Othering,governing, and resistance of abject urban animals: Egyptian geese and their right to the city

In this paper, we examine the controversy over the use of urban green spaces and water bodies by Egyptian geese in the German city of Frankfurt am Main as an example of more-than-human political conflicts over the right to an environmentally just city. Specifically, we analyze the media discourse and interviews that we conducted as multispecies go-alongs to identify how othering in media and policy constitutes Egyptian geese legally and discursively as “alien, invasive, and aggressive” as well as “disgusting, polluting, and health-threatening.” This othering constructs Egyptian geese as abject animals and justifies their governing through “geese management” technologies, ranging from monitoring to atmospheric engineering and to killing the birds. While the management objective is to displace the Egyptian geese from urban spaces dedicated for human recreation, these spaces also turn out to be places of animal resistance.     

Community Volunteering as Neoliberal Strategy? Green Space Production in Berlin

Abstract: The task for critical urban research is to analyze processes of neoliberalization “on the ground”. This paper examines—based on original empirical research—in how far the outsourcing of former local state responsibilities for public services and urban infrastructure is expressed in the promotion of community gardening in Berlin (Germany). It shows the contradictory outcomes: on the one hand, a failing strategy of outsourcing towards residents and the opening up of opportunity structures for other interests. On the other hand it shows how far the emergence of open green spaces maintained by volunteers can only be understood against the background of “roll‐back” neoliberal urban politics and that their rationality cannot be separated from “roll‐out neoliberalism”.     

KOSELLECK ON MODERNITY,HISTORIK, AND LAYERS OF TIME

In the scholarly reception of his work, Reinhart Koselleck's notion of modernity and his theory of multiple times have been cast as essentially at odds with each other. This article argues that although these positions are valid, Koselleck's writings can also accommodate an interpretation according to which the theory of multiple temporalities, or “layers of time,” provides theoretical ground for the modern understanding of time and history. Elaborating on this insight, the article shows the linkages sustaining the unity between Koselleck's formal theory of multiple times and his interpretation of modernity. To that end, I outline the main premises of the temporalization thesis that lies at the heart of Koselleck's theory of modernity, scrutinize his notion of Historik within which the framework “layers of time” belongs, and explore Niklas Olsen's and Helge Jordheim's interpretive accounts on how to conceive of the relationship between the two strands in Koselleck's thought. Ultimately, I argue that “layers of time” entails the formal conditions for historical acceleration, which is crucial for explaining the emergence of a specifically modern temporality wherein experience and expectation increasingly grow apart.     

“Neither Ākhūnd nor Fukulī”: Munāzirah and the Discourse of Iranian Modernity

Iranian modernity has chiefly been examined in the context of a dialectical antagonism between “traditionalists” and “modernists”—the main categories comprised of related sub-headings such as “Islamist” versus “secular,” “reactionary” versus “revolutionary,” and “regressive” versus “progressive.” Following this binaristic approach, Iranian adaptations of modernity have often been (de)historicized as a theatre of national “awakening” resulting from the toils of secular intellectuals in overcoming the obstinate resistance of traditional reactionaries, a confrontation between two purportedly well-defined and mutually exclusive camps. Such reductionist dialectics has generally overwritten the dialogic narrative of Iranian modernity, a conflicted dialogue misrepresented as a conflicting dialectic. It has also silenced an important feature of Iranian modernity: the universally acknowledged premise of the simultaneity and commensurability of tradition with modernity. The monāzereh (disputation or debate) is the account of the interaction between rival discourses that engaged in opposing, informing, and appropriating each other in the process of adapting modernity. Narrativizing the history of Iranian modernity as the conflict between mutually exclusive binaries overlooks its hyphenated, liminal identity—a narrative of adaptation rather than wholesale adoption, of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, of dialogics rather than dialectics. The monāzereh is the account of modern Iranian histories.     

Cities and the Geographies of "Actually Existing Neoliberalism"

This essay elaborates a critical geographical perspective on neoliberalism that emphasizes (a) the path–dependent character of neoliberal reform projects and (b) the strategic role of cities in the contemporary remaking of political–economic space. We begin by presenting the methodological foundations for an approach to the geographies of what we term “actually existing neoliberalism.” In contrast to neoliberal ideology, in which market forces are assumed to operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are “unleashed,” we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path–dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market–oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neoliberalization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political–economic space at multiple geographical scales. While the neoliberal restructuring projects of the last two decades have not established a coherent basis for sustainable capitalist growth, it can be argued that they have nonetheless profoundly reworked the institutional infrastructures upon which Fordist–Keynesian capitalism was grounded. The concept of creative destruction is presented as a useful means for describing the geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change that have been crystallizing under these conditions. The essay concludes by discussing the role of urban spaces within the contradictory and chronically unstable geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, we suggest, cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated.     

