Prosthetic Hands in King John

Author(s):  
Huw Griffiths

The word “hand” occurs more times in King John than in any other Shakespeare play. This is no accident. This play imagines sovereign agency through forms of prosthesis, and figures sovereignty through synecdoche: parts standing in for wholes. The word “hand” comes to the fore at moments in the play where the transactional nature of sovereign power is being accentuated: in John’s uncomfortable second coronation and, most concentratedly, in the peculiar circumstances of Prince Arthur’s death, a death that is willed by many but enacted by none. In the disputes between King John and Hubert over their relative responsibility, the word “hand” becomes a focus for a drawn-out meditation on the extent to which sovereign power is alienable or always located in the person of the King himself.

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 252-253
Author(s):  
Carole Levin (book author) ◽  
G. L. Owens (review author)

Author(s):  
Beatrice Marovich

Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on the political thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. If Weil was an early subject of Agamben’s intellectual curiosity, it would appear – judging from his published works – that her influence upon him has been neither central nor lasting.1 Leland de la Durantaye argues that Weil’s work has left a mark on Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality, largely in his discussion of the concept of decreation; but de la Durantaye does not make much of Weil’s influence here, determining that her theory of decreation is ‘essentially dialectical’ and still too bound up with creation theology. 2 Alessia Ricciardi, however, argues that de la Durantaye’s dismissal of Weil’s influence is hasty.3 Ricciardi analyses deeper resonances between Weil’s and Agamben’s philosophies, ultimately claiming that Agamben ‘seems to extend many of the implications and claims of Weil’s idea of force’,4 arguably spreading Weil’s influence into Agamben’s reflections on sovereign power and bare life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 1965-1986
Author(s):  
T.A. Komkina ◽  
M.A. Nikonova ◽  
M.G. Dubinina

Subject. The article analyzes development trends in certain types of service robots, namely, hybrid UAVs, bionic prosthetic hands, robotic vacuum cleaners. Objectives. We focus on identifying the main trends in the development of certain types of service robots, building dynamic models of their technical indicators and models of dependence of their price and weight on absolute characteristics and technical parameters. Methods. The study employs methods of correlation and multiple regression analysis. The data of the IFR, the Remotely Piloted Aircraft System, and websites of robot manufacturers serve as the informational basis of the paper. Results. The modeling unveils positive correlation between the integrated indicator of the technical level of hybrid UAVs of convertiplane type and the wingspan. The analysis of modern bionic prosthetic hands shows that the developers focus on optimizing the structure of the prosthetic, however, as the functions of the hand improve, the weight of bionic hand increases. The main factors influencing the price of robot vacuum cleaners are their power, weight, and operating hours. Conclusions. The unit price of a complex indicator of the technical level of hybrid UAVs is lower than the corresponding indicator of fixed-wing UAVs, reflecting a greater efficiency of hybrid UAVs. The analysis of technical indicators of robotic prosthetics (using the case of bionic hands) shows that any improvement of functional characteristics leads to deterioration of weight. The analysis of technical and economic indicators of robotic vacuum cleaners reveals a positive correlation between the price and weight, operating hours and power.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-125

Three phases in Foucault’s examination of authorship and free speech were essential to him throughout his life. They can be linked to such texts as the three lectures “What is an Author?” (first phase), “What is Critique?,” and “What is Revolution?” (second phase), and the two lecture courses, “Fearless Speech,” and “The Courage of Truth” (third phase). Initially, Foucault merely describes the founders of discursivity (hence, “superauthors”), among whom he reckoned only Marx and Freud, as the sole alternative to his own conceptualization of the author function, which is exhibited en masse in contemporary society. He then modifies his views on superauthorship by making Kant the paradigm and by linking his own concept of free speech to a Kan-tian critical attitude. However, Foucault claims only the half of Kant’s philosophical legacy that is related to the study of the ontology of the self.The article advances the hypothesis that the sovereign power of speech, which can be found in Marx and Heidegger and in generally in the concept of “superauthorship,” becomes unacceptable for Foucault. During the third phase, the danger of a tyrannical use of free speech compels Foucault to make a number of fruitful but questionable choices in his work. He focuses on a single aspect of free speech in which a speaker is in a weaker position and therefore has to overcome his fear in order to tell the truth. Foucault associates this kind of free speech with the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia, which according to his interpretation means “fearless speech”; however, this reading is not always supported by the ancient Greek sources. Foucault’s deliberations bring him to the radical conclusion that free speech transforms into performative “aesthetics of existence.” Foucault’s main motivation for pursuing this line of thought all through his life was to investigate his own abilities and powers as an author


