The Ethical Value of the Inhumanity in Art A Levinasian Reading

Reality and its Shadow, a brief yet powerful essay written in 1948, is the only text where Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) deals solely with the ontology of art. Already in this early text, we can see how his understanding that ethics is the ground of philosophy drives his discussion. The nature of art is therefore treated in relation to what it does, ethically, to the subject, the maker, and the viewer. Art is the “inhumanity” and “inversion” of ethics. Only philosophical criticism reintegrates its “inhumanity” in the ethical relation. The strength of Levinas’s philosophy issues from a pre-cognitive commitment to the “other”, epitomised in the “face to face” relation. Any philosophy emphasising the primacy of the subject over and above the “other” crumbles under his reading. Yet this same strength implies that those domains where the “face to face” relation is obscured lead to irresponsibility. One such domain is art. In this essay I argue that by applying his mature work to the criticism he advances in Reality and its Shadow we can find ethical value in art in virtue of its “inhumanity” and “inversion”. That is, we can agree with Levinas that art leads to irresponsibility, and yet ascribe to it positive ethical value in Levinas's own terms. This can help concretise the tension between the ethical and unethical aspects of art within a Levinasian framework.

Pre-notification and personalisation of text-messages to retain participants in a smoking cessation pregnancy RCT: an embedded randomised factorial trial

Background: Low response rates in randomised controlled trials can compromise the reliability of the results, so ways to boost retention are often implemented. Although there is evidence to suggest that sending a text message to participants increases retention, there is little evidence around the timing or personalisation of these messages. Methods: A two-by-two factorial SWAT (study within a trial) was embedded within the MiQuit-3 trial, looking at smoking cessation within pregnant smokers. Participants who reached their 36-week gestational follow-up were randomised to receive a personalised or non-personalised text message, either one week or one day prior to the telephone follow-up. Primary outcomes were completion rate of questionnaire via telephone. Secondary outcomes included: completion rate via any method, time to completion, and number of reminders required. Results In total 194 participants were randomised into the SWAT; 50 to personalised early text, 47 to personalised late text, 50 to non-personalised early text, and 47 to non-personalised late text. There was no evidence that timing of the text message (early: one week before; or late: one day before) had an effect on any of the outcomes. There was evidence that a personalised text would result in fewer completions via telephone compared with a non-personalised text (adjusted OR 0.44, 95% CI 0.22–0.87, p=0.02). However, there was no evidence to show that personalisation or not was better for any of the secondary outcomes. Conclusion Timing of the text message does not appear to influence the retention of participants. Personalisation of a text message may be detrimental to retention; however, more SWATs should be undertaken in this field.

‘A sculpture that has never been seen before’: the Advanced Sculpture Course, group crit and Silâns magazine at St Martin’s College of Art1

Focusing on the magazine Silâns, produced by students and tutors Barry Flanagan, Rudy Leenders and Alistair Jackson on the Advanced Sculpture Course at St Martin’s College of Art between 1964 and 1965, this article explores the magazine as a collaborative space for students and tutors alike. Arguing that while the ‘group crit’ or discussion forum at St Martin’s offered students a verbal platform to describe, defend or critique their work (which increasingly relied on concepts and ideas over formal properties), it was the format of the art school magazine that offered a space for discourse and collaboration. By questioning the purpose of art and the role of the artist more generally, Silâns offered a site for critique of a rapidly changing art education system. In doing so, it prefigured later conceptual magazines that encompassed similar territory and preoccupations. I argue that although the content and form of Silâns are now identified in relation to concrete poetry, it is better situated in the context of early text-based conceptual art practice. The emphasis on the magazine as a means to disseminate concrete poetry tacitly avoids any of its political implications, in favour of its formal aspects. In concluding that the importance of Silâns, as an alternative platform for student collaboration and a precursor to later text-based conceptual art practice, has so far been overlooked and confined instead to a footnote in the sculptor Barry Flanagan’s biography, I argue that, more than group crit, this magazine is a manifestation of the verbal impulse in art colleges.

Bataille/Athey: Solar Anus

The subject of the article, which is a revised version of the radio segment Object of the Month at Radio Študent, is the Solar Anus, short early text of the French sociologist and writer George Bataille. Solar Anus is also the object, concept and title of the masochistic performance of the US artist Ron Athey. If this serves as an opening question of the actualization of Bataille’s text in the specific cultural context and a parallel interpretation, the article departs from the understanding of the Solar Anus as a more radical and ineradicable form of currently topical ecological, systemic and elemental thinking. In this, the concept of general economy and non-productive consumption is a crucial part along with the materialistic understanding of transgression and excess and the links between the fact of cosmic annihilation and the political-economic order.

