bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Charter Impact: Influencing Local Self-Government in Europe
Authors: Himsworth C. M. G.
Published: May 2018

An important question in relation to the European Charter of Local Self-Government is how to measure the treaty’s actual impact on the law and practice of local government in Europe. This chapter offers a response, distinguishing principally between that group of states (broadly in Western Europe and including the United Kingdom) which became signatories to the Charter from 1985 and, on the other hand, those states of Central and Eastern Europe who undertook major political and constitutional transformations from the early 1990s and came late to the Council of Europe and the Charter. The Charter became an important dimension in applications for membership of the European Union.
Alcoholism and the Doctor in Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó
Authors: Watt Calum
Published: May 2018

Alcoholism forms a constant presence in the films of Béla Tarr. The focus of this chapter is on one episode from Tarr’s seven-hour-long masterpiece Satantango (1994), a film about life in a collective farm during the end of communism in Hungary. The episode centres on a reclusive, obese, and severely alcoholic doctor, played by Peter Berling, whose chief pastime is to sit at his desk drinking and obsessively recording every aspect of the petty goings-on at the estate in a journal. However, in this episode he finds himself having run out of alcohol and reluctantly resolves that he must leave to get some more. In this hour-long episode the camera follows this sick man on a veritable odyssey through the rain to the pub where the rest of the peasants are cavorting riotously. This intimate and yet epic treatment of bodily needs has few equals in cinema. In this chapter I show through close formal analysis of scenes featuring the doctor that what is often considered the essence of Tarr’s style – slowness – is found to have its roots in an attentive depiction of the physical life of the body. In addition, it is typical of Tarr’s style to situate the body within a material environment, a theme brought out in Satantango through vast images of the Great Hungarian Plain and as the doctor is shown reading from what seems to be a geological prehistory of Central Europe. Through an engagement with key writers on Tarr (András Bálint Kovács and Jacques Rancière) as well as Gilles Deleuze, I suggest there are two times at work in Tarr’s depiction of alcoholism: the heavy present of the body and another time which takes flight from the travails of the body.
Corporeal Exploration in György Pálfi’s Taxidermia
Authors: Bugaj Małgorzata
Published: May 2018

In the recent decades ample attention within the study of cinema has been paid to the human body, yet few films deal so directly with our physical nature as Hungarian director György Pálfi’s Taxidermia. This 2006 surreal family saga presents three generations of men obsessed with their corporeal needs. In its reflection on the body, the film juxtaposes the extremes of the human form. On the one hand, it probes the inside and the outside of the body. On the other hand, it investigates Bakhtin’s carnivalesque corporealities and considers Baudrillard’s notion of the body ‘as the finest of the consumer objects’. In contemplating the corporeal exterior, Taxidermia celebrates the senses as well as the varied textures and hues of the skin. Revisiting the visceral depths of the body, it imposes its own aesthetics as it exhibits the interior anatomy. Furthermore, while the film begins with grotesque depictions of the corporeality and its urges, in its conclusion these are replaced with the image of a modern, constructed physicality whose enslavement to its needs is rebuked. Such a body, emptied of its organic connections and ultimately likened to a taxidermist mount, constitutes a commentary on the contemporary perception of our own physical nature. Tracing Taxidermia’s exploration of the human body, this chapter analyses the film’s references to different theories revolving around the human corporeality.
Aerial Bodies in Polish Cinema
Authors: Ostrowska Dorota
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on the representation of the dynamics of the body in flight in selected Polish films from the period of state socialism including The Case of Pilot Maresz, Against Gods, To Destroy the Pirate and On the Earth and in the Sky. The discussion centers on the idea of ‘socialist aerial bodies’, which is informed by Paul Virilio's reflection about the relationship between the body and technologies developed for the most part during the Cold War, which coincided with the period of state socialism in Poland. Virilio’s arguments are not nuanced in the way that reflects the differences in the impact that war technologies, such as flying, might have had in the socialist context as opposed to the non-socialist one with which he was much more familiar. This chapter is an attempt to fill this gap in Virilio's reflection on the aerial body by discussing the development of a specific representation of the body, referred to here as a ‘socialist aerial body’, which is impacted not only by the advancements in the technologies of flying, but also by ideological concerns - some of them unique to the socialist context.
Jumps in Scale
Authors: Chion Michel
Published: May 2018

