Flowers of Time

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Payne
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Pastoral Poetry ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Postapocalyptic Literature ◽  
Historical Moment

The literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction — stories set after civilization's destruction — is a long one, spanning the biblical tale of Noah and Hesiod's Works and Days to the works of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. Traveling from antiquity to the present, this book reveals how postapocalyptic fiction differs from other genres — pastoral poetry, science fiction, and the maroon narrative — that also explore human capabilities beyond the constraints of civilization. The book places postapocalyptic fiction into conversation with such theorists as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Carl Schmitt, illustrating how the genre functions as political theory in fictional form. It shows that rather than argue for a particular way of life, postapocalyptic literature reveals what it would be like to inhabit that life. It considers the genre's appeal in our own historical moment, contending that this fiction is the pastoral of our time. Whereas the pastoralist and the maroon could escape to real-world hills and fashion their own versions of freedom, on a fully owned and occupied Earth, only an apocalyptic event can create a space where such freedoms are feasible once again. The book looks at how fictional narratives set after the world's devastation represent new conditions and possibilities for life and humanity.

Speculative Realism and Science Fiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Willems
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Quentin Meillassoux

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.

Virtues and Capabilities

2018 ◽  
pp. 586-599
Author(s):  
Steven Torrente ◽  
Harry D. Gould
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Capabilities Approach ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Ethical Systems

After a long dormancy in the modern era, virtue-based ethical thought has once again become a subject of serious consideration and debate in the field of philosophy. The normative orientation of most International Political Theory, however, still comes primarily from principles-based (deontological) or outcome-based (consequentialist) ethical systems. Virtue ethics differs from focus deontological and consequentialist ethics by emphasizing character, context, and way of life, rather than rule-governed action. This chapter reviews the emergence of contemporary virtue ethics as a challenge to overly abstract, language-based analysis of moral concepts, and its development into a broad and nuanced ethical theory. It then connects virtue ethics to the capabilities approach to human development, which is similarly focused.

Marvelous Stank Matter

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Stallings
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Alternative Models ◽  
Western Model ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Sexual Cultures

This chapter reviews the importance of sacred subjectivity to various black sexual cultures. In its proposal of nonmonogamy as an alternative practice for funk's genealogy of affection, relationality, and sexuality between human and nonhuman beings, the chapter addresses M. Jacqui Alexander's question about sacred subjectivity. Using queer legal theory, debates about the marriage crisis in black communities, and cultural depictions of nonmonogamy in the science fiction of Octavia Butler and the erotica of Fiona Zedde, the chapter reveals how funk attends to alternative models of family and community to challenge the heteropatriarchal recolonization that happens with capitalism and the Western model of family.

Beyond Carl Schmitt: Political Theory in the Frankfurt School

Telos ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 1987 (71) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Sollner
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Carl Schmitt

scholarly journals A Model for Innovation Culture Management in Organizations (IVALUE 7)

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ozgul Keles ◽  
Tezer Battal
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Development ◽  
Management Model ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Innovation Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Innovative Culture ◽  
Industrial Revolutions ◽  
Strategic Goal

Governments, companies, universities, institutes, and individuals all over the world have prioritized innovation on their agenda and some have declared innovation as a strategic goal, but for a few of them, innovation has been a way of life. Organizational development depends on human capabilities more than ever. Not just intellectual, emotional, executive, experiential, and physical quotients of human capacity, but also creative, spiritual, passionate, motivational, and social quotients now need to be considered. When an invention is valued, it becomes an innovation. Although, innovation began with human, it is hard to pinpoint the first inventor in history. Transformation from a learning organization to a thinking organization is needed to be able to sustain innovative culture. At this point, the hard question is how? A smart, creative and dynamic innovation culture will help organizations to see the value of invention. In this study, a brief review is first made on the historical backgrounds of universities, institutes, industrial revolutions, and management systems in order to understand the evolution of the concept of innovation. Then, IVALUE7, a management model for dynamic, smart innovation organizational culture, will be introduced and discussed.

