Introduction

Author(s):  
Paul Earlie

The Introduction outlines a number of issues central to Derrida’s thought and to his engagement with the legacy of psychoanalysis in particular. Using a series of lexemes developed throughout his work—including ‘origin’, ‘legacy’, ‘trace’, and ‘différance’—it shows how for Derrida, despite the fractious history of disputes over its significance, Freud’s legacy can never be reduced to a single, universalizable meaning. Against Lacan’s linguistic ‘return to Freud’, Derrida insists on the structural openness of Freud’s legacy to reinterpretation in new and unpredictable contexts. This openness calls us to a dual responsibility: towards the past traces that Freud has bequeathed to us and towards a future in which this legacy must be transformed. Existing commentaries on Freud’s significance for Derrida have not always taken the full measure of his account of legacy. What Derrida views as the possible-impossible structure of inheritance is developed in each of the book’s subsequent chapters, which explore the vicissitudes of Freud’s French reception, the role of spatiality within the psyche, the relationship between science and fiction, memory and the archive, and the politics of affect.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kornelia Kończal

In early 2018, the Polish parliament adopted controversial legislation criminalising assertions regarding the complicity of the ‘Polish Nation’ and the ‘Polish State’ in the Holocaust. The so-called Polish Holocaust Law provoked not only a heated debate in Poland, but also serious international tensions. As a result, it was amended only five months after its adoption. The reason why it is worth taking a closer look at the socio-cultural foundations and political functions of the short-lived legislation is twofold. Empirically, the short history of the Law reveals a great deal about the long-term role of Jews in the Polish collective memory as an unmatched Significant Other. Conceptually, the short life of the Law, along with its afterlife, helps capture poll-driven, manifestly moralistic and anti-pluralist imaginings of the past, which I refer to as ‘mnemonic populism’. By exploring the relationship between popular and political images of the past in contemporary Poland, this article argues for joining memory and populism studies in order to better understand what can happen to history in illiberal surroundings.


Islamology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Bobrovnikov

Visual propaganda played an enormous role in the history of the twentieth century. Unlike the propaganda of nineteenth century, it was aimed not only at educated classes in the imperial centres, but also at subaltern masses living in the colonies of great powers, including the vast territories in the east and south of the former Russian Empire. Posters created for (and with the assistance of) Muslims between the two world wars in the Soviet Orient (i.e., in the Volga region, Crimea, Urals, and Siberia, on the Caucasus and in the Central Asia) represent an enormous and still poorly studied layer in the history of Soviet propaganda. So far, the posters have been studied primarily in the context of art history. But the creation of visual propaganda is critical for historical reconstructions as well. It is more important to understand posters’ language, historical context, attitude to public policy, cultural background, in other words—the discourse of propaganda. This is a part of life, even if semiofficial, the loss of which would simplify and impoverish the picture of the past. Discursive analysis of poster art allows one to understand the relationship between knowledge and power in society, the role of different social strata in its reproduction, and the aspects of perception and rejection of official propaganda. 


Author(s):  
William Tullett

In England during the period between the 1670s and the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. This book traces that transformation. The role of smell in creating medical and scientific knowledge came under intense scrutiny and the equation of smell with disease was actively questioned. Yet a new interest in smell’s emotive and idiosyncratic dimensions offered odours a new power in the sociable spaces of eighteenth-century England. Using a wide range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, William Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them. From paint and perfume to onions and farts, this book highlights the smells that were good for eighteenth-century writers to think with. In doing so, the study challenges a popular, influential, and often cited narrative. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture. Instead, the book demonstrates that it was a new recognition of smell’s asocial-sociability, its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society. To trace this shift, the book also breaks new methodological ground. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England makes the case for new ways of thinking about the history of the senses, experience, and the body. Understanding the way past peoples perceived their world involves tracing processes of habituation, sensitization, and attention. These processes help explain which odours entered the archive and why they did so. They force us to recognise that the past was, for those who lived there, not just a place of unmitigated stench


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert James Mills ◽  
Milorad Miodr Novicevic ◽  
Foster Roberts

Purpose This paper aims to examine the role of James March and his actor-network in the development of a functionalist paradigm of organization theory (OT). Recognizing the important contribution of March to the development of the field of OT, the authors set out to understand the role that he played in establishing the oft-quoted development of founding a behavioral facet of the functionalist paradigm of management theory. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on ANTi-History to study some of the key factors that contributed to the challenges associated with the creation of a functionalist paradigm of OT. ANTi-History is an amodernist method drawing attention to how history is produced, differing from a modernist method for identifying the single-most truth of a series of past events and from a postmodernist method for revealing the relativity of accounts of the past. To that end, the method of ANTi-History is to explore the intersections of a series of human (e.g. scholars), non-human (e.g. a textbook) and non-corporeal (e.g. paradigms) actors to assess their role in producing a version of the past (e.g. a unified field of OT). Findings The authors reveal how the history, producing the paradigmatic idea of OT as a supposed field of inquiry, is not an account of an actual field of inquiry as much as it is the outcome of the shared and conflicted worldviews of multiple actors. Originality/value The unique and original contribution is in the tracking over time of the relationship between a known and important actor James March and the formation of a specific paradigm of OT. In particular, the authors focus on the factors and activities that formed or failed to form OT at points in time and James March’s role in this. In the process, the authors set out to learn not simply what James March achieved but how he achieved it.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Dorota Kozaryn ◽  
Agnieszka Szczaus

