Alterity

In this paper I discuss in a critical manner what I believe to be some of the more interesting contributions of Anthony Steinbock’s book Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. I will thus refer mainly to his clarification of the constitution of familiar and alien objects or states of affairs through appropriation and transgression. In connection with this I will try to put forward some of the advantages and implications of a phenomenological approach to the problem of historicity in terms of generativity.  However, I will also discuss some of the limitations and problems of Steinbock’s approach. I believe that most if not all of these problems are related to his understanding of the relationship between static, genetic and generative phenomenological methods. Therefore I will devote some lines to discuss this issue and to rethink some of Steinbock’s main theses under the light of another way of understanding the relationship between these methods as well as the task of the philosophical inquiry proposed by phenomenology.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

La tesi presenta inizialmente il pensiero di Jacques Derrida sull'animalità. Il tema affrontato è la sovranità dell'uomo sul resto dei viventi, in particolare nei riguardi della discriminazione dell'animalità. Nei capitoli a seguire si attua un'emancipazione dell'animalità e non dall'animalità come la corrente umanista voleva. Attraverso l'ontogenesi del concetto di "umanità" viene decostruito il costrutto che sorregge la soglia che divide l'uomo dagli animali, laddove essi partecipano all'animalità in maniere differenti. L'emergenza di questa composizione dei temi trattati si erge ad azione esemplare con cui Derrida, prima di morire, ha lasciato delle tracce da seguire durante il ricevimento del premio Adorno.

The first part of this paper presents a historical outline of how racial and cultural alterity (particularly indigeneity) has been imagined and represented by elites in Colombia since the nineteenth century. The evolution of these ideas takes us to the contemporary category of “ethnic groups” and its representation in positive terms, a process that signifies a substantial change compared to past discourses in favour of cultural homogeneity. The second part of this text reflects on the ways in which ethnic policies are legitimized  –today more than ever– through the principle of “the protection of cultural diversity”, a principle which is widely praised and uncontested, but which has become totally dependent on problematic concepts such as “cultural damage”, “authenticity” or “preservation”. Furthermore, the institutional actions based on that principle are actually uncertain, ambiguous and inefficient, a situation that invites us to question the “policies for diversity”.

Resumo: O presente trabalho analisa a sociedade de consumo sob a perspectiva do seriado televisivo de 1964, A Feiticeira, marco de um projeto político, social e econômico de vida, disseminado pelos Estados Unidos da América por meio de políticas de financiamento e culturais, de uma sociedade de consumidores compulsivos. Sob a ótica de Bauman será caracterizada essa sociedade que desagua em pessoas individualistas, degradadoras, sem um pensamento ambiental e sustentável. Com Beck demonstrar-se-á e as consequências advindas do modelo de consumo histórico e ainda presente na sociedade atual. Como resposta ao problema da sociedade de excessos e consumismo, o artigo retoma a filosofia ética epicurista e da alteridade para dirimir os efeitos trazidos por essa sociedade individualista evidenciado no sitcom e trazer uma ética social crítica ao modelo de consumo persistente. Utiliza-se a metodologia teórica-filosófica e o raciocínio dedutivo, por meio de pesquisas bibliográfica e documental. Conclui-se, pela possibilidade de um pensar ético epicurista e com alteridade no auxílio do pensar ambiental sustentável. Abstract The present work analyzes the consumer society from the perspective of the television series of 1964, Bewitched, the landmark of a political, social and economic life project, disseminated by the United States of America through financing and cultural policies, a society of compulsive consumers. From Bauman's point of view, this society will be characterized that empties into individualistic, degrading individuals without environmental and sustainable thinking. With Beck will be demonstrated and the consequences arising from the model of historical consumption and still present in today's society. In response to the problem of a society of excesses and consumerism, the article resumes Epicurean ethics and alterity philosophy to resolve the effects brought by this individualist society evidenced in the sitcom and bring a critical social ethic to the model of persistent consumption. Theoretical-philosophical methodology and deductive reasoning are used, through bibliographical and documentary research. It concludes by the possibility of an Epicurean ethical thinking and with alterity in the aid of sustainable environmental thinking. Introdução O presente trabalho explora o modelo de consumo e a sociedade do consumismo a partir da história, trazendo o desenvolvimento desse modelo a partir do seriado A Feiticeira, de 1964, que conta a história de uma bruxa e um publicitário, que se conhecem e se casam. Contudo, há uma investida por parte do marido em substituir o uso da feitiçaria da espoa pela

