Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe: Extended Essay on the Book

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe takes us back to his seminal text on “Necropolitics” translated and published in the US in 2003. At this point, 40 years after Foucault’s Biopolitics, Mbembe was re-theorizing biopolitics through a necro (death) horizon, which turned out to be a robust conceptual shift from Western thought. Not much else is explicitly said about necropolitics in the titular book, which comes 17 years after the seminal text that had a significant impact on the theory and practice of philosophy, politics, anthropology, and esthetics. Mbembe presents the layers of forms, modes, and procedures of the necropolitical working through contemporary neoliberal global societies. It is therefore not surprising that Mbembe makes reference to theory in forms, form is the way to redefine or rephrase content, and “who should live and who must die” is currently the beginning. But how this is done in the 21st century, what are the methods and procedures to implement this central act in neoliberal global democracy —that is the task of this book.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Essentials of Hindutva: A Study of Its Philosophical Elements to Hindu Nationalism

In the early twentieth-century, the concepts of Hindutva, Samyavada or Nationalism and national identity, reconstructed amid currents of globalization and neo-colonialism. During this period, the calls for an independent India reached its height. While, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru believed modern India’s strength depended on incorporating the solidarities of all Indians as they stood on the precipice of the postcolonial age, Veer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), an ethnocentric nationalist, held that a strong Hindu nation was the only way to guarantee India’s security against the Muslim other and the British imperialism. Being the philosopher of Hindutva, Savarkar represented the ethno-nationalistic component to Hindu nationalism and looked to cultural motifs in order to unify the “true” people of India. He, therefore, wrote glorified histories of India and its millennia-old cultural traditions in his essays. This article analyzes and historically contextualizes the timing and the rhetorical style of V. D. Savarkar’s infamous extended essay “Essentials of Hindutva”. Received 9th December 2020; Revised 2nd March 2021; Accepted 20th March 2021

Do not despair about severity—yet

In a recent extended essay, philosopher Daniel Hausman goes a long way towards dismissing severity as a morally relevant attribute in the context of priority setting in healthcare. In this response, we argue that although Hausman certainly points to real problems with how severity is often interpreted and operationalised within the priority setting context, the conclusion that severity does not contain plausible ethical content is too hasty. Rather than abandonment, our proposal is to take severity seriously by carefully mapping the possibly multiple underlying accounts to well-established ethical theories, in a way that is both morally defensible and aligned with the term’s colloquial uses.

Claire Denis – The Intruder

An extended essay on Claire Denis’ L’Intrus acts as a companion piece to the chapter on Frances Barrett. Dealing with similar themes of care, hospitality, and feminism, it expands on an aspect that sat at the edges of Curator, the questioning of received ontological boundaries or defining categories. Denis covers both formerly and conceptually a taxonomy of borders, which are both physical and psychological. Her source material, Jean Luc Nancy’s essay about his heart transplant, is considered in relation to the way Denis produces a moving image work from a philosophical text, with particular concern for her treatment of narrative to produce bodily sensation. The ‘Other’ or figure of the stranger is pitted against the disintegrating power of patriarchy referenced in Denis’ casting of the actor, Michel Subor, who appears in L’Intrus and Beau Travail (1999) as well as Jean Luc Godard’s Petite Soldat (1955). [145]

Józef Sikorski’s “Recollection of Chopin”: The Earliest Essay on Chopin and His Music

This chapter focuses on “Recollection of Chopin” by Józef Sikorski, the earliest extended essay on the composer's life and works. The author's emotional language captures the immediacy and poignancy of the response to the news of Chopin's death in the composer's Warsaw circles. A close reading, however, also reveals striking similarities between Sikorski's effusive prose and the overlapping metaphoric vocabularies of German Idealism and Polish political messianism: the figurative language is deployed to locate Chopin and his artistic achievement within these two philosophical frameworks. Moreover, Sikorski was among the first critics to offer perceptive analytical observations on Chopin's compositional strategies and his innovative musical language.

A Critical Inferno? Hoplit, Hanslick and Liszt’s Dante Symphony

The question of how to distinguish between form with a spiritual dimension and hollow form preoccupied Eduard Hanslick throughout his career as a writer on music aesthetics and as a music critic. His grappling with this issue was not confined to Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. It was manifest in his critical output, where he famously and consistently for many years singled out the music of Liszt as lacking a spiritual dimension. Hanslick has been noted for his views on Liszt since the mid-nineteenth century. More recently, Markus Gärtner has inestimably enhanced our understanding of the nature of the controversy between the two figures. Yet, although we now have a greater understanding of what Hanslick found deplorable in Liszt’s music, we are no closer to understanding why he considered it to lack a spiritual dimension. In other words: Hanslick represents the true dilemma of the critic in this area in that he interprets a lack of spiritual dimension but cannot quantify it. Excerpts of Richard Pohl’s extended essay on Liszt’s Dante Symphony, originally written in 1858, were included in the programme note Hanslick received at the Vienna Philharmonic’s performance of that work in 1881. These passages brought together in Hanslick’s mind the issues and controversies of the 1850s. Drawing both on Pohl’s essay and Hanslick’s review, this article explores what the lasting issues were in Hanslick’s critical reception of Liszt. It further questions what can be meaningfully said in relation to the spiritual dimension of a work, and the nature of Hanslick’s ontological enquiry.