scholarly journals Misrecognition and the Indian state: the desire for sovereign agency

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 902-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catarina Kinnvall ◽  
Ted Svensson

AbstractA focus on misrecognition allows us to move between levels of analysis in a holistic fashion. If misrecognition works through the conscious and the unconscious we can account for the many overlapping insecurities and securities believed to exist at the individual, group, or state level – and thus felt. These insecurities also present themselves through the categories used to describe them and the policies through which they become materialised, technologised, and depoliticised, often by closing down discursive boundaries. Lacan’s concepts of desire, real and lack are here important for understanding the impossibility of recognising something that cannot be recognised. Hence, a perspective that takes misrecognition not as an end result or as failed attempts to reformulate the exceptional as the normal, has the potential to rethink the political subject. In empirical terms, the article discusses how this process of misrecognition has been shaped in the Indian context of postcolonial state formation and articulations of sovereignty. We show how the Indian state is being rethought, restructured, and reimagined through Hindu nationalism and how the concept of misrecognition accounts for desires for sovereign agency and group cohesiveness, but also for resistance to various reimaginations of the Indian state.

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Geyer

Analysing unconscious anxieties and defences is essential to psychoanalytically informed approaches, including group analysis. While psychoanalysis focuses on the intrapsychic reality of the individual, group analysis studies the interrelations between intrapsychic and social realities as they are revealed in groups. Here, the concept of the ‘social unconscious’ has gained prominence in recent years. However, while there is an extensive body of work on the unconscious in psychoanalysis, the group analytic concept of the ‘social unconscious’ and its clinical applications are less well understood. In the first part of the article, theoretical contributions towards defining the ‘social unconscious’ are critically reviewed and discussed. In the second part of the article, the possibilities and limitations of the concept for understanding psychosocial processes are examined in relation to an anonymised vignette from a mentalization-informed psychotherapy group for young adults with a range of emotional difficulties. The article concludes with a summary and reflections.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilaria Cristofaro

From a phenomenological perspective, the reflective quality of water has a visually dramatic impact, especially when combined with the light of celestial phenomena. However, the possible presence of water as a means for reflecting the sky is often undervalued when interpreting archaeoastronomical sites. From artificial water spaces, such as ditches, huacas and wells to natural ones such as rivers, lakes and puddles, water spaces add a layer of interacting reflections to landscapes. In the cosmological understanding of skyscapes and waterscapes, a cross-cultural metaphorical association between water spaces and the underworld is often revealed. In this research, water-skyscapes are explored through the practice of auto-ethnography and reflexive phenomenology. The mirroring of the sky in water opens up themes such as the continuity, delimitation and manipulation of sky phenomena on land: water spaces act as a continuation of the sky on earth; depending on water spaces’ spatial extension, selected celestial phenomena can be periodically reflected within architectures, so as to make the heavenly dimension easily accessible and a possible object of manipulation. Water-skyscapes appear as specular worlds, where water spaces are assumed to be doorways to the inner reality of the unconscious. The fluid properties of water have the visual effect of dissipating borders, of merging shapes, and, therefore, of dissolving identities; in the inner landscape, this process may represent symbolic death experiences and rituals of initiation, where the annihilation of the individual allows the creative process of a new life cycle. These contextually generalisable results aim to inspire new perspectives on sky-and-water related case studies and give value to the practice of reflexive phenomenology as crucial method of research.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 366-366
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen

Eddic poetry constitutes one of the most important genres in Old Norse or Scandinavian literature and has been studied since the earliest time of modern-day philology. The progress we have made in that field is impressive, considering the many excellent editions and translations, not to mention the countless critical studies in monographs and articles. Nevertheless, there is always a great need to revisit, to summarize, to review, and to digest the knowledge gained so far. The present handbook intends to address all those goals and does so, to spell it out right away, exceedingly well. But in contrast to traditional concepts, the individual contributions constitute fully developed critical article, each with a specialized topic elucidating it as comprehensively as possible, and concluding with a section of notes. Those are kept very brief, but the volume rounds it all off with an inclusive, comprehensive bibliography. And there is also a very useful index at the end. At the beginning, we find, following the table of contents, a list of the contributors, unfortunately without emails, a list of translations and abbreviations of the titles of Eddic poems in the Codex Regius and then elsewhere, and a very insightful and pleasant introduction by Carolyne Larrington. She briefly introduces the genre and then summarizes the essential points made by the individual authors. The entire volume is based on the Eddic Network established by the three editors in 2012, and on two workshops held at St. John’s College, Oxford in 2013 and 2014.


Author(s):  
Benedetta Zavatta

Based on an analysis of the marginal markings and annotations Nietzsche made to the works of Emerson in his personal library, the book offers a philosophical interpretation of the impact on Nietzsche’s thought of his reading of these works, a reading that began when he was a schoolboy and extended to the final years of his conscious life. The many ideas and sources of inspiration that Nietzsche drew from Emerson can be organized in terms of two main lines of thought. The first line leads in the direction of the development of the individual personality, that is, the achievement of critical thinking, moral autonomy, and original self-expression. The second line of thought is the overcoming of individuality: that is to say, the need to transcend one’s own individual—and thus by definition limited—view of the world by continually confronting and engaging with visions different from one’s own and by putting into question and debating one’s own values and certainties. The image of the strong personality that Nietzsche forms thanks to his reading of Emerson ultimately takes on the appearance of a nomadic subject who is continually passing out of themselves—that is to say, abandoning their own positions and convictions—so as to undergo a constant process of evolution. In other words, the formation of the individual personality takes on the form of a regulative ideal: a goal that can never be said to have been definitively and once and for all attained.


