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This chapter examines Virilio's and Agamben's accounts of world politics. Virilio and Agamben, like Arendt and Benjamin, reject historicism and social science, taking them to be two, equally regrettable, sides of the coin of modern hubris. In Virilio's case, the re-thinking of chromos as globalised, infinitely accelerating time provides the key to the interpretation of contemporary world politics, which is a story of decline and potential apocalypse. For Agamben, the present is also identified with a potentially terrible end of history, as the ‘state of exception’ becomes the normal condition for the conduct of global politics. For both thinkers, redressing this parlous situation requires the re-assertion of political time, which Virilio understands in Arendtian terms as the spatial control of chromos, and Agamben in terms of Benjamin's messianic time.
Chapter 4 focuses on the giving and receiving of promises and speech acts. Reading The Franklin’s Tale and The Manciple’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it asks what kind of obligations and responses are engaged by promising and other performatives, and how gender and genre make a difference to the effects of these linguistic acts. In The Franklin’s Tale, a potential sex triangle is resolved happily through the protagonists’ generosities of body, word and coin. The Manciple’s Tale, by contrast, has a darker narrative patterning whose reciprocal gestures are destructive, and whose final warnings are of the dangers of giving and telling. Both tales represent the spoken or written word as an unpredictable object, whose meanings and return value may be initiated but not finally contained by its speaker or author.
this fluorescent-lit, makeshift youth club where I whiled away time in the evenings, dreaming that George Best might drop by in his white Rolls Royce and fluffed mink coat to throw us smiles and empty the coin boxes. Suddenly I’m 12 and being ordered to tug the family washing in a granny shopping trolley down Burton Road to the laundrette. The sight of me makes me laugh, my youthful doppelganger skinny as a pole, scrunched face hauling my weight in siblings’ dirty clothes. I snuck in with sellotape in my pocket to stick the coins onto. This was so, after slipping the
This chapter critically examines two dominant strands of diaspora theorising, one described as the ‘ideal-type approach’ and the other coined as the ‘hybridity approach’. The former focuses on the key characteristics of diaspora, that is ‘diaspora as a being’, often constructing ideal types (for example, Cohen 1996; Safran 1991). The latter examines ‘diaspora as a becoming’ and pays attention to subjectivity, fluidity and hybridity when discussing diaspora (for example, Bhabha 1990; Brah 1996; Clifford 1994; Gilroy 1993; Hall 1990).
While the chapter recognises the conceptual clarifications these theories have brought, it raises various problems that they have introduced. The chapter attempts to push the boundaries of diaspora scholarship, which has can get hemmed into debates on either hybridity or the gardening tropes and ideal type definitions. The chapter advocates a discussion of diaspora that focuses less on who constitutes a diaspora or according to what criteria or conditions, and more on how diasporas translate and decolonise. It argues that diaspora overlaps with transnationalism and migration, but suggests that the distinction of diaspora and its potential as a critical concept can be revealed and enhanced through translation and decolonisation. The chapter offers a temporal and heterogeneous calibration of the concept of diaspora, yet it seeks to refrain from confining it to subjectivity. The chapter thus argues how we should develop an understanding of diaspora that reveals its capacity as a critical concept, claiming its transformative and far-reaching potential.
Foucault often writes with an eye on the stage. In famous passages, he cites the theatre to explain violent displays of royal power or the oldest rituals of Christian penance. Elsewhere he coins technical terms on theatrical models (‘Ubu power’, ‘alethurgy’). Sometimes he cannot convey the importance of theatre except by repetition or superlatives: ‘the dramatization of the drama’, he says, or ‘maximum theatricality’. If these references occur throughout Foucault’s writing, in relation to varied topics, sustained discussions of theatrical performance appear where they may be least expected: in relation to philosophy itself. The clearest example is the essay entitled (in deliberate Latin) ‘Theatrum philosophicum’ (‘Philosophical Theatre’). The essay is typically read as Foucault’s reckoning with Deleuze. It is that, of course. It is also and more importantly a meditation on Pierre Klossowski’s erotic-theological tableaux vivants. More than Deleuze, Klossowski’s Nietzschean efforts to write philosophy as theatrical script provoke or inspire Foucault’s own writing. ‘Theatrum philosophicum’ declares his own practice as an author and thinker – that is, a dramaturge.
