scholarly journals ‘The Fool’ Revisited: The Making of Žižek as Sacrificial Public Intellectual

2021 ◽  
pp. 174997552110072
Author(s):  
Eliran Bar-El ◽  
Patrick Baert
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Positioning Theory ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Celebrity Status ◽  
Institutional Aspects ◽  
Sociological Explanation

This article provides a sociological explanation for the global emergence of Slavoj Žižek as a public intellectual. It presents an integrative account encompassing both personal and institutional aspects. Drawing on positioning theory and performative frameworks, the article contributes to the sociology of intellectuals, as well as to the vast ‘Žižek-literature’ that focuses on his philosophical content or political activities. We analyse the distinctiveness of Žižek’s performances, arguing that Žižek acts as a ‘sacrificial intellectual’: he plays ‘the fool’ and relies on irony to undermine the traditional role of the authoritative intellectual. Within the context of the digital public sphere and declining intellectual authority, Žižek’s unique form of positioning has been particularly effective and has contributed to his celebrity status.

Ambiguities and Clichés in the Debate about Public Intellectuals

2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara A. Misztal
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
New Left ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper's purpose is to exam Turner's (2006a) thesis that Britain neither produced its own public intellectuals nor a distinctive sociology. It aims to outline difficulties with the logic of Turner's argument rather than to discuss any particular public intellectual in Britain. The paper argues that Turner's claim about the comparative insignificance of public intellectuals in Britain reinforces the myth of British exceptionalism and overlooks the significance of the contribution to the public sphere by intellectuals from other disciplines than sociology. It discusses Turner's assumption that intellectual innovation requires massive disruptive and violent change and suggests that such an assertion is not necessarily supported by studies of the conditions of the production of knowledge. Finally, the paper argues that Turner's anguish at the absence of public intellectuals among sociologists in Britain is symptomatic of New Left thinking that models the idea of the intellectual on Gramsci. In conclusion, the paper asserts that Turner's idea of the intellectual fails to note the tension at the heart of the role of public intellectual–the tension between specialist and non-specialist functions.

Microblogs, Jasmine Revolution, and Civil Unrest

2019 ◽  
pp. 1153-1178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth C. C. Yang ◽  
Yowei Kang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
State Power ◽  
Social Medium ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Internet Users

Weibo provides an alternative channel for many Chinese citizens to obtain non-censored news contents and share their opinions on public affairs. In this book chapter, the authors employed Jürgen Habermas's concept of public sphere to examine how Chinese Weibo users (i.e., microbloggers) make the most use of this social medium to form a public sphere to contest omnipresent state power. Habermas's analytical framework helps to better comprehend the role of social media and its interactions with other stakeholders in Chinese politics. The role of social media in shaping this less controlled sphere of political deliberation and participation was examined using a case study approach. The authors analyzed the Chinese Jasmine Revolution to discuss the interrelations among social media, civil society, state power, economic development, political process, and democratization in China. The case study identified Weibo's essential role as a device to bypass existing government censorship, to mobilize users, and to empower Chinese Internet users to engage in political activities to foster its nascent civil society.

Microblogs, Jasmine Revolution, and Civil Unrest

2015 ◽  
pp. 140-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth C. C. Yang ◽  
Yowei Kang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
State Power ◽  
Social Medium ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Internet Users

Weibo provides an alternative channel for many Chinese citizens to obtain non-censored news contents and share their opinions on public affairs. In this book chapter, the authors employed Jürgen Habermas's concept of public sphere to examine how Chinese Weibo users (i.e., microbloggers) make the most use of this social medium to form a public sphere to contest omnipresent state power. Habermas's analytical framework helps to better comprehend the role of social media and its interactions with other stakeholders in Chinese politics. The role of social media in shaping this less controlled sphere of political deliberation and participation was examined using a case study approach. The authors analyzed the Chinese Jasmine Revolution to discuss the interrelations among social media, civil society, state power, economic development, political process, and democratization in China. The case study identified Weibo's essential role as a device to bypass existing government censorship, to mobilize users, and to empower Chinese Internet users to engage in political activities to foster its nascent civil society.

scholarly journals The Most Famous Writer of the Low Countries: Herman Brusselmans Star Author and (Reluctant) Public Intellectual

Werkwinkel ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-64
Author(s):  
Rick Honings
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
The Other ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Celebrity Status

Abstract The Flemish writer Herman Brusselmans is the most famous author of the Low Countries. In this article, Herman Brusselmans is analysed as a star author. First and foremost, two striking aspects of Brusselmans’s stardom are analysed: his public visibility and the cult of the private. Attention is then focused on Brusselmans’s experience of celebrity, which he - like many other star authors - thematises in his books. Doing so, he consciously places himself in the context of popular culture. On the other hand, as a result of his celebrity status he has been expected - particularly in the last few years - to assume the role of public intellectual willy-nilly, and this in turn has had consequences for his work.

scholarly journals The Figure of the Migrant: Tommy Wieringa’s Intellectual Intervention

Werkwinkel ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Odile Heynders
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Positioning Theory ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
European Public Sphere ◽  
European Public

Abstract In today’s transforming European public sphere various literary authors position themselves publicly and engagingly in the debate on migration and exclusion. Dutch writer Tommy Wieringa is a clear voice in this context: his ideas on the topic are meaningfully expressed in literary novels. This article analyses Wieringa’s position as an authoritative public intellectual speaking with great moral weight about the figure of the migrant. Drawing on positioning theory, the main claim of the article will be that Wieringa’s literary articulation of migration contributes to the societal discussion and underlines a specific type of moral knowledge as well as an appeal to human solidarity.