One of cinema’s inventions is the possibility, thanks to montage, of giving equivalent onscreen size to objects across the scale, from the smallest to the largest – just as, in poetic discourse, a human army might be compared to ants walking in line. In a number of recent films, it has even become possible to imply, with the help of digital effects, the presence of an imaginary camera, capable of ‘moving through solid matter’, of circulating between atoms: a camera that has nothing in common any more with the human eye.
Bill Viola and the Cinema of Indefinite Bodily Experience
Authors: Ravetto-Biagioli Kriss
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines ghostly gestures that we cannot consciously experience, but only perceive through digital technologies. Internationally recognized as a leading video artist, Viola’s work focuses on the intersections of new media and experiences like death, consciousness, spirituality, and emotion. Many of his recent installations manipulate our sense of time by using a special high-speed camera. Uncanny gestures (those that are embodied but unreadable) emerge as the film is transferred to digital video and slowed down. The emergence of gestures that we can recognize once visualized through digital media as our own, but we cannot recall – that is, we cannot reenact or remember – points to something uncanny about gesture and its relation to affect. Rather than offering us a new understanding of human interiority or an opportunity to make sense of the uncanny, Viola’s work leaves us only with uncertainty as a visceral affect.
Slow Looking: Confronting Moving Images with Georges Didi-Huberman
Authors: Fowler Catherine
Published: May 2018

A recent flurry of scholarship around slow cinema’s use of long takes signals a renewed interest in looking. Adding to this work, this chapter considers contemporary artists’ moving images shown in galleries, focusing in particular on a work by Sharon Lockhart. Lockhart’s film installations have much in common with slow cinema, including an emphasis on minimal movements, minor elements and the apparently undramatic. However, because it is conceived for contemporary art spaces, this work commonly adopts the short form or operates through a looped format. As a consequence of these differences, a new critical trajectory is opened up in which it is less duration that is of interest – or how seeing is produced by a sustained look – and more visuality itself, or how ‘really looking’ can produce a different kind of engagement with the visual. By applying ideas from Georges Didi-Huberman to Lockhart’s installation Double Tide (2009) we find that the work calls for a kind of slow looking. Through slow looking we are more able to ‘imagine for ourselves’ and more open to the experience of not knowing.
The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision
Authors: Shaviro Steven
Published: May 2018

The six Paranormal Activity movies (2007–15) explore a variety of methods for creating ‘found-footage’ horror. Produced on extremely low budgets, they devise a number of ways to generate scares and thrills without resorting to complicated, high-end special effects. They make use of sound, of temporal delay, and of the limitations and affordances of consumer video products that are both used to create the films, and actually used within the films. This self-reflexivity points up the ways that our actual world is permeated with recording and surveillance devices. The Paranormal Activity films eschew most formal principles of commercial filmmaking; their low-budget, unconventional technologies present us with a new sort of post-cinematic – and post-phenomenological – media apparatus. The last film in the series, in particular, uses glitches and breakdowns of the image in order to convey how the demonic realm it is ostensibly concerned with corresponds with new technical devices that extend outside the actual human sensorium
Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image
Authors: Cameron Allan
Published: May 2018

Exploring the deliberate ‘glitching’ of digital moving images across a range of contexts (from gifs to video art to horror cinema), this chapter demonstrates how such practices produce a virtual disfiguring of the image. Focusing on the trope of glitched faces, it examines their peculiar dynamic of unmasking and effacement, in which the image is rendered both transparent (revealing its structural logic) and opaque (obscuring its object of vision). Such works perform an ambiguous ‘de-facing’ of the human, remaking the face as blocky abstract shapes or, conversely, as an uncanny bodily extrusion. If digital errors, as Mark Nunes asserts, are often regarded as ‘abject’ in relation to the systemic operations they disrupt, then these works provide a visual index for this abjection, excavating the workings of digital code to produce a moment of uncanny recognition. Examples discussed include video works by Takeshi Murata and Nicolas Provost, as well as the horror film Unfriended (Leo Gabriadze, 2014).
Joseph and his Avatars
Authors: Kennedy Philip F.
Published: May 2018

Given the importance of Surah 12 as the paragon of all storytelling in the Qurʾan, it should not surprise us to find refractions and transfigurations of the story in postdating religious and literary narratives. The texts examined in this chapter all borrow themes, rework structures and seek the cognitive reassurance of anagnorisis from the scriptural epitome and its apocryphal accretions. Each of the works – which range, in distinctive styles, from the mystical epic Conference of the Birds to the popular Arabian Nights’ Romance of Ghānim b. Ayyūb – features recognition and discovery either as a central theme or as an element more essentially contingent upon defining features of the generic cast in which the given story is fashioned.
Intertextuality and Reading: The Myth of Deliverance in al-Faraj baʿd al-Shiddah
Authors: Kennedy Philip F.
Published: May 2018

Medieval Arabic anecdote collections regularly contain pious stories of deliverance (faraj) after distress (shiddah) in which recognition inflects the relief with which such narratives tend to end. These stories cater to and display popular sentiment on the whole, though they are preserved in highbrow belles-lettristic (adab) collections of prose. Their stories are those that mark and signal their identities – the story of their shared diaspora – and in this sense they are classic ‘hommes recits’, though accounts of their tribulations are relatively bare given the brevity of the tale. Their childhood severance becomes the very foretoken of their reunion, which is in the end a happy paradox.
Imposture and Allusion in the Picaresque Maqāmah1
Authors: Kennedy Philip F.
Published: May 2018

