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The present book brings together a series of interventions concerning pressing political, ideological and organizational issues of the contemporary situation, edited by Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda. These texts were written in a very specific political conjuncture: some during the time when Álvaro García Linera was serving as a vice-president of Bolivia, others in the period after the coup d’état of November 2019. The chapters in this book are dealing with social movements and different forms of political and subjective autonomy in Bolivia; with democracy and its function in late capitalism; with the discrepancy between national and capitalist spaces; with the Russian October Revolution as an event, and its resonances in other parts of the world; with the concept and function of the state; and, finally, with the idea of communism in its relation to necessity and contingency. At the end, the book presents a long and detailed conversation between Linera and Hamza and Ruda, as well as an afterword written by Slavoj Žižek.

The present volume collects some contributions about the Yaghnob Valley inspired by or directly developed in the framework of the various scientific missions of the University of Bologna in Tajikistan (2007-2012). The articles here collected follow, as far as it is possible, a chronological order, starting with the studies concerning the history of the Yaghnobis considered in the framework of the Upper Zarafšan region, beginning from the Sogdian period to the early Islamic age, up to those essays focusing on ethno-linguistics and related political aspects. Thus, old questions have to face new problems and social needs, in a very delicate and politically complex area, which now is experiencing a deep economic crisis, but that holds important energetic and mining resources. Both the researches aiming to clarify which were the political and economic role of the Yaghnob Valley during the Sogdian period, and the studies that try to explain the peculiar use and development of the Yaghnobi language, in the light of the socio-cultural politics of the Republic of Tajikistan, deserve great attention. From different point of views it has been deeply discussed the problem of the Yaghnobis’ isolation and uniqueness: the results seem to be very innovative. Also particular historical cases, such as the terrible Anzob plague (1898), have been analysed as a case-study in order to better understand the Czarist policy towards minorities in Central Asia, a relevant theme in Soviet and post-Soviet time, too. The strong humanitarian profile of these missions is well represented by some pharmacological and medical contributions. Finally, useful and detailed maps of the Yaghnob Valley, created with the GIS technology, were included at the end of the volume.

As Jacques Derrida stated in Archive Fever, nothing is less reliable or less clear thanthe word “archive.” Nevertheless, it is precisely within the semantic openendedness of this notion that contemporary discursive practices of cinema and art have developed, thus reconfiguring the very idea of the archive. The single disciplines involved in this broad field – film and art history, film and art theory, aesthetics, semiotics, philology, etc. – are now beginning to question the concept of archive even in its “negative” sense: in other words, they are now starting to investigate – following Michel Foucault – what the archive is not, or does not seem to be. The archive is not the “library of libraries” or the “encyclopaedia;” it is not “memory” or a “database.” In recent years, much attention has been focused on these ideas, revealing new “impulses,” “turns” and specific forms of art (“art archive”), as well as highlighting how the notion of archive has gained importance on different interrelated levels (aesthetic, political, ethical and legal) across diverse disciplinary fields.

David Sylvian may be seen as a philosopher, accordingly to the postmodern spirit, who invalidates identity, while preserving it at the level of “non-sound”, in a troubled relationship between the ego and the others. His most recent songs have been analysed, as well as the lyrics and Sylvian’s way of life. Music is the goal of a path of self-realization, which brought Sylvian to conceive a new view of arrangement, increasingly deprived of its frills and capable of magnifying his voice, which that it is uncontainable. Sylvian shows everybody that silence may become an integral part of music towards nonsense, or the recovery of existential nudity.

Emanuele Severino, one of the leading thinkers on contemporaneity, responds here to some of the most profound and essential questions raised by philosophy. His reflections are collected in this book, for the first time translated in English. Grounded on the affirmation of the eternity of every thing, Severino’s thought is one of the most original contributions to philosophy, that opens up paths hitherto unknown to its universe.

In 1995, in Chicago, Mary Jacob curated “Culture in action”, an experience of participatory Public Art which left a mark on the contemporary artistic research and criticism. Over the last twenty years, this “new genre of public art” (Lacy 1995) has developed. In these “dialogical” and “connective” aesthetics (Kester 1999, Gablik 1992), public artists have involved citizens in creative performances that aim to modify citizens’ perceptions of the places where they live, to create new relations within and toward the territory, and to transform (often temporarily) the physical spaces.  The book moves from the first outcomes of a two-year interdisciplinary research programme on the Italian contemporary Public Art, funded by the Sardinia Region (Italy). Moving beyond the traditional ladders of formal citizen participation to territory governance, the research investigates how public artists have involved citizens in creative performances that aim to modify citizens’ perceptions of the places where they live, to create new relations within and toward the territory, and to transform (often temporarily) the physical spaces. A book particularly useful to international students who have strong interests in the ongoing debates on political participation and communication from a multidisciplinary perspective, Performative Citizenship is the product of extensive teaching experience in the field of political participation and communication, and stems from continuous comparisons between students of sociology, cultural and media studies, political sciences, arts, architecture, and urban planning.

