Living in anachronistic space: Temporalities of displacement in Moscow's Soviet-era standardised housing

In 2017, the Moscow municipality announced the demolition of several thousand remaining Soviet-era, standardised apartments (khrushchevki). Known as the Renovation, the renewal project promises to replace the khrushchevki with new residential districts. Based on fieldwork in Northern Izmailovo, a district targeted for demolition, this article analyses encroaching displacement by foregrounding the temporal experiences of affected residents. Building on literature that explores the political underpinnings of discourse and aesthetics in urban renewal projects, with particular attention to Rancière's temporal politics, the article contends that the Renovation depends on the discursive construction of its targets as spatial anachronisms. This renders the Soviet-era housing blocks, and those who live within them, vulnerable to a spectrum of modernising aestheticising interventions—from minor ornamentation to wholesale demolition. Based on ethnographic data, the article shows how the initial stages of redevelopment have altered a local network of benches. For a group of long-standing, elderly residents, these disruptions have instigated more profound reckonings with their own sense of time in/and space, leading to an understanding that they, too, are seen as anachronistic features of the city. Paying attention to urban materiality on a granular scale, particularly in standardised housing estates, reveals the multifaceted temporalities that inform residents' engagements with the spaces of their home districts. The article argues that doing so counters the exclusionary temporal logic of the discourse of anachronism by denying its ubiquity. In turn, it speaks to growing geographic interest in amplifying alternative temporalities in the face of destructive, terminal change.     

Zambrano’s poetic reason in the light of Frankfurtian Critical Theory

ABSTRACT

María Zambrano's biggest contribution to intellectual history is, without a doubt, her poetic reason; her unique attempt to overcome the limiting coordinates of the framework of rationality established by the Enlightenment. Having spent forty-five years in exile, the relevance of this Republican thinker has only been acknowledged in recent decades. Since then, the political content of her early work, as well as her engagement with the Republic's cause prior to and during the Spanish Civil War are well known. Nevertheless, although Zambrano still wrote some political books after the Civil War, most notably, Persona y democracia (1958), the political component of her thought after this period has passed largely unnoticed. This article intends to take a wider approach to Zambrano's political engagement by exploring the political significance of her poetic reason. Here I contend, first, that poetic reason, far from being an isolated attempt at developing an alternative rationality, is actually in line with the critique of instrumental reason proposed by the Frankfurt School and, second, that, in fact, there are meaningful parallels between poetic reason and Frankfurtian Critical Theory. Thus, the purpose of this article is to explore such parallels and their significance in revealing the political dimension of Zambrano's thought.     

Genealogical narrative and self-knowledge in Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men

SUMMARY

Why did Rousseau cast the substance of the Second Discourse in the form of a genealogy? In this essay the author attempts to work out the relation between the literary form (genealogical narrative, as the author calls it) of the Discourse's two main parts and the content. A key thesis of Rousseau's text concerns our lack of self-knowledge, indeed, our ignorance of our ignorance. The author argues that in a number of ways genealogical narrative is meant to respond to that lack. In the course of his discussion he comments on Rousseau's puzzling remarks in the Second Discourse about his expository method. Further, given the thesis that we lack self-knowledge, Rousseau owes us an account of his genesis as self-knowing genealogist. He attempts to do so in part through his narrative of the ‘illumination of Vincennes’. The author examines that narrative as well, reading it and the Discourse in light of each other. Can Rousseau resolve the problems of self-reference that the philosophical use of genealogy often leads to? The article discusses this complex metaphilosophical problem, along with views about the value of genealogical accounts, in light of recent work by Robert Guay, John Kekes, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Frederick Neuhouser, among others.     

Ayatollah Khomeini: From Islamic Government to Sovereign State

This paper argues that the mature form of the political doctrine of the Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–89), Iranian Shiite religious authority and architect of the Islamic Republic of Iran, grew out of an encounter with the modern understanding of the state and the concept of sovereignty. Khomeini’s political doctrine, called the Absolute Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, although based on a religious foundation, should be studied as a break with the traditional understanding of political power in Shiism. It will be argued that such a political doctrine can play the same role as the Christian rhetoric of the early modern political thinkers played, pave the way for modernization of Shiite political thought, and prepare the ground for a modern temporal conception of politics.     