1. PRETEXTURES OF TIME

Textures of Time is a rich and challenging book that raises a host of important and hard questions about historical narrative, form, and style; the sociology of texts; and the core problem of ascertaining historical truth. Two that pertain to the book's main claims are of special interest to nonspecialist readers: Is register or style—“texture”—necessarily and everywhere diagnostic of “history”? Does a new kind of “historical consciousness” emerge in south India beginning in the sixteenth century, indeed as a sign of an Indian early modernity?Textures is not the first book to argue that historical discourse is constitutively marked by a peculiar style, but the claim is beset by difficulties that scholars since Barthes have detailed. Rather than textures of time—accounts of what really happened in history—what these works offer us may be only pretextures of time, textualized forms of a human experience that make claims about its degrees and types of truth through representations of various states of temporality. Instead of assessing, then, whether these works are history or something else like “myth,” we might ask whether they invite us to transcend this very dichotomy, to try, that is, to make sense of historical forms of consciousness rather than to identify forms of historical consciousness. As for modernity, nothing in south Indian historiography from 1500–1800 remotely compares to the conceptual revolution of Europe. But why should we expect the newness of the early modern world to have been experienced the same way everywhere? Modernity across Asia may have shown simultaneity without symmetry. Should this asymmetry turn out to reveal continuity and not rupture, however, no need to lament the fact. There is no shame in premodernity.     

Human Trafficking and Online Networks: Policy,Analysis, and Ignorance

Dominant anti‐trafficking policy discourses represent trafficking as an issue of crime, “illegal” migration, victimhood and humanitarianism. Such a narrow focus is not an adequate response to the interplay between technology, trafficking and anti‐trafficking. This article explores different levels of analysis and the interplay between human trafficking and technology. We argue for a shift from policy discourses with a very limited focus on crime and victimisation to more systemic understandings of trafficking and more robust micro‐analyses of trafficking and everyday life. The article calls for an agnotological understanding of policy responses to trafficking and technology: these depend upon the production of ignorance. We critique limitations in policy understandings of trafficking‐related aspects of online spaces, and argue for better engagement with online networks. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond a focus on “new” technology and exceptionalist claims about “modern slavery” towards greater attention to everyday exploitation within neoliberalism.     

Bakhtin,Boredom, and the ‘Democratization of Skepticism’

This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Goodstein has characterized as the “democratization of skepticism.” Although Bakhtin says little about “boredom” directly, he probes the sociocultural conditions that give rise to it. Bakhtin, for example, celebrates the liberatory and egalitarian promise of modern vernacular speech, which displays a healthy suspicion of “monotonic” qualities of elite genres, and which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace and the public square. Bakhtin is concerned about the nihilistic implications of this disenchantment of the world and the threats it poses—indifference, reification and alienation—to the “participative” mode of social life he favours.     

A MOST MODERN SUBJECT: THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY AND THE FASHIONING OF NATIONALIST AND OTHER MODERN SUBJECTIVITIES

This book takes an ethnographic approach to its topic by endeavoring to observe how social and disciplinary subjects shaped by modernity go on to constitute modern worlds. Specifically, it attempts to “explore modernity as a contradictory and checkered historical-cultural entity and category as well as a contingent and contended process and condition” (1). Most of the subjects considered are intellectuals and academic disciplines (specifically history and anthropology), although the argument occasionally focuses on artists as well. The book particularly recognizes and analyzes the ambiguities, ambivalences, and contradictions generated within modernity not as mistakes or gaps like so many potholes to be fixed over time, but as constitutive of the modern landscape itself. This accepting acknowledgment, in turn, stands central to the book's endeavor to resist the teleological paradigms inherent in many modern metaphors regarding roads that must be traveled to move from what is backward to what is forward, from a superseded past to a promising future. Central to the volume—and its most original contribution—are various deliberations on the productions of time and space by various subjects. To be clear, by “time” the book means history and temporality whereas “space” suggests tradition and culture. It resists the naturalization of modern constructs such as secularized time and cultural traditions, and forces them under an analytic lens. Critical to these investigations is Saurabh Dube's appropriately insistent claim that these temporal and spatial regimes can exist in tandem and coevally, even when they are seemingly in contradiction. Among other outcomes, the volume prompts further reflection on the manner in which historiography plays a role in the formation of nationalist and modern subjectivities among nonhistorians. This essay seeks to think through the history of history as a discipline emerging during the coalescence of a hegemonic European episteme and the emergence of a popularly embraced scientism. Despite its roots in Europe long preceding modernity and its parallels in South Asia preceding British rule, history underwent a transformation when inflected through European modernity, especially the influence of empirical science paradigms. Although its emergence as a discipline promoted and employed by both the empire and the nation-state created professional historians, an expanding public sphere has meant that research into its role in fashioning modern subjectivities (including nationalist ones) must consider its reshaping and redeployment by those resisting European-originated modernity and promoting alternative modernities.     

