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Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides – A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida
... We employ the metaphor of 'autoimmunity' in full antagonism with the white supremacist rhetoric by some far-right politicians, who have distorted it to denounce 'massive immigration' as the cause of the 'West's weakening body'. Instead, we draw on Derrida's (2003) notion of autoimmunity to argue the opposite: that the EU's self-destructiveness is not rooted in its openness to the world but in the counterproductive effects of its increasingly closed and xenophobic border regime. Dating back to its inception, the EU has been inspired by a nativist principle to develop a network of biopolitical filters along its external and internal borders. ...
... In a famous interview with the philosopher Giovanna Borradori, Derrida resorted to a deconstructive analysis of 9/11 to dissect the autoimmune syndrome that he saw affecting the U.S. ' global hegemony (Derrida 2003). He called out the asymmetry between the U.S. commemoration of 9/11 as an unparalleled historical tragedy and the far more atrocious violence orchestrated by the U.S. around the globe, which was unleashed many times before 9/11 and has been reoccurring many times afterwards without arousing a comparable amount of either media epitaphs or political lamentations. ...
... Seen through the lens of Derrida's (2003) conceptualization of autoimmunity, one could argue that the reflex of power manifested as the EU's territorial strategy to protect itself from unwanted foreigners through Schengen's paper b/ordering has been predicated on an inexistent apocalyptic threat of invisible and anonymous non-EUropeans-whom much of the EUropean press and opportunistic politicians wantonly associate with all sorts of crime and moral decay (Albahari 2018; Burrell/Hörschelmann 2019; Trilling 2019). Moreover, the EU has developed its paper-border regime hand in hand with a facetious 'war against human trafficking' (Frontex 2022a): a real peril faced by refugees which nonetheless is heightened-not diminished-by both the EU's border regime and Frontex, its callous border guard service. ...
This interdisciplinary anthology addresses the criticism that previous investigations of borders often lack complexity and, therefore, fall short. Instead, the authors assess the complex interplay of elements and dimensions of borders and show how this gives rise to instances of disorder/order and how such disorder/order becomes socially and spatially effective. They discuss principles of complexity-oriented border research, the significance of borders in emergent disorder/order formations and border demarcations as examples of social disorder/order in European border regions, the EU’s and US’ migration systems, and virtual realities. This book makes an important contribution to the emerging complexity shift in current border studies. With contributions by Falk Bretschneider | Cécile Chamayou-Kuhn | Ulla Connor | Norbert Cyrus | Maria M. Fellner | Dominik Gerst | Guillaume Javourez | Rodrigo Bueno Lacy | Daniel Lambach | Carolin Leutloff-Grandits | Islam Rachi | Henk van Houtum | Christian Wille
... "What would »September 11« have been without television"? 33 "What would happen if some magazine openly made fun of the Holocaust?" 34 Aktualitáskonstruálás tekintetében példa lehet 9/11, amely az eseményként honosodott meg, de mi voltaképpen az esemény? ...
... As Derrida puts it, "From now on, the nuclear 5 See Derrida (1998). 6 Derrida (2003), 94. Derrida (1998), 73, n. 27 also used this definition in Faith and Knowledge: "Especially in the field of biology, the lexical set of immunity has become decisive. ...
This paper examines the productivity of medical discourses around viral infections in the field of biopolitical theories of immunity. More particularly, it critically discusses the complex relationship established in theories of political immunity between the social body and the biological body in the face of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. First, it reconsiders Jacques Derrida's writings on terror and autoimmunity, and the ways in which Derrida (mis)uses the definition of AIDS to describe the autoimmunitary logic of the risk terror poses to democracy. Second, departing from the difference between Derrida's and Roberto Esposito's respective understandings of "tolerance", it examines the relationship between immunitas and communitas in Esposito's biopolitical theory of immunity, which he also extends to the analysis of the measures introduced during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
... Terrorist and Designated Survivor were chosen for three main reasons: first, the important role terrorism plays in the narratives. Updike's novel ends with a failed attack on the Lincoln Tunnel in New 1 For a broader discussion of 9/11 as an event, please see Jacques Derrida's interview to Giovanna Borradori (Borradori, 2003) and Jean Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism (2003). 2 Even though "Patriot Day" and "National Day of Service and Remembrance" have been adopted as the official designations (Public Law 107-89; Public Law 111-13), the "namedate" (Redfield, 2009: 1) has become instead the shorthand for the attacks of September 11, 2001. Derrida justifies this choice, namely in the early post-9/11 period, with the collective "powerlessness to name in an appropriate fashion, to characterize, to think the thing in question, to get beyond the mere deictic of the date" (Borradori, 2003: 87 York; in contrast, Guggenheim's show opens with a consummated terrorist attack on the US Capitol. ...