Author(s):  
Ursula Renz

This chapter discusses the implications of Spinoza’s concept of individual bodies, as introduced in the definition of individuum in the physical digression. It begins by showing that this definition allows for an extremely wide application of the term; accordingly, very different sorts of physical entities can be described as Spinozistic individuals. Given the quite distinct use of the terms divisibilis and indivisibilis in his metaphysics, however, the chapter argues that the physical concept of individuality is not universally applied in the Ethics but reserved for physical or natural-philosophical considerations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the problem of collective individuals. It is argued that, while societies or states are described as individual bodies, they do not constitute individual group minds in the strict sense of the term for Spinoza. This in turn indicates that minds are not individuated in the same way as bodies.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Lackey

Groups are often said to bear responsibility for their actions, many of which have enormous moral, legal, and social significance. The Trump Administration, for instance, is said to be responsible for the U.S.’s inept and deceptive handling of COVID-19 and the harms that American citizens have suffered as a result. But are groups subject to normative assessment simply in virtue of their individual members being so, or are they somehow agents in their own right? Answering this question depends on understanding key concepts in the epistemology of groups, as we cannot hold the Trump Administration responsible without first determining what it believed, knew, and said. Deflationary theorists hold that group phenomena can be understood entirely in terms of individual members and their states. Inflationary theorists maintain that group phenomena are importantly over and above, or otherwise distinct from, individual members and their states. It is argued that neither approach is satisfactory. Groups are more than their members, but not because they have “minds of their own,” as the inflationists hold. Instead, this book shows how group phenomena—like belief, justification, and knowledge—depend on what the individual group members do or are capable of doing while being subject to group-level normative requirements. This framework, it is argued, allows for the correct distribution of responsibility across groups and their individual members.


Author(s):  
Stephan Atzert

This chapter explores the gradual emergence of the notion of the unconscious as it pertains to the tradition that runs from Arthur Schopenhauer via Eduard von Hartmann and Philipp Mainländer to Sabina Spielrein, C. G. Jung, and Sigmund Freud. A particular focus is put on the popularization of the term “unconscious” by von Hartmann and on the history of the death drive, which has Schopenhauer’s essay “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual” as one of its precursors. In this essay, Schopenhauer develops speculatively the notion of a universal, intelligent, supraindividual unconscious—an unconscious with a purpose related to death. But the death drive also owes its origins to Schopenhauer’s “relative nothingness,” which Mainländer adopts into his philosophy as “absolute nothingness” resulting from the “will to death.” His philosophy emphasizes death as the goal of the world and its inhabitants. This central idea had a distinctive influence on the formation of the idea of the death drive, which features in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 3887
Author(s):  
María Luisa Sein-Echaluce ◽  
Angel Fidalgo-Blanco ◽  
Francisco José García-Peñalvo ◽  
David Fonseca

Active educational methodologies promote students to take an active role in their own learning, enhance cooperative work, and develop a collective understanding of the subject as a common learning area. Cloud Computing enables the learning space to be supported while also revolutionizing it by allowing it to be used as a link between active methodology and students’ learning activities. A Cloud Computing system is used in conjunction with an active methodology to recognize and manage individual, group, and collective evidence of the students’ work in this research. The key hypothesis shown in this work is that if evidence management is made clear and evidence is consistently and gradually presented to students, their level of involvement will increase, and their learning outcomes will improve. The model was implemented in a university subject of a first academic year using the active Flipped Classroom methodology, and the individual, group and collective evidence is constantly worked with throughout the implementation of a teamwork method.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 290
Author(s):  
Maxim Pyzh ◽  
Kevin Keiler ◽  
Simeon I. Mistakidis ◽  
Peter Schmelcher

We address the interplay of few lattice trapped bosons interacting with an impurity atom in a box potential. For the ground state, a classification is performed based on the fidelity allowing to quantify the susceptibility of the composite system to structural changes due to the intercomponent coupling. We analyze the overall response at the many-body level and contrast it to the single-particle level. By inspecting different entropy measures we capture the degree of entanglement and intraspecies correlations for a wide range of intra- and intercomponent interactions and lattice depths. We also spatially resolve the imprint of the entanglement on the one- and two-body density distributions showcasing that it accelerates the phase separation process or acts against spatial localization for repulsive and attractive intercomponent interactions, respectively. The many-body effects on the tunneling dynamics of the individual components, resulting from their counterflow, are also discussed. The tunneling period of the impurity is very sensitive to the value of the impurity-medium coupling due to its effective dressing by the few-body medium. Our work provides implications for engineering localized structures in correlated impurity settings using species selective optical potentials.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-75
Author(s):  
Alex Bertrams ◽  
Thomas H. Dyllick ◽  
Chris Englert ◽  
Ann Krispenz

AbstractSubjective vitality is a positive feeling of aliveness and energy, and it is a crucial aspect of well-being. The Subjective Vitality Scales (SVS) have been developed to measure subjective vitality both at the individual difference level and the state level in English-speaking samples. We translated the SVS into German (the SVS-G) and examined their psychometric properties. In Study 1 (N=260), we found that two correlated factors (Factor 1: individual difference level; Factor 2: state level) with five items each constituted a useful structure for the SVS-G. Moreover, the scores on the individual difference scale were more stable than the scores on the state scale. We also found partial evidence for the measurement invariance over a period of three weeks. Conforming to our expectations, Study 2 (N=296) revealed that the SVS-G scores were related to positive and negative affect but could still be distinguished from the affect variables. In line with previous findings, Study 3 (N=203) showed that SVS-G scores are related to well-being variables (happiness and joviality) and the perceived capacity to actively perform effortful tasks (attentiveness and capacity for self-control). Across all the studies, the SVS-G showed satisfying inner consistency, and the two consideration levels (individual differences vs. state) could be differentiated. The initial evidence suggests that overall, the SVS-G have good psychometric properties.


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