bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Effect of tree age and season on root distribution pattern of Bael (Aegle marmelos (L.) Correa)
Authors: Singh Subodh , Misra K.
Published: September 2023

The investigation was carried out on 3- and 13-year-old phenotypically similar and healthy budded trees of bael cv. Pant Shivani in autumn of 2000 and spring of 2001 as per free monolith method of root excavation. The experiment was laid out in factorial randomized block design with two replications involving four factors, viz., season, age, radial distance and depth. The results showed that the tree age significantly influenced the various categories of roots. The 13-year-old trees gave significantly higher dry weight of roots than 3-year–old trees. Seasonal variation did not affect the root distribution pattern in bael. The maximum dry weight of active roots was observed at 0-60 cm radial distance from the tree trunk and at 0-20 cm depth from the ground level. The interaction between tree age and soil depth in dry weight of medium and total roots were found to be significant while rest interactions were non-significant.
Analysis of the Economic Impact and Management Strategies of Health Education Programs on the Formation of Environmentally Responsible Attitudes in Students
Authors: Sitorus Syahrial , Nasution Monica Angelin , Maulidina
Published: September 2023

Health education programs play an important role in shaping students' attitudes and behaviors towards various aspects of health and well-being. This study aims to analyze the economic implications and management strategies of health education programs in shaping students' environmentally responsible attitudes. Environmental responsibility has become an important concern globally, and education is recognized as a key factor in creating awareness and internalizing sustainable behavior. This research adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative analysis of economic impacts with qualitative examination of management strategies. The quantitative aspect of the research involved assessing the cost-effectiveness of the health education program, taking into account the resources invested, the benefits derived, and the potential long-term savings due to behavior change. This economic analysis provides insight into the financial viability and potential return on investment of such a program. A qualitative phase explored the management strategies used in a health education program to encourage the formation of environmentally responsible attitudes. Through interviews, surveys, and content analysis, this study investigates how program design, communication methods, resource allocation, and stakeholder engagement contribute to program effectiveness. Results from this study are expected to reveal the economic benefits of health education programs that promote environmentally responsible attitudes in students. In addition, the findings will highlight management strategies that successfully increase the impact and sustainability of the program. By comprehensively understanding the economic dimensions and management aspects, educational institutions and decision-makers can make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and strategy implementation.
The Effect Of Permissive Parenting on Adolescent Sexual Behavior Pasar 7 Beringin Tembung
Authors: Kesuma Dewi Ira , Haryati Endang
Published: September 2023

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of permissive parenting on premarital sexual behavior in adolescents. This research method uses quantitative methods. The population in this study amounted to 350 people and the sample in this study amounted to 65 people. The sampling technique in this study used a purposive sampling technique. The data collection method in this study used the permissive parenting scale and the premarital sexual behavior scale. The data analysis technique uses simple linear regression analysis. The significance value obtained is 0.054 > 0.05, which means The regression equation based on research data is not significant, meaning that the linear regression model does not meet the linearity criteria. While the coefficient of determination obtained is (R2) 0.057. This means that permissive parenting style influences premarital sexual behavior by 5.7%.
Let Them Rot
Authors: Zupancic Alenka
Published: September 2023

The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all the numerous readings and rewritings of the play keep emerging? To what kind of (always) contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to re-read and re-imagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular questions have driven this research. First, the issue of violence—this term is not meant simply pejoratively. The violence in Antigone is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific “undeadness” that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted an investigation into the relationship between language, sexuality (sexual reproduction), death, and “second death.” The third issue, which also constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. How does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the “unwritten law” she follows, accord with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power?
Longing for the Father
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses Freud’s concept of nostalgia, or longing, in relation to the constitution of individual identity. This is framed within a discussion of the father, both biological and divine, as well an examination of Freud’s The Ego and the Id. Nancy brings this psychoanalytic dialogue into conversation with figures such as Lacan and Rousseau.
Afterword to Stoma
Authors: Gyenge Andrea , Ricco John Paul
Published: September 2023

This essay, a contribution from scholars Andrea Gyenge and John Paul Ricco, situates Nancy’s poem Stoma within his work more broadly, and specifically in relation to his thinking on the body. It recounts the genesis of the poem and provides a commentary on the philosophical and poetic elements it puts into play.
Scandalous Death
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: September 2023

Written only months before Nancy’s own death, this chapter presents a meditation on death, and in particular on the ancient relationship between philosophy and death. The birth of philosophy in a thinking of death and the tradition within philosophy of reflecting on death as a precondition for life are placed in the light of the difficult scandal that death never ceases to be, in order to bring out the interplay between sense and senselessness at the heart of this scandal.
You Ate What?
Authors: Gill Michael
Published: September 2023

