The journey as a transcultural experience for international students

An international two-year Erasmus Mundus MA, Transcultural European Outdoor Studies (TEOS), uses the journey as a central metaphorical concept, the “peregrinatio academica”, and experiential pedagogy. Students study human nature interactions through the lens of outdoor education and recreation while travelling for a semester at a time in three European countries: England, Norway and Germany. We argue that the transcultural concept is facilitated by the diverse nationalities of the student cohort and the concept and experience of the journey. Empirical evidence from student feedback, course discussions, and staff reflections is used to explore the ways in which the programme elucidates ideas of expert and Eurocentric knowledge of landscape and learning by valuing individual knowledge constructions and new research. Simultaneously, we argue that the typical European “gaze” on the “other” somehow is reversed as “others” gaze at European cultures, and, to some degree, contribute to destabilizing culturally taken-for-granted knowledge. This offers new opportunities for a more nuanced transcultural exploration of human nature interactions in diverse landscapes and cultures. We conclude that the knowledge and skills developed by this programme supports the development of “transculturalized” students with the enhanced capacity to shift between and discuss diverse positions and ways of viewing and knowing.     

5. GROSSRAUM AND GEOPOLITICS: RESITUATING SCHMITT IN AN ATLANTIC CONTEXT

Contemporary theorists of international relations and historians of empire have found utility in the spatial theory of “Grossraum,” or “great space,” that Carl Schmitt developed in the 1930s and 40s. This article asks whether Schmitt's concept of Grossraum can be fully disentangled from its German history—from the Nazi pursuit of Lebensraum in which it eventually culminated, but with which it is not identical either. I argue that Schmitt's Grossraum theory is neither merely a symptomatic reflection of the Third Reich's objectives, nor a free‐floating theory with strong potential for critiquing imperialism, but is best approached as an important moment in the transatlantic conversation among empires that unfolded between 1890 and 1945 about the sources, methods, and prerogatives of global power. It compares Schmitt with other figures in German geopolitics such as Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer in order to establish a genealogy of the distinction between land and sea powers, arguing that Schmitt's writings on Grossraum modernize and transmit to the twentieth century the most influential theories of political geography and geopolitics developed in the Atlantic world between 1890 and 1930.     

The Bible and Leo Strauss

According to Leo Strauss, the Hebrew Bible is to be regarded as being in “radical opposition” to philosophy and as its “antagonist.” This is an influential view, which has contributed much to the ongoing omission of the Bible from most accounts of the history of political philosophy or political theory. In this article, I examine Strauss's arguments for the exclusion of the Bible from the Western tradition of political philosophy (i) because it possesses no concept of nature; (ii) because it prescribes a “life of obedient love” rather than truth-seeking; and (iii) because it depicts God as “absolutely free” and unpredictable, and so without a place in the philosophers' order of “necessary and therefore eternal” things. I suggest that Strauss's views on these points cannot be accepted without amendment. I propose a revised view of the history of political philosophy that preserves Strauss's most important insights, while recognizing the Hebrew Bible as a foundational text in the Western tradition of political philosophy.     

“Remember me”: Hamlet,memory and Bloom’s poiesis

Although memory is not explicitly named in “Hades”, it nonetheless features centrally. Intertextuality is an example of memory, and in “Hades” Shakespeare’s Hamlet is remembered – specifically the Ghost’s relation to Hamlet, whom he bids to “Remember” and “revenge”. Derrida calls this relation “hauntological”: it is characterised by an uncertain gaze, the father telling his son what to do, and the son mourning for his father. In Bloom’s mourning for his father, Virag, hauntology might be expected. However, it is Bloom’s late son, Rudy, who hauntologises Bloom, thereby revitalising the latter; this adjusts Shakespeare’s original hauntology. While considering repeatable ways of maintaining this hauntology, Bloom jocularly reverts to new technology: the phonograph and photograph. His plan reveals his relish for liminality and poiesis: being and non-being at the same time. Bloom is thus remembered into the future, all the while Ulysses is haunted by Hamlet.     

The Wiley-Blackwell companion to cultural geography

The Western film genre fosters the mythic view of America as a feminized Eden where one can regenerate or recreate oneself. Westerns typically depict the American countryside as though it were simply a gorgeous framing device for the film's male protagonist whose primary function is to introduce the rough wilderness to the pioneers (or cinematic viewers) who will follow him. In contrast, in the rural femalecentered films of American life— such as Daughters of the Dust, Places in the Heart, Bagdad Cafe, and The Spitfire Grill—the landscape plays a central role. Nature, in fact, generally replaces the powerful male protagonist of the Western. Unlike European movies that also highlight nature's regenerative power, the American films discussed here center on the transformation of the woman. They highlight the Jeffersonian ideal of America as a garden community—one where the female protagonist is regenerated by her ties to the land and by her relationship with those labeled “Other.” She does not conquer or traipse through the cowboy's wild Eden. Rather, she inhabits a nurturing cinematic place that celebrates community and embraces difference.     