O tatu foi, talvez, o único animal americano a ser sistematicamente incorporado à iconografia europeia dos séculos XVI e XVII. Ele aparece, sobretudo, em representações dos gabinetes de curiosidades - como, por exemplo, no frontispício do Museum Wormianum - e em emblemas das Américas, nos quais é frequentemente  gurado, em tamanho maior que o natural, sendo montado por uma personi cação das Américas usando trajes e atributos indígenas.
O que o tatu deveria evocar, nessas imagens? A quais outros animais conhecidos ele pode ter sido associado? Como se conectava à iconografia anterior? Esta apresentação procurará iluminar algumas dessas questões através da análise comparativa de representações do tatu durante os séculos XVI e XVII.

The principal legacy of the 1923 exchange is arguably its contribution to the institutionalization of the management of difference via forced migration—a form of spatial redistribution of different groups according to their backgrounds and “origins.” Informed by the principle of segregation, the 1923 exchange is organically related to other cases that operate with the same logic: the construction of walls, apartheids, partitions, and forced migrations. In the book, I conceptualize these dynamics as segregative biopolitics. The 1923 exchange signaled a modern fusion of the eugenicist logic with demography, mobilized through racialized thinking and statistics, and implemented as spatial segregation—all of which gained a legal framework in the international arena with the ratification and execution of the 1923 exchange.

Against this backdrop, Humanism in Ruins offers a multi-sited analysis of how difference is regulated in refugee integration and in cultural politics in the post-1945 era. Considering the scale of atrocities of the Second World War, one might have expected that the underlying racialized logics, repertoires and archives of knowledge that contributed to the atrocities in the first place, such as eugenics and segregative biopolitics, would have been effectively put into question by the institutions established to find solutions to the postwar crises, such as refugee associations (particularly one that the book engages for the first time), or platforms founded to promote peace, such as the United Nations or UNESCO. Following the Second World War, however, population transfers again took place en masse across Europe and beyond in the name of securing peace and stability, generating a massive refugee crisis. The Greek-Turkish exchange constituted an important reference point for these population transfers as a story of "successful repatriation." Within this framework, the book addresses how despite major transnational efforts—spearheaded by UNESCO—to overcome scientific racialism and accompanying archives of knowledge that inform repertoires of cultural identification, the effort remained largely a limited one in the post-Second-World-War era. The book traces the implications of these limitations for the cultural policies developed over the last few decades through the case of Turkey—based on the legacies of the population exchange, as well as in the European Union and UNESCO. The book ultimately raises questions for the resurfacing of fascistic and racist discourses in different parts of the world today.

In a contribution to a symposium on xenophilia, this essay—a study of Brian Friel's 1980 play Translations—raises the question of whether all xenophilia is by nature doomed to fail. Set in Ireland in 1833, the drama centers on the tension arising from a young British lieutenant's falling in love with an Irish-speaker while he is in her country to translate Irish place-names into English for an imperial cartographic survey. While the lieutenant is referred to in the play as a Hibernophile, the essay interprets his love as xenophilic: love for the foreignness rather than the Irishness of what he encounters. The lieutenant's love of foreign places and their names impedes his effort to systematize Ireland for imperial ends, and his love for an Irish woman brings about his own undoing. Applying Simone de Beauvoir's view of alterity to the lieutenant's xenophilia, the essay questions whether the English written over the Irish in this play and the lieutenant's desire written over the objects of his love obscure enough of the other's otherness to render his xenophilia no longer viable.

Para salir del bucle de la identidad que idea fronteras personales y políticas, construye un 'otro' extraño, exótico y peligroso, es necesario deconstruir ese fantasma para encontrar la persona que se encuentra detrás con la que poder dialogar e intercambiar, con la que subsumirse en una nueva personalidad mestiza que supere el miedo mediante la empatía.