Over the last two decades, 9/11 established itself as an object of interest for the academia, news outlets and the arts, generating a multitude of cultural artefacts that allow us, collectively, to revisit the event, reread it in different circumstances, and, ultimately, rewrite it. Employing rewriting as a metaphor for a continuous process of representation and revision, this article explores the remediation of the terrorist attack of 2001 and how representations of the event across time and different media help consolidate its place in cultural memory. With this purpose in mind, it analyzes John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) and TV series Designated Survivor (2016) and discusses them as after-effects of 9/11.
... In a famous interview with the philosopher Giovanna Borradori, Derrida resorted to a deconstructive analysis of 9/11 to dissect the autoimmune syndrome that he saw affecting the US' global hegemony (Derrida 2003). He called out the asymmetry between the US commemoration of 9/11 as an unparalleled historical tragedy and the far more atrocious violence orchestrated by the United States around the globe, which was unleashed many times before 9/11 and has been reoccurring many times afterward without arousing a comparable amount of either media epitaphs or political lamentations. ...
In this chapter, we analyze the systemic mismatch between the EU’s self-aggrandizing promise of sustainable and humane migration policies and the actual practices characterizing its border regime. The EU’s discriminatory border regime (which we dissect into a pre-border visa regime, the in-situ land and sea borders, and the post-border camps) has set in motion a recurrent demarcation of increasingly inhumane, unlawful and deadlier borders. We contend that, in its self-proclaimed attempt to protect its foundational values through a selectively permeable border regime, the EU has triggered an autoimmune disorder that has become the Union’s most formidable threat. We conclude by discussing three possible paths out of this downward spiral: normalization, legalization and equalization. This, we believe, is the urgent turn that the EU needs to take in order to escape this suicidal paradox.
... Derrida develops his concept of democracy as an autoimmune institution, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York: "As we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, 'itself' works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its 'own' immunity" [20]. ...
Education has been described as and considered as a remedy or a treatment for the insecurity experienced by many young people today. To recognize mental health problems and to seek treatment is the subject of many of today’s research, analyses and academic debates on education. In this article, however, we will analyze, clarify and discuss how medicalized metaphors contribute to both an understanding and a reinforcing of what we call an “autoimmune reaction”. We explore how the meaning and use of the concepts of “immunity” and “autoimmunity” in the field of philosophy of education present a new understanding of medicalized metaphors, as well as a philosophy of autoimmunity, partly based on Derrida and his analysis of “inflammatory” democracies. We will nuance and offer new perspectives and concepts with which to think, in order to understand the existing dichotomy between normality and abnormal/pathology, health and illness in educational philosophy today.
... At first sight, then, this sense of 'immunity' is of limited significance at best. Yet more recent philosophical reflections on community, immunity and autoimmunity, most notably by Jacques Derrida and Roberto Esposito, make Hearn's nineteenth-century nonce-use appear less marginal than the OED suggests (Derrida, 1998(Derrida, , 2003(Derrida, , 2005Esposito, 2008Esposito, , 2010Esposito, , 2011Esposito, , 2013b. Esposito shows that earliest usages of immunitas in ancient Rome denoted an exemption from services or duties in the juridicopolitical realm. ...
... Sloterdijk is by no means the first to insist on immunity's formative impact on society and culture. He joins other theorists like Jean Baudrillard (1993), Niklas Luhmann (1995, Jacques Derrida (2003Derrida ( , 2005, and most recently, Roberto Esposito (2008 who have conceptualized the transit between the biological and the sociopolitical. 3 Each of these figures has deployed the language of immunology to diagnose the ills of Western modernity like global terrorism. ...
This essay surveys the evolution of scholarship that embodies what (Anderson and Mackay [2014], Intolerant bodies: A short history of autoimmunity. Johns Hopkins University Press) have called the “immunological turn,” an interdisciplinary critical movement that takes immunity and vaccination as its primary critical objects. While interest in the relationship between immunology as a field in the life sciences and immunity as a cultural discourse has existed since the 1980s and 1990s, this piece traces the development of this thinking over time across the fields of political theory, anthropology, sociology, the history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, as well as literary and rhetoric studies, that together articulate and critique the centrality of immunity to Western society. This article considers how the immunological turn models an approach to the nineteenth century that draws together the humanities and the sciences in both carefully historicized and deeply theoretical ways. This survey of the field concludes with speculations on new directions for the immunological turn that interdisciplinary scholars in the nineteenth century might take up to intervene in ongoing debates over vaccine hesitancy and refusal.
... As the security policy documents argue, '[t]he aim is to be better prepared for the future and -where possible -to actively shape it' (Federal Ministry of Defense 2021b) since 'ultimately, [strategic foresight] will help us act in the present to shape the future we want' (European Comission 2021). Yet, the geopolitics of technological futures approach emphasises that geopolitics (and life) are contingent -the future remains an open process, even if we try to avoid (sometimes negative) surprises (Anderson 2010;Derrida 2003). ...