FAITH–BASED COMMUNITIES AND POLITICS IN DULLSTROOM-EMNOTWENI: LOCAL STORIES OF IDENTITY

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Landman
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Service Delivery ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
Cultural Conflicts ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Local Municipality ◽  
The Face

A majority of the black community of Dullstroom-Emnotweni in the Mpumalanga highveld in the east of South Africa trace their descent back to the southern Ndebele of the so-called ‘Mapoch Gronden’, who lost their land in the 1880s to become farm workers on their own land. A hundred years later, in 1980, descendants of the ‘Mapoggers’ settled in the newly built ‘township’ of Dullstroom, called Sakhelwe, finding jobs on the railways or as domestic workers. Oral interviews with the inhabitants of Sakhelwe – a name eventually abandoned in favour of Dullstroom- Emnotweni – testify to histories of transition from landowner to farmworker to unskilled labourer. The stories also highlight cultural conflicts between people of Ndebele, Pedi and Swazi descent and the influence of decades of subordination on local identities. Research projects conducted in this and the wider area of the eMakhazeni Local Municipality reveal the struggle to maintain religious, gender and youth identities in the face of competing political interests. Service delivery, higher education, space for women and the role of faith-based organisations in particular seem to be sites of contestation. Churches and their role in development and transformation, where they compete with political parties and state institutions, are the special focus of this study. They attempt to remain free from party politics, but are nevertheless co-opted into contra-culturing the lack of service delivery, poor standards of higher education and inadequate space for women, which are outside their traditional role of sustaining an oppressed community.

JULIJONA – LIETUVOS DIDŽIOJO KUNIGAIKŠČIO ALGIRDO ŽMONA IR JO VAIKŲ MOTINA

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019/2 ◽  
pp. 5-39
Author(s):  
Darius Baronas
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Source Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Nature Of Information ◽  
Grand Duchy Of Lithuania

ANNOTATION. This article is the first attempt of the biographic research of Grand Duchess Uliana Algirdienė of Lithuania (d. 17/03/1392), based on the critical analysis of primary sources. It is also aimed at pointing out the reflection of the role of women in the pagan Lithuanian society. The research was carried out by means of the analytical and comparative method of historical source analysis with a view to separate as distinctly as possible the information derived from contemporary sources from the images imposed by later historiographic tradition. The article questions the stereotypes related to Uliana’s great political power in Lithuania’s political life that are well-established in modern historiography and present-day cultural memory. With this an attempt is made to draw attention to the problematic nature of information derived from historical sources as well as to more distinctly define the frames imposed by the political culture of pagan Lithuania which clearly marked the boundaries for the political activities of women representing the ruling dynasty. This article for the most part dwells on the issues related to the coverage of Algirdas and Uliana’s marriage and the period of their married life up to Algirdas’ death in 1377. KEYWORDS: Uliana, Algirdas, Simeon, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Moscow, Tver, Rus’, women

DEMOCRACY AT THE SERVICE OF FOREIGN POLICY OF THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. FREDDIE
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Foreign Policy Change ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Apartheid Regime

The article examines the place and role of democracy and human rights in South Africas foreign policy. The author analyzes the process of South Africas foreign policy change after the fall of the apartheid regime and transition to democracy. He gives characteristics of the foreign policy under different presidents of South Africa from 1994 to 2018 and analyzes the political activities of South Africa in the area of peacekeeping and human rights on the African continent.

Tom Jones

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. Expelled from Mr Allworthy's country estate for his wild temper and sexual conquests, the good-hearted foundling Tom Jones loses his money, joins the army, and pursues his beloved across Britain to London, where he becomes a kept lover and confronts the possibility of incest. Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest scholarship to examine how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere.

Applications of Energy Beams in Material and Device Processing

1983 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.J. Galvin ◽  
L.S. Hung ◽  
J.W. Mayer ◽  
M. Nastasi
Keyword(s):  
Ion Beam ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Ion Beams ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
Near Surface ◽  
Device Processing ◽  
Composition Modification ◽  
Directed Energy ◽  
Transistor Fabrication

ABSTRACTEnergetic ion beams used outside the traditional role of ion implantation are considered for semiconductor applications involving interface modification for self-aligned silicide contacts, composition modification for formation of buried oxide layers in Si on insulator structures and reduced disorder in high energy ion beam annealing for buried collectors in transistor fabrication. In metals, aside from their use in modification of the composition of near surface regions, energetic ion beams are being investigated for structural modification in crystalline to amorphous transitions. Pulsed beams of photons and electrons are used as directed energy sources in rapid solidification. Here, we consider the role of temperature gradients and impurities in epitaxial growth of silicon.

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