The geographical and ethical origins of neoliberalism: The Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the foundations of a new geopolitical order

Observers tend to overlook the early neoliberalism that derived from the “Lippmann Colloquium” organised in Paris in 1938. Analysis of the discourse produced and books published at this founding moment shows that neoliberalism was then presented as a geopolitical doctrine aimed at redressing the spatial fragmentation of the world into States. The means to achieve this, according to this first neoliberalism, was by implementing what, in 1978, M. Foucault called “governmentality”: a multiscalar political system based on the submission of territories to the transnational discipline of a multilateral free division of labour. This thinking was very similar to the convictions of a number of political leaders who, from the 1940s onwards, were involved in creating a new international order uniting Western Europe and the United States, the foundations of which had many similarities with the principles of the first neoliberalism.     

The Dialogical Tradition of Iranian Modernity: Monazereh,Simultaneity, and the Making of Modern Iran

Iranian modernity has chiefly been examined in the context of a dialectical antagonism between “traditionalists” and “modernists”—main categories comprised of related sub-headings such as “Islamist” versus “secular,” “reactionary” versus “revolutionary,” and “regressive” versus “progressive.” Following this approach, Iranian adaptations of modernity have often been (de)historicized as a theater of national “awakening” resulting from the toils of secular intellectuals in overcoming the obstinate resistance of traditional reactionaries, a confrontation between two purportedly well-defined and mutually exclusive camps. Such reductionist dialectics has generally overwritten the dialogic narrative of Iranian modernity, a conflicted dialogue misrepresented as a conflicting dialectic. It has also silenced an important feature of Iranian modernity: the universally acknowledged premise of the simultaneity and commensurability of tradition with modernity. The monazereh (disputation or debate) is the account of the interaction between rival discourses that engaged in opposing, informing, and appropriating each other in the process of adapting modernity. Narrativizing the history of Iranian modernity as the conflict between mutually exclusive binaries overlooks its hyphenated, liminal¹1 The notion of liminality has been theorized in different capacities. The anthropologist Victor Turner first used the idea of liminality in his study of tribal and religious rituals during which an initiate experiences a liminal stage when he belongs neither to the old order nor yet accepted into his new designation. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1969). Turner’s insight has been expanded to investigate the general question of status in society. See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynam, Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 27–51. Bynam applies Turner’s notion of liminality to the lives of Medieval female saints, arguing that Turner’s liminal passage applies more readily to the male initiate but does not in most cases reflect the experience of female initiates in Medieval times. Jungian psychology has shifted the focus from liminality as a stage in social movement to a step in an individual’s progress in the process of individuation. Jeffrey Miller, The Transcendent Function (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), 104. See also: Peter Homans, Jung in Context: Modernity and the Making of a Psychology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Others have used liminality to describe cultural and political change, have prescribed its application to historical analysis, or have made reference to “permanent liminality” to describe the condition in which a society is frozen in the final stage of a ritual passage. Respectively, Agnes Horvath, Bjorn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra, “Introduction: Liminality and Cultures of Change.” International Political Anthropology (2009); Agnes Horvath, Modernism and Charisma (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2013); and Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2000), 23. Finally, the notion of liminality has been applied to the analysis of mimetic behaviour and to the emergence of tricksters as charismatic leaders, given the association of the figure of the trickster with imitation. Respectively, Agnes Horvarth, Modernism and Charisma (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2013), 55; and Arpad Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2000), 155. This latter sense seems to apply to the history of Iranian modernity, for the anxiety of imitation was indeed one of its central concerns, and influential figures such as Mirza Malkum Khan (1833–1908) were sometimes perceived (though this was not universally the case) as saviours or tricksters alternatively by different people. On this issue, Fereydun Adamiyat notes how different people had different views of Malkum. The “despotic prince Zill al-Sultan” considered him to be of equal status to Plato and Aristotle. Aqa Ibrahim Badayi’ Nigar thought he was devoid of “the fineries of knowledge and literature (latīfah-i dānish va adab). Minister of Sciences and chief minister Mukhbirul Saltanah Hidayat thought “whatever Malkum wrote has been said in other ways in [Sa’di’s] Gulistan and Bustan.” Fekr-e Azadi (Tehran: Sukhan, 1340/1961), 99. Mehdi Quli Khan Hedayat’s view of Malkum Khan was summed up in these words: “This Malkum knew some things in magic and trickstery and finally did some dishonorable things and gave the dar al-fonun a bad reputation,” Khaterat va Khatarat (Tehran: Zavvar, 1389/2010), 58. Having said that, my use of the notion of liminality, though informed by the theoretical perspectives cited above, diverges from them in one important aspect: liminality as perceived by contemporary theory seems to be based on a pre-/post- understanding of non-liminal statuses accompanied by a desire on the part of the subject to emerge from the liminal state. This approach does not explain liminality as a site for the synthesis of coexisting identities. The munāzirah is precisely the account of such a process. In the context of Iranian modernity, the discourse of tradition was not perceived as prior to the discourse of modernity, as we shall amply see. In fact, European civilizational progress was deemed to have resulted from the successful implementation of Islamic principles. Therefore, while the history of Iranian modernity can still be analyzed as a liminal stage where a weakened old order meets the promise of a new order, it must be understood in terms of the encounter of simultaneous and parallel discourses. It is in this sense that liminality is employed in this study.View all notes identity—a narrative of adaptation rather than wholesale adoption, of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, of dialogues rather than dialectics. The monazereh is the account of modern Iranian histories.     

