The Struggle for Identity: A Personal Reflection

This article explores Agamben's revisionist presentation of the anarchy of the Son and the void of power in the Trinity in his genealogy of economy and government in the West. It argues for a reading that sustains the actual self-depiction of orthodox theology on these points of doctrine in order to evaluate and critique orthodoxy's impact on politics in the West. Only after a thorough assessment of orthodoxy's doctrinal self-understanding can Agamben's reading of potential or suppressed meaning in orthodoxy be appreciated and possibly applied.     

试论近代海关监督及其维权斗争

关税是国家税收的重要组成部分,负责关税征收和保管的海关监督历来是个肥缺,炙手可热。中国近代海关大权自操于外国人之手以后,原拥有主管海关大权的海关监督,其地位越来越低,职权也逐渐被剥夺,甚至变成徒有虚名的傀儡;而外籍税务司不断与监督争夺管理海关权力,反仆为主,俨然成了中国海关的主人,形成一种世所罕见的畸形关系。海关监督为了维护国家主权,围绕监督的地位和权力进行坚持不懈的斗争。随着中国关税自主进程的改变,海关华员的地位不断提高,特别是抗战胜利后,许多海关的负责人已是华人,海关监督的监督职能已失去作用,最终走向消亡。     

The Use and Abuse of Ideology: The Struggle for Africa

WILLIAM FREUND. The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of African Society since 1800. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Pp. 357. $19.50 (US); MAI FALMBERO, ed. The Struggle for Africa, trans. E.M.K. Andree, Mai Palmberg, and Howard Simson. London: Zed Press, 1983. Pp. iii, 286. $31.95 (Can.).Reviewed by John Flint     

The Struggle for Australian History

Dixson, Miriam The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia 1788 to the Present Ferres, Kay (ed.) The Time to Write: Australian Women Writers 1890–1930 Grimshaw, Patricia, Lake, Marilyn, McGrath, Ann and Quartly, Marian Creating a Nation 1788–1990 Summers, Anne Damned Whores and God’s Police Robinson, Portia The Women of Botany Bay     

President Versus Congress: The Struggle for Public Attention

Power relationships between the executive and legislative branches in the United States are affected by the nature and shape of public opinion. Both branches actively seek the stamp of popular approval but the President has advantages in the struggle for public attention that are vital in the exercise of his powers. Television, in the coverage it gives to presidential activities and pseudo-activities, provides the President with an opportunity to move and lead the nation. Although we are a nation of shared powers, television projects the message that we are a presidential nation and that message is affecting both popular perceptions and power relationships on the national level.     

The Survival of Words: Revolution and Class Struggle

How did Kirchnerismo, initially a motley coalition of progressive Peronists and born-again Menemistas and Duhaldistas trying to scrape together some form of governability from the 2001 default, turn into one of the ‘pink tide’ governments most virulently hated by the Right? Why did long-forgotten concepts and terminologies from the epic past of revolutionary struggle suddenly resurface in the context of what, at least from the viewpoint of the autonomist Left, was hardly more than a mildly redistributive administration of scarcity, aided by the post-millennial commodity boom? In this intervention, historian Javier Trímboli urges us to take seriously some of the discursive anachronisms that flourished during Néstor and Cristina Kirchner’s periods in office (2003–2015), which, he suggests, rather than merely a form of discursive cover for clientelist politics, may have been symptomatic of the way in which some of the foundational fault-lines of modern Argentine society continue to shape political identities, styles and forms of struggle in the present.