In this chapter, I explore the various motivations people take in eating allergens, even sometimes intentionally. Accidents happen, of course, but rarely are stories about why people choose to eat the very substance that causes harm explored. Once again, discourses of risk and pleasure emerge as individuals make choices on how to live with various levels of risk and reward. I also explore how those in a variety of communities map (and remember) those that have died as a result of various levels of violence. I end this chapter thinking about what types of violence is remembered (and prevented).
Inveterate Imperialists
Authors: Hammond John Craig
Published: September 2023

In the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War, sectional conflict frequently took place in overlapping continental, hemispheric, Atlantic, and international contexts. Within these broader geographies, northern and southern whites used conceptions of empire to construct a hemispheric, Manichean struggle pitting free labor versus slave labor, democracy against aristocracy and monarchy, and popular sovereignty versus slaveholder sovereignty and the Slave Power. By the late 1850s, Democratic and Republican imperialists advocated the imposition of their particular forms of sovereignty, race, labor, and republican government onto their sectional rivals as well as onto borderland regions in the trans-Mississippi West, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. In the 1850s the United States became an empire increasingly divided by antagonistic imperial visions for the broader Americas; by 1860, Democrats and Republicans had become de facto imperial rivals.
Walker to Riel
Authors: Greenberg Amy S.
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers the relationship of the state and individual at the margins of empire by comparing the careers of William Walker, a notorious filibuster from the U.S. who temporarily succeeded in seizing control of the Nicaraguan government, and Louis Riel, who led Métis resistance to the Dominion of Canada’s incorporation of Manitoba. The similarities between these two seemingly disparate episodes demonstrates the contingent nature of state consolidation in the nineteenth century.
“Hold the Fort”
Authors: Grant Susan-Mary
Published: September 2023

Scholars have long been fascinated by the link between violence, martial manhood, and state formation in the nineteenth century, but largely absent from their analysis is the emotional component of the newly reconstituted nation-states, what might be termed their spiritual sovereignty; the crucial link between any state and its population, and one largely determined by the dead. This is surprising, given that long before, but to an even greater extent since, the publication of Benedict Anderson’s famous thesis on nationalism and the “ghostly nationalimaginings” that saturate the modern state, scholars have taken it for granted that there is a relationship between the dead of war and those states in whose name they died. This chapter proposes that a fuller understanding of the ways in which martial manhood served as the link between the spatial and the spiritual dimensions of state sovereignty can be achieved if we explore the emotional ramifications of the tradition of citizen service in the name of the nation, the crux of the drive toward nationalism and modernity, that located the heart of the body politic, the spark that animated its existence as a state, in the soldier.
Conclusion
Authors: Schoen Brian , Towers Frank
Published: September 2023

This chapter frames the continental history of Civil War explored within A Continent in Crisis around the ideas offered by Philip S. Paludan’s 1972 article “The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order.” It suggests that the expectations that the citizens of U.S., Mexican, and Canada placed on their governments to create order across a politically heterogenous continent outpaced the power or foresight of those governments to do so. Drawing from the volume’s chapters it highlights the value of transnational histories that look to the peripheries rather than the centers of power for explaining the dynamic and processes that shaped the Civil War Era.
Innovation
Authors: Boynton Andy
Published: September 2023

Can principles of innovation travel well from management to higher education, especially when it comes to matters related to curriculum? Can design thinking in particular serve as a tool for renewing something as hallowed as a liberal arts university’s undergraduate core curriculum? These were among the questions aired at Boston College as we went on a hunt for fresh ideas about how to renew our core studies. We decided early on that design thinking could help us in such an endeavor, essentially because it invokes a non-hierarchical and human-centered approach to innovation—an asset for any effort that seeks to engage students and faculty. The core-renewal process threw light on the applicability of specific innovation/design principles. Among these: the need to bridge distant worlds (or disciplines); deep discovery (identifying the real problems, before lurching toward ill-targeted solutions); experiential modeling and experimentation (test-driving the ideas); and cultural and structural compatibility (between the proposed innovation and the institution).
Ambitious Plans Meet Reality
Authors: Thomas Crane Mary
Published: September 2023

Once the design work with Continuum was completed, Boston College faced the greater challenge of implementing what we designed. This chapter describes how a pared-down version of the plan for Complex Problem and Enduring Question courses was successfully piloted and adopted over several years. It details the challenges (both expected and unexpected) that we faced as our ambitious plans encountered real-world conditions and explains how a new Associate Dean for the Core and University Core Renewal Committee created systems to recruit and support faculty as they worked together to develop new courses. It also describes the instruments we put in place to assess the courses, which ultimately showed that they were a great success.
Teaching about a Planet in Peril
Authors: Parthasarathi Prasannan , Schor Juliet B.
Published: September 2023