Anglo-French appeasement at Munich had a transformative effect on the United States. This is something of a paradox: the proceedings at Munich were far from American shores, American public opinion was at the high point of ‘isolationism’, there was no large immigrant constituency of Czech-Americans to rally other Americans to their cause and US foreign policy had previously had little interest in Czechoslovakia. Before autumn 1938, American interests in Europe were peripheral. Yet even though the Roosevelt administration was a bystander, Munich brought the United States deep into the heart of European affairs, and the reason had everything to do with fear. Appeasement may have averted war in the short term, but it raised the spectre of longer-term and perpetual war. Americans began to fear not so much for their physical safety and their territorial integrity – although those fears were certainly amplified – but for the fate of ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’ and the ‘American way of life’, themselves new cultural constructions, because Hitler had taken international society outside civilised norms. Though they did not yet use the term, Americans acutely felt the pressures of globalisation, of a shrinking world that made possible new types of threats to their ‘national security’. These new fears resonated throughout American society, from elite politics to ordinary churches. The response to Munich eventually saw the repudiation of ‘isolationism’ and an enthusiastic embrace of a militarised, globalist role for the United States. Munich, in other words, inadvertently conceived the ‘American Century’ three years before Henry Luce coined the term.
Chapter 2 scrutinises the connection between the right to territoriality and the mobility of marginalised minorities, particularly how the perception of Roma as a ‘deviant culture’ contributes to the forceful restriction of their rights (such as the right to free movement). State authorities limit freedom of movement for Roma because they construct them as a security threat. The chapter argues that all these cases should not be simply seen in terms of the right to mobility, but in terms of the rights certain groups have on particular territories. The chapter then examines whether there are any similarities in relation to territory and mobility in the case of Australian Indigenous people. Although both of these groups have rights on the territory, their claims have been suspended when they have been in conflict either with the sovereignty of the states or the economic interests of the states (as in the case of the Intervention in the Northern Territory in Australia). The chapter concludes that freedom of movement and territorial rights are two sides of the same coin: it is the states that grant or restrict them, and this leads to the positioning of marginalised minorities at the fringes of citizenship.
The suggestive phrase ‘discrepant awareness’ was coined in 1960 by Bertrand Evans to explore the ways in which Shakespeare presents differences in knowledge and understanding between characters, and between characters and audience, in order to build up irony and suspense, and to complicate plotting. This device, Evans suggests, is crucial to Shakespeare’s dramatic craftsmanship and a clue to the great range of theatrical effects he creates, respecting the multiplicity of perceptions that coexist and interact. However, while Evans shows how narrative complexity is enhanced by studying the limitations of what each individual knows or is ‘aware of’ at a particular moment he pays little attention to what each character is feeling. The argument advanced in this chapter is that the neglected notion of discrepant awareness can fruitfully be developed to include consideration of emotional fluctuations in each play, including passions (fixed obsessions), affects (humoral aspects in character creation), and emotions (fleeting situational responses). We explore emotional complexity of scenes for both characters and audiences, using scenes respectively from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Cymbeline. It might be regarded as a distinctive hallmark of Shakespeare’s dramatic method in dealing with emotional complexity.
This chapter re-examines Beckett’s 1950s coining of the terms ‘adaphatroce’, which could best be paraphrased as ‘dreadful’ or ‘atrocious adaptation’, to argue that it does not signify a wholesale rejection of creative responses to his work but rather constitutes the starting point of a gradual embrace, at least an acceptance or recognition of the phenomenon as a powerful cultural force. By critically assessing his comments on the matter as they appear in published letters from the 1950s to the 1980s, touching upon various genres and media, the chapter attempts to reconstruct Beckett’s implicit ‘poetics’ of adaptation and illustrate how it aligns with key notions such as self-translation, self-directing, intertextuality and intermediality, which now have come to be recognised as central to his creative practice. Starting with an overview of adaptations that Beckett was himself involved in, the account moves on to creative reworkings he merely authorised or denied, to end with a reflection on how his perception of his own authority over his own work had changed as a result. In doing so, the chapter makes the ongoing (re-)historicising of Beckett, partly through archival research, an important precondition, not only for a better understanding of his own views on adaptation but also to keep his work vibrant in a twenty-first-century context.
distinguish brute and option luck; and to examine the relationship between the reward structure and responsibility. Luck and probabilities Imagine a simple Bournelli trial of coin tosses. In each trial we have a pattern of outcomes with probability p (success) and 1 − p (failure). What patterns do we describe as good/bad luck and what do we describe as ‘to be expected’? For each trial we know the probability of heads is 0.5 and 142 Luck for tails is 0.5. Let us concentrate upon the probability of getting heads as success. Each time the coin comes down heads, we see this