Refine
Year of publication
- 2018 (17) (remove)
Document Type
- Postprint (11)
- Article (3)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (2)
- Part of a Book (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (17)
Keywords
- Affective Computing (2)
- German colonialism (2)
- Italy (2)
- affect (2)
- disposition (2)
- emotions (2)
- event (2)
- eventology (2)
- genealogy (2)
- psychopower (2)
Institute
- Philosophische Fakultät (17) (remove)
On 6 June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to fight the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO). Between August 1982 and February
1984, the US, France, Britain and Italy deployed a Multinational
Force (MNF) to Beirut. Its task was to act as an interposition force to
bolster the government and to bring peace to the people. The
mission is often forgotten or merely remembered in context with
the bombing of US Marines’ barracks. However, an analysis of the
Italian contingent shows that the MNF was not doomed to fail and
could accomplish its task when operational and diplomatic efforts
were coordinated. The Italian commander in Beirut, General Franco
Angioni, followed a successful approach that sustained neutrality,
respectful behaviour and minimal force, which resulted in a
qualified success of the Italian efforts.
The focus in this article, through a reading of the German-Australian
newspaper Der Kosmopolit, is on the legacies of entangled imperial
identities in the period of the nineteenth-century German
Enlightenment. Attention is drawn to members of the liberal
nationalist generation of 1848 who emigrated to the Australian
colonies and became involved in intellectual activities there. The
idea of entanglement is applied to the philosophical orientation
of the German-language newspaper that this group formed, Der
Kosmopolit, which was published between 1856 and 1957. Against
simplistic notions that would view cosmopolitanism as the
opposite of nationalism, it is argued that individuals like Gustav
Droege and Carl Muecke deployed an entangled ‘cosmo-
nationalism’ in ways that both advanced German nationalism and
facilitated their own engagement with and investment in
Australian colonial society.
Affect Disposition(ing)
(2018)
The “affective turn” has been primarily concerned not with what affect is, but what it does. This article focuses on yet another shift towards how affect gets organized, i.e., how it is produced, classified, and controlled. It proposes a genealogical as well as a critical approach to the organization of affect and distinguishes between several “affect disposition(ing) regimes”—meaning paradigms of how to interpret and manage affects, for e.g., encoding them as byproducts of demonic possession, judging them in reference to a moralistic framework, or subsuming them under an industrial regime. Bernard Stiegler’s concept of psychopower will be engaged at one point and expanded to include social media and affective technologies, especially Affective Computing. Finally, the industrialization and cybernetization of affect will be contrasted with poststructuralist interpretations of affects as events.
Affect Disposition(ing)
(2018)
The “affective turn” has been primarily concerned not with what affect is, but what it does. This article focuses on yet another shift towards how affect gets organized, i.e., how it is produced, classified, and controlled. It proposes a genealogical as well as a critical approach to the organization of affect and distinguishes between several “affect disposition(ing) regimes”—meaning paradigms of how to interpret and manage affects, for e.g., encoding them as byproducts of demonic possession, judging them in reference to a moralistic framework, or subsuming them under an industrial regime. Bernard Stiegler’s concept of psychopower will be engaged at one point and expanded to include social media and affective technologies, especially Affective Computing. Finally, the industrialization and cybernetization of affect will be contrasted with poststructuralist interpretations of affects as events.
This essay sets out to theorize the “new” Arctic Ocean as a pivot from
which our standard map of the world is currently being
reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic
and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized
by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood
both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds
in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contact
zone in its own right. I examine both functions of the Arctic via a
reading of the dispute over the Northwest Passage (which
emphasizes the Arctic as a space of transit) and the contemporary
assessment of new models of sovereignty in the Arctic region
(which concentrates on the circumpolar Arctic as an oceanic
world). However, both of these debates frequently exclude
indigenous positions on the Arctic. By reading Canadian Inuit
theories on the Arctic alongside the more prominent debates, I
argue for a decolonizing reading of the Arctic inspired by Inuit
articulations of the “Inuit Sea.” In such a reading, Inuit conceptions
provide crucial interventions into theorizing the Arctic. They also,
in turn, contribute to discussions on indigeneity, sovereignty, and
archipelagic theory in Atlantic and Pacific studies.
Forging an Italian hero?