Teaching a Complex Problem course about a “wicked problem” requires getting creative about combatting paralysis, by fostering student involvement and building solutions and action into the course. In “Planet in Peril,” which focused on ecological overshoot and climate change, we employed a flipped classroom that gave us time for role plays, contests, simulations, and other participatory exercises. We also incorporated material on success stories into each unit, rather than leaving hopeful examples to the end of the semester. We also found that establishing strong social bonds among all participants in the class—faculty, TAs, and students—helps to get students more engaged in the issues in a personal way.
The Architecture of a Black Feminist Classroom
Authors: Jean-Charles Régine Michelle
Published: September 2023

This essay reflects on lessons learned from the course “Where #BlackLivesMatter Meets #METoo” in which the classroom operated as a generative and disruptive space. Using the example of a class that examines rape culture from the perspectives of literature, sociology, and African diasporic studies the essay highlights how Black feminist pedagogy empowers students to engage a complex social justice problem with transformation in mind. As the essay ultimately concludes, creating a space in the classroom that allowed students to claim space on campus, and move beyond it enhanced the learning experience and community impact.
(Re)Invented Tradition and the Performance of Amazigh Other-Archives in Public Life
Authors: El Guabli Brahim
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the various activist and commemorative strategies the Moroccan Amazigh Cultural Movement (MACM) (re)invented to recover and preserve suppressed Amazigh histories in Morocco. Reading MACM’s activism against the backdrop of political repression during the “Years of Lead,” the chapter articulates how writing history became an urgent concern among Amazigh activists, who wedded commemorative practices with (re)inventions of traditions that transformed the public sphere in Morocco. The chapter probes the historiographical and archival discourses that emerged among Amazigh activists, litterateurs, and historians between the early 1970s and 2021 to show that both Tifinagh (the Amazigh alphabet) and the geography of North Africa have become other-archives wherein silenced Amazigh histories can be recovered and disseminated. In its examination of the histories and historiographical agencies that are projected onto Tifinagh in the public sphere, this chapter posits that this alphabet now adorning official buildings throughout Morocco has transformed the country’s visual and historical identity by recounting histories of loss and marginalization of Berber culture in the public sphere. The chapter also demonstrates how the proliferation of Amazigh literature in Tamazight is participating in this Tankra Tamazight (Amazigh renaissance) in which cultural production occupies center stage.
Making Tazmamart a Transnational Other-Archive
Authors: El Guabli Brahim
Published: September 2023

This chapter makes the counterintuitive argument that Tazmamart as a locus for the collective trauma of the “Years of Lead” was deliberately constructed. Both the extraordinary nature of Tazmamart and the state’s eighteen-year denial of its existence generated a human rights movement whose advocacy on behalf of the prisoners paved the way for its transformation into a global, multilingual, and multimedia memory phenomenon. The chapter distinguishes between and theorizes three types of other-archives that emerged from Tazmamart: scandalous, embodied, and fictionalized. Connecting different geographical locations, languages, media, and literary genres, the chapter shows how the oscillation between political repression during the “Years of Lead” and Morocco’s brief moment of democratization in the early 2000s allowed different forms of other-archives to emerge in specific locations to accomplish the different goals their creators sought to achieve. Between their use to embarrass the Moroccan regime into releasing the prisoners and their mobilization to seek compensation for periods of enforced disappearance, Tazmamart other-archives have become a global and transregional literary and mnemonic phenomenon with exceptional ramifications.
Other-Archives Transform Moroccan Historiography
Authors: El Guabli Brahim
Published: September 2023

The chapter explains how the proliferation of other-archives has infused a new life into Moroccan historiographical thinking. Analyzing academic historians’ use of tārīkh al-zaman al-rāhin (the history of the present) alongside literary-historical writing experiments, such as collaborations between academic historians and novelists, as well as the Moroccan state’s investment in the institutionalization of history outside academia, this chapter teases out how other-archives’ existence and accessibility have begun to transform the discipline of history. From spurring methodological debates about memory and the history of the present to repurposing human rights institutions to sponsor history-focused projects, this chapter demonstrates how the consequences of rewriting the nation play out in the (re)writing of the country’s taboo history. The chapter also underlines the multiplicity of historical stakeholders and the place that producers of other-archives occupy in this fast-changing historiographical scene.
Introduction
Authors: Brehm Brett
Published: September 2023

