scholarly journals Intensifying and De-intensifying Distinctions

Author(s):  
Marin Terpstra

Abstract In this article I explore different ways of imagining distinctions in the form of borders and on the attitudes that people assume towards them. A distinction is primarily a cognitive operation, but appears as such in human communication (people talking about differences and identities), and in constructions that shape the material space people live in (borders, buildings, and the like). I explore two extreme positions, the one de-intensifying distinctions by focusing on their logical and contingent forms, the other intensifying distinctions by making them a potential cause of conflict. The first one is exemplified by Spencer Brown’s and Niklas Luhmann’s reflection on the logical and sociological aspects of distinctions; the second one by Carl Schmitt’s theory of ‘the political’ and its key notion of the distinction between friend and enemy. Both positions are relevant to understand a major debate and struggle in the world of today between liberal cosmopolitans and authoritarian nationalists. I show in what way both positions are aspects of the human condition, and what makes that alternately the one or the other is stressed.

Author(s):  
Conrad Scott

Raymond Holmes Souster has been described as a poet of place who invests Toronto, the city of his life-long residence, deeply into his writing. Having worked for some forty-five years at the downtown Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Souster’s immersion in a particular place certainly informed his poetic output; however, Souster the poet also ponders the human condition. On the one hand, he writes from a basis of experience: the destruction of war and the changes imposed by the rise of the modern era. On the other, his work seeks out and highlights that which is still precious despite the weight of the world he feels. Moreover, he clearly values poetry as a salve to the cacophonous imposition of modernity, and continually encourages poetic development: in addition to his substantial body of work, he has supported Canadian poetry by editing several anthologies, and as a creator of Direction (editor 1943–6); a founder of Contact (editor 1952–4); an editor of Combustion (1957–60); and a founding member of the League of Canadian Poets (president 1967–71).


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 235-241
Author(s):  
Barbara Klonowska

This article reviews the recent monograph by Maxim Shadurski, The Nationality of Utopia. H. G. Wells, England, and the World State (New York: Routledge, 2020) in the context of utopian studies on the one hand, and the political ideas of the nation state vs. world state on the other.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
Agapov Oleg D. ◽  

The joy of being is connected with one’s activities aimed at responding to the challenges of the elemental forces and the boundlessness of being, which are independent of human subjectivity. In the context of rising to the challenges of being, one settles to acquire a certain power of being in themselves and in the world. Thus, the joy of being is tied to achieving the level of the “miraculous fecundity” (E. Levinas), “an internal necessity of one’s life” (F. Vasilyuk), magnanimity (M. Mamardashvili). The ontological duty of any human being is to succeed at being human. The joy of being is closely connected to experiencing one’s involvement in the endless/eternity and realizing one’s subjective temporality/finitude, which attunes him to the absolute seriousness in relation to one’s complete realization in life. Joy is a foundational anthropological phenomenon in the structure of ways of experiencing the human condition. The joy of being as an anthropological practice can appear as a constantly expanding sphere of human subjectivity where the transfiguration of the powers of being occurs under the sign of the Height (Levinas) / the Good. Without the possibility of transfiguration human beings get tired of living, immerse themselves in the dejected state of laziness and the hopelessness of vanity. The joy of being is connected to unity, gathering the multiplicity of human life under the aegis of meaning that allows us to see the other and the alien in heteronomous being, and understand the nature of co-participation and responsibility before the forces of being, and also act in synergy with them.The joy of being stands before a human being as the joy of fatherhood/ motherhood, the joy of being a witness to the world in creative acts (the subject as a means to retreat before the world and let the world shine), the joy of every day that was saved from absurdity, darkness and the impersonal existence of the total. Keywords: joy, higher reality, anthropological practices, “the height”, subject, transcendence, practice of coping


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-518
Author(s):  
Wang Gungwu

For the past three decades, student movements in most countries in the world have been beaten back, but there are signs that some may be returning. In response to the Arab Spring, students participated fully in Tahrir Square and beyond. The student elections in Egypt that followed, however, seem to have been divided according to the various links that each student group had with the political groups contending for state power, like the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists on the one side, against secular and revolutionary groups on the other. It is not certain if the student elections really reflected the overall mood of the country or whether they were simply shaped by political protagonists outside the campuses.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 521-549
Author(s):  
Jana V. Schmidt ◽  

A near exclusive focus on Hannah Arendt’s concept of forgiveness from her major work The Human Condition has obscured the equally important model of reconciliation in her writings on aesthetics and in her Thought Notebook. By engaging Arendt in a dialogue with her contemporaries and friends Ingeborg Bachmann and Hermann Broch, on the one hand, and with the classic thinkers of tragedy, Aristotle and Goethe, on the other hand, I show how reconciliation responds to the situation of fatherlessness after 1945 and, as a “reconciliation with reality,” offers a new basis for intersubjectivity. Having, as Arendt writes, “enough of origin within” ourselves to do without pre-established categories cannot mean that we must begin to “father” ourselves but that, on the contrary, our inception as beings born to begin anew leaves us radically forlorn and yet equipped with everything we need to “make world” with one another. The essay contends that imagination, judgment, and understanding build a network of thought figures in Arendt that are tied to reality through the work of reconciliation.