scholarly journals Political Theology Revisited: Carl Schmitt's Postwar Reassessment

Konturen ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter U. Hohendahl
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Hans Blumenberg ◽  
Theological Turn ◽  
The Relationship

The essay examines the pronounced theological turn of the late Carl Schmitt, especially in his Politische Theologie II (1970). He aim is to understand what Schmitt meant by a “Catholic intensification” in the relationship between theology and political theory. The essay gives equal attention to Schmitt’s polemic against the theologian Peterson, who denied the possibility of political theology, and the dialogue with the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, who had severely criticized Schmitt’s conception of secularization. The essay shows that in both instances the opposition merely encouraged Schmitt to sharpen and clarify his own theological position, which includes heretical Gnostic elements.

scholarly journals Explorations in Ecocriticism: Reading the Select Novels of Cormac McCarthy in the Light of Anthropocentrism and Cartesian Thinking.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Sakti Sekhar Dash
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Close Contact ◽  
Environmental Ethic ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Road ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The One

            This study highlights the subtle and complex environmental ethic in Cormac McCarthy’s select novels. By delineating the relationships McCarthy’s characters have with non-human nature, an ecocritical analysis views their alienation as the result of their separation from nature. At the root of this alienation is an anthropocentric and mechanistic mode of thinking that is dominant in Western philosophy and that this study defines as Cartesian. While McCarthy’s environmentalist heroes are persecuted by Cartesian institutions and displaced from the land on which they have defined themselves and made meaning, his Cartesian anti-heroes represent extreme manifestations of Cartesian thinking. McCarthy’s environmentalism is as much a critique and indictment of Cartesian thinking as it is a portrayal of the value of a life lived in close contact with nonhuman nature.             McCarthy uses human treatment of non-human animals to evidence man's absolute desire to control the natural world and the beasts within the natural world. Animals often figure prominently in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, taking on mystical significance or even mirroring human nature. At other times, McCarthy portrays astriking intimacy between animals and men. The animals in McCarthy’s novels also represent a link to an older, natural order and a vanishing (or vanished) way of life. The representations are clearly myriad and diverse, but the one thing that can be asserted for certain is that the overarching tendency is to elevate animals to positions of great significance; they inhabit a space that, while often overlapping with the human realm, is distinctive and important. In All the Pretty Horses John Grady Cole is virtually defined by his relationship to horses, and there are moments of striking intimacy between him and horses in the novel. Wolves assume a similar place of significance in The Crossing. The ranchers discus show the cattle, in their domestication and defenselessness, “puzzle” the wolves, who kill the cattle in a much more savage manner than they do wild quarry, “as if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Billy also experiences moments of intimacy with the pregnant she-wolf that echo John Grady Cole’s relationship to horses, and this happens at the same two levels: in both the dream world and the tangible world. In McCarthy’s borderlands novels there is always the looming awareness that civilizations will rise and civilizations will fall, but what is constant is war, brutality, and death. This is why his books, particularly his works concerning the Southwest and Mexico, are littered with apocalyptic themes and images—until, of course, he delivers the death of all civilizations in the post-apocalyptic rendering The Road (2006).

scholarly journals (Nothing But) Futures

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
David Kupferman
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Educational Research ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Educational Futures ◽  
Research And Policy

The year after the journal ACCESS originally launched, Octavia Butler (1983) published a short story titled “Speech Sounds” in the science fiction monthly Asimov’s Science Fiction. The story takes place in the aftermath of a pandemic that seemingly has one of multiple effects: one either loses the ability to speak coherently, or one loses the ability to read and write (but not both). In this paper, I will discuss how this story has utility as an example of future studies. Futures studies is an attempt to game out multiple futures by using our present-day anxieties, institutions, and value systems to consider what is probable, what is possible, and what is preferable. Through future studies, I am looking for a new way for thinking about theory so that we can engage in imagining any number of educational futures, one that takes the scaffolding of futures studies and both looks to science fiction as its object of inquiry and reads educational research and policy as science fiction writing.

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