment in an era of secrecy around the death penalty; the undecidable difference between death by capital punishment and by suicide—a difference that Kant enforces and that Derrida contests; and even the collapse of the distinction between the sovereign powers to put to death and to pardon, a possibility that is shown up by a poetic work when, performatively, it “plays the law.” In relation to the death penalties they represent, these literary survivals may be seen as the ashes or remains of the phantasm that the death penalty has always been, the phantasm of calculating and thus ending finitude.
Beginning with Literature
Authors: Kamuf Peggy
Published: May 2019

This chapter reviews Derrida’s engagement with literature in The Death Penalty, Volume I. It explicates the notion of “the right to literature” and its relation to democracy (“No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy,” as Derrida has declared elsewhere). It works through Derrida’s reading of texts by Genet, Hugo, and Blanchot. It also recalls Derrida’s analysis in Given Time of the “absolute secret” of literature and includes a brief reading of Camus’s The Stranger.
Orwell’s Execution
Authors: Kamuf Peggy
Published: May 2019

The question of the chapter is the role of the witness in a capital execution. In contrast to Foucault, who asserted the becoming-invisible of punishment, Derrida insists that “By definition, there will never have been any invisibility for a legal putting to death . . . the spectacle and the spectator are required.” George Orwell’s early short text “A Hanging” is read very closely here to discern how this essential trait of non-secrecy is put to the test when the witness’s testimony is consigned to a literary text and thus to a set of sealed traces.
Is Justice Burning?
Authors: Kamuf Peggy
Published: May 2019

This chapter begins with a survey of several of the explanations historians of capital punishment have put forward for the end of public executions in the West starting in the mid-nineteenth century. Besides well-known arguments of Foucault and others, I cite Victor Hugo’s observation from 1832 that moving the scaffold away from public view was an admission of shame in the practice. Against the background of secrecy laws proliferating around the U.S. death penalty today, I read Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 as an immense public spectacle in Times Square. The novel, I argue, crosses the two senses of its title; by dragging the execution into the public square it also brings out a shameless public sexual display, a public that is burning.
The Sentence Is the Story
Authors: Kamuf Peggy
Published: May 2019

This chapter takes up Norman Mailer’s 1979 novel The Executioner’s Song as chronicle of the “modern death penalty” era post-Gregg v. Georgia. Two questions or issues frame my analysis: the relation between narrative structure in general and the death penalty plot; the distinction between execution and suicide. The first issue is explored with the help of narratologists, but especially Walter Benjamin. The second reviews Kant’s argument that “no one can will [capital] punishment” and Derrida’s remarks, contra Kant, on the undecidability of execution and suicide. The chapter concludes with a brief reading of Mailer’s 1964 poem of the same title as his novel and speculates on how these two texts read the recent history of the U.S. death penalty.
Postmortem
Authors: Kamuf Peggy
Published: May 2019

This brief conclusion remarks that the four fictional works featured in the book all conclude with something like a postmortem, a survival of the narrative after the execution represented. In the case of The Executioner’s Song, it is a postmortem in the clinical sense, which I briefly characterize. This condition of literature’s survival leads me to reflect, finally, on literature’s ambiguous relations to the death penalty; on the one hand, like the witness to an execution, literature can seem to fulfill or enable the executions it represents; on the other hand, these literary survivals are the ashes or remains of a phantasm that would calculate the end and put an end to finitude.
Race under Representation
Authors: Lloyd David
Published: May 2019

Working from the aesthetic thought of Kant and Schiller, “Race under Representation” elaborates how metonymy and metaphor function in the formation of the stereotype. Racialization works through the organizing tropes of representation and those tropes embody an order of representation, framing a civilizational narrative for which inclusion always functions simultaneously as excision. The metaphorical place of whiteness, or the “Subject without properties,” is constitutively barred to the racialized subject, as the work of Tayeb Salih and Frantz Fanon illustrates. Inclusion always requires the effective but impossible erasure of race even as it repeatedly constitutes racial positions. The chapter critiques the notion of “under-representation” in its demographic usage, arguing that the goal of inclusion consolidates institutional claims to universality and reaffirms the violence of the racial regime of representation that relegates racial others to the exteriority of race “under representation.”
The Politics of Seeing: Affect, Forensics, and Visuality in the US-Mexico Borderlands
Authors: Murphy Kaitlin M.
Published: May 2019