(2018)
Over the last two decades, Amedeo Guillet (1909–2010) has been turned into a public and military hero. His exploits as a guerrilla leader in Italian East Africa in 1941 have been exaggerated to forge a narrative of an honourable resistance against overwhelming odds. Thereby, Guillet has been showcased as a romanticized colonial explorer who was an apolitical and timeless Italian officer. He has been compared to Lawrence of Arabia in order to raise his international visibility, while his genuine Italian brand is perpetuated domestically. By elevating him to an official role model, the Italian Army has gained a focal point for military heroism that was also acceptable in the public memory as the embodiment of a ‘glorious’ defeat narrative.
The grammatization of European vernacular languages began in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance and continued up until the end of the 18th century. Through this process, grammars were written for the vernaculars and, as a result, the vernaculars were able to establish themselves in important areas of communication. Vernacular grammars largely followed the example of those written for Latin, using Latin descriptive categories without fully adapting them to the vernaculars. In accord with the Greco-Latin tradition, the grammars typically contain sections on orthography, prosody, morphology, and syntax, with the most space devoted to the treatment of word classes in the section on “etymology.” The earliest grammars of vernaculars had two main goals: on the one hand, making the languages described accessible to non-native speakers, and on the other, supporting the learning of Latin grammar by teaching the grammar of speakers’ native languages. Initially, it was considered unnecessary to engage with the grammar of native languages for their own sake, since they were thought to be acquired spontaneously. Only gradually did a need for normative grammars develop which sought to codify languages. This development relied on an awareness of the value of vernaculars that attributed a certain degree of perfection to them. Grammars of indigenous languages in colonized areas were based on those of European languages and today offer information about the early state of those languages, and are indeed sometimes the only sources for now extinct languages. Grammars of vernaculars came into being in the contrasting contexts of general grammar and the grammars of individual languages, between grammar as science and as art and between description and standardization. In the standardization of languages, the guiding principle could either be that of anomaly, which took a particular variety of a language as the basis of the description, or that of analogy, which permitted interventions into a language aimed at making it more uniform.
This paper offers an exploratory Interactional Linguistic account of the role that inferences play in episodes of ordinary conversational interaction. To this end, it systematically reconsiders the conversational practice of using the lexico-syntactic format oh that's right to implicitly claim "just-now" recollection of something previously known, but momentarily confused or forgotten. The analyses reveal that this practice typically occurs as part of a larger sequential pattern that the participants orient to and which serves as a procedure for dealing with, and generating an account for, one participant's production of an inapposite action. As will be shown, the instantiation and progressive realization of this sequential procedure requires local inferential work from the participants. While some facets of this inferential work appear to be shaped by the particular context of the ongoing interaction, others are integral to the workings of the sequence as such. Moreover, the analyses suggest that participants' understanding of oh that's right as embodying an implicit memory claim rests on an inference which is based on a kind of semantic-pragmatic compositionality. The paper thus illustrates how inferences in conversational interaction can be systematically studied and points to the merits of combining an interactional and a linguistic perspective.
Literaturen der Welt
(2018)
Wovon sprechen wir, wenn wir von Weltliteratur sprechen? Seit seiner goetheschen Prägung hat der Begriff der ‚Weltliteratur‘ immer wieder und auch in jüngerer Zeit eine breite Debatte innerhalb der philologischen Disziplinen erfahren. Dabei ist es spätestens seit Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts nicht mehr ausreichend, einen politischen Schlüsselbegriff in einen „vereinheitlichenden Singular“ zu verpacken: Die Heterogenität eines weltweit sich erstreckenden literarischen Feldes sowie historisch involvierter Mechanismen zumeist europäischer Zentralisierung bleiben nach wie vor unbeachtet. Eine verfestigte Literaturpolitik des Kanonischen suggeriert hier allein schon begrifflich einen exklusiven Deutungsanspruch des Weltliterarischen.
Daher bedarf es einer kritischen Fundierung zugunsten einer pluralisierenden Öffnung der Literaturwissenschaften auf die „Literaturen der Welt“. Der vorliegende Band verhandelt Ansätze, Analysen und Kritikpunkte der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, Geschichte, Übersetzungswissenschaft, Soziologie und Genderforschung, die ein solches Unterfangen begleiten und vertiefen.