Gillian Rose

A dilemma in critical systems thinking is how to balance a desire for critique to inspire far-reaching transformations in society with the requirement for people to reach accommodations to enable on-the-ground change. Both critique and accommodation are necessary to realise transformations, yet they are often in tension. If critique is undertaken by lone researchers and prioritised over accommodation, then the lack of stakeholder buy-in can lead to a failure of implementation. Conversely, if accommodation is prioritised over critique, then implementation is more likely, but it may be less than transformative due to the need to keep more conservative stakeholders engaged. A strategy to address this problem is offered by Gillian Rose. This paper discusses how her strategy can inform critical systems thinking. It then ends with more general reflections on the value of the work of Gillian Rose for systemic intervention.

In Origin of the German Trauerspiel, Benjamin offers a “natural history” of Baroque sovereignty. This paper examines how the Baroque allegory of nature, implied in the natural history approach, informs Benjamin’s legal critique and analysis of Fascism. I begin by discussing Benjamin’s historico-philosophical approach to law and justice in “Critique of Violence,” where the evocation of natural history occurs against the backdrop of Benjamin’s rejection of any affirmative concept of natural right. This negative criticism is shown to have originated in Trauerspiel, where natural history as a method contains the discoveries Benjamin made about the 17th-century Baroque allegory of nature in philosophical, theological, and aesthetic terms. The portrayal of nature as fallen, transient, and positivized informs Benjamin’s theory of Baroque sovereignty and his understanding of the fate of legal positivism. At the crux of this paper, I show that this conservative-revolutionary hermeneutics enables a profound understanding of reactionary political phenomena from the 19th-century Romantic counter-revolution and restoration to the 20th-century Fascist triumph of legal positivism. In particular, Benjamin’s natural history reveals the origins of Schmitt’s total state in these persisting tendencies with origins in the political theory of the 17th-century absolute monarchy. However, regardless of the metaphysical depth of Benjamin’s natural history of Baroque sovereignty, his dismissal of the natural right tradition leads him to pit fallen positive law against redemptive utopianism in a way that fails to expound any realizable just ends. I conclude that the limitation of this approach, which is reflected in antinomian interpretations of Benjamin, can be remedied with an expanded program of natural history that calls forth the materialist dialectical critique of historical contradictions of rational natural right without rejecting it.

Karl Korsch was the prominent member of Western Marxism. The deaths of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels led to separation of Marxists in Western Europe. K. Korsch was more independent and critical than others. His approach to Marxism was defensive in the context of its philosophy. In this case, he emphasized the relationship between Marxism and philosophy. According to K. Korsch, variety of statements about this relationship was the main factor of separation between Western Marxists. In addition, the analysis of Marxism by K. Korsch to revive it as theoretical expression of proletarian movement, and his emphasis on relationship between theory and practice made his philosophy debatable between 19-21st centuries. Thus, the problems of western Marxism will be analysed from K. Korsch’s point in this paper. The investigation will focus on his Marxists philosophyPolitikos mokslų ir diplomatijos fakult.Vytauto Didžiojo universiteta

This paper poses the question as to whether identity politics can be understood as a dialectics of liberation or what philosopher Gillian Rose calls a "paradox of empowerment."  The first promises to emancipate the oppressed and marginalized, the second suggests a logic whereby individual members of oppressed groups are subsumed by group identity and therefore continue to be dominated, although now by precisely by the representatives of the very group seeking collective emancipation. I suggest that identity politics is both and proceed to argue for a "(non-)identity politics whereby the irreducible particularity of the individual is recognized and affirmed in a world that has transcended the identifying logic inherent in the exchange principle.