Germany’s role in global geopolitics is being renegotiated within current debates about future security architecture, weapons technology capabilities, and the spatiality of future battlefields. This paper introduces a critical geopolitics of technological futures approach and analyses weapons technology discourses through poststructuralist discourse theory and scholarship on technological expectations. It investigates German security policy documents’ construction of future threat scenarios, technological visions, battlefields, and the material-technological consequences associated with these futures. It identifies how the geopolitical scenario of ‘Westlessness’ discursively shifted after Russia’s war in Ukraine. It also considers the socio-technical imagination of ‘hyperwar’, which justifies the development of artificial intelligence-based weapons technologies. Such socio-technical imaginations construct desirable weapons and influence geopolitical leitmotifs. In turn, geopolitical imaginaries affect expectations of future weapons technologies and legitimate the acquisition of specific technologies. Therefore, this paper offers an approach to examining geopolitical power-knowledge constructions in relation to (new) technologies of killing.
Agriculture's productivity and sustainability heavily depend on crops' health. However,
monitoring the health of crops can be a daunting task for farmers, as it requires continuous
surveillance of crops and interpretation of data. In recent years, advances in technology have
led to the development of smart crop health monitoring systems that leverage the power of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate the process of monitoring and analyzing crop health
data. This paper presents an overview of a smart crop health monitoring system that uses AI
algorithms to analyze the collected data and identify any anomalies or diseases affecting the
crops. The proposed system can alert farmers in real-time about any crop health issues and
provide them with actionable insights to take preventive measures. Additionally, the system
can generate crop health reports to help farmers make informed decisions regarding crop
management practices, such as irrigation, fertilization, and pesticide application.
9/11 is a singular event in American history, with specific language and phrases that seemingly cannot be translated. The topic of terror attacks is written about in media, fiction, and nonfiction. Due to its global significance, news about 9/11 was translated into many different languages, but some aspects of the tragedy fall under the "untranslatable" category. Many shorthand phrases became popular in the United States to encompass the unspeakable. "Ground Zero" references the area where the towers collapsed, "the Pile" was often used to discuss the rubble and debris that remained. Those who either fell or leaped out of the Twin Towers were called "the Jumpers", etc. These terms are difficult to input into a different language because they are stripped of their cultural significance or simply do not have a foreign-language equivalent. Furthermore, 9/11 is viewed as an event that supersedes words in English as well. Many writers expressed a reluctance to talk about 9/11 due to the magnitude of the event and the apparent lack of words to capture it. Moreover, part of the problem of understanding (and translating) 9/11 is that two cultures and religions also clash. The American, mostly Christian perspective does not comprehend the motivations of the Muslim terrorists. So, when translating texts about 9/11, multiple problems arise. The aim of this paper is to explore translation strategies and trauma studies as a tool for understanding and translation for 9/11 essays.
This article analyzes the United States biosecurity state’s orchestration of the COVID-19 phenomenon into a public health emergency, tracing the legal platforms that made this mobilization possible. Leaning on the longstanding reverberations between political and biological discourses around immunology, I argue that the polis entered into a state of autoimmune disease where its public/private biosecurity organisms attacked its own body politic. COVID-19 constitutes the culmination of a development that had been in the making for several decades. Besides parsing the central legislative inventions that form the basis of this operation, the article analyzes the most central medical countermeasure deployed as the ostensible remedy to the public health emergency. A novel technological platform (mRNA transfection) is introduced as the solution to the threat of infection (falsely promising immunity). This platform is equally built on autoimmune logic, not traditional immunity. Unlike previous vaccine technologies, synthetic mRNA transfections coerce the body’s cells to produce the antigen against which the immune reaction is mounted. The immune system will then attack those cells that express the antigen, the most publicly acknowledged example being myocarditis. The feedback loop between biological and political discourses on autoimmune disease has begun to restructure societies globally.
At the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, several countries declared “states of exception,” that is, authorized legal devices that, in the face of circumstances deemed catastrophic, permit the implementation of extraordinary measures and the temporary suspension of some rights in order to restore the previous state of affairs as soon as possible. This paper offers a comparative textual analysis of the different states of exception declared in the USA, France, and Spain. I argue that these texts constitute a privileged site to explore how prevalent global political logics and mainstream discourses on illness are interwoven. Regarding the global political logics in play, I hold that these declarations constitute an instantiation of democracy’s autoimmune character; it attacks itself in order to protect itself. Regarding mainstream discourses on illness, I explore how illness is regarded as a threat to one’s self (by something seemingly other) and the notion that therapy must consist of securing the self’s triumph over anything seemingly other. This twofold analysis reveals that an aporetic dialectic between self and other—as regards politics and illness—operates in these declarations, most likely because it is, in fact, one and the same dialectic, upon which Western epistemology rests. Furthermore, I suggest that these texts reflect and promote these dominant logics, contributing to shape human relationships around the globe in a certain dangerous way.
Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology aims at studying critique
as an immanent phenomenon of social life. Accounting for the
critical operations undertaken by social actors in the course of
everyday disputes (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006 [1991]; 1999)
and the role played by institutions in constructing social reality
(Boltanski, 2011 [2009]), Boltanski claims that the possibility of
any social critique is grounded on the existence of specific tests
that can be set up to confirm or undermine an existing order. This
paper discusses Boltanski’s notion of “existential test,” associated
with the possibility of a radical type of critique that can be found
in those affairs, scandals, or disputes that perturb social reality.
This text aims to explore the archive as a powerful force that shapes life. Consequently, it seeks to develop an ethical framework for the archive from a feminist perspective. De-extinction can be linked to the archive as a stabilizing apparatus and a scene of responsibility (Wolfe 2018) that entails our ethical commitment to acknowledge the radical passivity of those who no longer exist in this world, both as individuals and species. This scene of responsibility is intertwined with the agency of the archive. In other words, the archive acts as a life-creating apparatus by shaping the conditions for reading, the future, and, to some extent, reality itself. By establishing the foundations for an ethics of the archive as a practice that creates life, this text aims to reframe the discourse surrounding extinction and de-extinction.
The opening article of this collection serves as an invitation to academics and practitioners of international relations to rethink and transform, not merely observe and contain, long-standing conflicts in East Asia and beyond. Traditionally such conflicts, and the violence that has emerged around them, have been understood through the lens of dichotomous frameworks associated with Westphalian modernity. We need alternative paradigms in East Asian political discourse to think and do differently. Here, we contribute to this effort by examining how East Asian medical thought and practice can facilitate political healing in the region. The use of medical analogies and metaphors is not uncommon in academic and policy discussions, and our approach underscores terminologies and thought processes that resonate with many in the region. East Asian medicine (EAM) is rooted in Daoist yin/yang dialectics and the concept of qi, both of which stress attention to balance, ontological parity and inter-connectedness. It offers inspiration for a creative analytical approach, metaphorical imagination and normative inspiration to diagnose ongoing confrontations. Despite apparent divisions, we propose that ongoing conflicts can be treated as ailments afflicting a shared political body.
The contemporary preoccupation with terrorism is marked by a curious paradox: whereas the topic has been ubiquitous in public discourse since the late twentieth century, the voices of terrorists themselves are usually silenced. Is the terrorist “the quintessential proscribed or tabooed figure of our times”, as cultural anthropologists Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass have suggested? The present volume is the first to approach the tabooing of terrorists from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective.
The depiction of identity in foreign policy analysis is typically presented as inherent or predetermined. However, discursive approaches within the field, particularly poststructuralism, have emphasized foreign policy discourse's influence on identity formation. The main aim of this paper is to elucidate the performative relationship between identity and foreign policy through a poststructuralist lens, even in situations that are not existential or geographically proximate crises. This study employs a critical discourse analysis methodology to examine the performative dynamics between foreign policy discourse by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) policymakers and officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) about distant natural disasters and the construction of the Turkish national identity. The study presents three primary findings: firstly, the AKP's foreign policy discourse recognizes the Indonesia and Pakistan disasters as significant events, in contrast to the case of Haiti; secondly, this discourse constructs a homogenous Turkish identity; and thirdly, this homogeneous Turkish identity qualifies by several signifiers and is distinguished from external others.
Recent years have witnessed a “vernacular turn” in critical security scholarship centered on everyday constructions of (in)security. In this article, I advance this turn by arguing for greater attention to the role of numbers in non-elite discourse on (in)security. Doing so deepens understanding of the mechanisms and registers through which (in)securities are constructed in the vernacular while conceptually strengthening work on vernacular security through insight from literature on the rhetorical, sociological, and political functions of numbers. To pursue this claim, the article develops a new methodological framework through which to explore the work of numbers in vernacular security discourse before applying it to original focus group data on (counter-)radicalization. From this, I highlight the importance of numerical arguments in vernacular constructions of threat, evaluation of security policies, contestation of dominant security discourses, and performances of security literacy.