This paper proposes an existentialist reading of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (2018), a memoir by former U.S. Border Patrol agent Francisco Cantú. Drawing upon Anya Topolski's political ethics of relationality, grounded in Emmanuel Levinas's notion of alterity and Hannah Arendt's concept of plurality, and Luna Dolezal's rereading of Jean-Paul Sartre's account of shame, it examines the triangulation of the personal, the intersubjective, and the public in Cantú's autobiographical act. The paper argues that by articulating its protagonist's experience from the perspective of both a law enforcer and an emotionally involved immediate observer of the hazards and horrors of undocumented immigration, Cantú's memoir negotiates subjectivity in relational terms, exposing complex human realities of the U.S./Mexico borderlands that signify the immigrant body as a product of alarmist discourses, illegal industries, and geopolitical mapping, and hence adds new perspectives to the human tragedy produced by the global economic apartheid. The paper also maintains that by turning the private lives of immigrants from abstractions into subjects of the polarizing (trans)national debate and foregrounding both its protagonist's and its readers' ethical and critical response, The Line Becomes a River affirms the existentialist view that the ability to sustain personal responsibility and relationality within a network of Others by making a conscious authentic choice is the ultimate signpost of our humanity and self-determination.

Hablar de márgenes permite imaginar las fronteras físicas o simbólicas de todo lo que este lenguaje hace posible. Se dice que la naturaleza del lenguaje es excluyente, principalmente bajo la noción de que afirmar algo implica, circunstancialmente, negar otra cosa. Han sido varios los autores que han insistido en revisar con cierto escrutinio lingüístico, histórico, filosófico y/o antropológico la manera en que nos relacionamos con el mundo y el entorno a partir del lenguaje. Nombrar las cosas va más allá de un proceso de categorización del mundo, involucra relaciones diversas de orden cognitivo, identitario y, por supuesto, de poder.

Abstract: This article provides a relation between the problem of shame in both Levinas and Agamben, focusing, for the most part, in the development of Levinas' metaphysics and its relation to the emotional tonality of shame in three works: "On Escape", "Time and the Other" and "Otherwise than Being". In stressing the unique take that Levinas has on metaphysics, I try to point at the tension between Jewish and Greek thought in Levinas, and his option for a radical notion of a situated understanding of the "ethical".Hencemy interest in contrasting Levinas and Agamben, as Agamben's appropriation of Levinas' lexicon in his "Remnants of Aushwitz" places the subject in a political, and material, position which is ultimately uncompatible with Levinas' situational and metaphysical take on the self. Keywords: Shame; Desire; Ethics; Affective Tonalities

Proponemos un modelo de análisis del español americano enfocado en su contacto con los idiomas y culturas indígenas con los que ha coexistido en el llamado “Nuevo Mundo”. Para ello utilizamos conceptos sociolingüísticos y semióticos, en especial, el principio dialógico de Mikhail Bakhtin y sus nociones centrales de "utterance", "cronotopo" y "alteridad".

We propose a model to analyze the Spanish language in the Americas that focuses on its contact with the indigenous languages and cultures with which it has co-existed in the New World. Our analysis makes use of sociolinguistic and semiotic concepts, in particular, Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical principle and its central notions of utterance, chronotope and alterity.

This study examines a painted combat scene on a ceramic vessel of the Moche culture (AD 100–800) of the north coast of Peru. The scene portrays a series of distinctly Moche warriors fighting adversaries who feature characteristics (weaponry, ornaments and dress) that are unconventional for Moche visual culture. Correspondences in Recuay pottery and stone sculpture instead support the argument that the enemies were groups from the neighbouring inland valleys and highlands of the Pacific Andean flanks. The analysis of the imagery and its implications illuminate how societies without writing sometimes perceived and configured interaction with other groups — namely, through representations of warfare.