The first portion of Chris Cutrone's 2024 book Marxism and Politics published by Sublation Press. Book description: Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel said history has always been: the slaughter-bench of everything good and virtuous humanity has ever achieved. Marxism defined itself as the critical self-consciousness of this task of socialism in capitalism, but this has been eclipsed by the mere moral condemnation of catastrophe. This happened as a result of Marxism’s own failure, over a hundred years ago, to make good on the crisis. This pattern has repeated itself since then, in ever more obscure ways. The essays by Chris Cutrone collected here span the time of the Millennial Left’s abortive search to rediscover a true politics for socialism in the history of Marxism: the attempted recovery of a lost revolutionary tradition. Cutrone’s participation as a teacher alongside this journey into the heart of Marxism was guided by the Millennial investigation into controversial and divisive figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and Marx himself. The question of a political party for socialism loomed large — but was abandoned. Readers of these essays will find no taboo unchallenged, as every aspect of Marxism’s accumulated wreckage is underwritten by the red thread and haunting memory of what was once the world-historical character of socialist revolution. Can this Marxist “message in a bottle” cast adrift by history yet be received? | Reviews: “The Millennial Left is fading, because it lost sight of the telos of historical Marxism. Chris Cutrone’s fascinating essay ‘The end of Millennial Marxism’ could serve as a good primer on dialectical materialism.” — Sohrab Ahmari, Editor of Compact Magazine | “Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left is explicit in pronouncing fatality: how this generation’s failure is a product of past defeats and the bad ideas it has internalized. If an authentic Marxian Left were to emerge today, it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable: the Left itself has become so distorted by the experience of defeat that it hardly recognizes its own traditions. Cutrone offers a searching and deep historical critique of a Millennial Left whose failures are mere iterations on previous failures: what is taken to be ‘Left-wing’ or ‘socialism’ today is nothing more than the ‘naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication. This is explored through reference to Left-wing political traditions.” — Alex Hochuli, author of The End of the End of History, review of The Death of the Millennial Left, American Affairs | “Cutrone is most comfortable with the larger stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims and how their position emerges from Marx’s and Lenin’s own example.” — Todd Cronan, Nonsite | “The worthwhile and provocative article by Chris Cutrone, ‘Lenin’s liberalism’ argues that Lenin helped legitimize political differences.” — Mike Macnair, author of Revolutionary Strategy, Communist Party of Great Britain | “A great wodge of material spanning Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lenin and the esoterica of 20th century Hegelian Marxism.” — Paul Demarty, Communist Party of Great Britain | “Inspirational.” — Philip Cunliffe, author of Lenin Lives!

In his 1990 book on Adorno, Late Marxism, Fredric Jameson writes that

the sheer guilt of art itself in a class society, art as luxury and class privilege [is] a ground bass that resonates throughout all of Adorno’s aesthetic reflections without a break, even where its vibration has become a virtual second nature in our sensorium, so that from time to time we no longer hear it consciously

As prominent but perhaps underacknowledged readers of Adorno in the Anglophone Marxist tradition, both Jameson and Gillian Rose attempt to deal with the persistence of this sense of guilt, this distorted promise of happiness as it pertains to both ideological culpability and utopian hint of a world otherwise, in the context of what is perhaps unfashionable today to call postmodernity. Postmodernity, understood as the historical emergence of an unprecedented restructuring of daily consumption habits, as well an attendant theoretical challenge to hold surface and depth together for the continuation of the Marxist project in hostile times.

In this paper, I briefly sketch some points of affinity and tension between Rose and Jameson as Marxist readers of Adorno, in terms of recovering a critical orientation toward the totality, alongside detecting seeds of incipient fascism, from the sanitized and depthless space of 1990s Western postmodernism.

Bu yazı Britanyalı filozof ve sosyolog Gillian Rose'un Marksist Modernizm adlı eserinden alınmıştır. Bu eser Rose'un 1979 yılında Sussex Üniversitesi'nde lisans öğrencilerine Frankfurt Okulu üzerine verdiği bir dizi giriş dersinden oluşuyor.

This essay advances a reading of Theodor W. Adorno's mature interventions into sociology as a 'critique of sociological categories'. It maintains that his unorthodox commitment to sociology was simultaneously a dialectical commitment to the critical value of its fundamental untenability – at least, in its dominant bourgeois variant. From this sketch, the essay attempts to examine one instance of this critique, centred on the category of reification and one of its most proximate sociological cognates, Émile Durkheim’s concept of the social fact.

The first section reconstructs Adorno’s concept of reification as outlined in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere. With recourse to Marx’s extended mature project and pace the interpretation offered by Gillian Rose, it argues that reification in Adorno underscores not the discrepancy between use-value and exchange-value as well as the exchange of false equivalents but holds to issues pertaining to the social and relational form of value that objectively arise from the exchange process.

