Magdalena Zolkos

Climate Change as Experience of Affect

Dubbed a “wicked problem,” climate change is exceeding our ability to agree upon any of the modern repertoire of responses available to us, perhaps most notably a market for carbon trading. Scientists are calling on social scientists and humanities scholars for radical approaches to social transformation. Responding to this call, in this paper we stage a conversation between two scholars across the humanities and social sciences on how new possibilities of political-ethical action might emerge from within the current environmental catastrophe. The site of our philosophical exploration is an agricultural assemblage in New South Wales, Australia, which we examine through the story of a farmer affected by landscape degradation. We are particularly interested in an encounter between a farmer, the landscape, and other species from which new possibilities for agricultural action emerged. Our conversation focuses on the affective formations and fluctuations accompanying this farmer’s experience of “rapid [environmental] degeneration and collapse” in the here and now. Extending from this case study, we develop a way to theorize the profound sense of sorrow experienced by those confronted with the direct and immediate manifestations of environmental degradation and how this sorrow can become a source of political-ethical action. Through the conversational style of our paper we offer an experimental approach to collaboration that aims to create and maintain space from which new thinking can emerge. Such an approach may be exactly what is needed in response to the wicked problem of our time, climate change.

The Hoax of War: The Foreign Policy Discourses of Poland and Bulgaria on Iraq, 2003–2005

An analysis of Polands and Bulgarias foreign policy articulations on Iraq provides a discursive platform not only for the manifestation of national self-positioning in the international arena, but also for the expression of national fears and the re-contextualization of historical narratives. The claim is that the Iraq war became a ‘hoax’ for public expressions of the ‘essence of the nation’. Despite the different conditions and historical experience, in both Poland and Bulgaria the foreign policy discourses on Iraq conjured up a fictitious construct of the nation, which, while playing on the (apathetic) credulity of the public, facilitated the radicalization of the political discourse in both countries by undermining the assertion of diversity as a precondition of politics and instead has invoked the imagination of ethnic and moral unity. The conclusion, therefore, is that the foreign policy discourses on Iraq attest to the possibility of the erosion of politics in the post-communist countries.

POSTHUMANIST PERSPECTIVES ON AFFECT

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation. The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue (sensation, subjectivity, sociality, and politics) in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researchers encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing.

The Origins of European Fascism: Memory of Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Abstract Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a cinematic exploration of the causal relationship between the authoritarian formation of the juvenile subject and her susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an anti-psychological interpretation of the film. This reading seeks to understand The White Ribbon in terms of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices, which underpin his notion of “ethical spectatorship.” I argue that the film offers a dual metaphorical construction of the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and of the mnemonic and affective aspects of the history of violence. Haneke forges a link between the European attitude to its history of fascism and its ongoing politics of exclusion, arising from its covert fascist desire for the unified self. The significance of The White Ribbon in the ongoing debate on history/memory thus lies in its critique of Europe’s current self-understanding as having outgrown its violent past.

Aporias of belonging: Jean Améry on 'being a Jew without Judaism' and the tradition of conscious pariah

The figure of the Jewish pariah has permeated Western cultural imagination, as demonstrated, for example, by the re-emergence of the medieval myth of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, in modern anti-Semitism. In Western European states the figure (and fantasy) of the Jewish pariah helped to consolidate national identity in the modern period at the cost of exclusion and violence against Europe’s others. This article focuses, first, on the cultural and political genealogy of the tradition of the ‘conscious pariah’, which emerged in Jewish thought in the nineteenth century, as a formation of the subject who asserts, rather than rejects or evades, her/his status as an outcast. Second, the article situates the Jewish tradition of conscious pariahdom vis-à-vis the work of Holocaust philosopher Jean Améry in order to critically analyse his alleged advocacy of the victim-oriented politics of memory and historical redress. The argument is that in contrast to the dominant interpretations of Améry’s thought as invested in the subject’s own suffering, his negative constructions of Jewishness engender a philosophical gesture beyond the lachrymose readings of Jewish history and pariahdom. Améry’s conception of the conscious pariah is an attempt to inscribe ‘hyperbolic’ ethical content into the experience of deracination and estrangement.

Life as a political problem: the post-human turn in political theory

The post-human turn in political theory has challenged the anthropocentric assumption that individuated human agency is the exclusive domain of political action, subjectivity, and community. Recently, there has emerged an important intersection between, on one hand, the “post-human turn” in political theory and, on the other hand, the critical studies of neoliberal governance and ideology, which define the contemporary historical moment in terms of the late capitalist monitoring, regulation, and exploitation of biological life of populations. In this context, the post-human turn in political theory has meant the extension of focus from human agency to include animals, plants, inanimate objects, and machines. Focusing on the work of Catherine Malabou, Maurizio Lazzarato, Brian Massumi, Brad Evans, and Julian Reid, I discuss some of the problems that arise from the attempt at non-anthropocentric theorizing of politics, including what it means—theoretically, politically, and epistemologically—to consider biological and machinic units in terms of political agency. I suggest that the problems encountered by these post-humanist contributions to the field of political theory are epistemological, analytical, and political. I focus in particular on whether the non-anthropocentric refiguring of politics offers new critical insights into, and resistances against, neoliberal governance. Bhandar B and Goldberg-Hiller J (eds) (2015) Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the work of Catherine Malabou. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Evans B and Reid J (2014) Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lazzarato M (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (trans J D Jordan). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Massumi B (2014) What Animals Teach us about Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past

ing decision-making mechanisms in related species, and even when eschewing “folk psychological intuitions” (260), authors describe goals guiding behaviors, goal-directed behavior determining adaptations, and other teleological driven mechanisms. The texts are also riddled with human-centered hierarchical rationalizations (such as “a peak in the human ability to represent spatial information symbolically” [75]), tautologies (e.g., “Natural selection favors any solution which makes individuals more adapted” [211]), and value-laden terms (such as “basic,” “primary,” “primitive,” and “simple” competing with “higher-order,” “more sophisticated level,” and “true”). Hopefully, readers will use the abundant data in Animal Thinking to refashion cognition around contemporary theories of evolution.

Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real

Troubles, subtitled “Collected papers Volume I” (Oxford University Press, 2011), implying a forthcoming Volume II, but many others are inaccessible to the philosopher without special connections. The contributors to this volume have had access to these unpublished works. Almost all the contributors are truly distinguished figures themselves, who have made important contributions to the topics they discuss. The intricacies of the issues that have developed in the decades since the original appearance of some of Kripke’s works are explained in enough detail to give an excellent grasp of the state of discussion. Several of the fifteen essays are important original contributions in the guise of commentary. The first section deals with “Naming, Necessity, and Apriority” and their related issues. Linsky’s essay is primarily expository. The other three essays add critical commentary to their explanations of Kripke’s ideas. Soames examines Kripke’s arguments for a posteriori necessary truths. Salmon discusses the difficulty that Kripke’s account of naming as involving historical links to referents has with fictional objects, and argues for his own theory of such objects. Stalnaker discusses the attraction and the interpretation of the idea of possible worlds, and explains why every familiar way to handle possibilities about merely possible objects is unacceptable for Kripke. He then gives an account of the conception of possible worlds Kripke would need in order to have possible worlds cover all real possibilities. In modest fashion, Stalnaker carefully presents this very non-standard conception as something Kripke had thought about. In my opinion, Stalnaker here seriously undermines the intuitive plausibility of the idea that “possible worlds” really explicate modal notions. The second section on “Formal Semantics, Truth, Philosophy of Mathematics, and Philosophy of Logic” begins with two essays by the eminent logician John Burgess, a straightforward essay on Kripke’s contributions to model theory and an extremely useful essay on Kripke’s proposed solution to the truth-theoretic paradoxes. Steiner discusses Kripke’s remarkable account of what numbers are, unavailable to anyone without access to Kripke’s unpublished Whitehead lectures. Alan Berger reports on Kripke’s 1974 Princeton seminar on the incoherence of the idea of “adopting a logic” and adds his own thoughts on this topic. Berger’s essay is especially interesting for the challenge it poses to fashionable non-classical logics. The third section, “Language and Mind,” begins with Richard’s and Salmon’s essays on Kripke’s “A Puzzle About Belief,” about which a great deal has been written. The puzzle, roughly, is that, on a direct reference account of names, a person would seem able to reasonably hold contradictory beliefs. Richard argues that it can be indeterminate whether or not a person believes a proposition, given that the person assents to a sentence expressing that proposition. Salmon in effect argues against Kripke that a rational person can indeed believe contradictory propositions when the contradiction is not syntactically overt. George Wilson’s essay skillfully disentangles Wittgenstein’s antirealism from the non-factualism that Kripke reads into Wittgenstein’s discussion of following rules. The last essay of the section is an exposition of Kripke’s objectivist views about color words by Gomez-Torrente. The fourth section, “Philosophy of Mind and Philosophical Psychology,” consists of two expository essays, one by Shoemaker on Kripke’s arguments against mind-body identity theories, and one by Buechner on Kripke’s anti-functionalism. This is a volume that anyone who wants to understand Kripke’s work, and especially anyone who uses Kripke’s work in class, will want to own.

Frau Mata Hari on Trial : Seduction, Espionage, and Gendered Abjection in Reunifying Germany

Recently, the notion of gender has been employed as an epistemological and critical category in the study of transitional justice, reconciliation, and historical memory. Most of the relevant studies have been singular or comparative analyses of a predominantly empirical and/or socio-legal character.1 Also, in that context, important feminist contributions to these debates have discussed doing justice for sexual violence in post-war and/or post-conflict settings, with particular regard to the (inadequate) recognition of sexual violence as a strategy of war, and as a war crime in the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere.2 At the same time, however, so far there have been few attempts at theorizing gender as a modality of reconciliation and/or transitional justice,3 in contrast to, for instance, the ‘gender turn’ in the Holocaust studies.4

Apocalyptic Writing, Trauma and Community in IMRE Kertész's Fateless

This article explores philosophical themes in Imre Kertészs novel Fateless. More specifically, it offers a reading of Fateless from a perspective of trauma theory and of the idioms of an apocalyptic coming in order to demonstrate that at the heart of this literary text there is a question of the subjects (im)possibility of community with another in the wake of a catastrophic occurrence. There are many figurations of community in the text, which testify to a collective and interpellative violence of the subject, and which are inscribed into a patriarchal organization of society. The world of the main protagonist, a Hungarian-Jewish adolescent Gyuri, is one that cannot exist without the paternal figure. In the wake of the fathers departure for the camp, which for the boy gains a psychic significance of the scene of traumatic erasure, the book abounds with substitutive figures of paternal authority. However, there is also a radically different, subterranean communal theme in the book: it is a figure of a non-productive and non-accumulative community that the main protagonist experiences as an ethical demand of anothers unjust and premature dying. This community is both unachievable and hyperbolic, and as such implicates the subject ethically and politically. After interpreting the various figurations of community in Fateless, this article concludes with reflections on love of another and on catastrophic writing.