Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-04-05DOI: 10.1177/07255136241240082
Wojciech Engelking
{"title":"Transubstantiation as a normative process: James Joyce and Carl Schmitt in 1922","authors":"Wojciech Engelking","doi":"10.1177/07255136241240082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241240082","url":null,"abstract":"The thesis that legal norms are rooted in theology is not new. It is worth considering, however, to what extent not only singular norms, but also models of normativity are the structural representation of theological concepts. In this article, I consider transubstantiation as one of such ideas. I analyse its place in two political theologies published at the same time (in 1922): Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology and James Joyce’s Ulysses. I argue that both thinkers used the idea of transubstantiation as a normative mechanism to deal with anomie that encompassed European societies after the First World War.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140587681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-03-25DOI: 10.1177/07255136241240093
Domonkos Sik
{"title":"Justifying the paradoxes of modernity: On the emergence of contemporary cynical discourses","authors":"Domonkos Sik","doi":"10.1177/07255136241240093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241240093","url":null,"abstract":"Late modern existence is built around ambivalences: subjects experience the structural paradoxes of global capitalism or information society as social suffering; yet they follow behaviour patterns reinforcing the unsustainable trajectories. The article explores the discourses justifying such structural paradoxes, while normalizing the related suffering. First, the pragmatic theory of justification (Boltanski, Thévenot) is reinterpreted from a modernization theoretical perspective: a distinction is drawn between traditional, classic and late modern ‘tests’, ‘critique’ and ‘cités’. In the second and third sections, the gradual emptying of critique is analysed: as disillusionment reaches the sphere of subjective experiences, not even personal suffering can ground critique any more (Berlant), thus the impossibility of critique is demonstrated in a cynical manner (Sloterdijk). In the fourth section, the various cynical modalities of justification fitting the ambivalent contemporary existence are overviewed. Finally, a way out from the naturalized, quotidian cynicism is sketched: by turning cynicism’s logic against itself, the dialectics of justification can move forward.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140300318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-03-25DOI: 10.1177/07255136241240090
Luyang Zhou
{"title":"Revolution as a transition from empire to nation-state(s): Comparing the Soviet and Chinese paths","authors":"Luyang Zhou","doi":"10.1177/07255136241240090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241240090","url":null,"abstract":"How did revolutions facilitate empires’ transition to nation-states? This article compares the Bolshevik and the Chinese Communist Revolutions. It conceptualizes this Soviet–Sino comparison through three dimensions of nation-building: separating from a universal community, building a national cultural core and overcoming internal ethnopolitics. Both socialist regimes accommodated the nation-state model by fusing centralized control with limited autonomy for ethnic minorities. Yet, whereas the Soviet Union claimed to be a universal union of nation-states, which was supposed to keep accepting new members until it covered the entire globe, the People’s Republic of China resembled a typical nation-state that preserved multiethnicity and enclosed borders under the title of the ‘Chinese Nation’. In analyzing the influence of revolutions, this article probes three relations: inter-revolution, revolution–society and revolution–counterrevolution. Arising after the Bolsheviks as a follower-revolution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was confined to a national component of the USSR’s global communism project. This shaped the CCP’s enclosed geographical activity space, Han-dominated ethnic composition and the consciousness of national liberation. The CCP’s mobilization covered far wider social strata than the Bolsheviks’ had, which engendered stronger manpower and motivation to transform the traditional culture into a national culture. Being weak at its borderlands, the CCP was cautious about the doctrine of ‘national self-determination’, not daring to make it a geopolitical weapon for revolution export as the Bolsheviks had done in founding the Soviet Union. Owing to each of these differences in revolutionary trajectories, the CCP was more receptive to ‘China’ than the Bolsheviks were to ‘Russia’, and this led to two distinctive ways of reorganizing empires into nation-states.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140380909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-03-25DOI: 10.1177/07255136241240086
Mads Ejsing
{"title":"Why the turn to matter matters: A response to post-Marxist critiques of new materialism","authors":"Mads Ejsing","doi":"10.1177/07255136241240086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241240086","url":null,"abstract":"Theories of new materialism have gained increasing traction in the social and human sciences in recent decades, as thinkers like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett have reinvigorated the philosophical interest in topics such as the agency of nonhuman matter, the relational nature of existence and the limitations of anthropocentric forms of inquiry. However, these theories have faced criticism from post-Marxist critical theorists, who argue that theories of new materialism blunt social and capitalist critique and promote obscurity by flattening the world to a single ontological plane. In this article, I argue that these critiques rely on mischaracterizations of new materialist scholarship and that theories of new materialism can in fact help us re-examine – not reject, as their critics suggest – the role of critique, responsibility and human politics in the context of the Anthropocene and its unfolding ecological crises.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140382599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-03-21DOI: 10.1177/07255136241229230