The second section then recounts Durkheim’s concept and theory of the social fact as advanced in his early plea for the sociological discipline, The Rules of Sociological Method. Drawing on Adorno’s essays, interventions, lectures, and, albeit cautiously, seminar protocols, the concept of reification is taken as a leitmotif with which to reconstruct his mature encounter with Durkheim. Doing so demonstrates that Adorno finds in the concept of the social fact a correct but deficient notion of reification, a recognition, to paraphrase Marx, that social relations between individuals assume the phantasmagoric form of relations between things, though with the intonation inversed.

The final section shows how this framework is redeployed as part of Adorno’s confrontation with Karl Popper and others as part of the now-infamous Positivism Dispute. It argues that some of the stakes involved in this dispute might be better understood if Adorno’s criticisms are viewed as offering a particular reading of internal developments within sociological positivism itself. For, whilst Adorno characterises both Durkheim and Popper as positivists, much to the chagrin of their defenders, the charges levelled against them are not equivalent. Comparing the critiques levelled against them brings to the forefront how sociological positivism over the course of the twentieth century was to undergo a theoretical impoverishment. In this, Durkheim is mobilised because his sociological theory sketched a ‘more serious’ alternative approach to those sociologists who lacked even the faintest hint of, to use Adorno’s phraseology, the ‘guilt of reification’.

In his famous meditation on Jewish history, Zakhor, Yosef Haim Yerushalmi laments what he considers to be a lacuna of "historiography" in rabbinic literature. "Classical rabbinic literature," he writes, "was never intended as historiography, even in the biblical, let alone the modern, sense, and it cannot be understood through canons of criticism appropriate to history alone. "1 Yerushalmi follows Hannah Arendt in drawing a distinction between Jewish history and memory. History, he argues, is focused on constructing linear narratives with defined teleologies. Memory, on the other hand, is less concerned with chronology and is "by its nature, selective. "2 Memory, Yerushalmi asserts, and not history was the sustaining force behind the Jewish people prior to the advent of modernity. Yerushalmi expresses anxiety that in the modern period the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction: while there is no shortage of historical writing, Judaism has failed to create a metahistorical narrative that functions as memory once did. This failure of synthesis, he asserts, pushes the community toward a crisis.3 What if, though, the rabbis of the Talmud had a different approach to history and historical memory-one that is perhaps obscured by its very synthesis? We might argue that asynchronous tales of rabbinic literature are models of what Walter Benjamin famously called "the tradition of the oppressed. "4 In reading such traditions, one of Benjamin's translators, the philosopher Susan Buck-Morss has argued for privileging the fragmentary over the linear. "The detail that counts, " she writes, "is the one that arrests the reader because it does not fit that narrative. "5 Such fragments, she asserts, can function as the Paris arcades did for Benjamin, as "a passageway that

This paper explores Hegel’s philosophy of reconciliation grounded in the Christian concept of the Trinity and considers its practical relevance to peacemaking work in a Christian, pro bono legal ministry.  It further discusses Hegel's concept of mutual recognition and his Master/Slave parable.  Finally, it considers how these ideas might be used in conflict coaching, especially within the framework of Bush & Folger's Transformative Model of Mediation.

During the First World War, György Lukács began to study Hegel more intensively, as he reminds us in 1967 in the “Preface to the New Edition” of History and Class Consciousness. Although Hegel’s effect on him “was highly ambiguous”, Lukács “strove to go beyond bourgeois radicalism” and felt repelled by social democratic theory, especially Karl Kautsky’s version of it (Lukács 1971 [1923]: ix–x). At the same time, Lukács became acquainted with the work of Rosa Luxemburg, whose theory, and even more so her Marxist methodological leanings were to become very important for the theories he developed during the war and in the first post-war years.

As an anomaly on the market of military shooters of the 21st century, Spec Ops: The Line entails a journey of anti-militainment and modern warfare consequences. In this study, the narrative is analyzed from the perspective of Jean Baudrillard’s idea that simulations have replaced our
conception of reality. Both the protagonist and the player of Spec Ops will unavoidably descend into a state of hyperreal, lost within the game in a sea of simulacra ready to drown from its implications. The excessive use of violence, direct approach of the player through a break with the
4th wall and a deceitful narrator contribute to this loss of reality within the game. Although the game represents simulacra – being a simulation in itself, the object of study is the coexisting state of hyperreal shared between protagonist and player when comprehending events in the game. In the end, neither part can understand or discern with any certainty what transpired within the narrative.