This essay will suggest that Gandhi’s true/real politics can be best understood in terms of the integrity of his ideas. This integrity refers to the fact that Gandhi was a man of integrity but more importantly to the fact that there was an integrity between his ideas and practice and between his ideas themselves. The continuities that we read in Gandhi—between politics and religion, politics religion and morality, the human being and nature and the past and present—can best be unpacked if one were to understand this integrity. This essay will argue that one way to understand it would be to see that Gandhi’s arguments in economics, politics, religion, and even aesthetics drew from his fundamental moral convictions. Accordingly, the first part of this essay will suggest that Gandhi’s politics was premised on his integrity, i.e. on the idea that a human being ought to live an undivided life integrated around and by a commitment to his/her fundamental moral beliefs. The second part of the essay will argue then that a truly meaningful philosophical critique of Gandhi’s politics would only be one which could demonstrate how and where Gandhi’s politics failed to remain integrated with his fundamental moral convictions, i.e. which demonstrated how the integrity between Gandhi’s ideas themselves and between his ideas and practice broke so to say. In this context, the second section of the essay will bring in and philosophically examine Ajay Skaria’s, (Skaria, 2016) argument that satyagraha as a religion of the question (always seeking the truth which the satyagrahi did not know) involved the use of force and the imposition of the thekana/proper on the other. The essay will discuss this critique with a view to examine if it demonstrates that Gandhi’s practice disrupted his integrity both of his character and that between his ideas.KeywordsIntegrityContinuitiesSwarajSwabhavaTapasyaSatyagrahaThekanaReal politicsPower politicsCoercionDeath of God
Violence has always played a part in the religious imagination, from symbols and myths to legendary battles, from colossal wars to the theater of terrorism. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence offers intersections between religion and violence throughout history and around the world. Its forty chapters include overviews of major religious traditions, showing how violence is justified within the literary and theological foundations of the tradition, how it is used symbolically and in ritual practice, and how social acts of violence and warfare have been justified by religious ideas. They also examine patterns and themes relating to religious violence, such as sacrifice and martyrdom, which are explored in cross-disciplinary or regional analyses; and offer major analytic approaches, from literary to social scientific studies.
Since 9/11, Islam has emerged as the new Other that threatens the world’s peace and stability. Islam and the West are polarized and antagonized. They are viewed as monolithic and exclusive binaries. Islam is seen as the arch-enemy of the West and its human rights and cherished values. The Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida holds some Eurocentric views regarding Islam, which is not surprising in the case of a philosophy that is based on the extermination of all kinds of authority including religion. However, Derrida’s perception of Islam as the Other of democracy is in sharp contrast with the main tenet of his philosophy which aims at deconstructing binaries and moving the margin to the center. This paper vindicates that Derrida shows some sympathetic attitudes towards Islam and that his philosophy can be used to debunk the Western myth that represents Islam as a violent, exotic,and destructive Other. Derrida’s deconstruction theory makes it possible to deconstruct the polarity Islam/West and open dialoguebetween cultures
We reinvigorate vulnerability theory as a radically ethical device — ethical vulnerability analysis. We bring together fuller vulnerability analysis as theorized by Fineman and Grear in conversation with Levinas and Derrida’s radical vulnerability and the ethics of hospitality to construct a theoretical framework that is firmly anchored in the realities of the everyday that are vulnerability and migration. This novel framework offers a thinking space to subvert approaches to migrants and migration as it compels us to come face-to face with the “other”, which in turn renders the political accountable by her.
We deploy ethical vulnerability analysis to deconstruct the EU’s “migration crisis” and investigate whether the activation of temporary protection for displaced persons from Ukraine signifies a humanizing turn in the EU’s asylum and migration policies. In this regard, we submit that this hospitable moment constitutes an “exception to the rule” rather than a paradigm shift.
Uskonnon julkinen näkyvyys on kasvanut. Samalla myös uskontokritiikistä ja ateismista on tullut näkyvämpää kuin koskaan ennen. Väärin uskottu? Ateismin uusi näkyvyys tarkastelee ateismia ja uskontoa koskevaa julkista keskustelua monipuolisesti ja kriittisesti. Teos osoittaa erilaisia laadullisia ja määrällisiä aineistoja tutkien, miten, miksi ja missä muodossa ateismista on tullut näkyvä keskustelunaihe niin Suomessa kuin kansainvälisesti. Se ehdottaa, että äänekkäimpien ateistien ja heidän vastustajiensa jäsennykset tarvitsevat rinnalleen keskustelua rikastuttavaa ja monipuolistavaa uskonto- ja kulttuuritieteellistä otetta uskonnosta ja ateismista. Teos myös kehittelee suomalaista ateismin ja uskonnottomuuden tutkimusta. Se sopii yliopistolliseksi kurssikirjaksi ja hakuteokseksi kaikille ateismista kiinnostuneille.
The aim of this article is, based on Jacques Derrida’s and Roberto Esposito’s reflection, to articulate a philosophical paradigm that would be able to face with what I propose to call the autoimmunitarian logic of nihilism. Dealing with this logic means, first and foremost, to face “the negative” that runs through our experience without rejecting or absolutizing it. It means to think the relation between life and politics, society and institutions not in a merely oppositive way but rather in a constructive and affirmative manner. Even if in many of his works Esposito criticizes Derrida precisely for his conception of autoimmunity, in this article, I intend to show that both the philosophers orient their analyses towards what I consider the most appropriate ontological political paradigm for reading the actual political events – what they both call “co-immunity”. In the first section, I establish some methodological coordinates useful to define the approach I consider the most appropriate for the purposes of this research, namely political ontology. In section two, from a diagnostic point of view, I analyse the autoimmunitarian logic of nihilism. To investigate this logic, I firstly concentrate on Esposito’s definition of nihilism, and then I refer to his analyses of the relation between community and immunity. In the third section, with the intention of taking a closer look at the political aspects of the question, I focus on the Derridean analysis of the aporias that are inherent in the very concept of democracy. In the last section, I briefly try to test the heuristic capacity of the co-immunity paradigm with respect to the biopolitical problems arising from the management of the pandemic crisis caused by COVID-19 (and discussed in the field of the Italian biopolitical debate).