Beginning with an account of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph recordings, the introduction bridges theories and scholarship in visual culture with established and emerging questions in auditory culture. The “kaleidophonic,” as guiding concept and neologism, is inspired by the kaleidophone, a nineteenth-century device for translating sound into “beautiful forms” that serves as the book’s point of departure for exploring audio and visual relationships in the nineteenth century. The prehistory of the phonograph together with the very idea of phonography, often in dialogue with the idea of photography, emerge as key issues for the book. The introduction traces a distinctive genealogy in the literary imagination of sound technologies, from an ancient Chinese myth about boxing up a human voice to François Rabelais’s “frozen speech” to Cyrano de Bergerac’s seventeenth-century audiobook to Jules Champfleury’s short story “The Legend of the Daguerreotype” (1863).
Poe’s Tintamarre
Authors: Brehm Brett
Published: September 2023

This chapter uncovers a certain proto-phonographic imaginary in Edgar Allan Poe’s writings, while considering the particular trajectory of this thought in transatlantic audiovisual culture. Poe’s writings about science, urban life, and modern technological innovations enter into dialogue with Cros and Baudelaire. Acoustic figures in Poe’s literary works (“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” especially) form part of Poe’s search for a “more absolute truth” discoverable by listening to the past, as in his mystifying text “Eureka” (1848), which is at once prose poem and prophetic scientific treatise. While the connection between Poe and Baudelaire is well established in the scholarly literature, this chapter makes the case that a fecund and largely unexplored dialogue exists between Poe and the other authors considered in this book, especially Cros in the scientific context and Villard in the literary context.
The Amazing Chorus
Authors: Brehm Brett
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers the impulse to imprint Whitman’s poetic voice ‘on record’ with Edison’s newly improved phonograph to be precise, a desire that speaks to an emerging aesthetic of poetic performance for the machine, part of a broader imaginary about the place of performance in modern society and the societal drive to preserve such performance. The chapter demonstrates how Whitman’s desire to capture all sounds with a democratic ear compares with emergent audiovisual media of the era. Whitman, for instance, discovers “living and buried speech” resonant in the streets of New York, as in his “omnibus jaunts” along Broadway.
Setting the Stage
Authors: Rich Bryce E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter lays out the guiding principles for a critique of Orthodoxy regarding gender essentialism. These principles, guided by the values of the Paris School of Russian theologians and religious thinkers, include a constructive appeal to the fathers, a limited set of inviolable dogmatic statements approved by the seven ecumenical councils, broader Orthodox tradition, an engagement with contemporary culture, and the consensus of the Orthodox faithful (sobornicity). Each of these criteria are communally balanced with the goal of theosis or divine-human communion as the ultimate aim of Orthodox teaching and practice.
Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Orthodox Thought
Authors: Rich Bryce E.
Published: September 2023

An exploration of the theological anthropology popularized in contemporary Orthodoxy by Thomas Hopko. Hopko’s theologoumenon or theological opinion suggests that male and female within humanity are representations of principles that exist within the Trinity. The characteristics and activities of men and women in the world are parallel to the activities of the Son and the Holy Spirit within the divine life of the Trinity. The chapter traces both the stated sources of Hopko’s intuition and the likely theologians and religious philosophers of Russia and the Paris School diaspora who pioneered elements of this theological anthropology. These thinkers, in turn, were inspired by a variety of sources that includes Jewish Kabbalah, the mystical writings of Jacob Böhme, German Romanticism, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Jung. While the inspirations for contemporary gender essentialism do not automatically disqualify these extra-Orthodox ideas, they do call for further evaluation in light of Orthodoxy’s ultimate goal of divine-human communion.
Some Final Thoughts on Pastoral Care
Authors: Rich Bryce E.
Published: September 2023

The concluding chapter explores initial Orthodox responses to intersex, transgender, and non-binary phenomena. While individuals, jurisdictions, and autocephalous bodies have attempted to formulate teachings, there is no universally accepted doctrine. The chapter advocates the acceptance of the ambiguity of intersex persons while parents and specialists work to identify what actions, if any, best promote the wellbeing of the child. The chapter explores proposed aetiologies for transgender experience and offers suggestions for pastoral care of those who seek medical transition through hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery. Finally, a brief discussion of the use of pronouns, “deadnaming,” and creating safe spaces within the parish is offered. The approach in each case advocates an individualized approach that considers the unique persons involved. It emphasizes walking together in love and unconditional acceptance while seeking counsel from those best qualified to address each situation. This generally means medical specialists, social workers, psychologists, and experts from within the intersex and transgender communities. The chapter explores a prayer written by an Orthodox bishop that has been used to bless renaming persons as a result of a change in gender and a comparison to other occasions within the tradition when Orthodox Christians take on new names.
Introduction
Authors: Spragins Elizabeth
Published: September 2023

