Resistance and Psychoanalysis

Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham

As calls mount for resistance to recent political events, Simon Morgan Wortham explores the political implications and complexities of a psychoanalytic conception of resistance. Through close readings of a range of authors, both within and outside of the psychoanalytic tradition, the question of the politics of psychoanalysis itself is read back into the task of thinking resistance from a psychoanalytic point of view. Simon Morgan Wortham explores what he sees as the phobic resistance at the centre of the politics of psychoanalysis, one that creates fresh possibilities for contemporary cultural and political analysis.

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-150
Author(s):  
Maria Nadia Covini

The lordship of the Beccaria, a branch of the great family from Pavia, on Arena Po, was established at the end of the thirteenth century, taking advantage of both the financial difficulties of the small municipality and the power of the family in Pavia. It was meant to last for centuries. Managed in a consortium form by various Beccaria exponents, it encountered difficulties also in relation to the political events of the duchy. Various documents are examined to investigate the nature, modalities and reality of the relations between the lords and the land in the final centuries of the Middle Ages, especially from the fiscal, economic and agricultural point of view.


2008 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Σταυρούλα ΧΟΝΔΡΙΔΟΥ

  <p>Stauroula Hondridou</p><p>The plot of Romanus Boïlas: A Type of Concpiracy Prevention in the Mid-Eleventh Century</p><p> </p><p>Conspiracy was not rare during the long-lived history of Byzantium. Accordingly, the plot of Romanus Boïlas against Constantine IX Monomachos, in the middle of the 11th century, would not have been of great interest, if the way by which the Byzantine emperor handled it did not render it an event worth to investigate.</p><p>According to the sources, Romanus Boïlas served Monomachos' bodyguard battalions, when he acquainted the emperor. Soon, he rose in the state hierarchy and became politically powerful, a fact that enabled him to conspire against the throne. His plot was revealed before his attempting to assassinate the emperor and was himself arrested. However, during the trial Monomachos tried to acquit Boïlas by claiming the offender's naiveté and honesty. After the deliberations, Monomachos honoured Boïlas with a symposium, while Boïlas abettors were arrested, tortured, deprived of their property and exiled.</p><p>Byzantine historiographers interpret Monomacho's peculiar reaction as the result of his dependency on Boïlas, whom they consider as the emperor's buffoon, although the Emperor was in his hands a weak-willed tool.</p><p>Nevertheless, the thorough examination of the sources, the investigation of the two heroes' profiles according to the point of view represented by Byzantine historiographers, and the detailed study of the political events at the time of the conspiracy, lead us to a different conclusion. Thus, Boïlas' plot is not to be seen as a hostile action targeting the central, imperial power, but rather as a means by which the imperial power attempted to control a conspiracy against itself.</p>


Pragmatics ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adeyemi Daramola

Nigeria, which is variously described by some people as ‘a geographical expression’, ‘a unique nation’, ‘the giant of Africa’, ‘the most populous black nation on earth’, among several others, had three distinct governments in the year 1993 alone. Against this background of political instability, numerous discourses which should be of interest and significance to linguists, political scientists, historians, social anthropologists and discourse analysts of various persuasions are examined in this work. Notable is the emergence of the metaphorical use of the word child in the farewell speech of the deposed Head-of-State, Chief Ernest Oladeinde Shonekan, when he spoke of the interim regime as ‘a child of circumstance’ and in the inaugural speech of the then new Head-of-State, General Sani Abacha, as ‘a child of necessity’. These expressions were used not only as part of the reasons for either taking up or rather seizing the mantle of leadership but also as descriptive signals both to the state of the nation and the kind of government that they purported to lead. Using articles in some national newspapers, I attempt in this paper a functional-semiotic discourse analysis of the relevant statements, responses and comments on these national, dramatic, political changes. This paper is therefore an analysis of aspects of the linguistic features of discourses engendered by the diverse problematic, economic, socio-cultural and political events within the Nigerian polity and the political implications for putting in place adequate democratic principles in a developing nation.


2001 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Frankel

In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza attempts to establish a Scriptural basis for liberal democracy by showing that the Gospels, when understood correctly, assert the need for freedom, toleration, and equality. He does so by reducing prophecy to the imaginative expression of prejudice and superstition and then by confining such imaginings to the Hebrew Bible. Spinoza then contrasts the primitive Hebrew prophets, particularly Moses, with an idealized portrait of Jesus, whom he presents as a philosopher, free of prejudice and superstition. Moses was concerned with legislating for a particular regime, while Jesus, according to Spinoza was concerned primarily with salvation. Spinoza thereby exposes the political implications of Jesus' teaching. The injunction that we should obey God rather than man requires freedom and toleration, a condition that can be best guaranteed by a free and democratic regime.Students of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) are often struck by the fact that although the work portrays Christianity more favorably than Judaism, Spinoza devotes far more time to an examination of the Hebrew Bible than the New Testament. Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Spinoza's comparison of Moses, the greatest prophet in the Hebrew Bible, with Jesus, the most revered figure in the New Testament. Although Spinoza lavishly praises Jesus, insisting that Jesus had achieved more intimate apprehension of God, he devotes far more analysis to Moses. By asserting the superiority of Jesus, Spinoza clearly hoped to appeal to his largely Christian audience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (51) ◽  
pp. 113-140
Author(s):  
Denis Vorobiev ◽  

The article examines the debate between Quebecois anthropologists and historians around the “disparationist” thesis. According to this thesis, first expressed in several 17th century texts, the Attikamegues and Montagnais peoples had completely disappeared by the end of that century due to epidemics and Iroquois raids, and the territories in which they lived were occupied by alien autochthonous groups. Therefore, the modern Innu and Atikamekw are implied not to be the direct descendants of the people who lived here before the arrival of Europeans. Anthropologists criticize this thesis, stressing intergenerational continuity. They see it as a political notion that denies the indigenous rights of the First Nations. The author examines the critical arguments of the anthropologists and tries to reveal the relationship between the political implications of the problem and its purely scientific component. From his point of view, the “disparationist” thesis does not take into account the mobility and the relatively amorphous social structure of taiga hunters, in which even the replacement of some groups by others does not imply a break in continuity.