David Roberts
{"title":"From modernism to presentism: On the destination of art","authors":"David Roberts","doi":"10.1177/07255136241229230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241229230","url":null,"abstract":"The idea of modern art presupposes the rise of historicism and the sense of progress since the Enlightenment. Once art, however, conceives itself as progressive and hence modern, it is confronted by the paradoxes of progress: progress renders the modern obsolete at the same time as it seeks to give itself meaning by positing a goal, a destination that would be the end purpose and hence the end of progress. As a consequence, modern art is impelled to constantly transcend its own achievements and limits in a utopian quest for the artwork of the future, the ultimate work of art. But what happens to art when the grand art-historical narrative of modernism collapses? I argue that the ‘modern’ mutates into the ‘contemporary’ and that art now defines itself not in relation to the future but to the present. Contemporary art understands itself as operating in the present, that is, as an art for the present. It finds its destination now in the latest institutionalization of the paradoxes of progress: the museum of contemporary art.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140300392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-03-21DOI: 10.1177/07255136241240091
Kristian Bondo Hansen, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou
{"title":"Not so ‘dumb money’? Constituting professionals and amateurs in the history of finance capitalism","authors":"Kristian Bondo Hansen, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou","doi":"10.1177/07255136241240091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241240091","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the historically contentious relationship between the financial market and the public as discussed in academic literature, financial journalism and prescriptive how-to invest handbooks during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although financial markets thrive off active public participation, speculating at stock and commodity exchanges has been a sanctioned ritual reserved for a privileged minority. We argue that the financial establishment’s intent to control market access through financial entry-barriers (such as exchange membership fees and margin requirements) has been part of a bigger story we need to understand: a history of delegitimating uninitiated ‘lay speculators’ through the construction of exclusionary narratives about unfit amateur investors and morally corrupt publics. We conceptualize this process as an ongoing and delicate boundary-making exercise contributing to a market participation discourse that has been characterized by a set of reductive binaries, such as those of insider–outsider, professional–amateur and speculator–gambler. We show, however, that attempts to delineate popular participation in financial markets through these binaries have been complicated by the idea that besides being a force of market instability and collective irrationality, the public was a largely untapped source of liquidity. We argue that today’s discourse on public participation in financial markets resuscitates these simplified narratives and propose a more nuanced view of non-professional market participants being both destabilizers and liquidity-providers.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140223514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1177/07255136241233334
Peter J Verovšek
{"title":"Book review: Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis","authors":"Peter J Verovšek","doi":"10.1177/07255136241233334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241233334","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140044741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-02-28DOI: 10.1177/07255136241227675
Rob Shields, Nicholas Hardy
{"title":"Practical aesthesis","authors":"Rob Shields, Nicholas Hardy","doi":"10.1177/07255136241227675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241227675","url":null,"abstract":"Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct albeit contested relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic, somatic concept, prompting a re-evaluation of the distinction between experience and abstraction. We trace its ongoing repression from Plato through ‘western’ theories of formal Aesthetics. Drawing on a relational interpretation of Protagoras’ aesthesis, we argue that modern pragmatists and radical empiricists, as well as more contemporary critics of the ‘colonization’ of aesthesis (Mignolo and Vasquez) by formal Aesthetics recognize and develop the relational and ethical aspects of aesthesis. We consider the role of the body, affect, and of the intangible or virtual qualities of aesthesis. The ethics of obligations (Weil) in the polis (Arendt) shows how aesthesis informs politics despite its repression in favour of moral and legal norms. We argue this is relevant to contemporary crises such as xenophobia and ecocidal climate warming.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140034033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-02-21DOI: 10.1177/07255136241233351
Jonathan Fardy
{"title":"Book review: The Poverty of Philosophy: Readings in Non and Other Philosophies or Arts of Immanence","authors":"Jonathan Fardy","doi":"10.1177/07255136241233351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241233351","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139948398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thesis ElevenPub Date : 2024-02-21DOI: 10.1177/07255136241233350
Zeger Polhuijs
{"title":"Book review: My Life in Fragments","authors":"Zeger Polhuijs","doi":"10.1177/07255136241233350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241233350","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139948470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}