Worldview ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-8
Author(s):  
Robert A. Gessert

It is sometimes suggested that nuclear weapons technology has made the world safe for “wars of national liberation.” I don't happen to accept this proposition, but I do acknowledge that “wars of national liberation” are a prominent part of both the declaratory and action policies of the Communist world. The free world does not have the option of declining to respond to such wars. This is sufficient reason for attempts to assay the ethical issues they raise.Wars of liberation have been called “political wars.” I assume two different things are intended by this: on the one hand, that they have a larger political component than other wars in that they do emphasize or circumvent some of the more typical military missions such as seizing and holding territory; on the other hand, as compared with nuclear war, they seem more nearly to be. compatible with Clausewitx's dictum that war is a continuation of policy. There are difficulties with both notions, but I do acknowledge that wars of liberation are intimately related to the political purposes of their sponsors and that they do generally employ means aimed directly at political power and try to postpone or avoid military engagements as the determinants of their outcome.


Rusin ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 269-284
Author(s):  
J.A. Emer ◽  
◽  
K.A. Akenteva ◽  

The article examines the conceptual and compositional transformation of the genre of congratulations on professional holidays in the East Slavic presidential discourses of V.V. Putin, A.G. Lukashenko and V.A. Zelensky. The authors analyze the specificty of modeling a picture of the world in the interaction of holiday and presidential discourses within the traditionally interpersonal communication genre. In the presidential discourse, congratulations are a tool to maintain and strengthen power, a way to form necessary values and attitudes and a form of communication with professional communities, which can contribute to the development of professional identity and strengthen the prestige of the profession. Congratulations on professional holidays allow to model the image of a specialist, which, on the one hand, is determined by the socio-cultural characteristics of this society, and on the other hand, by the political attitudes of the speaker, who is the country leader with undeniable authority. As in other congratulations in the presidential discourse, the texts under consideration preserve the traditional structure of the genre and add an informational part, where the speaker models the image of a professional, choosing characteristics in accordance with their own political goals and objectives, and gives an orientation to the future. At the same time, the content of the congratulation is determined by the holiday (honoring the professional community), the speaker’s attitudes, and the current political and economic situation in the country.


involve either the rejection of sexual love or its abuse. love chastely but want sexual satisfaction now, for Although Guyon is the servant of the ‘heauenly example Timias at v 48. The lowest stair is occupied Mayd’ (II i 28.7), he never sees the one and only by those who pervert love, either through jealousy spies on the other before binding her and ravaging in loving a woman as an object (as Malbecco at ix 5) her bower. From the opening episode of Book III, it or in using force to satisfy their desire (as Busirane becomes evident that Guyon’s binding of Acrasia has at xi 11). Book III is aptly named ‘the book of sex’ initiated an action that requires the rest of the poem by M. Evans 1970:152, for Spenser’s anatomy of to resolve, namely, how to release women from male love extends outward to the natural order and the tyranny, and therefore release men from their desire cosmos, and to the political order in which the ‘Most to tyrannize women. Chastity is fulfilled when its famous fruites of matrimoniall bowre’ (iii 3.7) are patron, Britomart, frees Amoret from Busirane’s the progeny of English kings. tyranny; friendship is fulfilled when Florimell’s chaste To fashion the virtues of the first two books, love for Marinell leads to her being freed from Spenser uses the motif of the single quest: a knight is Proteus’s tyranny; and Artegall is able to fulfil the guided to his goal, one by Una and the other by the virtue of justice when his lover, Britomart, frees him Palmer, and on his way engages in chivalric action from Radigund’s tyranny to which he has submitted. usually in the open field. To fashion chastity, he uses By destroying Acrasia’s sterile bower of perpetual the romance device of entrelacement, the interweav-summer, Guyon frees Verdant, whose name invokes ing of separate love stories into a pattern of relation-spring with its cycle of regeneration. The temperate ships. (As the stories of the four squires in Books III body, seen in the Castle of Alma, ‘had not yet felt and IV form an interlaced narrative, see Dasenbrock Cupides wanton rage’ (II ix 18.2), but with the cycle 1991:52–69.) The variety of love’s pageants requires of the seasons, love enters the world: ‘all liuing multiple quests, and the action shifts to the forest, wights, soone as they see | The spring breake forth the seashore, and the sea (see ‘Places, allegorical’ and out of his lusty bowres, | They all doe learne to play ‘Sea’ in the SEnc). Thus Britomart, guided by ‘blind the Paramours’ (IV x 45). Once the temperate body loue’ (IV v 29.5), wanders not knowing where to has felt ‘Cupides wanton rage’ in Book III, knights find her lover. As she is a virgin, her love for Artegall lie wounded or helpless and their ladies are either in is treated in the Belphœbe–Timias story; as she seeks flight or imprisoned – all except Britomart, who, to fulfil her love in marriage, her relationship to though as sorely wounded by love as any, is armed Artegall is treated in the Scudamour–Amoret story; with chastity, which controls her desire as she follows and as her marriage has the apocalyptic import ‘the guydaunce of her blinded guest’ (III iv 6.8), prophesied by Merlin at III iii 22–23, its significance that is, her love for Artegall. in relation to nature is treated in the Marinell– Book III presents an anatomy of love, its motto Florimell story. Like Florimell, Britomart loves a being ‘Wonder it is to see, in diuerse mindes, | How knight faithfully; but, like Marinell (see iv 26.6), diuersly loue doth his pageaunts play, | And shewes Artegall scorns love (see IV vi 28.9), neither know-his powre in variable kindes’ (v 1). While there is ing that he is loved. Yet Florimell knows whom she only one Cupid, his pageants vary, then, according to loves while Britomart does not, having seen only his diverse human states. If only because the poem is image. In contrast to both, Amoret loves faithfully, dedicated to the Virgin Queen, virginity is accorded and is loved faithfully in return; and in contrast to all, ‘the highest stayre | Of th’honorable stage of Belphœbe does not know that she is loved by Timias womanhead’ (v 54.7–8), being represented in Book and does not love him. (To complete this scheme: at III by Belphœbe. She was ‘vpbrought in perfect III vii 54, Columbell knows that she is loved by the Maydenhed’ by Diana, while her twin (yet later Squire of Dames but withholds love for him.) The born) sister, Amoret, was ‘vpbrought in goodly pattern formed by these stories fashions the virtue of womanhed’ (vi 28.4, 7) by Venus. Accordingly, chastity of which Britomart is the patron. Amoret occupies the central stair of chaste love, for Since interlaced narratives take the place of the lin-she loves Scudamour faithfully and is rescued by ear quest, Spenser structures Book III by balancing Britomart, the virgin who loves Artegall faithfully. the opening and concluding cantos against the mid-Since both are chaste, their goal is marriage in which dle canto. Canto vi is the book’s centre as it treats