Ogni popolo ha sempre avuto i suoi stereotipi e le sue modalità di definizione per l'Altro, e che si possono applicare al vicino come alle popolazioni più lontane ed esotiche, purché in qualche modo conosciute. L'improvvisa ondata migratoria verso l'Italia, cominciata negli anni '90, ha fatto sì che gli italiani si trovassero improvvisamente a coabitare con popoli fino ad allora poco conosciuti, di cui non esisteva un'immagine o di cui si aveva un'idea folkloristica e datata. Va sottolineato che la terminologia specifica destinata a designare un certo gruppo Altro, a cui non appartiene il locutore, non è necessariamente legata all'esistenza di uno stereotipo, dato che spesso mancano termini per definire popolazioni estremamente connotate dal punto di vista dell'immagine; ma, se il termine esiste, esiste anche l'immagine. La presenza di un lessico dell'alterità è un problema che dipende da molti fattori storici, sociali e culturali, e anche i vuoti semantici sono legati a tali fattori. Quello dei vuoti è un problema che si fa molto sentire nella lingua italiana, e tra le sue cause ci sono una scarsa dimestichezza storica con l'Altro, una storia coloniale breve e confusa, e il fatto che l'Italia sia sempre stata una nazione di migranti piuttosto che una terra di accoglienza. Fatto sta che i termini, positivi o negativi, per l'Altro sono scarsi rispetto a quelli presenti in altre lingue occidentali, e bisogna spesso ricorrere a neologismi o a calchi, soprattutto dall'inglese e dal francese. Un altro problema è dovuto al fatto che il cambiamento di sensibilità porta talvolta a non poter più utilizzare la terminologia già esistente.
Per illustrare la presenza, la decadenza o la nascita di alcuni termini che si riferiscono all’Altro abbiamo scelto di utilizzare come supporto una serie di romanzi di Andrea Camilleri, quelli che vengono definiti il «ciclo di Montalbano» e che vanno dal 1994 al 2014. Per ragioni di pertinenza e di presenza della terminologia in questione, da questa selezione sono stati esclusi sia i racconti che il romanzo a quattro mani che hanno anch’essi Montalbano come protagonista . Il periodo in cui sono stati scritti questi romanzi, che si estende sull’arco degli ultimi vent’anni, è particolarmente propizio per questo tipo di analisi: si parte infatti da un’epoca di relativo benessere, in cui l’immigrazione era ancora ridotta e scaglionata, per giungere al momento attuale con i suoi arrivi in massa ed una situazione sociale ed economica molto difficile sia sul piano nazionale che internazionale. Vi sono stati nel frattempo anche importanti cambiamenti delle aree di immigrazione, che riguardano sia quelle di partenza che di approdo, e che Camilleri registra puntualmente.

This e-book is a collection of papers focussing on the discursive dimension of the 'eastern enlargement' of the European Union, relying on lessons from post-colonial scholarship, world-systems analysis and critical race studies. The empirical material comes from discourse of 'eastern enlargement' process in the late 1990s-early 2000s .

Magnus, a novel from Sylvie Germain published in 2005, is a narration made up of several marks of hybridity – structural, generic and discursive hybridity. Those marks are not simply formal but emphasize the necessity of a true presence towards the world and others. The itinerary of the character is a spiritual one, and the novel reveals the part played by reading and writing in the reconsideration of our relationship towards the world and the other people.

La investigación sobre identidad y alteridad en la historia es una línea de estudio en pleno desarrollo en la historiografía actual y es a la vez una forma inmejorable de acercarse a un debate de actualidad dentro y fuera de nuestras fronteras: el de la territorialidad española, su origen, su formación y la justificación de las fronteras físicas y culturales actuales.
Este libro recoge diferentes perspectivas sobre las singularidades de la Edad Media hispana, un territorio de convivencia, de cohabitación y de desencuentros, inevitablemente marcado por un largo proceso de transferencias entre culturas y de negociaciones colectivas e individuales de la propia identidad.