This article draws on Espen Aarseth's concepts of cybertext (1997) and ludo-narratives (2012), on rhetorical narrative theory and on Miguel Sicart's (2013) conception of the ethics of computer games, in a discussion of medial functions and affordances of games and literary narratives, and the construction of ethical fictions. On the basis of this discussion, it analyzes the interrelationship between ethics, war and games in three popular fictional works: Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" (1977), Terry Prachett's Only You Can Save Mankind (1992) and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games (2008). Their publication spanning three decades, these narratives all hinge on the premise that what some characters in the diegesis experience as an actual war, others perceive as a game, thus problematizing the relationship between the two. Furthermore, all of the narratives explore the "fictionalization" that occurs to our perceptions of people encountered via the mediation of a screen. Comparing and contrasting the ways that these narratives frame the interrelationship between war, games and ethics, the article reveals the development between "Ender's Game" and The Hunger Games of an increasing focus on the effects of advanced military technology on the individual human body.

This essay challenges the dismissal of nationalist politics in readings of Ulysses by reconnecting the “Cyclops” episode to the aporias of modern political thought. Drawing from Joyce’s neglected notes to the episode, it relocates anticolonial nationalism within the diremption and mutual implication of civil society and state, first articulated by G. W. F. Hegel and developed by Hannah Arendt. The essay rereads Hegel’s state/society diremption through Gillian Rose’s conception of “speculative thinking” and the historical openness of the “broken middle.” It argues that “Cyclops” generates a dynamic interpretative space in which other configurations of the social and political in the nation might be registered. In a contemporary moment when legality and constitutionality are under attack in the name of nationalist populism, this reading suggests an alternative to frameworks that conceive of law only as violence.

We explore Marx's conception of a humanly emancipated society and the role of political life in achieving it. We argue that Marx's critique of political alienation must be balanced with a positive vision of political life embracing the particularity of individuals and collectives. This requires a form of political life that acknowledges human finitude and antagonism, and creates a space for dissent, consensus, and decision-making that brings together the interests of all. We also discuss the role of dialectics in Marx's thought and criticize the notion that a humanly emancipated society would be free from mediation and personal differences. Instead, we advocate for a form of communist politicity that recognizes the particularity of individuals and allows them to express their interests and knowledge in a democratic scenario.

In a recent article appearing in Spectre Journal, Darren Roso concludes his discussion of "Weimar's Marxist Heretic: Reading Karl Korsch Today" by stating that "It is, perhaps, a good but dark time to read authors like Korsch who articulated something timeless about revolutionary Marxism." What Roso finds "timeless" is the importance of "timeliness" in "absolute" commitment to human liberation. One might hesitate before a timeless absolute, yet it is noteworthy that the text that is most central to the intellectual legacy of Karl Korsch (1886-1961) has now reached its centenary and Roso may well be correct to claim that is indeed a good, albeit dark, time to re-read Korsch. This essay will not retread the ground covered by Roso, the reader is strongly encouraged to learn more about the life and work of Karl Korsch by accessing Roso's timely and excellent contribution. This essay will instead focus on "Marxism and Philosophy," and consider to what extent it remains timely for our times, mostly but not necessarily only for those who share ongoing progressive and socialist commitments.

Following Jacob Taubes, this essay seeks to make a comparison of the work of Karl Barth and Walter Benjamin. I argue, with the assistance of Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose, that Barth and Benjamin, for differing reasons, refuse the mediation of the transcendence qua history and the created world. For Barth, this may be traced to his critique of natural theology and his rejection of the analogia entis, and his apparently inability to conceptualize how materiality and historicity may constitute a "fitting" mediation for divine self-disclosure, intimating a nascent voluntarism in his theology. For Benjamin, this failure to approximate mediation may be linked to the conceptual diastasis between metaphysics and law, which leads him to adopt the idea of divine violence of law-breaking, as opposed to the mythical violence of lawmaking, as a way of resolving the disjunction. However, following Rose, I argue that this leads to a pathological conception of the relation of immanence to transcendence and a messianic politics that avoids the labour of mourning and the constraints of the middle.