Recognition stories lend themselves to easy parody. A few examples exist in the Arabian Nights, depending on how one leans in interpretation. There is a case to be made that the maqāmāt (sing. maqāmah, often rendered ‘seances’ or ‘assemblies’) are in large measure parodies of the art of storytelling or of the values with which stories can be burdened by a culture. Intrigues of disguise and imposture all make for good stories in which manifold deceit is veiled at first, and then exposed. Sometimes the story itself may be exposed, for a good story about forgery will stir suspicions that the story too has been fabricated. Allusive narratives exacerbate the point since they are texts in which much detail and significance lie under the surface in the play on language. The rhetorical figures of al-Oarīrī’s maqāmāt emphasise the sensation that one thing – a word, or even just a phoneme – can have two very different, and sometimes even contrary, meanings.
Sequence, Series and Character in Children of Violence
Authors: Brazil Kevin
Published: May 2018

Explorations of selfhood have been central to Lessing’s work. Perhaps less recognized, however, is that this has been accompanied by an ongoing and highly self-conscious exploration of the function of literary character as a formal device. This chapter addresses this question by focusing on Lessing’s most sustained treatment of character: Martha Quest in the five novel Children of Violence (1952-69) series. Previous criticism has often read Martha autobiographically, but this chapter begins by analysing how Lessing situates her novel-series in relationship to the history of the form, from Balzac to Proust to Louis Aragon, and how her initial conception of character bears close comparison with Georg Lukács’s discussions of critical realism in the era of the Cold War and decolonization. Such questions are written into Children of Violence, in Martha’s own scenes of reading and inability to find a fictional representation of her life. The chapter closes by considering how Lessing manipulates the aesthetic requirements and tensions of the novel sequence to foreground the representational limitations imposed not just by realist theories of character, but by capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and the bourgeois family. These, in the end, provide the horizon beyond which Martha cannot pass – but which Lessing’s writing can.
Analytical framework for a comparative study of change in political regimes
Authors: Szmolka Inmaculada
Published: May 2018

This chapter reflects on the existence or not of a new wave of democratisation in the wake of the Arab Spring. It is true that simultaneity, contagion, diffusion and emulation do feature in the political dynamics of change following the Arab Spring. However, rather than a democratic tsunami, there were ebbs and flows of a ‘wave of political change’ that has involved differing transformative processes in each country. Secondly, the author offers a typology of political regimes as well as a classification of MENA regimes prior to the Arab Spring, in order to identify the starting point of political change. Thirdly, different types of political change processes are defined and categorised: two general processes of political change (democratisation and autocratisation); and, five specific processes of political change affecting democracies (democratic regression, democratic deepening and consolidation of democracy) or authoritarianisms (political liberalisation and authoritarian progression). And finally, the author presents the methodological framework used in this book to study political change in the MENA countries. This change is analysed with reference to three dimensions: pluralism and political competition (party/representation systems and electoral integrity); government (constitutional reforms, government and state powers, and good governance; and public rights and liberties (political rights, civil rights, rule of law, and civil society).
Civil society and social movements
Authors: Pérez-Beltrán Carmelo , Álvarez-Ossorio Ignacio
Published: May 2018

This chapter establishes a general framework that enables to assess the situation of civil society in the MENA region, before and after the Arab Spring.
The Arab Spring undermined many of the theories that dwelt on the depoliticisation of civil society, its inability to influence the political agenda and the customary use made of it as an instrument of authoritarian regimes. Although this activism appeared to take on new forms, it was not spontaneously generated, but included an accumulation of baggage from the past, in constant relationship and tension with the state; hence, along with associations concerned with charity work and development, there also existed another more critical and politically committed type of organisation, in which the theory of the persistence of authoritarianism had not shown sufficient interest.
Likewise, the Arab Spring questioned the institutionalised, structured, organisational nature of civil society that transitology usually supports. During the uprisings, none of the traditional or formal civil society organisations came to the fore, either in their interventionist (NGOs) or their most contestatory dimensions (human rights organisations, Islamist groups, or more politicised platforms).
Thus, the chapter shows that it is necessary to go beyond a certain reductionist view of what civil society is and to propose another concept, much more dynamic, creative and horizontalist that involves not only hierarchical organisational structures, but also other spaces of mobilisation in which the citizenry can express its social, political and economic commitment.
Introduction
Authors: Arnason Johann P. , Hrubec Marek
Published: May 2018