The aim of this thesis is to present key aspects about Yanomami dreams. This ethnography was developed from fieldwork accomplished among the Yanomami of Pya ú community, situated in the Toototopi region, TI Yanomami, during the period from October 2015 to February 2017. Yanomami dreams are constituted as a way of relating to the world and to the others who inhabit this world. The end of the afternoon is the moment of the emergence of longing and the beginning of the day of the deceased, the spirits. Here there is an inversion between day and night. The night of the Yanomami is equivalent to the day of the pore (dead). It is through this inversion that we seek to indicate how, in Yanomami theory of personhood, the utupë (image) is the locus of feelings, thoughts and volition. In the Yanomami forest everything has a utupë and it is through dreams that these images can meet each other. We also attempt to demonstrate, through the dreams of the shamans, how myths are dreams, insofar as they are continually dreamed, opening the possibility of a world in permanent construction. At this point, the time of the dream and of the myth operate in the manner of a Möbius strip and move on a path that tends to infinity.

Within the horizon of the critique of Eurocentrism, this manifesto presents methods of interpre-tation that can advance the project of decolonising human rights and creating new Third World discourses. These hermeneutical strategies include the re-contextualisation of human rights theory in the historical horizon of modernity/coloniality; the elaboration of alternative geogra-phies followed by provincialising human rights; deparochialising legal theory and constructing a cosmopolitan jurisprudence; the ‘universalisation’ and ‘globalisation’ of human rights; the trans-nationalisation of human rights; a re-writing of the history of rights; a becoming of the Other into the Self; the critique of Critical Theory; the adoption of an ethics of emotions as an ethics of human rights; and a dialogue between different traditions and rationalities of human rights. The paper also presents concepts and ideas such as empire/suffering, modernity as crisis, the colonial origins of human rights, postmodernity as an epoch of moral sensibilisation, power/epistemology, and critical dialogue

Für Theodor Lipps, Wilhelm Dilthey und EdmundHusserl ist die Erfahrung des Anderen eng verbunden mit dem Verstehen der Gefühle des Anderen: Ich mache die Erfahrung des Anderen, indem ich seine Gefühle verstehe. In der theoretischen Analyse der Erfahrung des Anderen stoßen diese Autoren jedoch immer wieder auf ein Problem. Die Erklärung erweist sich als zirkulär, weil sie jede Erfahrung des Anderen zunächst mit einer Wahrnehmung des anderen Körpers beginnen läßt. Erst Max Scheler gelingt mit einer radikalen Abkehr von der traditionellen Annahme eines Primats der inneren Erfahrung vor der äußeren Erfahrung eine plausible Analyse. Für ihn setzt die Erfahrung des Anderen zunächst am psychophysisch indifferenten Ausdruck des Anderen an. Schelers Denken erweist sich als attraktiv, weil es die Bedeutung von Gefühlen auf allen Ebenen der menschlichen Situation erhellt. Er kann zeigen, wie die verschiedenen Formen menschlichen Miteinanders von verschiedenen Gefühlen getragen werden: Gemeinsam geteilte Gefühle bestimmen unser Zusammenleben, lange bevor wir die Erfahrung des Anderen machen. Weil wir die Gefühle der Anderen verstehen, können wir die Erfahrung des Anderen machen. Und im Mitfühlen bzw. Teilnehmen an den Gefühlen der Anderen erfahren wir die Anderen als uns gleichwertig.

And what if the border was the center of the territory? And what if the origin was not a first event but a repeated and thus upcoming event?

These are all issues brought up when a foreigner arrives at the border of a Berber tribe in southern Morocco, the Ait Baamran, largely composed of exiles from the four corners of the Maghreb and beyond. The foreigner—including the ethnologist—is being asked to inhabit the borderlands of the political territory to best embody the founding values based on the principle of conquest and not autochthony. When otherness challenges History, late-comers become first-comers and wandering people become the worthy descendants of the Prophet of Islam.

Only exile may give rise to a special way to inscribe into the land. In the arid area of southwestern Morocco where a last range of mountains borders the Sahara and argan trees offer their shade, Romain Simenel reconsiders in this volume some major paradigms of the Maghreb Anthropology in the light of an original ethnographic context.