Degree Programme MA Christian Theology Module Code CTH599 Module Title Dissertation in Christian Theology Dissertation Title A comparative, case study analysis of Christian and Muslim perspectives on the secular world and associated possibilities for interfaith dialogue. Coyle, Adrian, 'A Comparative, Case Study Analysis of Christian and Muslim Perspectives on the Secular World and Associated Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue' (unpublished MA Christian Theology dissertation, Heythrop College,

Philosophical attention to Georg Lukács has increased in recent years, with several studies focused specifically on the unique approach to Marxist theory he developed between the October revolution and the end of the 1920s. While Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute is an addition to this general trend, it also aims to move past what author Daniel Andrés López sees as a detrimental elision of the speculative character of Lukács' project in these treatments. If Lukács can be helpful to us a century after the composition of his most well-known works, we cannot merely separate the insightful or problematic parts of his method from their total context, but must rather bring every element of this system into a comprehensive interpretation. Reading Lukács' philosophy of praxis thus requires an immanent reconstruction of the way in which his project struggled to unite the conceptual and logical dimensions of critique with the possibility of genuine historical novelty.

The problem of beginning, of course, appears first in thought and speculation about the origin of the universe, and we know the Hebrew solution for its perplexities-the assumption of a Creator God who is outside his own creation in the same way as the fabricator is outside the fabricated object.

Vladimir Safatle's new book, Dar corpo ao impossível: O sentido da dialética de eodor Adorno (Giving Body to the Impossible: e Meaning of eodor Adorno's Negative Dialectic, 2019), shows that he ought to be counted among the impressive list of dialectical thinkers in Brazil: Antonio Candido, Roberto Schwarz, Paulo Arantes. We might thus ask, before discussing Safatle's book, why has such a rich dialectical tradition emerged in the periphery? It is not simply that the dialectic has been taken from one context and "applied" in Brazil. e dialectic is premised on the rejection of such methodologism, that is, the idea that principles can be justified first and then put into practice. Instead, the dialectic always begins in the middle of a conceptually mediated socio-historical situation. e historical context in which the Hegelian dialectic itself emerged has been brilliantly reconstructed by Paulo Arantes in his Ressentimento da dialética (1996), a work that unfortunately remains largely unknown outside the Portuguese-speaking world. Arantes traces the emergence of the dialectic to Germany's peripheral status relative to classical bourgeois society, to the disjuncture between radical philosophical theory and intransigent political institutions from which intellectuals were alienated. e socio-historical conditions for the dialectic were brought into relief for Arantes by Roberto Schwarz's diagnosis of the same sort of dissonance between ideas and reality in nineteenth-century Brazil, when the elite cynically adopted liberal ideology despite its blatant contradiction with the slave economy. 1 While Schwarz shows how liberal ideas reveal their truth when they appear "out of place" in the periphery, Arantes historicizes the Hegelian dialectic and uncovers its political content.

Father Ioan Chirila, professor at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology from Cluj-Napoca, proposes in 2017 a new volume of theological essays: Model, Chip, Sens, published by the Eikon publishing house, Cluj-Napoca. The previous volume, also appeared in 2017-The Scale of the Word, Homiletic Essays, "is, certainly, an elevated demonstration of hermeneutic incursion into the text and the spirit of Holy Scripture" (Constantine Cubleşan). By contrast-Model, Chip, Sens-is an essay puzzle from which you can select, as you like, your favorite piece to go on with another and the next, until you grab all the thoughts and feelings.

Gillian Rose, a notoriously difficult philosopher, is not only worth the effort to read but, at least in my experience, has proven to offer real insight and practical guidance in the context of conflict mediation 'on the street' outside academia. Her deployment of the Hegelian theme of recognition, with its implications for an intersubjective reading of 'Geist', and her spin on Hegel's speculative reason offer a refreshing take on mediation practice 1 .