Toleration and religion are intimately related, not least because toleration first arose in Europe as one means of avoiding conflict arising from religious differences. This chapter discusses these historical origins of toleration and its association with religion. In particular, it focuses on the development of ideas of toleration as these emerged amidst the religious conflict ushered in by the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. It considers obstacles, existing at that time, to the widespread acceptance of religious toleration, centered, not least, on the “moral challenge” to which toleration gives rise among the religiously devout. It considers how pragmatic arguments for toleration, adopted by political authorities seeking to avoid conflict among rival religious denominations within their jurisdiction, circumvented this “moral challenge.” It then considers debates concerning not only the “possibility” of toleration but its “desirability” – such reservations arising as a result of the clear inequalities that toleration is perceived to involve. Finally, the chapter seeks to address the question of whether toleration remains a relevant policy within contemporary liberal democracies, the plurality and diversity of whose populations have only increased over time, and within which conflicts such as those centered on religion have not entirely abated.
This article focuses on different iterations of virality to explore the racial logic of death and the crisis of our time during the coronavirus pandemic. By examining the war on the coronavirus, the sanctions on Iran, and the rise of white supremacy in the United States, this article argues that the optimistic analyses of virus and virality are predicated upon the abstraction of the human, thus overlooking race and geopolitics.
Esteemed “Batologist” and psychologist Travis Langley has argued that for Batman’s over 80-year presence in comics, film, and TV culture, Bruce Wayne has suffered Posttraumatic Stress. However, Langley contends, that does not necessarily give Wayne a full-blown disorder from the wounds and agony (Langley 2022). I can see how this nuanced thesis holds up over the superficial World War II-themed 1940s serials, the comic 1960s Batman television series (Semple 1966–1968) and 1966 movie (Martinson 1966), the deliciously campy Burton-directed films of Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), and the Joel Schumacher-directed and Tim Burton-produced Batman Forever (1995) complete with Nicole Kidman’s smoldering psychologist who keeps trying to analyze the early traumas inside both Bruce Wayne and Batman (flirting with both, but finally finding Batman sexy and Wayne a bore). I comprehend, too, how trauma in the animated Batman series starting in 1992, developed by Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, and Mitch Brian, does not leave Batman fully dysregulated. Moreover, director Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin (1997) where a psychologist again appears and Wayne discloses more and warms to the notion living within a kind of family, Wayne does show many but not all of the hallmarks of PTSD, and we may say that these symptoms do not leave him maladapted to life. Even in one of the most traumatic treatments of Batman which will include intense terrorism scenes and battles along with a nuclear threat, Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, I still see Wayne functional: he is able to sleep, has his pleasures and hobbies, regulates himself and his anger, shows a refreshing sense of humor (at himself), laughs, and enjoys sex with dangerous women (Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter Talia) without much fear and trembling. Certainly, Wayne is injured mentally and physically; definitely, he is troubled by frequent intrusive thoughts and memories of his parents being shot down in an alley. Yet, all that is not PTSD—not an actual distressing disorder that renders him helpless—but a composite of some post-traumatic symptoms.
This book is a journey remembering, reimagining, and contending with the Global War on Terror (GWOT) via storytelling media from 2002 to 2022. It is a study of how fighters against terrorism, as reflected in 20 years of American storytelling art, are shaped by their extreme experiences at the time of incident and haunted by strange forms later. These battlers of terrorism may be masked vigilantes, New York City Police, FBI, CIA, NCIS, NSA, U.S. military intelligence officers, U.S. army armored infantry and tank corps, U.S. Marines, and U.S. government contracted interrogators, prison administrators, in-country trainers of Afghan or Iraqi national police and security forces, and psychologists. The other criterion for this study is that somewhere the counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency protagonists face paranormal activities in the narratives, ones that engage Gothic art and literature’s preoccupation with the uncanny, decay, disease, despair, death, and return of the repressed. The indisputable point is that something forever follows these protagonists either by what they had to do, or wish they had done, or what they saw and heard and felt. Their wartime behaviors, like their posttraumatic stress, persist and trail them into peacetime. Some are like living ghosts come back to haunt their homeland. Some find that they can only cease being haunted by dying themselves.