This chapter focuses on Who Is Dayani Cristal (2013), a hybrid documentary-fiction film that combines forensic attempts to identify a body found in the southern Arizona desert with the fictional retracing of his steps along the migrant trail, running through Central America up to the deadly stretch of desert known as the “corridor of death,” where his body is ultimately found. The author examines the film alongside a range of other contemporary visual and new media texts, including the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/B.A.N.G. Lab’s 2010 “Transborder Immigrant Tool” and John Craig Freeman’s 2012 “Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos.” Within the context of visual economies that simultaneously promote both the radical invisibility and hypervisibility of undocumented border crossers (both alive and deceased), this chapter investigates how visual memory mapping projects work to redirect the gaze toward new ways of seeing and feeling. In so doing, I argue, memory mapping functions as a visual strategy to ask, and to challenge, why certain lives are rendered visible and thus grievable and others not.
Terraforming
Authors: Neyrat Frédéric
Published: May 2019

In this chapter, Neyrat continues to explore and trace a bit more in depth what he calls the genealogy of the fantasy of geo-constructivism as it has begun to develop within the era of the grand narrative of the Anthropocene. To do this, Neyrat situates a number of current theoretical discussions such as those of controlling and managing the climate by way of terraformation or novel research in synthetic biology within the larger imaginary of the Space Age.
Naturing Nature and Natured Nature
Authors: Neyrat Frédéric
Published: May 2019

In chapter 10, Neyrat returns to a summary of two manners of defining nature that date back hundreds of years: natura naturans (nature as a process, a becoming, and a permanent genesis of things) and natura naturata (nature as finite, created objects that are the result of this process). Neyrat returns to this summary in order to show how these two ways of defining nature were, eventually, over-interpreted in a religious sense. Neyrat shows an exemplary example of how these concepts of nature became religiously over-interpreted through interpretations of Spinoza’s concept of Nature as God —Deus sive natura. He cites how in the work of Spinoza, the creative capacity of the natura naturans becomes substituted or replaced by the creative capacity of God and what is created by god, natura naturata.
Conclusion
Authors: Neyrat Frédéric
Published: May 2019

In the conclusion, Neyrat sets about re-iterating the political goals of an ecology of separation. While numerous actors continue with either the conceptions of continual growth through fossil fuels or more extreme energy sources, and others believe technological advancements are to be adhered to in order to simply continue the management of the Earth and capitalism in the era of the Anthropocene, Neyrat describes all of these intentions and forces under the rubric of geo-power. The question for Neyrat and his ecology is not one of continual geo-construction, or production, but an attentive prudence to what can perhaps be unmade. Neyrat cites the dilemma that many minoritarian groups face, in the midst of losing their home territories when faced with powerful entities coming to extract resources from their lands, as having to decide between kneeling down or confronting them.
The Copenhagen Chiasm
Authors: Neyrat Frédéric
Published: May 2019

“This evening, the city of Copenhagen is a crime scene, with those responsible fleeing for the airport.” It was in this manner that John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace for the United Kingdom, expressed himself following the Copenhagen summit on climate change.1 A crime? What sort of crime? What exactly happened during this summit? More than likely, no kind of event that would be capable of immediately changing the history of the world. But nevertheless, there was a noticeable turning point in relation to how societies were discussing the management of climate change; there was a revelatory moment in regard to what we have taken to calling the ...
Object, Subject, Traject
Authors: Neyrat Frédéric
Published: May 2019

Throughout the first two parts of this book, we have examined the price to be paid for getting rid of any idea of something we call nature. This price is exorbitant, in the proper sense of the term: We have to get ourselves to exit any orbit, propelling ourselves into a stratosphere, one that is indeed much more imaginary than real, of an unbridled construction where humans are agents of mastery, into a stratosphere of limitless developments and technological monsters that should deserve our unconditional love. The absence of nature legitimizes the fantastic possibility of remaking the world in order to steer it, to be its pilot, to manage it; but the world, inevitably, withdraws from the human setting, leaving the latter alone—without nature and without a world....
Turbulence, Resilience, Distance
Authors: Neyrat Frédéric
Published: May 2019