The introduction establishes the framework for the concept of necroepistemology at the intersection of Mediterranean and transatlantic studies and theories of death and the corpse. It surveys the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir as Mediterranean event for which the status of the body was renegotiated alongside epistemological standards that shifted through imperial, religious, and bureaucratic innovations in the region. Narratives produced in this complex intellectual environment had to grapple with shifting terms of authority, authenticity, and orthodoxy and a crisis of knowledge about the fate of key casualties of the battle. Restoring narratives of al-Qasr al-Kabir to their Mediterranean context opens alternate methodological possibilities beyond simplistic categories of language, religion, or nation. The introduction articulates a grammar of the dead that emerged in response to this epistemological crisis, considering not just what is said about the dead but also how it is said, and how that generates knowledge in historical text. The reading is centered on the semiotics of the corpse, an approach to the corpse that theorizes it both in terms of its symbolic significance (representing human mortality and representable in terms of linguistic signs) and its materiality (as a real thing that requires attention and engagement).
Presence
Authors: Spragins Elizabeth
Published: September 2023

At the heart of the corpse’s power to generate a sense of narrative certainty is its material presence. Textually representing corpses situates the narrator as a present and privileged arbitrator between interiority and exteriority of text.⁠ This chapter investigates how Jerónimo de Mendonça’s Jornada de África (1607) describes the deaths of dozens of Portuguese noblemen, depicting the impact of the events almost in real time as they die “here” before the reader’s eyes. These indexical corpses create deictic clusters with other verbal markers that collectively orient the reader to the immediate field of interpretation surrounding the body. By insisting upon the presence of these dead bodies within his narrative, Mendonça creates a common ground within the text upon which he and his reader can meet and experience the events he narrates. The reader becomes another witness of this set of events and testifies to what they have witnessed “here.”
Erasure
Authors: Spragins Elizabeth
Published: September 2023

Whereas the first four chapters of the book focus on examples of “reactive” necroepistemology—how narrators cope with disaster by scrambling to establish knowledge of its corpses—this chapter considers “creative” necroepistemology—how new knowledge can be produced through corpses from a position of power. While Leitão and Silva embrace the subjectivity that lingers in the material remains of the corpse, other narrators bear witness to its violent reduction to a mere object. Corpse desecration deliberately erases and suppresses the vital subjectivity and humanity of dead bodies, and its documentation within text can inscribe that brutal objectification into the language that describes that process.⁠ Such processes feature prominently in Tārīkh al-dawla al-saʿdiyya, one of the major chronicles of the Saʿdīs. I focus on the textual erasure that results from necroviolence in a case that describes Ahmed al-Manṣūr’s public flaying of his nephew Abū ʿAbdallah Muḥammad al-Mutawakkil. This violent episode emerges as one strategy to foreclose potentially disruptive alternate versions of the story, like those that irrupted into the gaping void left by Sebastian’s disappearing body.
Literary Extinctions and the Existentiality of Reading
Authors: Schuster Joshua
Published: September 2023

The third chapter examines the rise of the genre of human-wide extinction narratives in the late nineteenth century, an offshoot from early formations of science fiction. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) developed the genre in connection with the expansion of a public culture of extinction manifested in exhibits in natural history museums and in talk in the popular press about planetary disasters. Wells’s novel did not project extinction on to an external other but imagined England, and by extension all of humanity, implicated in a future evolutionary decline. Wells’s text provides a plot for extinction after debates in Darwinism, and also shows how extinction affects the formal and structural narratological aspects of novels more broadly. Wells’s example demonstrates how “last human” novels pose questions about the functional qualities and limits of form and character at the same time as they give a fictive account of the end of the world. Using contemporary narrative theory, the chapter discusses how last human novels function paradoxically as cultural works envisioning the end of culture. The genre allows readers to consume their own finitude, as well as the end of literature as such, as an aesthetic event.
Critical Theory for the Critically Endangered
Authors: Schuster Joshua
Published: September 2023

The fifth chapter shifts to contemporary extinction events that are currently playing central roles in redefining the meaning of species finitude. It discusses the specific conditions of bison, tigers, and coral as emblematic cases for thinking extinction today. Each of these animals face a situation in which they are not under an immediate extinction threat, yet their populations remain at historic lows. The chapter examines rhetoric used by conservationists in support of this “sustainable” economy for the bison in comparison to recent Indigenous artwork that envisions a queer and decolonial future for sustainability. The chapter also discusses how tigers also are endangered animals intertwined with nationalist agendas and corals are fast becoming barometers for the precarity of coastal oceanic ecosystems in the Anthropocene.
What Is De-Extinction?
Authors: Schuster Joshua
Published: September 2023