The Unquiet Frontier

Abstract

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.     

At Once the Saviours and the Saved: “Diaspora Girls”, Dangerous Places,and Smart Power

This article explores how racially marked young women and girls are sought to be discursively and materially incorporated into markets and imperial economic and geopolitical strategies in spatially differentiated ways, through an examination of a series of media productions which portray the engagement of young racialised British citizens with their countries of heritage. I propose the term “diaspora girls” to refer to the protagonists of these media productions, who are understood as embodying “British” post‐feminist gender values and heroically carrying them to “dangerous” spaces of gender oppression and violence. In the context of current constructions of diasporas as agents of development, alongside the framing of migration as a “security threat” to the global North, these British citizens are viewed as ideally positioned to further the contemporary imperialist project. Their perceived empowerment is understood to be fragile and contingent, however, because of their affective connection with these spaces. Further, for those who are Muslim in particular, their perceived Britishness is understood as requiring continual reaffirmation and proof, thus reinforcing racialised structures of citizenship, and legitimising a border regime which reinscribes permanent North–South inequality.     

MODERNITY: A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS

Emotions in History: Lost and Found by Ute Frevert is a lively introduction to some of the issues that historians must address when writing about emotions. Emotions in History notes some of the uses emotions have had in both public and private life, and it charts the changing fate of several emotions—particularly acedia, honor, and compassion—that have been either “lost” or “found” over time. Nevertheless, it suffers from a notion of modernity that obscures rather than clarifies. Making “modernity” the cause of changes in emotional ideas, comportment, and feeling, it cuts today's society off from its earlier roots and fails to see the continuities not only in emotions themselves but also in the mechanisms by which emotions have changed over time. Frevert's assumption that only the modern world has been interested in emotions is belied by eloquent learned writings on the topic in the medieval period (though not using the term “emotions”). Further, modernity is not alone in having effective mechanisms by which ideal standards of emotions and their expression are transmitted to a larger public.     

Gender,Risk and Micro‐financial Subjectivities

Abstract: This article analyses the gendered contradictions of microfinance's celebrated “double bottom line” of social and financial impact. The example of microfinance is used to illustrate the gendered and colonial constructions of “risk” and “responsibility” that underpin neoliberalism and its gendered paradoxes. After revisiting the discursive critique of these terms, I draw on how indigenous women participating in a microfinance institution in Bolivia describe their experience to suggest how gendered ideas of risk and responsibility are framing their negotiation of and resistance to the market. While the gendered and colonial construction of risk creates dynamics that perpetuate indigenous women's exclusion from the market, the terms of the resistance and use of the intervention also challenge feminist critiques of neoliberal governmentality developed mostly with reference to advanced modernity and welfare regimes.     