Le Danger des liaisons: Censoring Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses

When Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses first appeared in late March 1782, it was an immediate succès de scandale. Laclos’s focus on his characters’ libertine psychology and his creation of a “monstrous” female villain, Merteuil, distinguished the novel from mainstream eighteenth-century French works. As an analysis of the novel’s reception demonstrates, Laclos’s suggestive portrayal of female sexuality and empowerment—and, specifically, of Merteuil—led first to the text’s association with dangerous works known as “mauvais livres” or “livres philosophiques” such as the Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1791) and the anonymous Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier de Chartreux (1741), and later contributed to its classification as a pornographic work at the time the concept was invented in the early nineteenth century—and, ultimately, to its censorship in 1823. If the novel was devoid of explicitly sexual scenes, it nonetheless elicited such images in the minds of (at least some of) its readers and thereby caught the attention of the authorities. Les Liaisons dangereuses may be one of the most prominent historical cases of a book being banned not for what was depicted in its pages, but for the fantasies it inspired—providing a compelling twist to the adage that “pornography is in the eyes of the beholder,” or the mind of the reader.     

“Obra de arte yo too”: Eduardo Mendicutti on soccer,glamour, and the “Beckham effect”

ABSTRACT

La Susi en el vestuario blanco (2003) is a fictional chronicle of life in the Real Madrid locker room, a privileged insight into the sanctum sanctorum of the world's richest soccer team. The hiring of Susi as glamour coach ostensibly aims to boost the competitive advantage of the galácticos in foreign as well as local markets (reflecting the reality of the club at the time). In Mendicutti's homoeroticizing gaze, it also serves to uncover the homophobic substrate reportedly still common in male team sports and teases at the anxieties of the players. This article explores the peculiar function of Susi as she sets the comic tone of the work and engages with the varied virilities before her. It examines the notions of “glamour” and “identification” both as tongue-in-cheek team objectives and as phenomena with wider relevance for the way spectators relate to sport and players relate to the world around them.     

Lactantius’s Power Struggle

Abstract

During the Diocletianic Persecution and at the dawn of Constantine’s rise to power, Lactantius penned Book V of the Divine Institutes, in which he offers a striking account of Church-state relations. For Lactantius, imperial power is at odds with the Christian “course of life.” To be a people of virtue, Christians must perform justice from below, under the rule of a secular state whose gaze is fixed on its self-preservation at all costs. Lactantius makes clear that if Christians collude with the power of the state, exercising power from above, justice becomes an impracticable virtue. Not only would Christianity’s transition to the imperial seat alter the material conditions which best form Christians in virtue, it would, in Lactantius’s view, cultivate lives of vice and alienation from God. This essay contends that in Book V of the Divine Institutes, Lactantius employs Christian reasoning to demonstrate how secular politics are antithetical to Christian discipleship.     

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITE'S METAHISTORY

This paper assesses Hayden White's Metahistory through the test of reflexivity; that is, it asks whether the book's “general theory of the structure of that mode of thought which is called ‘historical”’ applies, as it should, to its own history of nineteenth‐century “historical consciousness.” Most components of the theoretical apparatus—the various concepts invoked in the “theory of the historical work” and in the “theory of tropes”—fail the reflexivity test; further, it emerges that those same components are also seriously flawed on other grounds. The sole and partial exception is the concept of emplotment, which passes the reflexivity test, albeit with qualifications, but more particularly has the virtue of illuminating the traditional history of history against which Metahistory's own story was pitched; and this result provides an ironic and unexpected vindication of Metahistory's underlying vision. Thus the book's fundamental insight—that the form of historical writing is epistemologically consequential—can be retained, even though its two theories should now be set aside.     

2. BOOTSTRAPPING,SELF‐BINDING,AND OTHER METAPHORS OF ANTIFOUNDATIONALISM

In Images of History, Richard Eldridge deploys the metaphor of “bootstrapping” to describe the possibility of a mutually constitutive interaction of historical understanding and reflection on political ideals outside of and beyond the notion of a completed theory or teleological development. Although “bootstrapping” does considerable work in the book, it remains relatively unthematized in itself. This article explores the concept of bootstrapping in both Eldridge's book and in a number of disciplines. In doing so, it aims to make three critical observations. First, while Eldridge rightly seeks to energize our sense of historical openness, the argument is usefully enriched by the adjacent field of political theory, where “boot‐strapping” is often paired with “self‐binding” to describe how self‐creating processes might be arrested and stabilized. Second, Eldridge's use focuses on individual dispositions, but the concept of “bootstrapping” points to the need to pursue understanding of collective processes of self‐institution. Third, when extended to the natural world, “bootstrapping” calls for scrutiny of the relationship between human self‐creation and nature as a site of emergence and self‐organizing phenomena.     