In March 2001, the Washington state novelist and frequent Playboy fiction contributor Jess Walter was headed to Gotham. Harper Collins had hired him as a memoir ghostwriter for the acting New York City Police Commissioner, Bernard Bailey Kerik. Six months later, with this project finished—The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice (Kerick 2002)—Kerik’s and Walter’s lives would take an unthinkable turn, and a far bigger story exploded than anything in the Police Commissioner’s complimentary memoir.
Joyce Carol Oates’ Carthage is in part the story of hometown golden boy Brett Kincaid of Carthage, New York. An actual town of under 4000 people, Carthage is about 200 miles northeast of Oates’ own hometown of Lockport, New York, with a current population of under 20,000 people. Named after the Tunisian city historically destroyed by the Romans during the Third Punic War in 146 BCE, destroyed again by Umayyad armies in 698 CE, and blasted by the Hafsid Dynasty around 1270 CE, the name Carthage has the Gothic resonance of a ruin. Over 2000 years, its land was razed, its soldiers were killed, and its living civilians enslaved. It is the appropriate name for a place contending with memory and trauma. It also happens to be the 1948 birthplace of one of America’s most treasured directors of urban legend horror, possession, Lovecraftian mystery, Satanic excess, Gothic revenge, and weird little brothers. From his Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Christine (1983), Prince of Darkness (1987), to In the Mouth of Madness (1994), John Carpenter has haunted viewers with tragic threats at the edge of life that creep closer. Sleepy Carthage, New York, then, named after a city of continual tragedy and home to artists who meditate on the monstrous, becomes the locus of a family’s tragedy when their university freshman daughter Cressida (Cressie) Mayfield goes missing. Another family’s tragedy ignites in Carthage when its son Corporal Brett Kincaid is blamed for the kidnapping and probable murder of Cressie. What powers and emotionalizes Carthage is not the mistreatment or killing of underage terrorist suspects as in The Zero or Castle, but another kind of crime more frequent in the fictions of Joyce Carol Oates where Death and the Maiden meet, which I will argue is based on a true-crime one which may be the most painful (and sensationalized by enemy terrorists including Al Qaeda) in all of America’s tragic involvement in the Iraq War (2003–2011). An astonishing, emotionally draining page-turner of novel with an ingenious structure to build suspense and surprise, the ghost of a killed child comes back with the Corporal when he returns to his fiancée in upstate New York, and will help to shatter the town named after the storied ruined city of Roman hatred.
This chapter explores the way the concept of resilience is used in the US Marines in the twenty-first century. ‘Resilience’ valorizes character, choice, and Marine Corps values, rather than technology, medical developments, or belief in a higher mission. The Corps adopted ‘positive psychology’ deployed in the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program and Operational Stress Control and Readiness. These initiatives created tensions because of difference between macro-policies and micro-implementations as well as the coexistence of two different approaches (the physiological-social and emotional-social model). The chapter turns to responses to ‘bad events’ where attempts were made to distinguish distress of combat from avoidable traumas. The chapter concludes by addressing some of the larger political and ideological consequences of ‘resilience’.KeywordsResilienceMarine CorpsCSFOSCARMilitary trainingPTSD
While regularly applied to globalized migration, conceptualizations of hospitality have rarely been used to understand healthcare settings. Drawing on interviews with healthcare staff in Sweden, our article contributes to the current conceptualization of hospitality accounting for: the internal contradictions of hospitality that racialized staff experience in their everyday interactions with patients and other staff; the shifting boundaries between host and guest in everyday healthcare practices, especially when examined through the lens of racialization and finally; the subtle though troubled coexistence of hostility and un(conditional) hospitality that weakens resistance against racism. The analysis maps the complex contingencies of professional, ethnic and national relations between staff and patients, in light of their racialized and gendered nature, to suggest that the ambivalences theorized as part of the concept of hospitality show how the hurts of racism are so hard to pinpoint.
Originally imagined as both granary and church writ large, Langland’s Barn of Unity morphs into a space of refuge-in-crisis as it is besieged by Antichrist and the Seven Deadly Sins in Piers Plowman’s apocalyptic finale. Central to Langland’s imagining is a conundrum at the heart of hospitality, the Latin root of which means not only guest and friend but also stranger and enemy. Within Unity, the allegorical figure of Conscience practices hospitality, welcoming others, yet attempting to set conditions for entry to keep his space morally intact. Unity is intended to be a refuge from the violence of sin, but with every act of welcome Conscience risks letting sin in. This essay breaks new ground by interrogating Langland’s representation of these acts of welcome in relation to recent hospitality theory (of Derrida and others) to illuminate how the satirical bent of the ending of Piers Plowman coexists with reformist idealism.