Problems of social revolutions and/or transformations belong to the classical agenda of social inquiry, as well as to the most prominent real and potential challenges encountered by contemporary societies. Among revolutionary events of the last decades, particular attention has been drawn to the changes that unfolded at the turn of the 1990s and brought the supposedly bipolar (in fact incipiently multipolar) world to an end. The downfall of East Central European Communist regimes in 1989 and of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of a new era, originally characterised on the one hand by the relaxation of international tensions and on the other by the ascendancy of Western unilateralism.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet collapse prompts the authors of this book to reflect on revolutions and transformations, both from a long-term historical perspective and with regard to the post-Communist scene. The social changes unfolding in Eastern and Central Europe are not only epoch-making historical turns; their economic, social and political aspects, often confusing and unexpected, have also raised new questions and triggered debates about fundamental theoretical issues. Moreover, they have had a significant impact on developments elsewhere in the world, in both Western and developing countries.
Hidden Revolutionary Processes in 1990s India?
Authors: Krejčík Jiří
Published: May 2018

The chapter considers the history of India, mainly in the last decades, in light of the contemporary situation, created by the decisive victory of the Hindu nationalist party. While India has not experienced a political revolution in the generally accepted sense, it is a noteworthy fact that the label „revolution“ has been used to describe varying developments during the last half-century. This raises conceptual questions. In particular, it needs to be clarified whether the idea of a „passive revolution“, a major structural change without the collective action and the struggle for social power that are associated with full-fledged revolution, is applicable. In India, it has been applied to Gandhi’s actvities, but also to those of his less charismatic disciples; but some scholars have doubted its relevance. The chapter argues for a cautious application of the concept, especially with regard to the rise of a new capitalist class.
Matching Reforms of Political and Economic Systems of China
Authors: Xiaoping Wei
Published: May 2018

China’s socialist economic reform began in 1978. Its history can be divided into three stages. The first one lasted from 1978 to 1992, with the introduction of a system of contract responsibility system and the use of monetary incentives. The second one was from 1992 to 2001, with the introduction of a market system, regulating the productive activity of enterprises through market information. The third stage began in 2001; including the joining of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and a more general linking up with the trends of globalisation. No matter what the future outcome of this transition will be, the incoherence of the reformed economic system and the only partly reformed political system has become evident. The prospects of China’s historical transition depend on how we can guarantee first, that the economic reform will still move in a socialist direction, and second, that political reform will match economic reform.
The First Thirty-Six Years of the Boeotia Project, Central Greece
Authors: Bintliff John
Published: May 2018

A description by one of Anthony’s collaborators of the progress and achievements of archaeological survey work in Boeotia.
Secularism and Multiculturalism in India: Some Reflections
Authors: Bajpai Rochana
Published: May 2018

What role does secularism have in the governance of religious diversity in an age marked by the assertion of religio-cultural identities across the world? India, with its long history of religious pluralism, a state ideology of secularism, and the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism, is a key site for examining the disposition of secularism towards religious identities and diversity. Secularism and multiculturalism are often seen as opposed in political debates involving religious minorities, notably the well-known French headscarf case. Several scholars have suggested that religious traditions offer better resources for toleration than modern secularism (for India, see, for example, Madan 1998: 316; Nandy 1998:336–7). Others, more sympathetic to secularism, have also suggested that it may be deficient in the normative resources required for the accommodation of religious practices, particularly in the case of minorities (Mahajan, this volume; Modood 2010).
Four Dogmas or Heresies in the Discussion of Secularism and Religion
Authors: Weiler Joseph H. H.
Published: May 2018

One person’s dogma is another’s heresy. So it is with any discourse of religion and even more so in the discourse of secularism and religion. So, I wish to strip any normative patina which attaches to these words. I use them simply because I want to address some of the most commonly and strongly held assumptions and positions underlying this discourse. This afterword does not set out to summarise the rich contributions to this volume nor to take direct issue with any particular one. And yet, there is no idea or proposition in this afterword which is not inspired by, or does not take issue with, at least one of these contributions and in this respect it may be seen as a veritable dialogical epilogue (even if monological in form) to the collection of essays
From Solitude to Stealth: Taha Hussein and Sonallah Ibrahim
Authors: Nasser Tahia Abdel
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the foundational three-volume autobiography in Arabic literature by Egyptian reformer Taha Hussein and an autobiographical novel by Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim. The two works rework the form through important historical, cultural, and literary junctures. The chapter explores the ways in which Hussein’s The Days and Ibrahim’s Stealth blur the conventional borders between fiction and autobiography. One lays down the conventions of the autobiography of childhood and the other dramatically revises the genre. By focusing on a canonical autobiography and a seemingly conventional autobiographical novel, the chapter reads the reworking of the form from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries in parallel with national developments and through the cultural status of the writers.
The Radical Contingency of Temporality, Correlation and Philosophy: Merleau-Ponty’s Indirect Ontology contra Meillassoux’s Hyper-Anthropocentric Idealism
Authors: Morris David
Published: May 2018

