‘Thinking of the land in that way’: indigenous sovereignty and the spatial politics of attentiveness at Skwelkwek’welt

Grassroots Secwepemc attempted to stop the expansion of Sun Peaks resort on a site for Indigenous knowledge. I attend to the practice of Indigenous knowledge related to the confrontation and assert that Indigenous sovereignty and identity were outcomes. To make this argument, I investigate the space made for emotion, affect and intuition in the performance of Indigenous knowledge. From a relational materialist position, these more-than-representational forces play an important role in epistemology, ontology, ethics, and subjectivity. Identity therefore materialized in three ways related to feeling(s). As a result of their attunement to these forces, the Secwepemc understood that (non)humans underpin their material being and placed the collective on the political horizon. Furthermore, the practice of Indigenous knowledge encouraged an identity characterized by “attentiveness” to feeling(s) and to the activity of feeling itself. From the perspective of the struggles of subjugated knowledge, I also contextualize the attentiveness at the core of Indigenous knowledge practices as part of a more-than-representational and decolonizing spatial politics.     

“实证”观念与当代中国史学

“实证”是当代中国史学进程中一个含义复杂的主题词,它既显示了当代中国史学一种富有成果的发展方向,又折射出其面临的种种问题与困境。20世纪80年代,对实证观念的批判确立了历史研究的“主体性”,开启了历史学研究范式的多元化;90年代,关于历史学“客观性”与“人文性”的争论,触及学科发展的内在动力问题。可能为当代中国历史学的新发展进一步提供观念前提。     

世界遗产:现代人类中心主义的实证

面对全球性的生态危机,人类中心主义遭到种种质疑,现代人类中心主义应运而生。现代人类中心主义的产生与可持续发展战略的提出不仅具有时间上的相关性,而且具有相同的问题背景,二者的价值取向有着惊人的一致。只有自觉地坚持现代人类中心主义,人类才有可能有效地实施可持续发展战略,实现真正意义上的可持续发展。现代人类中心主义在实践上的全面落实是一个相当长的历史过程,在当前历史条件下,世界遗产为现代人类中心主义提供了实证,并可望成为实现现代人类中心主义的典范。     

The Paradox of Subjective Truth

Abstract

This paper focuses in part on Jan Assmann's interpretation and refutation of Carl Schmitt's very well-known secularization theory that all significant modern concepts of the state are secularized theological notions. It will be demonstrated that Assmann attempts to counter Schmitt's conception of modern secularization by suggesting that Mosaic monotheism inaugurated a revolution by theologizing the political. By briefly exploring Assmann's interpretation of Egyptian religion, it will be argued that a conception of the political as distinct from the theological characterized the political form of ancient Egypt. This leads to a discussion of Assmann's argument that Schmitt's conception of the friend/enemy distinction should be understood as an aberration of the political form of ancient Egypt and therefore viewed as a category of political illegitimacy. In order to illustrate this, attention will first be drawn to Assmann's distinction between primary and secondary religion. This is followed by a discussion of Assmann's notion of the structural transform of the political by theology, which then moves specifically into his argument for the intellectual origins of Schmitt's concept of the political. It will be attempted throughout this paper to bring conceptual clarification to Assmann's notion of theologization by relating it to the question of political theology currently taking place in France and the English-speaking world. Towards the end I offer a number of criticisms of Assmann's notion of theologization.     

‘Arsenic of the size of a pea’

It is one of criminology’s (few) established truths that women commit far fewer violent crimes than men do. This has been especially evident when it comes to deadly violence. Besides witchcraft and infanticide there is, however, another serious crime that has been associated with women: poisoning. This article studies female poisoners in 19th-century Sweden. The investigation shows that poisonings were fairly common during this period, albeit far from being an exclusively female affair. The empirical findings reveal that these crimes were directed at several different categories of victims: spouses, children and elderly household members, as well as other women. It is also shown that a considerable number of the women accused of poisoning was acquitted, in many cases thanks to the strict process rules associated with the statutory theory of legal proof. Theoretically, the article hypothesizes an understanding of these poisonings where agency is placed at the centre. They are thus seen as acts where (female) subjectivity was created during this period.     

Erschöpfte Literatur. Über das Neue bei Samuel Beckett

Exhausted Literature. The Emergence of the New in Samuel Beckett's Novels and Plays. The article investigates literary subjectivity in some texts by Samuel Beckett. The article proceeds by relating the ways of how narration and speech acts constitute literary subjectivity to the problems of subjectivity that scientific investigations deal with. While successful self‐regulation of the organism nourishes the roots of subjectivity, i. e. the habits, subjectivity decomposes in states of exhaustion, when self‐regulation breaks down. As soon as a certain threshold is transgressed, fatigue sets in, alters the personality and eventually leads to exhaustion – a state, which psychiatrists compare to mental illness. Notwithstanding the different explanations given, scientists agreed about the effects of exhaustion. According to their investigations, the decomposition of personality by exhaustion generally does not involve apathy, withdrawal from activity or termination of movements, but rather mere action. Similarly, in Beckett's novels and plays exhaustion is much more than tiredness, as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze observed. For Beckett, exhaustion is rather the model for both literary innovation and a new concept of subjectivity, which he explores on the basis of a detailed knowledge of physiology, psychology, and psychiatry, but using his own literary means. The exhausted subject is beyond any calculus of activity. It will perform an activity even if he or she makes mistakes or loses control, and will thus act in an unpredictable way. This unpredictable action is not an exception in the continuation of the habits, but rather points to the moment when a new subjectivity emerges. Such new subjectivity surfaces in Beckett's novels and plays in forms of literary innovation.     

The objective–subjective dichotomy and its use in describing probability

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the nature of the objective–subjective dichotomy, first from a general historical point of view, and then with regard to the use of these terms over time to describe theories of probability. The different (metaphysical and epistemological) meanings of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are analysed, and then used to show that all probability theories can be divided into three broad classes. A formal definition of (epistemological) objectivity is given and used to clarify this division.     

The Politics of Subjectivity in Vangelis Raptopoulos’s Urban Stories

In this article I offer a critical analysis of the spatial cultures of modern Athens through the urban portraits presented in three fictive stories by Vangelis Raptopoulos—“At the Bottom of the Sea” (Sto Vytho), “One-Way Street” (Monodromos), and “Long-Distance Call” (Yperastiko)—from his 1995 collection “In Pieces” (Kommatakia). I argue that by constructing first-person fictive narratives, written in confessional prose, Raptopoulos problematizes the notion of subjectivity in its varying relationships to modern urban and spatial cultures. My main focus is on the practice of subjective recitations of urban space in view of the narrator’s experiences of imaginative and physical spatial appropriation. I argue that these experiences and the fragmentary style, through which they are conveyed in the stories, are an incisive critique of the official planning practices of urban public space and prescribed practices of spatial mobility. By drawing on the critical-philosophical and critical-historical literature, with particular reference to Benjamin, Foucault, Lefebvre, and de Certeau, this article contributes to the broader critique of the politics of subjectivity in modern Europe.