Chapter 6 examines recent efforts to develop de-extinction technologies to bring back iconic animals that have been lost and whose genomes can be potentially reconstructed in laboratories. New biotechnologies including cloning, genetic modification, and creating “frozen zoos” contributing to de-extinction science are changing the definitions and meanings of species and extinction. Discussions of the ethics of de-extinction have yet to consider how this science would change the existential structure of life by recasting species precarity as a technological and programming problem. This chapter finishes with a reflection on the allegorical science fiction of Octavia Butler’s trilogy Lilith’s Brood, which features gene banks and de-extinction science as caught up in visions of salvation and extinction for humans as well as nonhuman animal life on Earth. Butler’s trilogy narrates the malleability of biological life through an animal-human-alien spectrum, positioning human and nonhuman characters in a series of biopolitical decisions that appear specifically at the threshold of extinction events.
Introduction: The Philology of Life
Authors: McLaughlin Kevin
Published: September 2023

This chapter provides an overview of the book and an introduction to its main thesis concerning Walter Benjamin’s development of a philological method in his early literary criticism that shapes all of his work. It focuses on a key letter written by Benjamin to his friend Gershom Scholem on February 14, 1921, that outlines his idiosyncratic redefinition of the traditional field of philology as a method for discovering genuine “historical time” in works of literature. Benjamin’s early work concerns the writings of Hölderlin, the German Romantics, and Goethe as representing together what he describes as “perhaps the greatest epoch in the Western philosophy of art.” This philological theory is situated in relation to the emergence of Lebensphilosophie (the philosophy of life) in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of history and Henri Bergson’s exploration of time as durée in the later nineteenth century.
“Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin”
Authors: McLaughlin Kevin
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on two essays composed by Walter Benjamin during his student years (1914–1915) in the wake of the suicide of his friend Fritz Heinle at the outbreak of World War I. It begins with Benjamin’s essay “The Life of Students,” which reveals the influence of Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie (the philosophy of life) and Henri Bergson’s theory of time, and it goes on to consider his first great work of literary criticism, “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin.” The main focus of this chapter is Benjamin’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s proposition on the “sobriety” of ancient Greek art that confronts the modern poet as expressed in what became the poem “Timidity.”
Introduction
Authors: Suresh Mayur R.
Published: September 2023

The introduction argues that legal technicalities are at the heart of the trial. It argues that legal technicalities are forms of tekhne—knowledge practices that are akin to craftmanship or artistry, that is, knowledge that emerges by doing. It argues, that by looking at how terror-accused work with legal technicalities, we can see how technicalities provide avenues of participation in the trial process. In doing so, we can attend to human voice and vulnerability that emerges through the law. In focusing on technicalities, this chapter departs from (1) linking law exclusively with epistemic and physical violence; (2) framings of law as being extensions of society and politics; and (3) framing ant-terror laws through the ideas of the ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’. In doing so, this chapter argues that legal technicalities engender forms of life.
Certification and the Fabrication of Truths
Authors: Suresh Mayur R.
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the technical practices of certification and their relation to the production of truth though the file—‘paper truths.’ Certifications are the granular processes through which these realities come to be simultaneously produced and contested by the case file. I argue that the process of producing different versions of reality depends on a series of smaller technical and certificatory practices—the maintenance of log books, signatures, countersignatures, stamps, seals, and other seemingly insignificant practices. I show how the police and prosecution use certificatory practices to slowly construct a narrative of a case, and I show how the same certificatory practices are used by the defence lawyers and terror-accused to construct a counter-narrative. I show that to contest the narratives constructed by the prosecution, the defence does not seek to bring in ‘reality,’ but another narrative. Thus, paper truths are fought with paper truths.
People of the Sunna and the Assemblage: Deleuzian Hadith Theory
Authors: Knight Michael Muhammad
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the hadith corpus, the thousands of narrators reporting Muhammad’s sayings and actions, through the lens of Deleuzian assemblage theory to examine its rhizomoatic and arborescent tendencies. Like any assemblage, this corpus exhibits strata that stabilize and contain its flows, but also deterritorializing lines of flight. These competing tendencies both appear in consideration of the isnad, the chain of transmission history that accompanies each hadith.
Conclusion: The Seal of Muslim Pseudo
Authors: Knight Michael Muhammad
Published: September 2023

In Islamic interpretive traditions, “seal” (khatm) can signify a conclusion but also a confirmation. This concluding chapter reassembles the themes and arguments of the book and imagines Deleuzo-Islam as a tradition characterized by theological immanence and ongoing destratification through a positive relationship to change and mixture, an Islam that remains unfinished and continually informed by its encounters.
The World, Absolutely
Authors: Gasché Rodolphe
Published: September 2023