Archaeology’s quest for a seat at the high table of anthropology

Between 1900 and 1970, American archaeologists perceived themselves as second-class anthropologists because the archaeological record suggested little not already known ethnographically, archaeology served anthropology by testing ethnologically derived models of cultural evolution, the archaeological record was ethnologically incomplete as a result of poor preservation, and archaeologists used but did not write anthropological theory. Ethnologists of the period agreed with these points and regularly reminded archaeologists of their limited role in anthropology. A few archaeologists claimed in the 1950s that archaeology could contribute to anthropological theory but they were ignored. The claim was reiterated by new archaeologists of the 1960s, and by the 1970s worries about the poor preservation of the archaeological record had softened. However, most archaeologists after 1970 (and before 1990) used anthropological theory and did not write new theory on the basis of archaeological data. The root cause of American archaeology’s ninety-year absence from anthropology’s high table of theory seems to be the discipline-wide retention of the ninety-year old belief that archaeology is prehistoric ethnology and the (unnecessary and constraining) corollary that archaeologists must use anthropological theory to explain the archaeological record.     

"承负说"与两汉灾异论

作为《太平经》基础理论的"承负"说主要有两层含义:一是善恶报应,继承汉代之前中国本土的善恶报应思想;二是对汉代社会危机提出的一套解释系统,此与灾异论的盛行具有重要关联。前者为《太平经》对下层民众进行宗教教化准备了前提,后者为其政治改良方案的提出铺平了道路。尤其后者,对两汉之际不同派别的道教运动产生了革命性的影响,进而深刻影响了后汉之政治变迁。     

《说文》训“词”例考释兼及许慎的虚字观

本文在<说文>训"词"例穷尽性统计的基础上,从字形演变、出土文献用例、传世文献用例等方面,对<说文>训"词"例字进行了类分析与研究,补增<说文>训释语气词的8种条例,并兼及许慎的虚字观.     

Contesting scale: A space of the political in a post-disaster context

Disasters create spaces for the political to unfold. This paper contributes to the recurring debates on space and the political in geography by providing a novel empirical focus: following a fire in Lærdal, Norway in 2014, contesting discourses on how emergency services should be spatially organized revealed themselves. A scalar discourse of the local, situated in discourses on periphery and rurality in Norway, emerged to contest a neoliberal discourse promoted by the government. I illustrate the scalar discourse of the local through four identified narratives in Norwegian newspapers that emphasize different aspects of the local. This demonstrates how scalar categories are meshed with everyday vocabulary, and hence are important to study. Although a space of the political was realized following the fire, in the last part of the paper I reflect on why the scalar discourse of the local has not gained recognition as legitimate contestation, as reforms aiming to centralize and/or merge continue to be rolled out in Norway.     

Post-politics,crisis, and Ireland's ‘ghost estates’

This paper argues that the global economic recession provides an instructive point to reconsider recent theorisations of post-politics for two reasons. First, theories of the post-political can help us to understand the current neoliberal impasse, and second, current transformations provide us with an empirical basis to test the limits of these explanatory frameworks. While the resurgence of neoliberal policies, evidenced through the state-sponsored rescue of the financial sector and the introduction of harsh austerity measures in many countries, appear to confirm post-politics, various protest movements have testified to a concurrent re-politicisation of the economy. Furthermore, crises constitute periods of disruption to the discursive and symbolic order, which open a space for hegemonic struggle, however fleeting. We focus our analysis on Ireland's ‘ghost estates’ – residential developments left abandoned or unfinished after the property crash – and their treatment within mainstream print media. We argue that in the context of crash, the ‘ghost estate’ functioned as an ‘empty signifier’ through which hegemonic struggles over how to narrate, and thus re-inscribe, the event of the crisis were staged. We explore the double role played by ‘ghost estates’: firstly, as an opening for politics, and secondly, as a vehicle used to discursively contain the crisis through a neoliberal narrative of ‘excess’. We argue that our analysis offers an instructive example of how post-politicisation occurs as a process that is always contingent, contextual, and partial, and reliant on the cooption and coproduction of existing cultural signifiers with emergent narrations of crisis.     

思想是考古学的工具--论俞伟超的考古学理论与实践

俞伟超考古学思想历程可以分为三个阶段,马克思主义考古学解释体系的初步探索;考古学文化与族群关系的文献与实物的二重证据推定;考古学文化遗存的技术、社会和观念的三重解读以及以此为方法论核心的考古学新体系的建立。