This chapter first analyses Meillassoux’s critique, in After Finitude, of subject-object correlation and phenomenology. It then traces connections between passivity, radical reflection, and indirect ontology in Merleau-Ponty, to show how Meillassoux, contra Merleau-Ponty, takes the activity of thinking for granted and neglects passivity, in ways that lead to ontological confusions and assumptions about being's determinate character. The latter troubles Meillassoux’s ancestrality problem and leads him to overlook a radically contingent being indicated within correlation itself. The final section clarifies and supports this claim via physics, specifically the measurement problem in quantum mechanics—a concrete problem that Meillassoux does not discuss when he broadly invokes mathematics and science to support his position.
Speculative Empiricism
Authors: Debaise Didier , Stengers Isabelle , Stengers Isabelle
Published: May 2018

Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with a method of systematic cosmological speculation? Didier Debaise’s reading of Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy that makes this possible looks like, how it works and what is at stake. He focuses in on Whitehead’s attempt to construct a metaphysical system of everything in the universe that exists whilst simultaneously claiming that it can account for every element of our experience: everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or thought.
What is Speculative Philosophy?
Authors: Debaise Didier
Published: May 2018

This chapter questions the contemporary stakes of speculative philosophy. Taking Whitehead’s claim of inscribing all problems of knowledge, of reality, and of experience within a “speculative scheme” seriously, this chapter is organized around a number of questions: How to inherit from speculative philosophy in the aftermath of the critiques that haven been formulated with respect to it in the beginning of the 20th century, most notably by pragmatism, Bergsonism, and phenomenology? Which are the instruments thanks to which speculative philosophy can enlarge the field of thought in order to account for experiences that transcend human limitations?
Temporal Dimensions of Actual Entities
Authors: Debaise Didier
Published: May 2018

The individuation of actual entities has a beginning and an end. It passes from disjunctive diversity, where it has the character of an ‘aim’, a potentiality, through its being in action, to its satisfaction, at which point it is no longer susceptible to transformations or becomings. The best way of expressing this highly delimited nature of individuation is to use terms like ‘blocks’, ‘blocks of becoming’ or ‘blocks of individuation’. In Some Problems of Philosophy, William James, attempting to account for sensible experience, for perception in immediate experience, develops a notion of what he calls ‘drops of experience’. Divisions within a ‘drop of experience’ are always possible, an analysis into parts or elements can always be performed, and yet to do so would be to lose what is important, namely, that these drops are indivisible totalities. The divisions are ideal; they emerge out of acts of representation which translate what is given in totality into distinct elements. The most concrete experience is that which can be expressed by movements like augmentation, intensification and amplification, movements which reach a point of effective realisation, a point which, at the same time, marks the passage to a new ‘drop of experience’.
Conclusion: What is Speculative Empiricism?
Authors: Debaise Didier
Published: May 2018

Process and Reality ends with a warning: ‘[t]he chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence’ (PR, 337). Although this danger of narrowness might emerge from the ‘idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilization’ (PR, 337), we should not be mistaken: it occurs within philosophy, in its activity, its method. And the fact that this issue arises at the end of Process and Reality reveals the ambition that has accompanied its composition: Whitehead has resisted this danger through the form and ambition of his speculative construction. The temptation of a narrowness in selection attempts to expel speculative philosophy at the same time as it haunts each part of its system.
Coming to the Aid of Africa
Authors: Webber David M.
Published: May 2018

The final case study returns to the theme of financing for development explored in chapter 5. Yet where this first case study chapter explored the macroeconomic architecture surrounding debt relief, chapter 7 examines the link between the welfare reforms that Gordon Brown introduced in the UK, and the ‘Global New Deal’ that he sought to promote abroad. The centrepiece of Brown’s ‘Global New Deal’ was his much-vaunted International Finance Facility (and, latterly, International Finance Facility for Immunisation). The IFF, it is argued here, was very much in keeping with Brown’s ‘golden rule’ to ‘borrow only to invest’ and his enthusiasm to use Private Finance Initiatives and Public-Private Partnerships to fund public goods. With overseas aid viewed as a form of global welfare, the IFF would frontload the finance needed for development and distribute it to those recipient countries that met the responsibilities demanded of them. Ascribing aid with the same contractual obligations of ‘rights and responsibilities’ however, served only to obscure the structural causes of inequality faced by many countries in the global South. Moreover, Brown’s own form of ‘conditionality’ would restrict still further the already-limited economic autonomy of those nations urgently in need of this aid.
Saving the World?
Authors: Webber David M.
Published: May 2018