The subject of the analysis in the article are the etymological explanations presented in the old non-literary texts (i.e. the texts that function primarily outside literature, serving various practical purposes), i.e. in the sixteenth-century Kronika, to jest historyja świata (Chronicle, that is the history of the entire world) by Marcin Bielski and in two eighteenth-century encyclopaedic texts: Informacyja matematyczna (Mathematical information) by Wojciech Bystrzonowski and Nowe Ateny (New Athens) by Benedykt Chmielowski. The review of the etymological comments allows us to take notice of their considerable substantive and formal diversity. These comments apply to both native and foreign vocabulary. On the one hand, they provide information on the origin of proper names (toponyms and anthroponyms), and on the other hand, a whole range of these etymological comments concern common names. A depth of etymological comments presented in non-literary texts is significantly diversified and independent of the nature of the vocabulary to which these comments apply – they can be merely tips on sources of borrowings of foreign words, but they can also constitute a deeper analysis of the meaning and structure of individual words, both native and foreign. These comments are usually implementations of folk etymology. The role of etymological considerations in former non-literary texts is significant. First of all, these texts have a ludic function, typical of popularised texts – they are supposed to surprise, intrigue and entertain readers. Secondly, they serve a cognitive function typical of non-literary texts – they are supposed to expand the readers’ knowledge about the world and language. Thirdly, they have a persuasive function, which is a distinctive feature of both popularised and non-literary texts – they are supposed to provoke the readers’ thoughts on the relationship between non-linguistic reality and the linguistic way of its interpretation, they also stimulate linguistic interests, which was particularly important in the past when the reflection on the native language was poor.


2019 ◽  
pp. 121-143
Author(s):  
Riccardo Resciniti ◽  
Federica De Vanna

The rise of e-commerce has brought considerable changes to the relationship between firms and consumers, especially within international business. Hence, understanding the use of such means for entering foreign markets has become critical for companies. However, the research on this issue is new and so it is important to evaluate what has been studied in the past. In this study, we conduct a systematic review of e-commerce and internationalisation studies to explicate how firms use e-commerce to enter new markets and to export. The studies are classified by theories and methods used in the literature. Moreover, we draw upon the internationalisation decision process (antecedents-modalities-consequences) to propose an integrative framework for understanding the role of e-commerce in internationalisation


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-431
Author(s):  
Bulat R. Rakhimzianov

Abstract This article explores relations between Muscovy and the so-called Later Golden Horde successor states that existed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the territory of Desht-i Qipchaq (the Qipchaq Steppe, a part of the East European steppe bounded roughly by the Oskol and Tobol rivers, the steppe-forest line, and the Caspian and Aral Seas). As a part of, and later a successor to, the Juchid ulus (also known as the Golden Horde), Muscovy adopted a number of its political and social institutions. The most crucial events in the almost six-century-long history of relations between Muscovy and the Tatars (13–18th centuries) were the Mongol invasion of the Northern, Eastern and parts of the Southern Rus’ principalities between 1237 and 1241, and the Muscovite annexation of the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates between 1552 and 1556. According to the model proposed here, the Tatars began as the dominant partner in these mutual relations; however, from the beginning of the seventeenth century this role was gradually inverted. Indicators of a change in the relationship between the Muscovite grand principality and the Golden Horde can be found in the diplomatic contacts between Muscovy and the Tatar khanates. The main goal of the article is to reveal the changing position of Muscovy within the system of the Later Golden Horde successor states. An additional goal is to revisit the role of the Tatar khanates in the political history of Central Eurasia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-112
Author(s):  
Richard Larouche ◽  
Nimesh Patel ◽  
Jennifer L. Copeland

The role of infrastructure in encouraging transportation cycling in smaller cities with a low prevalence of cycling remains unclear. To investigate the relationship between the presence of infrastructure and transportation cycling in a small city (Lethbridge, AB, Canada), we interviewed 246 adults along a recently-constructed bicycle boulevard and two comparison streets with no recent changes in cycling infrastructure. One comparison street had a separate multi-use path and the other had no cycling infrastructure. Questions addressed time spent cycling in the past week and 2 years prior and potential socio-demographic and psychosocial correlates of cycling, including safety concerns. Finally, we asked participants what could be done to make cycling safer and more attractive. We examined predictors of cycling using gender-stratified generalized linear models. Women interviewed along the street with a separate path reported cycling more than women on the other streets. A more favorable attitude towards cycling and greater habit strength were associated with more cycling in both men and women. Qualitative data revealed generally positive views about the bicycle boulevard, a need for education about sharing the road and for better cycling infrastructure in general. Our results suggest that, even in smaller cities, cycling infrastructure may encourage cycling, especially among women.


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