On the assumption that in Marx already the humanist heritage becomes problematic, Nancy explores Marx’s notion of “value itself” in view of a notion of value that is no longer measurable in terms of equivalence, and which, by uncoupling “world” and “laboring humanity,” becomes the distinctive mark of a world in which being-together is based on the infinite acts of singularities.
Worldless
Authors: Kaufman Eleanor
Published: September 2023

Jean-Luc Nancy gestures to a terrain where the posthumously published musings of Martin Heidegger and Simone Weil both clash and resonate. Whereas their thought aligns on a number of counts and both Heidegger and Weil voice unsettling expressions of anti-Judaism, the latter is accomplished by mobilizing the notion of the “world” to somewhat different ends, and Nancy’s The Banality of Heidegger (in resonance with his larger oeuvre) helps elucidate that difference. Weil’s thought, and particularly her notions of detachment and decreation, gestures affirmatively to the world’s weakness and negatively to Judaism’s strength, while in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks the figure of the Jew signals poverty in world. Whereas Weil is part of a recognizable lineage of Jewish apostasy that veers into heretical Christianity, Heidegger’s pejorative association of the Jew with worldlessness nonetheless opens his anti-Judaism to other lines of questioning.
Infinitely Passing (or, Pascal Passes)
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: September 2023

In this piece, Jean-Luc Nancy returns to a phrase by Pascal that has always fascinated him, a phrase that he oftentimes cites: “man infinitely transcends man.” Through a “deconstructive” close-reading, Nancy here explicates for us what this phrase means for him and argues how already from Pascal we can elicit the idea of human transcendence freed from any sacred meaning.
Beyond Unity in Diversity
Authors: Reynolds Susan Bigelow
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines how Vatican II (1962–65) changed the way that the Roman Catholic church conceived of its relationship with “others.” The council re-envisioned the church’s once-fortified internal and external borders as porous, a change manifested vividly at the parish level. There, improvising on the council’s themes, structures, and practices, parishioners experimented with new approaches to inclusion, authority, and public witness. Gaudium et Spes (1965) laid the groundwork for an understanding of the parish as a school of solidarity. Yet as magisterial attention shifted to emphasize communion as the foundation of Vatican II’s ecclesiology, the implications of the council’s vision of solidarity for the church ad intra went—and continue to go—largely overlooked. A critical examination reveals the inadequacy of communion ecclesiology as a theological basis for racially and culturally diverse communities. Communion ecclesiology offers a vision of unity in diversity that takes insufficient account of the borderlines within local ecclesial communities. By ignoring power asymmetries that shape the liturgical, sacramental, and social lives of parishes, the communion paradigm underwrites ecclesial colorblindness and renders unclear the mission of the local church with respect to racial justice.
Passion of the Neighborhood
Authors: Reynolds Susan Bigelow
Published: September 2023

This chapter weaves together text, photography, and song in a phenomenological analysis of how public devotional practice functions as a site of border negotiation and source of solidarity in communities of faith. At the center is the annual Good Friday Neighborhood Way of the Cross through the streets of Roxbury. The ritual emerged in the 1970s or ’80s as both an act of piety and an ecumenical, popular-liturgical protest against local gang violence. Winding through the streets of Egleston Square, the stations of the cross are places—street corners, storefronts, apartment stoops—marking the neighborhood’s own passion. Participants’ memories of migration—international, transnational, parochial, spiritual—converge in the streets, woven together in the present through the shared body language of footsteps and the Christian aesthetic vernacular of suffering, death, and resurrection. By crossing neighborhood lines, parish boundaries, and gang territories, parishioners reconfigure local space and actively defy structures of segregation, violence, and displacement.
Introduction
Authors: Soars Daniel
Published: September 2023

I pick up on a tantalising invitation in the footnotes and margins of many of David Burrell’s articles to explore the metaphysics of the ‘Christian’ distinction between the world and God in conversation with religious traditions beyond Abrahamic borders. Specifically, he directs Christian theologians to the work of Sara Grant. I set off from Christian shores, therefore, and journey out with Grant to the farther depths of Vedāntic Hinduism in order to see more clearly what it might mean to say that the world and God are ‘not two’ (in Sanskrit, advaita).
​The Relation between the World and God in Śaṁkara and Thomas
Authors: Soars Daniel
Published: September 2023