Drawing this book to a close, this concluding chapter returns to the core theoretical and empirical claims made in the opening chapter and throughout the book. It summarises those policies that Gordon Brown transposed from New Labour’s domestic political economy to meet his undoubted concern for international development, and the analysis offered in respect of each of these policies. The significance of this policy transmission from the domestic to the international spheres is explored, and the critical tensions inherent in such a strategy, are teased out. Gordon Brown was clearly passionate about matters of global poverty (and indeed, even out of office, remains so). Yet in his zeal to deliver lasting change in some of the world’s poorest areas, Brown attempted to address global poverty by explicitly working with and indeed enhancing the self-same structures of market capitalism that had reinforced and reproduced the levels of inequality and underdevelopment experienced across the global South. Gordon Brown’s development strategy therefore did not simply assimilate ‘market’ actors in the development process but more often than not, ended up prioritising the expectations of these actors over the delivery of a more socially just and equitable set of outcomes.
Émile Benveniste
Authors: Wilberg Henrik
Published: May 2018

Émile Benveniste was a French linguist of Sephardic descent, born in 1902 in Aleppo in what was then the Ottoman Empire. A specialist in comparative Indo-European grammar and, in the interwar years, a student of Ferdinand de Saussure’s follower Antoine Meillet at the École pratique des hautes Études in Paris, he held the chair of linguistics at the Collège de France from 1937 to 1970.1 Having published widely since 1935, Benveniste came to prominence outside the field of linguistics in 1956, when he contributed a famous article on the function of language in Freud to the first issue of Jacques Lacan’s early journal, La psychanalyse.2 From 1960 onwards, at the height of structuralism’s influence, he founded and co-edited another journal, L’homme, alongside the anthropologist Claude LÉvi-Strauss and the geographer Pierre Gourou.
Dante Alighieri
Authors: Bartoloni Paolo
Published: May 2018

The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is invoked several times in the work of Giorgio Agamben, often in passing to stress a point, as when discussing the political relevance of désoeuvrement (KG 246); to develop a thought, as in the articulation of the medieval idea of imagination as the medium between body and soul (S, especially 127–9); or to explain an idea, as in the case of the artistic process understood as the meeting of contradictory forces such as inspiration and critical control (FR, especially 48–50). So while Agamben does not engage with Dante systematically, he refers to him constantly, treating the Florentine poet as an auctoritas whose presence adds critical rigour and credibility. Identifying and relating the instances of these encounters is useful since they highlight central aspects of Agamben’s thought and its development over the years, from the first writings, such as Stanzas, to more recent texts, such as Il fuoco e il racconto and The Use of Bodies.
The significance of Agamben’s reliance on Dante can be divided into two categories: the aesthetic and the political. The following discussion will address each of these categories separately, but will also emphasise the philosophical continuity that links the discussion of the aesthetic with that of the political. While in the first instance Dante is offered as an example of poetic innovation, especially in relation to the use of language and imagination, in the second he is invoked as a forerunner of new forms of life. Mediality and potentiality are the two pivots connecting the aesthetic and the political.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Authors: Garrison Alysia
Published: May 2018

Though more studies have been dedicated to the place of Kant in Agamben’s oeuvre, Hegel – that other major Enlightenment philosopher indispensable to modernity – holds an equally formative, if perhaps more subtle, place in his work. From the very earliest to the latest texts, Agamben’s work seeks to surpass the horizon of Western metaphysics through a philological engagement with the negative, formed in large part through a complex confrontation with Hegel. Agamben’s grappling with the dialectic in search of its idling is not merely strategic, but as he puts it, ‘one of the most urgent tasks today’ for a Marxist philosophy shored on its wreckage (IH 39). In ‘The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic’, Antonio Negri claims that the work of Agamben enables a ‘discreet dialectical rediscovery’ typifying left Hegelianism and the young Marx, resulting not in ‘the triumph of the Aufhebung‘, but in ‘the heroism of the negative’.1 Rather than valorising the negative, however, as Agamben painstakingly argues in his early text Language and Death, it is precisely the negative structure of the Voice, or, in Hegel’s terms, the ‘bad infinity’ predicted on division, that Agamben’s thought seeks to absolve (LD 100).
Friedrich Hölderlin
Authors: Wilberg Henrik
Published: May 2018

In the preface to Stanzas, Agamben unambiguously provides the setting for his engagement with Friedrich Hölderlin: The name of Hölderlin – of a poet, that is, for whom poetry was above all problematic and who often hoped that it would be raised to the level of mechane (mechanical instrument) of the ancients so that its procedures could be calculated and taught – and the dialogue that with its utterance engages a thinker who no longer designates his own meditation with the name of ‘philosophy’ are invoked here to witness the urgency, for our culture, of rediscovering the unity of our fragmented word. (S xvii) Hölderlin is invoked as a poet who occupies a singular position among poets, one for whom poetry was ‘above all problematic’ – problematic in the sense that it persists as a discourse of recovery with regard to something that is not itself exclusively ‘poetic’. In this capacity, the peculiar fracture of poetic discourse in Hölderlin is a ‘witness to the urgency’ of what is singled out as the main theme of Stanzas: the scission, in ‘our culture’, between poetry and philosophy with regard to objects of experience. Complementing this problematisation of poetry in Hölderlin, however, is the equally problematic discourse of ‘a thinker who no longer designates his own meditations with the name of “philosophy”’.
Marquis de Sade
Authors: Grünnagel Christian
Published: May 2018