How does tribal territory connect segmentarity and holiness today? What role rituals play in territory and body perception? In what ways does Arab marriage reverse the foundations of the Alliance theory? How does inheritance shape genealogy? Far from prejudices on how Muslim religion may influence the way the environment is addressed and enriched by a context where human beings feel stranger to other beings (plants, animals, genies) of these lands, Romain Simenel makes Morocco stand out among the discussions engaged by the anthropology of Nature. This book has also cast some light on a few major enigmas of Muslim social history such as the growing number of descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Finally, the author opens up new anthropological perspectives on human cognition by considering the coexistence of a biological conception of language transmission and a horizontal learning of the Berber language by children-shepherds. Language, territory, the environment, kinship, the ritual and history are thus examined in the light of exile in the form of a narrative that commends human societies for their ability to be defined by the elsewhere.

Der Hauptteil des Buches zeichnet in einem chronologischen Close-Reading die Entwicklung des Derridaschen Werkes und die Bedeutung seiner zentralen Termini – différance, Spur, Schrift – nach. Zugleich wird dabei die performative Struktur seines Denkens und Schreibens aufgedeckt, die für das Verständnis unverzichtbar sind: die Nachträglichkeit der Einführung des Terminus »différance«, die Bedeutung des »donc« und des »vielleicht«, des Sich-selbst-riskierens-im-Nichts-Sagen-Wollen sowie der Rede vom »Unmöglichen« im Kontext von Gerechtigkeit und Politik.
Eingebettet sind diese Lektüren in den Horizont einer notwendigen Neubestimmung der Grundlagen und Möglichkeiten (fundamental-)theologischen Sprechens.

Like all discourses on the 'other', Bataille's heterology is faced with the problem of conceptualizing the heterogeneous (the other of thought, reason and language), while preserving its alterity, its fundamental resistance to conceptual thought. This paper interrogates the potential parallels between this aspect of Bataille's notion and some of the prevalent concerns of contemporary and traditional aesthetics. The argument is based on the idea that theories of the aesthetic, akin to Bataille's heterology, are always inevitably confronted with the paradoxical task of conceptually framing an experience that, per definition, resists philosophical or political appropriation. In relation to this my paper traces a development in Bataille's thinking from an initial rejection of art and the aesthetic to their later reconfiguration as manifestations of sovereignty. Here I show how Bataille's notion of sovereign art presents an implicit attempt to overcome some of the aporias to have surfaced in his earlier account of heterology. This development in Bataille's thought is analysed in the context of his changing relationship with Surrealism.

Did Greeks and non-Greeks banquet together in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and if so, how does this mode of cultural contact explain the evidence of cultural exchange between Greece and the Near East? Following suggestions in scholarship that Greeks shared a banqueting culture with West Semitic peoples, and that Greeks sometimes banqueted with non-Greeks, this dissertation presents evidence that Greeks banqueted with non-Greeks, explains why they should have done so in terms of earlier practices and anthropological theory, and argues that multicultural banquets were the primary mode of peaceful cultural contact in the thought-world of Greeks in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Chapter 1 addresses the evidence for multicultural banqueting before the first millennium, and finds that it was a feature of diplomacy in the Late Bronze Age (1700-1100). Objects and texts are examined and used as evidence that members of various populations learned foreign banqueting customs. I argue that the multicultural banqueting in the Iron Age (1100-750) and Archaic period (750-490) is a revival of Late Bronze Age diplomatic practices. Chapter 2 addresses evidence for reclined banqueting in the Iron Age, arguing that it is a result of multicultural banqueting among various groups. It is interpreted as a feature of diplomacy and as an instantiation of the anthropological theory of Mary Helms (1988) that elites seek out external symbols of status in order to be recognized as elite by foreigners and to differentiate themselves at home. Chapter 3 focuses on the Iliad and finds that multicultural banquets are philologically distinguished from banquets among Greeks, and that the banquet is essential in cultural contact where hostility is possible. Chapter 4 focuses on the Odyssey and demonstrates that banqueting mediates contact between Greeks and non-Greeks in the Archaic imagination. I hope hereby to construct a stable mode of contact that explains the evidence of cultural exchange between Greek and West Semitic populations, such as the alphabet, the burning of incense in ritual, and adaptations of gods and cults. The multicultural banquet becomes an interpretive model for developments in Archaic Greek literature, culture, and society.