Autoimmunity is a philosophical term that enhances the fields of life-sciences, and links out to the unnatural behaviour of an individual. It is caused by the defenses of an organism that deceive its own tissues. Obviously, the immune system should protect the body against invading cells with types of white blood cells called antibodies. Nevertheless, when an autoimmune disease attacks, it causes perilous actions like suicide. Psychologically, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) calls autoimmunity a double suicide, because it harms the self and the other. In this case, the organ disarms betraying cells, as the immune system cannot provide protection. From a literary perspective, Derrida has called autoimmunity as deconstruction for over forty years. Autoimmunity is an animalistic behaviour that makes a sufferer strive to change the current political system, because s/he believes to have a better democratic system. The purpose of this paper is to explore Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons (2000), to reflect how people should always expect autoimmune attacks. Worse attacks should be expected in the future, because more people want to revolt against current political systems. That is why autoimmunity is considered to be political terrorism.
Introduction. In modern life sciences, it is impossible to ignore the problems of viruses, bacteria, parasites and their impact on the ecosystems. But the interface is a human ecosystem of the digital age and a new formation of life, which means that it also needs to be understood from subdiscursive elements, such as digital analogues of viruses, bacteria, and parasites.
Methodology and sources. Methodologically, the work is based on a philosophical analysis of the challenges and precedents of the digital field, examples of research literature, the methods of media philosophy, anarchist epistemology, and philosophical epidemiology are applied (M. Foucault, K. Kukso).
Results and discussion. The article shows that the epistemological understanding of the interface should be supplemented with an epidemiological understanding, otherwise the principles and forms of life translated into numbers will elude theory.
The interface is thought of as a condition of possibilities: discursive, instrumental, demonstrative. The interface is seen as an epistemological configuration (from the Greek ῐ̔ѧστημῐ, i.e. not just “possessing knowledge”, but “possessing”, – to establish, appoint) – as a form of power, i.e. as a series of forced measures, reacting to something not completely determined, spontaneous, but imperceptibly limiting and transforming the will, the very logic of the act, or the pragmatics of the action.
Conclusion. To understand the interface, it is necessary to shift attention from various plugins, drivers, interactive mechanics that determine epistemological possibilities to microprocesses that build the interface as a user experience based on epidemiological restrictions.
Most ethical theories focus on the study of the moral behaviour of human beings, on those human beings who are considered adults. However, there is no consistent account of what an adult is in moral terms, or of how we become adults with moral responsibilities. In this dissertation I interrogate the Kantian moral theory and I propose to complement it by incorporating a model of moral development inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis. The purpose of this dissertation is to depict a model, based on the observation of the dynamics of guilt, capable of explaining the moral transition from childhood to adulthood in order to reflect on what goodness means, how we can take care of our moral goodness, and how we can recover it if we lose it.
Shaped by Hegel, philosophy’s approach to Antigone has always been firmly rooted in all the assumptions of realism, with proper, true-to-life, consistent, and plausible characters. These characterological mimetic interpretations often feed off of each other within the context of what’s perceived as “realist” drama, with its focus on characters and their insoluble, hence tragic, conflict. Starting with the twentieth-century avant-garde, however, theatre became less and less interested in characterological mimicry as a foundation of drama and what follows, as the foundation of the theatrical experience itself. Along with the shift in our approach to character, we have also experienced a shift in our understanding of other Aristotelian components of drama (“Plot” and “Thought”) and dramatic genres (“Tragedy”). As our sense of character and Thought shifted from stable to unstable, so did our understanding of tragedy and its role at the junction of theatre and philosophy. Tragedy has shifted from dialectic to aporia, from binary to polynary. Antigone—with its multiple interpretations and critical lenses—illuminates this fundamental shift in our understanding of tragedy and, thus, the fundamental shift in the relationship between theatre and philosophy in postdramatic theatre.
We deploy a novel and radical approach to vulnerability theory to investigate Scotland's response to asylum seekers’ vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic and test Scotland's self-affirmation as a hospitable country. Our ethical vulnerability analysis enhances Fineman's vulnerability analysis by denationalising the vulnerable subject and locating her within our ‘uneven globalised world’. We further enrich this fuller version of vulnerability analysis with insights from Levinas's and Derrida's radical vulnerability theory and ethics of hospitality. We demonstrate how our ethical vulnerability analysis enables us to subvert the hostile premise of migration laws and policies, and thus fundamentally redefine relationships between guests and hosts so that the host is compelled to respond to the Other's vulnerability. We argue that this hospitable impulse yields a generous and absolute commitment to progressive social welfare provision for asylum seekers, which brings Scotland closer to fulfilling its aspirations to be a hospitable host by welcoming the Other.
Roberto Esposito (1998; 2002; 2008) examines how immunological apparatuses originally designed to protect communities end up undermining communities. This paper explores comparatively his view on the interplay between community and immunity with Giorgio Agamben’s and Jacques Derrida’s, although in their works these notions appear under other labels. Beyond pointing out their similarities, the paper concludes by analyzing what, in our view, constitute the raison d’être of their ultimate and irreconcilable differences: Agamben’s approach is antinomic, while Derrida’s is aporetic and Esposito’s is rather dialectical.
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