On August 15, 1971, the gold standard, the conversion of the dollar into gold, was suspended. Two years later, the currency exchange became “floating,” which meant that from now on, the rate of exchange would be determined by the state of market fluctuations. And it was in this manner that the Bretton Woods Agreement, which had regulated the international financial system since 1944, came to an end. What happened at that time with regard to important economic data is something that obviously has an important bearing on how we largely structure our present—such a fluctuation of the exchange rate has largely favored speculation on currency and a disconnection of the speculative sphere, its autonomization from the so-called “real” economy. However, we shouldn’t convert this economic data too quickly into a hastily formed explanation for what should be more properly described as a major epistemic change, even a change in civilization, a major upheaval in the way we think about science, politics, the economy, as well as ecology and the environment....
Het professionele verschoningsrecht in het nieuwe wetboek
Authors: Fanoy N.A.M.E.C. (Nathalie)
Published: May 2019

Het professionele verschoningsrecht in het nieuwe wetboek

In de conceptwetsvoorstellen tot vaststelling van Boek 1, 2 en 6 van het nieuwe Wetboek van Strafvordering is een aantal voorstellen gedaan voor een nieuwe regeling van het ‘professionele verschoningsrecht’: het verschoningsrecht van bepaalde beroepsbeoefenaren met een vertrouwenspositie die in het kader van hun beroepsuitoefening een geheimhoudingsplicht hebben. Deze bijdrage gaat in op de voorgestelde bepalingen die betrekking hebben op het professionele verschoningsrecht bij het getuigenverhoor en bij een doorzoeking en inbeslagneming bij professioneel verschoningsgerechtigden dan wel ‘derden’. De nadruk ligt op de geheimhoudingsplicht en het verschoningsrecht van de advocaat. De wetgever beoogt met de voorgestelde bepalingen de reikwijdte en de omvang van het verschoningsrecht te verduidelijken en in overeenstemming te brengen met recente ontwikkelingen in jurisprudentie en rechtspraktijk. In de bijdrage worden de voorstellen nader beschouwd in het licht van deze doelstelling.
Weakly primal submodules
Authors: Atani S. Ebrahimi , Darani A. Yousefian
Published: May 2019

Let $R$ be a commutative ring and let $M$ be an $R$-module. A submodule $N$ of $M$ is called a weakly primal submodule provided that the set $ P = w(N) \cup \{ 0 \} $ forms an ideal of $R$. Here $w(N)$ is the set of elements of $R$ that are not weakly prime to $N$, where an element $ r \in R $ is not weakly prime to $N$ if $ 0 \neq rm \in N $ for some $ m \in M \backslash N $. In this paper we give some basic results about weakly primal submodules. Also we discuss on the relations between the classes of the weakly primal submodules of $M$ and the weakly primal submodules of modules of fractions of $M$.
Hildegard of Bingen
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: May 2019

The book provides a short but thorough introduction to twelfth-century composer and visionary St. Hildegard of Bingen, creator of seventy-seven plainchant melodies (her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum) as well as a complete play set to music, the Ordo virtutum. Six chapters chronicle her eventful life, incorporating information about her compositions in the Dendermonde and Riesencodex manuscripts as appropriate: enclosure at the monastery of Disibodenberg; the catalytic vision that spurred her multifaceted creativity; her founding of the convent at Rupertsberg; preaching tours and exorcisms; clashes with priests, prelates, popes, and the Holy Roman Emperor; punishment by interdict; and final vindication. These chapters also explore her many nonmusical creations (three major theological treatises, Gospel homilies and smaller religious writings, scientific and medical works, two hagiographies, an invented language and accompanying alphabet, and her extensive correspondence). A seventh chapter traces continued awareness of her achievement after her death, her canonization and recognition as Doctor of the Church, and the belated rebirth of her music. The final three chapters are devoted to her music, beginning with a general overview and followed by a chapter each on shorter and longer genres, with the former providing basic liturgical information. Ancillary material includes a dozen illustrations (including several iconic images), a works list, and a selected bibliography and discography.
New Challenges
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: May 2019