The Dharmaputrikā Saṃhitā: Preliminary Notes on an Early Text on Yoga

This essay aims to present the current state of research on the Dharmaputrikā Saṃhitā, an ancient text on yoga which describes, with an exceptional depth of detail and a high level of bodily technicality, internal yogic practices. The study of the Dharmaputrikā Saṃhitā was initiated as part of the ERC-funded AyurYog project, which was led by Dagmar Wujastyk (2015–2020), whose central aim was to examine the link between yoga and classical Indian medicine, two distinct fields of knowledge in the Sanskrit tradition. Not only does chapter Ten (called yogacikitsā) of the Dharmaputrikā Saṃhitā describe “therapy in the context of yoga practice,” but it also appears to integrate within its discourse the practice’s physical and mental effects on the body at each stage of the yoga process, thus reflecting an empirical knowledge of physiology. This essay introduces the dating, authorship, textual history, and reception of the text. It provides preliminary research on parallel passages in other works, and proposes that the Dharmaputrikā Saṃhitā is a textual testimony of ancient yoga practices referred to as the “yoga of Hiraṇyagarbha.” On the basis of the critical edition, which is yet to be published, it offers the reader an annotated and detailed summary of the work’s content, along with various discussions of important questions raised by broader considerations on the history of ancient yoga.

Deleuze in utero: Deleuze — Sartre and the Essence of Woman

The article is devoted to a detailed analysis of Deleuze’s early essay “Description of Woman” (1945). The author demonstrates that this text contains both the rudiments of the Deleuzian problems of immanence and abundance of desire and also reveals Sartre’s influence on Deleuze’s thought because what Deleuze found in Sartre prompted him to develop his own philosophy. Dissatisfied with Sartre’s concepts of love and desire, Deleuze pushes Sartre toward immanence, for which purpose he pares away those aspects of Sartre’s thought that he sees as problematic. The author shows how Deleuze in this early essay abandons Sartre’s intersubjectivity to discover a specific relationship with woman-as-object-of-desire. Rejecting Sartre’s model of the Other-as-subject, Deleuze arrives at what he calls the a priori Other. The article describes how Deleuze challenged Sartre’s understanding of sexual difference in order to find the ontological and bodily foundations of desire through a rejection of subjective desire in favor of a more fundamental desire. Deleuze hoped to develop a model of desire that would make it something immanent instead of a lack. The article shows that Deleuze’s attempt to discern this immanence in woman fails but that he subsequently provides an aesthetic method for realizing the immanence of desire and thus counteracts Sartre. One of the main points of Deleuze’s early text is rejection of Sartre’s masculine point of view, which makes male desire the foundation of female sexual difference. In conclusion, the author claims that the encounter with Sartre was a watershed event for Deleuze because it was Sartre’s philosophy that Deleuze tried to recast to allow for immanence. In this sense, Deleuze’s first essay is a mirror image of his last essay because both of them seek immanence.

Agonism, Democracy, and Law

This chapter begins by examining the origins of agonism in the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s early text “Homer’s Contest.” It then attempts to formulate a political interpretation of agonism that could provide law and legal studies a post-Marxist and Nietzschean critical position in which democracy is central. A first attempt at the formulation is an analysis of the constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt’s “antagonist” and “polemical” notion of politics that is based on a friend-enemy distinction, and of the consequences of such a notion for state constitutions and law. Schmitt serves as the background for the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, whose “agonistic pluralism” represents a conscious effort to moderate Schmitt’s existentially belligerent critique of liberalism into a workable politics in late modernity. Interpretations of agonism provided by William E. Connolly and Bonnie Honig and their possible links to law and legal studies are then briefly discussed. The chapter concludes that there is a kinship between political agonism understood in this way and a contemporary strain in political theory represented by, for example, Jacques Rancière. The roots of this kinship are traced finally to a post-Marxist tradition of “radical liberalism.”

Dimensionality of Early Writing in English and Spanish

Writing development is understood to be a multidimensional task, heavily constrained by spelling in its early stages. However, most available evidence comes from studies with learners of the inconsistent English orthography, so our understanding of the nature of early writing could be highly biased. We explored writing dimensions in each language by assessing a series of text-based features in children’s texts between mid-Grade 1 to mid-Grade 2. Results revealed that two constructs, writing conventions and productivity, emerged in both languages, but the influence of orthographic consistency started to be evident in the later time points. Other constructs of text generation seemed to emerge later and were less stable over time. The article thus highlights the language-general underpinnings of early text-writing development and the impact of orthographic consistency; furthermore, it strengthens the view that some writing components develop before others. We discuss implications for the assessment of early written products.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Though more studies have been dedicated to the place of Kant in Agamben’s oeuvre, Hegel – that other major Enlightenment philosopher indispensable to modernity – holds an equally formative, if perhaps more subtle, place in his work. From the very earliest to the latest texts, Agamben’s work seeks to surpass the horizon of Western metaphysics through a philological engagement with the negative, formed in large part through a complex confrontation with Hegel. Agamben’s grappling with the dialectic in search of its idling is not merely strategic, but as he puts it, ‘one of the most urgent tasks today’ for a Marxist philosophy shored on its wreckage (IH 39). In ‘The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic’, Antonio Negri claims that the work of Agamben enables a ‘discreet dialectical rediscovery’ typifying left Hegelianism and the young Marx, resulting not in ‘the triumph of the Aufhebung‘, but in ‘the heroism of the negative’.1 Rather than valorising the negative, however, as Agamben painstakingly argues in his early text Language and Death, it is precisely the negative structure of the Voice, or, in Hegel’s terms, the ‘bad infinity’ predicted on division, that Agamben’s thought seeks to absolve (LD 100).