Author(s):  
D.B. Polyakov ◽  

The article is devoted to the actual and, perhaps, even painful topic of political violence considered through the prism of contemporary anarchist thought and, in particular, through the understanding of violence in the theory of postanarchism. The aim is to fixate with using the historical-philosophical descriptive approach the intensification of conflict discourse in contemporary radical political philosophy, as well as a specific postanarchist articulation of such type of violence, which would imply going beyond the logic of a standard encounter of opposing political forces. Such articulation in works of the leading theorist of post-anarchism S. Newman is accompanied by the reception of the conceptual apparatus of the German thinker W. Benjamin. The resulting thesis of this work can be considered as the conjugation of the increasing politicization of life with the tendency to think of politics and the political in terms of antagonism, war and, ultimately, violence. In other words, if the political is thought in this way, it can be assumed that the growing politicization of practically all aspects of life is fraught with similar impulses. In the context of the above, the consideration of postanarchism seems not only adequate as an example of reflecting current trends in political philosophy, but also from the point of view of novelty, because the postanarchist theory as such is rather poorly covered in the Russian academia. From this, firstly, the practical significance follows, because the article gives a notion of the little-studied phenomenon of Western political thought, which correlates with the realities of contemporary politics. Secondly, this work sets a number of vectors for further research concerning both the relationship between the theory and practice of contemporary protest movements and the reaction of state institutions to them. In addition, further work on the problematization of the theory of post-anarchism itself, which is not distinguished by uniqueness and homogeneity due to its own methods and approaches (anti-essentialism, deconstructivism, micro-political analysis, etc.), can also become perspective. Therefore, subsequent development of the topic with the involvement of a larger number of primary sources on the postanarchist theory seems to be significant.


Author(s):  
Erdem Özgür ◽  
Alp Yücel Kaya ◽  
◽  

İsmail Hüsrev Tökin, in his preface to Türkiye Köy İktisadiyatı (1990 [1934]), argues that an economist who might travel Turkey from its western to eastern frontiers would face diverse social and economic scenes: remnants from the previous centuries, in both their mature and embryonic forms. A common point of view of the literature related to agrarian question, from Kautsky to Chayanov, was the problem of the co-existence of pre-capitalist and capitalist agricultural structures within the context of a capitalist economic system, and the political implications of this setting. Tökin’s discussion was a part of such literature in general but it was also part of a movement formed around a monthly journal, Kadro, published between 1932 and 1935. This shortlived movement succeeded in producing original ideas with a dependency-like, developmentalist approach. Our paper aims to explain the analysis of Tökin, and also the Kadro journal on “the agrarian question” in Turkey. To this end, it will discuss how their empirical observations on agrarian dynamics in Turkey in the 1930s, and their theoretical background on the agrarian question, interacted to examine the specific aspects of Turkey’s rural economy. It concludes that Kadro authors’ focus in the agrarian question was on the problem of accumulation for industrialization, rather than the problem of democratic or socialist struggle.


Author(s):  
Denis Eckert

This article analyses Ukraine’s current borders, de jure and de facto, from a geopolitical point of view. Significant changes in the border regime occurred after the political events of 2014. The emergence of de facto borders after the annexation of Crimea and the hostilities in eastern Ukraine raises the question not only of the direction of the Ukrainian state’s foreign policy but also has fundamental consequences for domestic policy. The presence of international organisations monitoring parts of the state border shows that Ukraine is involved in the process of combating illegal immigration and smuggling, on the one hand, and that it has not solved all its state-building problems, on the other. The delimitation of state borders (demarcation) with the other former Soviet republics has taken a long time for land borders and has not been completed for maritime borders. Today’s Ukraine, in the context of European integration, opens its borders to the West and minimizes its contacts with the East. The sharp deterioration in relations with Russia following the annexation of Crimea, Russia’s support for separatist entities in eastern Ukraine has led to the abandonment of cross-border cooperation between border regions, including for mechanisms as effective as Euroregions. The need to amend current Ukrainian legislation, to take into account the political and legal status of de facto borders is an important point at the moment. To achieve this objective, it is necessary not only to draw on the experience of the functioning of the State border with Moldova in its section not controlled by the Moldovan government but also to develop new approaches to facilitate the lives of displaced persons, legalize their legal status and facilitate the crossing of the line of demarcation.


2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (01) ◽  
pp. 77-98
Author(s):  
Carme Ferré-Pavia ◽  
◽  
Mariona Codina ◽  

This article aims to analyze the strategies used by political parties on Instagram posts during the election campaign of November 10, 2019, in terms of their content and media resources, in a politainment environment. A total of 655 publications were analyzed, coming from state and autonomous Catalan parties, through content analysis with quantitative and interpretative focus. From a comparative point of view, a gap is found between new and old political parties in the use of Instagram, and it is evident that the use of per- sonalization varies between formations. In the case of Catalan parties, the campaign is mixed with the effects of the situation of their former leaders. With some exceptions, the programmatic proposals during the campaign are blurred in almost all cases. It is concluded that, on Instagram, the electoral narrative is constructed as a narrative of staged self-referential actions, with the context of the political events in the Catalan case.


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