The present thesis puts the trinitarianism, christology, and anthropology of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s kenotic theology, Rowan Williams’s tragic theology, and Sarah Coakley’s ascetic theology into critical and triangulated conversation: in order to argue that suffering and death is ontologized at the same level as love and life in God in the kenotic trinitarianism of Balthasar; that the tragic is given an ontological value in the tragic imagination of Williams; and that vulnerability is essentialized in the ascetic spirituality of Coakley. I will argue that, on the whole, their arguments tend to put a positive light on the darkness of suffering as that which proves to be christologically meaningful, and portray the divine–human relationship competitively in a shared proclivity for emphasizing Jesus’s cry of dereliction on the cross (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”). A concern that moves the tripartite chapters forwards is to examine how these three respected thinkers are...

The present thesis puts the trinitarianism, christology, and anthropology of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s kenotic theology, Rowan Williams’s tragic theology, and Sarah Coakley’s ascetic theology into critical and triangulated conversation: in order to argue that suffering and death is ontologized at the same level as love and life in God in the kenotic trinitarianism of Balthasar; that the tragic is given an ontological value in the tragic imagination of Williams; and that vulnerability is essentialized in the ascetic spirituality of Coakley. I will argue that, on the whole, their arguments tend to put a positive light on the darkness of suffering as that which proves to be christologically meaningful, and portray the divine–human relationship competitively in a shared proclivity for emphasizing Jesus’s cry of dereliction on the cross (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”). A concern that moves the tripartite chapters forwards is to examine how these three respected thinkers are...

As an alternative to Utilitarianism, animal ethics turned to the Continental philosophies of Levinas and Derrida that welcome and revere Otherness. While Utilitarianism relies on a 'closed' system of ethical calculations, the Levinasian model remains open-ended. This essay argues for a revised approach to animal ethics that combines Levinasian immeasurability, what Matthew Calarco called 'ethical agnosticism', with a closed approach that sees ethics as issuing from particular modes of practice. Highlighting some of the problems inherent in the Levinasian ethics of love as well as Agamben's biopolitical critique of law, I propose a corrective, 'between love and law', that avoids predetermining the limits of moral consideration yet insists on the social and normative dimensions of ethical responsiveness. I take the practice of veganism-broadly conceived beyond the strictly dietary-as the heart of animal ethics and consider some of the philosophical and theological dimensions of veganism as neither naïve nor as utopian but on the contrary, as a worldly mode of engagement that acknowledges the realities of violence.

This paper begins by showing how Georg Lukács' determination of the 'standpoint of the proletariat' resolved the theoretical and practical antinomies of bourgeois life in a too-abstract, philosophical manner. In Lukács' hands, the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat was construed as a philosophical necessity, and this made his thinking susceptible to substituting first the party, and then the party-leadership for necessary, but not yet complete proletarian self-transcendence. By the mid twentieth century this kind of wager was unacceptable for an increasing number of left thinkers. As paradigmatic, but selective inheritors of Lukács' legacy, the paper then explores the theoretical alternatives posed first, by the sociology of Lucien Goldmann, and then the negating powers of literary critic Franco Fortini. In grounding the standpoint of the proletariat in the maximum consciousness appropriate to a given time and place, Goldmann avoided Lukács' over-confidence. However, in times and places where liberal, reactionary, or apolitical tendencies dominate, Goldmann's grounding strategy risks denying that there is a properly revolutionary standpoint at all. The political stance of 'doubt' offered in the poetry and literary criticism of Franco Fortini then provides a fine way to thread a path between Lukács' philosophical over-confidence and Goldmann's potentially de-radicalized sociology. By retaining the critical register of doubt, and using it to continuously test proletarian powers, Fortini insists on challenging the forms of creative, practical, and radical organization that can orient revolutionary practice. In this way, Fortini's commitment to communism offers an open-ended politics: the organized forms of refusing this world through which communism is pursued are as subject to criticism as they are in principle creatively inexhaustible.

Gillian Rose, a notoriously difficult philosopher, is not only worth the effort to read but, at least in my experience, has proven to offer real insight and practical guidance in the context of conflict mediation 'on the street' outside academia. Her deployment of the Hegelian theme of recognition, with its implications for an intersubjective reading of 'Geist', and her spin on Hegel's speculative reason offer a refreshing take on mediation practice 1 .