The main focus of Chapter 3 is a close reading of Grant’s interpretation of Advaita Vedānta and her work on the concept of relation in Śaṁkara and Thomas, for it is here that she locates the possibility of moving beyond contrastive distinctions between God and world, and toward a ‘non-dualist’ Christianity. As I have already indicated, my exploration of her work points not so much to a theological lacuna within Christianity which can only be filled from without, as to deep resonances between the spiritualities of Grant’s own Catholic tradition and the wisdom traditions of Vedāntic Hinduism. The exciting result of this Scholastic-Vedāntic comparative engagement is, according to Grant, the Copernican revolution which it could bring about in Christian theological understandings of God—not as a distant entity ‘out there’ to whom many people find it increasingly hard to relate, but as the transcendent and yet immanent Self of our own self always already present in creation by the very fact of the world ‘being there’ at all.
Conclusion
Authors: Soars Daniel
Published: September 2023

As we have seen, comparative theology can lead to different types of learning, such as rectification, intensification, and recovery, all of which are in evidence throughout this book. Looking forward, though, I think the real question for my own work and others like it is whether an engagement with Advaita Vedānta contributes toward, or is seen as, a reaffirmation of the truth and value of Christian teaching or whether, more provocatively, it triggers, or is seen as demanding, a radical reinterpretation of certain aspects of the tradition. In this conclusion, I consider especially the anthropological and ethical questions raised by Christian engagement with the non-dualistic metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta.
Nabokov and the Lure of Freudian Forms
Authors: Spitzer Jennifer
Published: September 2023

Vladimir Nabokov presents the most well-known and explicit rejection of Freud by a twentieth-century author and modernist. He dedicates his pivotal work, Lolita, to an extended satire of Freudian forms. Lolita is not only structured as a parodic case study, it is reliant on Freud’s theories of child sexual development, traumatic repetition, and father-child incest, while proliferating Freudian puns and wordplay. Lolita burlesques psychoanalytic interpretation, including its “symbol hunting” and paranoid style, while also relying on a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” As the chapter suggests, the only ethical orientation to Lolita is a hermeneutics of suspicion, one that reads Humbert’s discourse against the grain of his intentions and looks for flashes of Lolita and her experience through the confusing mesh of Humbert’s perspective.
Conclusion
Authors: Spitzer Jennifer
Published: September 2023

As psychoanalysis became more entrenched within literary critical discourses at mid-century, writers from Vladimir Nabokov to Susan Sontag to Theodor Adorno warned of the impoverishing effects of psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism on art and literature.By emphasizing the artwork’s own authority and its capacity to be understood on its own terms, and refusing a hermeneutics of depth, these critics reignite modernist defenses of aesthetic autonomy, while anticipating more recent calls for “reparative reading,” “surface reading,” and “postcritique.”The debates that emerged during the first half of the century over the value of psychoanalytic criticism thus seem uncannily predictive of more recent discussions of literary form, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the authority over literary meaning—whether that authority should lie with the text, the critic, the general reader, or some combination of those stakeholders.
Huddle
Authors: Philbrick Ethan
Published: September 2023

In the second chapter, Philbrick turns to Simone Forti’s 1960 movement score Huddle to develop an account of huddling as a small group artistic and political practice under neoliberalism. Huddles are experiments with gathering subjects to be together without a sense of hierarchal verticality to create a leaderless being of social mattering, a collective encounter with entangled horizontality. While many non-hierarchical group procedures have been subsumed within neoliberalism’s relational forms, Philbrick moves between Forti’s 1960 score and the call of the 2017 Women’s March to form “huddles,” to think about ongoing possibility of gathering otherwise within noeliberalism’s genres of collective containment.
Commune
Authors: Philbrick Ethan
Published: September 2023

The third chapter develops a sense of the commune by turning to Delany’s 1978 memoir of dwelling in a short-lived commune on Manhattan’s Lower East Side Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love. Heavenly Breakfast was a commune and band that came together in an apartment in Manhattan’s East Village during the winter of 1967. Heavenly Breakfast, the memoir, tells the story of the communal attempt years after its dissolution. Delany’s accountis a literary, theoretical, and practical document that approaches the commune as a kind of studying, playing, and sleeping together so as to practice how to live otherwise. The event’s dissipation is not a closure of potentiality but a scene of writing that keeps a no-longer present attempt still in play. Philbrick concludes the chapter by turning to Morgan Bassichis’s queer communal performance from 2017, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions The Musical.
Ensemble
Authors: Philbrick Ethan
Published: September 2023

The fifth chapter approaches the mid-1970s ensemble compositions for groups of one kind of instrument by Julius Eastman to think about the group forms of emergent queer politics. Philbrick interprets Eastman’s mono-instrument ensemble pieces as sounding out a different kind of homo-ness—a dissonant sonic gathering around being of the same kind (of body, of instrument) in which categorical sameness is also always a space of dissonance, interference, and differentiation. In addition, Philbrick turns to more recent projects by artists such as Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste and Tiona Nekkia McClodden that engage with Eastman’s legacy to consider how Eastman’s group disruptions might continue to exceed their containment.