The Dialectics of Affect

Anxiety ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 133-174
Author(s):  
Bettina Bergo

Initially influenced by Schelling’s lectures on positive philosophy (1841–1842), Kierkegaard ultimately withdrew from his lectures, devoting his attention exclusively to the redaction of Either/Or. The Concept of Anxiety was written in the shadow of that work under a uniquely anonymous pseudonym. Of course, anxiety in his deformalization of late idealism was not a concept; it belonged and did not belong to the understanding. Indeed, it precedes human actions under the sign of inherited “sinfulness” and as sheer possibility. If Kierkegaard aligned freedom with a leap, then anxiety was the affect precursive to it. Anxiety was the prethetic knowing that we are able to do. . . X. Tracing the “spiritual” history of the human race which carries the sins of the fathers even as it freely enacts sin, Kierkegaard urged that the more spiritual the culture, the more anxious it was. No longer the adjuvant of reason as in Hegel, anxiety belonged to the irreducible condition of a living subject. Over the five years that separated the Concept of Anxiety from Sickness onto Death, Kierkegaard’s mood of “Angest” will intensify as it is approached from his new perspective of Coram Deo (“before God”). Within the new perspective, the status and the meaning of the self is altered, showing a clearer relation to infinity. For the task of Kierkegaard’s philosophy—learning to become the nothing that one is—had attained a new stage in his existential dialectic. His arguments influenced Heidegger’s recourse to anxiety as a passage toward the question of being.

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 821-836
Author(s):  
Z. T. Golenkova ◽  
Yu. V. Goliusova ◽  
T. I. Gorina

The article considers the development of self-employment in the contemporary society: the history of its representation in legal norms and practices; the scope of informal employment according to statistical and sociological data; definitions of self-employment in the scientific literature. The self-employed are usually defined as not employed in organizations but independently selling goods and services produced by themselves. The global number of the self-employed grows. The authors present an algorithm for calculating the indicator potential self-employed based on the secondary analysis of the 27th wave of the RLMS (2018), and stress the lack of a unified methodology for calculating informal employment. According to the official data, the number of the self-employed in Russia ranges from several thousands to several millions, which confuses researchers who study this phenomenon. The article focuses on the results of the study Self-Employed: Who Are They? (Moscow, 2019), whose object were not potential but real self-employed selected on the basis of online advertisements of their services in Moscow. The authors collected information with the method of semi-formalized telephone interview. Based on the collected data, the authors make conclusions about motivating and demotivating factors of self-employment: independence, freedom in planning time and activity, distrust in the state, lack of social guarantees, unpredictable legislation, and imperfect tax system. Today, the status of the self-employed in Russia is still unclear and often substitutes the individual entrepreneur status in order to apply for tax preferences.


2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Maureen Eckert

In this paper, I examine broad features of Hegel's interpretation of Plato from his Lectures on the History of Phihsophy, noting how these features resonate with current views of Platonic philosophy. Hegel formed his interpretation of Plato under very different circumstances than those of today. Serious study of the Platonic dialogues had come to the forefront in German Idealist philosophy. As Rüdiger Bubner notes: ‘It was this tradition of thought that discovered, in an original way of its own, the authentic Plato in place of the various mediated substitutes of before, and indeed saw him as a thinker who was to provide continuing inspiration to the needs of post-Kantian philosophy’. We find Hegel holds Plato in high esteem, most famously as a ‘teacher of the human race’ alongside Aristotle. His Plato is one who is fundamentally significant in the development of philosophy, raising it to the status of science, although not in a fully systematic manner. At the same time, Hegel distinguishes his Plato from the projects of his contemporaries, Tennemann's esoteric Plato and Schleiermacher's aesthetic Plato. Hegel also forms his view of Plato at a time just prior to the development of stylometric studies of the dialogues, begun in its earliest form by K. F. Hermann (1839) and pushed forward by Lewis Campbell and Friedrich Blass in the later half of the 19th century. (This is not to claim that questions regarding the ordering of the dialogues did not arise earlier than 1839, but that they became scientific and central in Platonic interpretation with Hermann.) The pressures Hegel negotiates in his interpretation are quite distinct, especially in this last respect, yet not altogether alien. There are, I think, interesting reasons for this. (One might think that given Hegel's strong opposition to Schleiermacher (and Hegel's disposition towards development), he might have been inclined towards a developmental reading of Plato. One also might think that given his opposition to Tennemann's esotericism, he might have had more doubts about discerning a system within Plato's unsystematic dialogues. But one would be wrong on both counts.)


Author(s):  
Joe Moshenska

This chapter begins with lists compiled in Lincolnshire in the 1550s. These lists show that objects including pyxes--containers for the Eucharist--were given to children as playthings. The chapter links this practice to the widespread discourse that sought to demean traditional religion as a mere trifling with inane and worthless things, but it argues that the practice of iconoclastic child’s play differs from this polemic in that the object actually lingers as a potential locus for newly emerging meanings. This possibility is linked to the wider complexities surrounding the status of trifles and inanities in the history of Christian thought and its consistent inversions of value, as well as to the self-reflexive interrogation of the status of trifles in the writings of Thomas More.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Abdul Muiz Amir ◽  
Akbar Akbar ◽  
Faiq Ainurrofiq ◽  
Muhammad Widus Sempo