Sound is an important medium in our lives, but its ephemeral nature can be problematic when people cannot recall something they heard in the past. Motivated by everyday conversational breakdowns, we present the design of a continuous, near-term audio buffering application: the Personal Audio Loop (PAL). PAL was designed as a truly ubiquitous service to recover audio content from a person's recent past. Initial brainstorming and prototyping for PAL revealed major aspects of the design space that require further investigation, including potential usefulness in everyday life, the level of ubiquity required, the usability features for any instantiation of the service, and the social and legal considerations for potential deployment. We present a design of PAL, informed by a controlled laboratory study, diary study, and examination of pertinent legislation. We conclude with an analysis of the results and some initial observations of the deployment of a prototype developed for a Motorola i730 handset.

In the central chapter of his History and Class Consciousness (1923), 'Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat', Georg Lukacs explicated the concept of reification. Lukacs drew insights from Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Tonnies about the trajectory of modernity into his emerging Marxist theory of revolutionary subjectivity. Marx made few explicit references to reification. For Marx, commodity fetishism is the form of alienation specific to bourgeois society. Commodities are qualitatively different objects that are exchanged through the medium of the money-commodity as if equivalent to each other. They appear as fantastic 'thing-like objects' possessing autonomous 'magical powers'. Social relations, as Marx put it, assume the form of 'material relations between persons, and social relations between things'. For Lukacs, the concept 'reification' expresses the structure of a society founded upon universal commodity exchange. Reification is 'only an illusion' but it is also a necessary one. Insofar as human functions are transformed into a commodity, self-objectification, atomization and estrangement are already presupposed by the abstract, quantitative mode of calculability of the commodity structure. Consciousness thus both reifies and is reified by the commodity structure. Lukacs' notion of reification undermines 'false consciousness' and ideology from their vaunted explanatory position within Western Marxism.

Two course curricula: "Critical Theory" and "Holocaust and Liberation Sociology", both offered as part of the MA in Social and Political Thought, University of Warwick, 1991-2. The second curriculum has my own annotations from Gillian's spoken introduction to the course (please excuse my handwriting).

This essay discusses the political thought of Rowan Williams in the context of his leading influences and wider theology. It shows the continuity in his political writing from his early days as a radical to his frequent political speeches and lectures as Archbishop of Canterbury. The over-riding theme is that of ‘interactive pluralism’, which seeks to establish a form of politics with a very weak system of sovereignty. This influenced his 2008 lecture on ‘Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective’, which suggested a limited role for parallel religious law codes alongside those of the state. Although this lecture was subject to much criticism, particularly in the popular press, it nevertheless displays a consistency with his strongly disestablishmentarian inclinations, which give a large amount of space to ‘first-level’ institutions in both decision-making and community formation. A healthy society is established through dispute and dialogue between such groups rath...

As an alternative to Utilitarianism, animal ethics turned to the Continental philosophies of Levinas and Derrida that welcome and revere Otherness. While Utilitarianism relies on a 'closed' system of ethical calculations, the Levinasian model remains open-ended. This essay argues for a revised approach to animal ethics that combines Levinasian immeasurability, what Matthew Calarco called 'ethical agnosticism', with a closed approach that sees ethics as issuing from particular modes of practice. Highlighting some of the problems inherent in the Levinasian ethics of love as well as Agamben's biopolitical critique of law, I propose a corrective, 'between love and law', that avoids predetermining the limits of moral consideration yet insists on the social and normative dimensions of ethical responsiveness. I take the practice of veganism -broadly conceived beyond the strictly dietary -as the heart of animal ethics and consider some of the philosophical and theological dimensions of veganism as neither naïve nor as utopian but on the contrary, as a worldly mode of engagement that acknowledges the realities of violence.

This article deals with the journey of western dialectical debate from Hegel to Marx and other Marxist critics. Hegelian idealist philosophy believes on the existence of idea which, according to Hegel, shapes other worldly matters. Marxian materialist philosophy, on the other hand, believes on the power of materiality in human life. For the study of connections and contradictions between them, an assessment on the views of Hegelian Idealists and Marxist Materialists has been done from critical perspective. The study explores that the two philosophers stand together on the views that conflict is the foundation for change in society, and historical development of human civilization has gone through dialectical process. They view differently on the nature and agents of conflict. Hegel believes upon the intellectual power of mind to bring change where as Marx believes on the power of proletarians to subvert the existing bourgeois ideology with socialist ideology. -----------------------...