The origin and evolution of the concept of mixin (superstition): A review of May Fourth scientific views

ABSTRACT

This article explores the evolving connotations of the concept of “superstition” up to the establishment of “superstition studies,” in an examination of the process of secularization experienced by early modern Chinese thought under the impact of Western science. In traditional texts, the Chinese term mixin (迷信, literally “delusional beliefs”), modernly translated as“superstition,” carries diverse and variable meanings: aside from referring to the proper or improper content of ideas and beliefs, mixin also has political connotations, broadly referring to beliefs or behaviors differing from the official rituals. On an ideological level, the traditional concept of mixin refers to a category of thought opposed to Confucian concepts such as the cosmology of Heaven, Earth, and Man, or the idea that “for a man to sacrifice to a spirit which does not belong to him is flattery.” In the late Qing Dynasty, as the idea of “superstition” as opposed to “science” was introduced via Japan, the traditional connotations of mixin evaporated, and it merged with other neologisms. From the late Qing to the early Republic, the parameters of “superstition” were expanded to encompass anything at odds with “reason.” This was also a reflection of China’s shift from the “Classical Age” to the “Age of Science,” as Confucian concepts and scientific ideas successively served as the criteria for judging “superstition.” As of the present, a consensus has yet to be reached on how to distinguish between “religion” and “superstition.” This paper shall seek to clarify the connotations of mixin or “superstition” in different contexts and their connection to the changing times, which may aid in understanding the complex facets of this issue.     

The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics

This essay outlines a theoretical framework for investigating the links between the production of urban space (Lefebvre) and the production of ideology (Althusser) and hegemony (Gramsci) by proposing the concept of “the urban sensorium”. With a view to the aesthetics of urban experience and everyday life, this concept aligns Fredric Jameson's “postmodern” adaptation of city planner Kevin Lynch's research on “cognitive mapping” with Walter Benjamin's insights on “aestheticizing politics” in order to ask: how does urban space mediate ideology and produce hegemony while aestheticizing politics? In so doing, the spotlight falls on a conceptual constellation including four key theoretical terms: “ideology”, “aesthetics”, “mediation” and “totality”. While working through them, the essay argues that Jameson's outstanding contribution to a spatialized understanding of “postmodernism” lies above all in his Marxist (Lukácsian, Althusserian and Sartrean) theorization of mediation and totality; whereas radical students of the city can find the richest dialectical elaboration of these two concepts with special attention to space and urbanism in the oeuvre of Henri Lefebvre, especially in the recently translated The Urban Revolution.     

The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense

This essay constructs philosophical defenses against criticisms of my theory of the end of art. These have to do with the definition of art; the concept of artistic quality; the role of aesthetics; the relationship between philosophy and art; how to answer the question “But is it art?”; the difference between the end of art and “the death of painting”; historical imagination and the future; the method of using indiscernible counterparts, like Warhol's Brillo Box and the Brillo cartons it resembles; the logic of imitation—and the differences between Hegel's views on the end of art and mine. These defenses amplify and fortify the thesis of the end of art as set forth in my After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997).     

Die Grippe‐Pandemie 1918–20 in der medizinischen Debatte

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–20 in medical debate. The history of the so called Spanish Influenza 1918–1920 is summarized especially in regard to the developments in medical debate. In Germany, Richard Pfeiffer, who had discovered Haemophilus influenzae after the previous pandemic 1890 / 91, managed it to defend his thesis that his “bacillus” was the causative agent of the flu, by modifying his theory moderately. The Early Virology of influenza in postwar times was still fixed to bacteriology and did not yet have the force of school‐building. Aggressive therapy, e.g. with derivatives of chinine, were used in a concept of polypragmasy. The connection between influenza in animals and influenza in mankind was unknown or of no major interest till the rise of virology as an academic discipline in the 1950s. Since the outbreak of avian influenza in Asia 1997 virological archaeology is challenged to fill the historical part in the attempt to fight the threat of the highly pathogenic bird flu. In the beginning of the “short 20. century” politicians and doctors had no interest to build a “monument” of influenza. Today, virological reductionism does not have the power to (re‐)construct such a monument.     