2014 ◽  
pp. 33-33

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-49
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Ziarek

Abstract This essay reconsiders the notion of “world” by looking critically at the idiom of life dominating current critical debates. Showing how and why life should be displaced from the privileged position it has assumed in modernity, it examines Arendt’s and Heidegger’s comments on the world. In The Human Condition, Arendt provides an interesting philosophical and cultural account of the rise of life to prominence in the modern age, pointing out its detrimental effects on the understanding of the world and human action. Heidegger, on the other hand, executes, through his idiomatic approach to mortality, perhaps the most radical displacement of life in an attempt to rethink and bring to eminence being and the event of the world. At stake is a different experience of the world and a change in the understanding of the human, situating the human (and) life always already in response to the nonrepeatable event of being.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Güllistan Yarkın

When founded in 1978, the PKK defined itself as a socialist movement aiming to create a classless society through the formation of a new state-power. In the 1990s, the ideology of the PKK began to change and this transformation became apparent in the 2000s. The PKK has since completely abandoned its statist Marxist-Leninist national liberationist ideology, and has instead proposed to build “democratic modernity” through the creation of an anti-capitalist, anti-industrialist, women emancipatory and ecologist “democratic confederalism” framework. This project defines the ecologist-rural communes grounded on food sovereignty as its basic economic units. This article argues that the transformation of the PKK’s goals on the political economy of the Kurdish region is shaped by, on the one hand, the world systemic and internal restraints acting upon the PKK, and on the other hand, the ideological responses of the PKK to those restraints.Keywords: The PKK; Abdullah Öcalan; democratic modernity; democratic confederalism; anti-capitalist movements.Guherîna îdeolojîk di PKKyê de û aboriya siyasî ya herêma kurdî li TirkiyeyêGava di sala 1978an de hate damezrandin, PKKyê xwe wek hereketeke sosyalîst pênase kiribû û armanca xwe wisa danîbû ku civakeke bêçîn durist bike bi rêya avakirina desthilata dewleteke nû. Di salên 1990an de îdeolojiya PKKyê dest bi guherînê kir û di salên 2000an de ev guherîn pir aşkera bû. Ji hingê ve, PKKyê bi temamî dest ji îdeolojiya xwe ya Marksî-Lenînî ya azadiya neteweyî kêşaye, li batî wê, ragihandiye ku dixwaze “modernîteya demokratîk” ava bike bi rêya duristkirina çarçoveyeke “konfederaliya demokratîk” a dij-sermayedarî, dij-endûstrîgerî, jin-rizgarkerane û ekolojîk. Di vê projeyê de yekeyên aborî yên esasî ew komûnên ekolojîst-gundî ne ku li ser serbixweyiya xwe ya xurekî pêk hatine (anku ji bo bidestxistina xureka xwe ne muhtacê derve ne). Ev gotar diyar dike ku guherînên di armancên PKKyê yên li ser aboriya siyasî ya herêma kurdî, ji aliyekê ve, ji ber wan zext û berbest û mehdûdiyetên sîstemî yên global û navxweyî pêk hatine ku kar di PKKyê dikin, ji aliyê dî ve, ji ber bersivên îdeolojîk ên PKKyê ne bo wan berbest û mehdûdiyetan.


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