The article discusses the poster as a form of visual message used for agitation propaganda mainly during world wars. Hence, the introductory part covers both the visual layer, verbal communication, and non-verbal communication as well as aspects of political communication used in agitation propaganda. The authors took into account propaganda posters using the pointing finger motif, the prototype of which was the poster by Alfred Leete from 1914. The image of Lord Kitchener and a hand with a pointing finger stretched out towards the recipient of the message, as well as the exclamation “Your country needs you” became an inspiration for subsequent posters that influence exceed time and geographical space. The analysis of posters with the pointing finger motif was carried out taking into account four periods. The authors also drew attention to the media space that was the original one for the 1914 poster. A space without media known today, where, on the one hand, the poster made it possible to reach a wide audience, and on the other, its impact was a product of the strength of the messages it contained and the means used. The analysis was carried out based on the methodology of interpretation of visual materials by Gillian Rose.

Adorno's social theory is enjoying renewed attention, as is the debate to what extent is it Marxist. A central issue remains Adorno's concept of social totality: capitalism as a fully integrated society in which every difference is levelled. One problem this raises is why is he still committed to the Marxist concept of class. And second, how to understand his critique of the idea of proletarian class-consciousness, which seems to leave his critical theory without an addressee. The article suggests that, for Adorno, capitalist society exhibits what is termed here "differential integration." It is predicated both on the labor/ capital distinction and, at the same time, on sufficient homology between the two, such that the qualitative class divide is experienced as mere quantitative variance. This efficacious gap between social structure and social experience is at the center of his concept of ideology. Ideology-critique for Adorno is mainly the critique of symptomatic misconceptions of how ideology functions, due to lack of attention to how the class structure is in fact not experienced as such. Adorno's alternative to proletarian class consciousness is "differential solidarity": consciousness of social domination that is on the one hand found across class divides yet is experienced differentially between them.

Eschatology is a key theological concept within Christian theology, derived from the Greek to designate the study of the "end of things." 1 As part of theological discourse, eschatology would at first glance, therefore, appear at most a curiosity to scholarship concerning global governance since the mainstream narrative depicts modernity as the heir to religious disenchantment and the rise of an empirical intellectualism. 2 In this progress story that the disciplines tell themselves (theologypolitics-law), secular forms of legal and political philosophy may draw upon theological conceptions, but they empty these doctrines of their theological content. Religious thought, in other words, may be important, but its impact enters the contemporary field of governance as either an external phenomenon (e.g., the rise of political Islam) or an ethical legacy (e.g., salvation-dignity, church-culture/nation, God-state, and so forth).

In the second half of the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th century there was a surge in creative writing and most of the masterpieces in American and European literature came out during this period as they did during the Renaissance. The novel became the most dominant form and received the most excruciating concern regarding its form, technique, theme, people and style and other aspects of novel-writing. It was a period full of literary giants such as George Eliot,

As the computer game matures and grows as an art form, the question of how game designers can use ethics as a means of game motivation and thus also as a means of game mechanics becomes increasingly important. The times when designers could hide behind phrases like "It's just a game" are a thing of the past. For an art form that wants to be taken seriously, it is intellectually pathetic anyway. When I started to approach the question, I quickly found out that we still know far too little about whom the player is. Furthermore, it proved to be essential to define a clear dividing line between ethics and morality in order to raise conflict potential (each art form treats conflict as a main subject). Only then could I turn to the core question: How does ethics work in the context of a game at all-and which levers can be used for the creation of gameplay mechanics? This article started as a three-piece on my blog Der Blindband, then was printed in the German Making Games magazine, was then translated into English for the makinggames.biz website before I revisited and edited it for publication in this book. This gave me the chance to clarify some weaker points, lift around some of the emphasis and fix some typos. In very few instances I fixed some logical missteps, and one little detour into Ryans "Possible worlds-theory" was cut. I also had to erase any reference to the three-parts of the series. And I needed to sew these three parts together at the edges to make it a one-piece. My thanks go out to Bettina Wilding for the initial translation. All mistakes that remain in the text are mine.