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), appears in European literature and culture like a ghostly figure whose prolific and monstrous works haunt not only nineteenth-century French novels and the surrealist artists (Magritte, Man Ray), but also thinkers, essayists and philosophers of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century.1 After the Second World War and the devastation that it caused worldwide, some influential thinkers – such as Klossowski, de Beauvoir, Horkheimer and Adorno2 – reread the oeuvre of the divine marquis, long decried as the product of a troubled, ill and wicked mind. Lacan and Adorno and Horkheimer even proposed structural parallels between Sade’s libertinage and Kant’s philosophy.3 Keeping this history of reception in mind, it is not completely surprising that Agamben includes commentaries on Sade’s political and philosophical writing in one of his own central
projects, Homo Sacer, and comes back occasionally to Sade in other works.
Aby Warburg
Authors: Efal-Lautenschläger Adi
Published: May 2018

One preliminary point which must be stated regarding Agamben’s relation to the art historian Abraham (‘Aby’) Moritz Warburg (1866–1929) is that this line of questioning is not reducible to problems regarding imagery or ‘visual’ art. Agamben says explicitly that ‘only the myopia of a psychologizing history of Art could have defined [Warburg’s art history] as a “science of the image”’ (ME 53). Although most scholarship on Warburg has indeed viewed the latter’s work as laying the foundations for image and visual studies, in Agamben’s account Warburg ushers the humanities towards another kind of inquiry, one having more to do with the concept of time than with any sort of imagery or visual phenomena. In this, Agamben’s reading of Warburg differs substantially from those of major art historians influenced by Warburg, such as Horst Bredekamp (Bildakt)1 or Georges Didi-Huberman (images malgré tout).2 In fact, Agamben’s reading of Warburg’s art historical inquiries can be elaborated as a fruitful critique of the recent ‘imagist’ turn in the history of art, viewing visual artworks as being primary and essentially ‘images’.
Gershom Scholem
Authors: Ng Julia
Published: May 2018

Giorgio Agamben’s earliest encounter with Gershom Scholem concerns an essay from 1972 entitled ‘Walter Benjamin and his Angel’,1 Scholem’s first attempt to provide a definitive account of Benjamin’s legacy. At its centre was a short text entitled ‘Agesilaus Santander’, which Benjamin composed on 12 and 13 August 1933 as a gift for the Dutch painter Anna Maria Blaupot ten Cate. In the text, the narrator is first given a ‘secret’ Jewish name, which is then revealed to contain an image of the ‘New Angel’ as well as a ‘female’ and ‘male’ form. Before naming himself as such, the ‘new angel’ presents himself as one of a host of angels that God creates at every given moment, whose only task, according to the Kabbalah, is to sing God’s praises at His throne before returning to the void. By sending his ‘feminine aspect’ to the masculine one, however, the angel has only strengthened the narrator’s ‘ability to wait’; even when face to face with the woman he awaits he does not fall upon her because ‘he wants happiness: […] the conflict in which the rapture of that which happens just once [des Einmaligen], the new, the as-yet-unlived is combined with the bliss of experiencing something once more [des Nocheinmal], of possessing once again, of having lived’. Thus, the narrator continues, ‘he has nothing new to hope for on any road other than the road home’ to the future whence he came, where the as-yet-unlived will have been lived.
Conclusion: Agamben as a Reader of Agamben
Authors: Kotsko Adam
Published: May 2018

Thus far, the contributors to this volume have considered the many and varied bodies of work that have left their mark on Agamben’s project. In this concluding chapter, I would like to take up one final body of work that Agamben must somehow account for, if only implicitly – namely, his own. The task is more difficult than it may sound, because Agamben is not nearly as self-referential as some major twentieth-century thinkers. Unless his habits change drastically, he will not leave behind a voluminous legacy of interviews on the stakes and intentions of his work, as Foucault did. His explicit cross-references between his own works are few and far between. Heidegger spent his entire career attempting to unpack the significance and shortcomings of Being and Time, while the later Derrida provided exhaustive footnotes demonstrating that the themes of his so-called ‘ethical turn’ were always already present in his earliest work. By contrast, Agamben rarely reflects directly on the relationship between any given text and the texts that preceded it. And within individual texts, the reader rarely finds the kinds of ‘signposts’ that explain why each book is structured in the way that it is.
Gender and Migration
Authors: Syswerda Rebecca
Published: May 2018