Significant challenges and interactions facing Hildegard of Bingen in her new life at Rupertsberg are the subject of this chapter. The departure and subsequent death of her favorite disciple, Richardis von Stade, was a painful and humiliating loss. A new scriptorium enabled the dissemination of Hildegard’s creations. Her nuns’ use of golden crowns, jewelry, and veils was criticized by Canoness Tenxwind of Andernach but justified by Hildegard; the chapter explores the appearance of these elements in Hildegard’s output. Her interaction with Elisabeth of Schönau is connected to Hildegard’s extensive set of compositions about St. Ursula and her 11,000 Virgins. Finally, in 1158 Hildegard gained financial independence from Disibodenberg.
New Creations
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: May 2019

In this chapter Hildegard’s presumed output before Liber vite meritorum is discussed, including Scivias, her correspondence, Physica, Cause et cure, the Lingua ignota and Litterae ignotae, the Gospel homilies, commentary on the Benedictine Rule, and her musical collection Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum. The structure of Scivias, its illuminations, and the musically important closing concert, with its song texts and short version of Ordo virtutum, are emphasized. The nature and genesis of the Symphonia is examined, and its differing structure in the Dendermonde and Riesencodex is laid out and explained. The significance of the 1150s for Hildegard’s activity closes the chapter.
Longer Genres
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: May 2019

The concluding chapter examines Hildegard’s longer genres. It begins with her single alleluia and then moves to the seven works called sequences. Special attention is paid to their formal structures and their often idiosyncratic treatment of generic norms, while the sequence for St. Disibod, O presul vere civitatis, is examined closely. Hildegard’s four hymns come next, with a demonstration of the ways in which the problematic Mathias sanctus shares characteristics with the other works called hymns. The unusual genre of “symphonia” is discussed, with an enumeration of the differences between Hildegard’s symphonia for virgins and her one for widows. After treatment of the unassigned song O viridissima virga, the chapter concludes with a synopsis of the song’s function.
The Risorgimento and the Origins of Anarchist Violence
Authors: Pernicone Nunzio , Ottanelli Fraser M.
Published: May 2019

Chapter 1 highlights the continuity between the Risorgimento and Italian anarchist activities during the movement’s formative years. Specifically, it describes how anarchist violence based on insurrections, guerrilla warfare and tyrannicide was an amalgam of two revolutionary ideologies and traditions inherited from the Risorgimento: the revolutionary democracy of Carlo Pisacane (specifically his articulation of “propaganda of the deed,”) Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi along with lesser known republicans, and the anarchist socialism introduced into Italy by Mikhail Bakunin.
Malfattori: Government Repression and Anarchist Violence
Authors: Pernicone Nunzio , Ottanelli Fraser M.
Published: May 2019

Chapter 2 explains the role of government repression as the primary precipitant of Italian anarchist violence. Specifically it describes how, in a climate of growing economic hardship and social unrest among the peasantry and factory workers, in 1878 Giovanni Passanante’s failed “tyrannicide” of King Umberto I provided Italian authorities with a justification to attempt to deliver a mortal blow to socialism and the International. Repression took various forms. Socialists and anarchists groups were dissolved, their newspapers suppressed, rank-and-file members classified as “malefactors” and subjected to ammonizione (admonishment) and domicilio coatto (internal exile). Important anarchists were arrested and those who escaped detention, as in the case of Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero, forced into exile. These developments led many anarchists to embrace anti-organizational forms of revolutionary ideology and practices that rejected all forms of organization and exalted terrorist violence.
Fatti di Maggio and Gaetano Bresci
Authors: Pernicone Nunzio , Ottanelli Fraser M.
Published: May 2019

In May 1898, worsening economic conditions culminated in demonstrations and brutal military intervention, centered mainly in Milan, known as the Fatti di Maggio. Chapter 6 describes how the carnage of the Fatti di Maggio along with the increased repression that followed set the stage for the most momentous of all the attentats carried out by an Italian anarchist giustiziere: the assassination of King Umberto I by Gaetano Bresci on July 21, 1900. The chapter traces Bresci’s experiences and political evolution within the radical and working class communities in Prato and, after he migrated, in the dynamic anarchist milieu in Paterson, NJ.