MODERNITY IN RELIGION: A RESPONSE TO CONSTANTIN FASOLT'S “HISTORY AND RELIGION IN THE MODERN AGE”

Contrary to Constantin Fasolt, I argue that it is no longer useful to think of religion as an anomaly in the modern age. Here is Fasolt's main argument: humankind suffers from a radical rift between the self and the world. The chief function of religion is to mitigate or cope with this fracture by means of dogmas and rituals that reconcile the self to the world. In the past, religion successfully fulfilled this job. But in modernity, it fails to, and it fails because religion is no longer plausible. Historical, confessional religions, then, are no longer doing what they are supposed to do; yet the need for religion is still very much with us. Fasolt's account would be a tragic tale, if not for his claim that there is a new religion for the modern age, a religion that fulfills the true reconciling function of religion. That new religion is the reading and writing of history. Indeed, for Fasolt, reading history is religiously redemptive, and writing history is a sacred act. The historian, it turns out, is the priest in modernity. In my response, I challenge both Fasolt's remedy (history as religiously redemptive) and its justification (the fall of historical religions). Indeed, I reject both his romantic view of past religion as the peaceful reconciler, as well as his pessimistic view of present religion as the maker of “enemies” among modern people. In the end, I argue that the way Fasolt employs his categories—“alienation,”“salvation,”“religion,”“history”— is too vague to do much useful work. They are significant categories and they deserve our attention. But in my view, the story Fasolt tells is both too grim (on human alienation) and too cheerful (on historian as modern savior).     

THE PHILONIC DISTINCTION: GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF JEWISH THOUGHT

Leon Roth's famous question “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” has been the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. This paper argues that the concept of a Jewish philosophy—in the sense of an allegedly continuous philosophical tradition stretching from antiquity to early modernity—was created by German Enlightenment historians of philosophy. Under competing models of historiography, Enlightenment philosophy construed a continuous tradition of Jewish thought, a philosophia haebraeorum perennis, establishing a controversially discussed order of discourse and a specific politics of historiography. Within this historiography, historical and systematical paradigms, values, and patterns kept shifting continuously, opening up perspectives for different, even contradictory accounts of what Jewish philosophy was (and is). With Hegel and his successors, this specific discourse came to a close. Hegel attacks “Jewish thought” as a form of metaphysics of substance—a critique countered by several thinkers who can be referred to as “Jewish Hegelians” (E. Fackenheim). The Jewish Hegelians fully accepted, however, Hegel's account of the “Philonic distinction”: the difference between substance and subject within the conception of the one. This calls attention to the idea that not only the role of the “mosaic distinction” (J. Assmann), the distinction between true and false in religion, should be examined more closely, but also the consequences of the “Philonic distinction” between identity and difference in monotheistic concepts of deity.     

Nomadic,ecstatic, magic: Arctic primitivism in Scandinavia around 1900

The aim of this article is to delineate the term “Arctic primitivism” in an aesthetic context and, by means of three examples from Scandinavian artists whose works were also the subject of ethnological discussions, to give an illuminating impression of Scandinavian Arctic primitivism around 1900. First some conceptual considerations about the combination of Arctic and primitivistic discourse will be presented. Then three examples for the “primal conditions” of an aesthetic conception of Arctic primitivism will be discussed: the nomadic, the ecstatic, and the magical. They serve as counter principles to modern categories such as spatial fixedness, linear chronology, and rational thought. Emilie Demant Hatt’s visual art stands for the nomadic principle; the Swedish cartoonist Ossian Elgström deals with ecstatic states; and the poems of Danish “eskimologist” William Thalbitzer show his fascination with indigenous magical incantations as an alternative to rational thought. All examples illustrate the artists’ interest in an authentic and uncorrupted culture, which they reflect on with awareness of inauthenticity and second-hand acquisition. The effects of duplication, simultaneity, and secundarity arising from the three principles drive a reflective discourse on media through which awareness of the crisis of modernity is sublimated, revealed, or made the subject of artistic exploration.     

Art and Impowerment: Levinas,Nietzsche, and the Ethics of Literary Discourse

This article draws on the profound affinities between the thought of Levinas and Nietzsche to argue that aesthetics plays a major role in Levinas's ethical philosophy. As in the case of Nietzsche, who called himself “the first tragic philosopher,” aesthetics gives reference to the tragic, yet affirmative content of Levinas's ethics. For both, what Levinas calls the “alterity,” or otherness, of art and literature is located not in an ontological or conceptual “beyond”—in a “spiritual” dimension “which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute”—but in the “interstices” of language, in the “between times” (entretemps) of its modes of temporality: which can only be accessed by way of “the tragic” in art. Alterity signifies not a privileged, interpersonal dimension freed from the problematics of modernity, but points to the complicity between the West's concept of rationality and its history of barbarism exemplified by the Holocaust. The artwork for Levinas is at once temporally diachronic and spatially diasporic, a region of impowerment that is precisely lacking in the expressive or imaginative empowerment normally attributed to the artwork, but which demonstrates a utopian, emancipatory potential in revealing the fissures and hidden pathways that run through the hegemonic structures and totalizing frameworks of modernity.