While much of the literature about Muslim identities has tended to focus on British-born Muslims in densely populated ‘Muslim’ localities, the experiences of Muslim migrants living outside such localities have been largely overlooked. This leaves unanswered questions about the role of ‘other’ women – that is, women from diverse religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds – in shaping Muslim migrant women’s sense of self and their attitudes towards post-migration life. This chapter seeks to address this oversight by exploring the ways in which recent Muslim migrant women to Scotland construct new identities in relation to the ‘other’ women whom they encounter in their post-migration, everyday lives, including friends, neighbours and local community members. Thus, this chapter steps off from what is now a ‘relatively widespread understanding of the self as a relational achievement’ (Conradson and McKay, 2007: 167).
Sexuality
Authors: Siraj Asifa
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores how three Scottish Muslim gay men struggle to integrate their sexual and religious identities as they navigate their sexual orientation within an existing condemnatory religious, social and cultural context. The present study illuminates the heterogeneity and diversity of experiences within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) population. It further raises the importance of providing a nuanced portrayal of the lives of men, who do not necessarily incorporate Western discourses into making sense of their identity as gay men (Rahman, 2015). The chapter begins by highlighting the very limited research carried out on the lives of gay people in Scotland. This is followed by an overview of the theory of intersectionality in order to understand and situate how sexuality is not a separate entity of one’s identity, but is interconnected to other parts. Adopting an intersectional framework allows us to appreciate how gay men experience different forms of oppression in relation to their race/ethnicity and sexuality in ways that are distinct from their White counterparts and/or heterosexual men (cf. Crenshaw,1996).
Generational Relations
Authors: Ashraf-Emami Hengameh
Published: May 2018

Researchers have paid attention to the significance of intergenerational research for several years (see Maxey, 2006; Punch, 2002; Skelton, 2000; Tucker, 2003; Valentine, 2003). Some important scholarly works have focused on intergenerationality and identities, particularly using intersectionality to understand people’s multiple identities (Crenshaw, 1993; Brah and Phoenix, 2004; Dwyer, 1999; Nayak, 2003; McDowell, 2003; Hopkins, 2006). Pain et al. (2001: 141) argue that ‘age is a social construction’and Hopkins et al. (2011) draw attention to the complexity of intergenerationality and its functions in the everyday lives of younger and older generations by examining the experiences of Christian families in Scotland. There are some influential scholarly works on the intergenerational identity of Scottish Muslim men (e.g. Hopkins, 2006), but there is still a dearth of intergenerational research on Scottish Muslim women’s identities. By intergenerational research, I mean the study of the differences and similarities – and the transformation between generations – in the Muslim community. This phenomenon is most evident in the dynamic relationship between mothers and daughters, but the interactions between other family members are also important.
Heritage
Authors: Shaikh Omar , Bonino Stefano
Published: May 2018

The Colourful Heritage Project (CHP) is the first community heritage focused charitable initiative in Scotland aiming to preserve and to celebrate the contributions of early South Asian and Muslim migrants to Scotland. It has successfully collated a considerable number of oral stories to create an online video archive, providing first-hand accounts of the personal journeys and emotions of the arrival of the earliest generation of these migrants in Scotland and highlighting the inspiring lessons that can be learnt from them. The CHP’s aims are first to capture these stories, second to celebrate the community’s achievements, and third to inspire present and future South Asian, Muslim and Scottish generations. It is a community-led charitable project that has been actively documenting a collection of inspirational stories and personal accounts, uniquely told by the protagonists themselves, describing at first hand their stories and adventures. These range all the way from the time of partition itself to resettling in Pakistan, and then to their final accounts of arriving in Scotland. The video footage enables the public to see their facial expressions, feel their emotions and hear their voices, creating poignant memories of these great men and women, and helping to gain a better understanding of the South Asian and Muslim community’s earliest days in Scotland.
Saving Perfection from the Alchemists: Shakespeare’s Use of Alchemy
Authors: Jones-Davies Margaret
Published: May 2018

In this chapter devoted to the “abstract riddles” of alchemy (Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 2.1.104), Margaret Jones-Davies argues that Shakespeare uses the poetics of alchemy at a time when it begins to be on the wane as a “science.” Perfecting nature was the aim of alchemy. But in the Renaissance, the literal reading of the power of alchemy was being questioned (Rabelais, Erasmus, Jonson…). And yet, Jones-Davies explains that no matter how cruel the satire, but also the persecutions, against some alchemists had become, the influence of alchemy remained active on a figurative level as hermetic philosophy came to acquire a political importance as the basis of a new religious language, freed from the fanaticism of the warring parties. Now, however much Shakespeare shared Rabelais’ and Erasmus’ irony against alchemical lore, he did not extend his scepticism to the ideal of perfection, which he expressed through alchemical imagery and numerology, more particularly in the Histories and the Romances. Alchemy doesn’t work miracles, Jones-Davies notes, but by lending its language to the ideal of perfection, it certainly creates wonder. Shakespeare