THE VIRTUE OF A HISTORIAN: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN HERMAN PAUL AND CHINESE THEORISTS OF HISTORY

This article reflects on the role of scholarly virtues in the Chinese theory of history and compares it with the recent approach proposed by Herman Paul. The first three parts reconstruct what might be called a “Chinese virtue epistemology of history,” starting from Confucian views on sincerity in writing history and then turns to concepts of an “unbiased mind” and the “responsibility of a historian.” The latter ideas were developed by Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801), who introduced the concept of “the virtue of a historian (shide),” treating it as a sympathetic understanding toward the narrated characters. Interpretations of shide changed along with modern Chinese theorists of history, some of whom elaborated on it in the positivist manner. Thereafter, the article outlines Paul's view on the function of epistemic virtues in the formation of “historical persona.” In the summary, I will draw upon the main similarities and differences between Paul's position and the traditional Chinese view in order to point out the main directions for further research on this topic.     

HEIDEGGER,LATOUR AND THE REIFICATION OF THINGS: THE INVERSION AND SPATIAL ENCLOSURE OF THE SUBSTANTIVE LANDSCAPE OF THINGS – THE LAKE DISTRICT CASE

“Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conjoined twin” – “landscape”. Whereas thing once was the name for meetings where people assembled to treat common things that matter, things, in the modern sense, have become physical objects (things as matter). Likewise, landscape's meaning has been reified from being a polity constituted by common thing meetings treating substantive things that matter, to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things as matter. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of revolutionary inversion, or turning inside–out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity. The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, subaltern meanings that can work to empower an alternative “non‐modern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, Bruno Latour's notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analysed in relation to Martin Heidegger's concept of the “thing”, and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to England's Lake District.     

Capitalism's Anxious Whole: Fear,Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse

Abstract: Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse. The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not‐value of value, i.e. “labor”, Marx explains how capital must continuously enroll labor to its will in order to survive and expand. But this enrollment is never given; hence, despite its emergent structure of necessity, capital's return to itself as “self‐animating value” is never free of peril. The most speculative aspect of my argument is that the figure of “labor” in Grundrisse, because of its radically open formulation as not‐value, anticipates the elusive subject of difference in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern”—that figure which evades dialectical integration, and is in some ontological way inscrutable to the “master”. Unexpectedly, then Grundrisse gives us a way to think beyond the epistemic and geographic power of “Europe”.     

Danto and the Pale of Aesthetics

Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace is a new theory of art, seeking to catch the flavour and essence of its contemporary phenomenology. It is obliged, however, to pit itself in toto against aesthetic philosophy, leaning on the derivatives from deuteropraxis and institutional definition while committing itself to a concept of arthood extracted from exoteric ideas, which are held to comprise the artworks’ individuation and identity. This paper examines the principal notions in support of his contentions and contrasts them to the chief principles of aesthetic philosophy. In this juxtaposition, it transpires that conviction eludes Danto, as his suppression of aesthetic criteria yields unsuspected aporias from a disconjugate amalgam of inherence, ontology, epistemology and concept integration. Thus the leap from “mere real things” to the plateau of arthood is never accomplished, as it falters at the step where a perceiving subject has a stake in, and the power of authorisation, of this conception of art.     

Republic in early modern China: The cross-cultural dissemination of a political concept

ABSTRACT

The English term republic and the Chinese term Gonghe (共和, “joint harmony”; i.e., “republic” in modern Chinese) stem from different conceptual origins and carry different connotations. When they first encountered the term republic, the intellectuals of China and Japan could only understand it by drawing on the political knowledge of Chinese antiquity. But soon after, two different concepts corresponding to the term republic emerged in the form of Chinese characters within the Chinese and Japanese linguistic environments—minzhu (民主, “people's rule”) and gonghe, which gradually shed their ancient Chinese significations. After its coining as an early modern political concept in the Japanese language, the term gonghe sporadically filtered into the Chinese linguistic context during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1898–1902, the concept of gonghe rapidly gained popularity in China, primarily due to its introduction by Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929) and other figures, with a clearly demarcated line separating the term from its ancient Chinese significance. As the concept of gonghe spread in China, it became embroiled in the contemporary tide of political reform, both influencing and being influenced by this trend. In the first decade of the 20th century, two competing interpretations of the term gonghe appeared. The moderates, represented by Liang Qichao, maintained that the evolution of the political system had a natural order; that their contemporary China did not yet have the conditions to adopt a republican system; and that it was necessary to first improve the citizens’ character, and cultivate the habits of self-governance among the people. The radicals, represented by Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, 1866–1925), held that China should overleap a constitutional monarchy, overthrow the Manchu emperor through violent revolution, and directly establish a republican form of government. The views of the radical party won discursive power, but their discussions and deliberations on the implications of a republic were clearly inadequate. Following the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, a republican form of government was quickly established, but its functional results fell far short of people's expectations, causing the concept of a republic to be distrusted, criticized, and even shelved.