This thesis will examine the problem of alterity that presents itself for “being” in relation to “language” in James Joyce’s Dubliners, Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. I will argue that being in relation to language manifests itself into an ethical problem that can be traced back to the subject’s search for an origin. Blanchot’s writings on the “limit-experience” will be used as a methodological approach to the problem of being in relation to language. The theme of death and dying will be explored in each chapter through the dialectic of negativity. The dialectic of negativity arises from the problem of separation that comes between being and language. As being faces the limit to language, the subject faces the limits to being seen as another negative presence. Thus, once the subject’s negative thought doubles into the negation of absence, being becomes infinitely estranged by language. Here, the subject’s experience of separation manifests itself into signs of “affliction” that resembles a state of “dying” as being faces absence. Moreover, the dialogic of negativity opens up a dialogue between the subject’s relation to language and the subject that is questioned within the narrative. Therefore, Blanchot’s notion of the “neuter” will be used to explore the critical character of the narrator that questions the subject within the narrative from the exterior God like position, also linked to Blanchot’s notion of the “Outside”. The Outside space demands an ethical response from each subject called into question and afflicted with the haunting nature of being a double. This doubling space of alterity will be traced in this thesis in order to reveal a crisis for the subject in the irreducible state for “being-in-itself” that is locked in the sacred space of literature and present at the final experience of the limit to the Outside.

Renaissance beyond the constraints of conventionally reasoned argument?
Appropriateness of rebirth metaphor for Renaissance of civilization?
Global surreality farming vs planned reality framing?
Engaging the imagination through metaphorical "stargates"
Configurations of fundamental values as "stargates"
Recognizing missing values and the challenge of configuring value dilemmas
Getting to the "stars": understandings of how a "stargate" might work?
Complementary features of "stargate" de-sign and functionality?
Qualitative values vs Quantitative values: a fundamental irony?
Cognitive challenge of a "stargate": paradox, twist, riddle?
Pattern of value interrelationships implied by "metabolic pathways"?
Value "flow dynamics": Renaissance as a "time machine"?
A "stargate" of higher dimensionality -- the Renaissance as a Gateless Gate?
Embodying externalities -- engaging otherwise with otherness

What happens to a culture in which the death drive has been totally repressed and turned into a narcissistic desire to consume? Alexander Bove’s response to A. Kiarina Kordela’s first book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007), puts ethics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and biopolitics in conversation with each other. Drawing out a gap in Kordela’s logic, Bove concludes that the insertion Levinas’s concept of the face allows us to conceptualize the role of the death drive in ethics in late capitalism. (Jen Hedler Phillis)

English title and abstract: Races and Degeneration. The Emergence of the Knowledge on the Abnormal Man.
This Ph-D thesis develops the twofold history of the notions of “race” and “degeneration” between the XVIIth and the XIXth century. This history is studied from two points of view: historical epistemology that is “how race and degeneration became the concepts of various knowledges (natural history, anthropology, psychiatry)”; and history of government practices, that is “how race and degeneration became problems of government”. Focusing on the historical link between these notions gives us the possibility to analyze the emergence, in the XIXth century, of a field of knowledge that dealt with what we call the “abnormal man”, that is this very specific entity which agglomerates madness, criminality and “inferior” races as deviations of human normality, in an ambiguous space between the normal and the pathological. Our thesis describes the various categories that organise this field of knowledge.  More deeply, we want to argue that the notions of race and degeneration, far from being external to humanism and universalism, far from being systematically correlated to practices of exclusion, are intimately connected to a practical and theoretical humanism and to practices of inclusion, that deal with race, madness and crime as alterations of a norm one has to regenerate, correct and improve through specific apparatus of power. Through this historical lens, we want to study all the ambiguities and aporias that lurk in the very heart of this will of inclusion and this analysis of heterogeneous realities as alterations of a norm. We show in particular how we can establish a very strong link between the insertion of the concept of “race” into natural history and monogenism; and, on the other side, how it is important to study the insertion of “race” into the political field and, more broadly, the emergence of the knowledge of the abnormal, to take into consideration its logical links with political liberalism in the beginning of XIXth century.