Author(s):  
Heather L. Ferguson

The Proper Order of Things demonstrates how early modern Ottoman territorial control, both in general practice and in the specific contexts of Greater Syria and occupied Hungary, was enabled through the creation of a particular web of textual authority. The book therefore focuses attention on an Ottoman paper trail of legal edicts, administrative reports, and reflective treatises that extended the jurisdiction of sovereign power through an evolving textual corpus. This corpus sublimated anxieties of fragmented regional power to assertions of imperial universalism. Formalized registers and circulated protocols fostered the development of a trifecta of imperial order: the emergence of an elite administrative class defined in and through an emerging court bureaucracy; the circulation of a documentary corpus of edicts that promulgated and registered imperial supremacy via a specific idiom of power; and the establishment of a dynastic linguistic and legal medium that defined the shape, even if it did not control the content, of intellectual activity, speculative inquiry, and literary stylizations. The Proper Order of Things thus argues that a link between territorial and textual authority also formalized a particular discourse that became the means by which the Ottoman establishment managed distance and organized diversity into an ordered system of state power. This discourse created a particular orientation to authoritative texts and bridged the divide between conceptual or ideological frameworks and administrative practices.


Author(s):  
C Cosenza ◽  
V Niola ◽  
S Savino

The development of suitable models for mechanical fingers, whether they are part of prosthetic device or of a robotic hand, is a powerful tool to predict the behaviour of their components since the early stages of design, especially for underactuated mechanisms. Experimental data can improve the reliability of such models and promote their application to build proper control strategies especially for prosthetic hands. Here, we have developed a multi-jointed model of a mechanical finger. The finger is part of the Federica hand: an underactuated mechanical hand that was conceived for prosthetic purpose. The model accounts for friction phenomena in the finger and it is tuned with experimental data acquired through a digital image correlation device. The model allowed us to write kinematics relations of the phalanges and evaluate finger configurations in relation to the closure velocity. Moreover, it was possible to estimate the tendon force and the work analysis occurring during the closure tasks, both in free mode and in presence of objects.


2021 ◽  
pp. 019145372110330
Author(s):  
Sandro Chignola

This article addresses the modern concept of sovereignty as a multivocal and conflictual semantic field, arguing for the necessity to trace its genealogy based on the structural tensions that haunt its logical framework – as well as its representations – rather than on a linear historiographic reconstruction. In particular, the scrutiny I propose aims to examine a series of exchanges that have been characterizing this concept since the beginning: the global and the European, the maritime and the territorial, the colony and the state, the imperial and the proprietary. The problematic balance between ‘imperium’ and ‘dominium’ is indeed assumed here as the turning point of the rise of a sovereign power that appears to be originally rooted in the very production and governance of the global space, thus giving up all possible Eurocentric narratives of modernity. To illustrate my argument, I focus on the frontispieces to three of Thomas Hobbes’s most important books, that is, his translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, De Cive and Leviathan. A thorough analysis of these images enables us to understand how these lines of force traverse the very heart of modern European political concepts, along with the mirroring effects that constantly bounce their normative construction of subjectivity back and forth from the periphery to the centre and, ultimately, from the market to the state.


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