The flag inscribed with the phrase tauḥīd has been claimed by Jihadist-extremism groups to use the narrative hadith as a representation of the flag of the Prophet Muhammad (Liwā' and Rāyah). This phenomenon inspires researchers to carry out in-depth investigations on the history of the hadith, either through micro analysis (isnād) or macro analysis (matn). The purpose of this investigation is to reveal the status and motive for the existence of the phrase tauḥīd on the Prophet's flag. This research uses a qualitative interpretive study to explore the historical-critical paradigm through isnād-cum-matn approach by Harald Motzki. The findings show that the phrase tauḥīd, which is claimed to be part of the symbol of the Prophet's flag, is only the form of insertion (idrāj) by Ḥayyan bin Ubaidillah as “the real common link”. The deviation was carried out as propaganda against the political contestation between the Abbasiyya dynasty and the Umayya dynasty in Egypt. This study’s results supply a new perspective that the religious symbols used as religious identity are not all based on valid sources.Keywords: Prophet’s Flag, Tauḥīd Phrase, Hadith, Isnād-cum-Matn, Political Religion Symbolic


2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Lampland ◽  
Maya Nadkarni

Since 1989, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have mourned the death of jokes in postsocialist societies. While in fact humor has not gone away, the everyday experience of sharing jokes as an intimate form of political criticism has indeed vanished. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research on the history of Hungarian humor, this article contributes a new perspective to the recent wave of scholarship on Soviet laughter, by examining the “loss of the joke” as both a cultural phenomenon and a critical discourse in postsocialist Hungary. First, we argue that a series of important shifts in the way Hungarians work, socialize, communicate, and engage in politics has led them to be far more circumspect in sharing political humor. Second, we analyze the self-reflexive perception of loss as a form of cultural criticism that indexes broader anxieties about the challenges of interpreting the operations of power under postsocialism. With this shift in political sensibility, we argue, the lament that the joke is “lost” may now offer more effective political commentary than a joke itself.


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN C. YALDWYN ◽  
GARRY J. TEE ◽  
ALAN P. MASON

A worn Iguanodon tooth from Cuckfield, Sussex, illustrated by Mantell in 1827, 1839, 1848 and 1851, was labelled by Mantell as the first tooth sent to Baron Cuvier in 1823 and acknowledged as such by Sir Charles Lyell. The labelled tooth was taken to New Zealand by Gideon's son Walter in 1859. It was deposited in a forerunner of the Museum of New Zealand, Wellington in 1865 and is still in the Museum, mounted on a card bearing annotations by both Gideon Mantell and Lyell. The history of the Gideon and Walter Mantell collection in the Museum of New Zealand is outlined, and the Iguanodon tooth and its labels are described and illustrated. This is the very tooth which Baron Cuvier first identified as a rhinoceros incisor on the evening of 28 June 1823.


Author(s):  
Chris Himsworth

The first critical study of the 1985 international treaty that guarantees the status of local self-government (local autonomy). Chris Himsworth analyses the text of the 1985 European Charter of Local Self-Government and its Additional Protocol; traces the Charter’s historical emergence; and explains how it has been applied and interpreted, especially in a process of monitoring/treaty enforcement by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities but also in domestic courts, throughout Europe. Locating the Charter’s own history within the broader recent history of the Council of Europe and the European Union, the book closes with an assessment of the Charter’s future prospects.


Author(s):  
Didier Debaise

Which kind of relation exists between a stone, a cloud, a dog, and a human? Is nature made of distinct domains and layers or does it form a vast unity from which all beings emerge? Refusing at once a reductionist, physicalist approach as well as a vitalistic one, Whitehead affirms that « everything is a society » This chapter consequently questions the status of different domains which together compose nature by employing the concept of society. The first part traces the history of this notion notably with reference to the two thinkers fundamental to Whitehead: Leibniz and Locke; the second part defines the temporal and spatial relations of societies; and the third explores the differences between physical, biological, and psychical forms of existence as well as their respective ways of relating to environments. The chapter thus tackles the status of nature and its domains.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-250
Author(s):  
Stephen Cheeke

This article argues for the centrality of notions of personality and persons in the work of Walter Pater and asks how this fits in with his critical reception. Pater's writing is grounded in ideas of personality and persons, of personification, of personal gods and personalised history, of contending voices, and of the possibility of an interior conversation with the logos. Artworks move us as personalities do in life; the principle epistemological analogy is with the knowledge of persons – indeed, ideas are only grasped through the form they take in the individuals in whom they are manifested. The conscience is outwardly embodied in other persons, but also experienced as a conversation with a person inhabiting the most intimate and sovereign dimension of the self. Even when personality is conceived as the walls of a prison-house, it remains a powerful force, able to modify others. This article explores the ways in which these questions are ultimately connected to the paradoxes of Pater's own person and personality, and to the matter of his ‘style’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-51
Author(s):  
Debashree Mukherjee

In 1939, at the height of her stardom, the actress Shanta Apte went on a spectacular hunger strike in protest against her employers at Prabhat Studios in Poona, India. The following year, Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the extractive nature of the film industry. In Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I Join the Movies?, 1940), she highlighted the durational depletion of the human body that is specific to acting work. This article interrogates these two unprecedented cultural events—a strike and a book—opening them up toward a history of embodiment as production experience. It embeds Apte's emphasis on exhaustion within contemporaneous debates on female stardom, industrial fatigue, and the status of cinema as work. Reading Apte's remarkable activism as theory from the South helps us rethink the meanings of embodiment, labor, materiality, inequality, resistance, and human-object relations in cinema.


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