Peter Eisenman (Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, Eisenman Architects, New York, USA) discusses with architects and philosophers: Jörg H. Gleiter (Germany), Kim Förster (Switzerland), Preston Scott Cohen (USA), Emmanuel Petit (USA), Mario Carpo (USA), Sarah M. Whiting (USA), Manuel Orazi (Italy), John McMorrough (USA), Gabriele Mastrigli (Italy), Panayotis Pangalos (Greece), Cynthia Davidson (USA), Ingeborg M. Rocker (USA), Alejandro Zaera-Polo (USA), Djordje Stojanović (Serbia), Greg Lynn (USA) performing on the stage for two days in Belgrade.

The Battle of Algiers is a figure for liberation and it can still communicate a sense of euphoria to those who experience and study it. The purpose of this book is to account for this power in terms of the film’s complexity and ambivalence – in terms, that is, of the film’s ‘impure’ means. Building on a large body of scholarship, the book focuses on the key themes of location, address and temporality. What is the precise role of the city of Algiers in the film? What are the consequences of its address to multiple audiences, including those in the old colonizing North? What are the effects of the fi lm’s activity of reenactment and what can these tell us about revolutionary agency? Ultimately, the account here of the power of The Battle of Algiers is intended to shed light on the means and capacities of historical and political cinema as such.

The publication will investigate the multiple interactions between the written word and images. Literary works (drama, fiction, poetry, essays), films, photography and the fine arts will be studied with a comparative approach. The interrelationship between word and image will also be analysed according to the various types of occurrences: ekphrasis (narrative description of artistic objects); imagology (stereotypical images, orientalism, exoticism); cultural, rhetorical and symbolic constructs (Shakespearian imagery); filmic, digital or televised transpositions and adaptations of literary works; intermediality (mixed media works). Moreover, another field of investigation explored will be the digital world (e-archives, blogs embedded in literary worls, webliterature, twitterliterature, hipertexts).

What is the connection between a compass and a couch? It is the meeting of a mechanical gadget used for geographical orientation on the planet, together with another artifact, one of furniture, which has become the icon of the psychoanalytic practice. Both objects allow us to orient ourselves in uncertainty and in darkness with regard to our own subjective, intimate or physical position. Within an effort to encompass the heterogeneous, Mariano Horenstein provides specific conceptual tools that examine different meanings of the notions of “place” and “encounter” from a psychoanalytic perspective. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines the fields of topology, architecture, geography, and archaeology, this book enables an in-depth understanding of the idea of “space” and explores new aspects in the current debate of this timely issue.

The book focuses on Kant’s philosophy of history as a part of his practical philosophy. It deals with Kant’s interpretation of history that leads to political issues and introduces his project of cosmopolitanism as the culmination of his philosophy of history. Kant’s effort to introduce a model which would guarantee perpetual peace is studied from various perspectives and the book deals with the philosopher’s inspirational impulses stemming from the eighteenth-century European thought as well as with contemporary philosophical thinking in the field of cosmopolitanism showing the topicality of the idea of Kant’s cosmopolitanism in today’s world. The issue of objectivity in history, brought by various interpretations of history and its future projections by the philosophers of the 18th century, offers a great potential for the analysis of Kant’s contribution to the problem.

A&P is a multidiscilinary journal which gathers international scholars and thinkers to analyse the latest debates in the field of philosophy and anthropology.

Montage, today, is a widespread procedure that doesn’t concern just artistic production, but also our daily lives and the use everyone makes of that huge visual archive contemporary media places at our disposal. In a technologically advanced society, where the notion of postproduction regulates our relationship with images and objects, it is therefore necessary to thoroughly investigate the role, possibilities, and, most of all, anthropological and politic connotations of montage; and to ask ourselves whether – in comparison to the heroic years of the first avant-gardes – montage has become a faded and standardized practice or if it is a more and more effective means to understand and reprogram the world, especially in relation to the technical possibilities offered by new media and remix practices.

Atmospheres are omnipresent and they are frequently used in everyday language. Yet, when do we perceive atmospheres and how can we explore them? The concept of atmosphere extends aesthetics to aisthesis and comprehends perception as a relation bound to the present and with regard to others. In this context, the astonishing atmosphere is identified as a watershed moment when the object of perception becomes the object of discourse. Surveying Benjamin’s definitions of aura, one becomes aware of two modes of perception, which are crucial for the understanding of atmospheres. The “atmospheric portfolio”, therefore, provides for the possibility to explore the particular features of the phenomenon. It is a collection of studies and research methods, which, on the one hand, reflects on the terms and concepts, and, which, on the other, allows for exemplary experiments of the empirical approaches to the phenomenon.

An overview of the complex world of John Donne's poetry and specifically of his reflections on the theme of the journey of the soul. Donne's Metempsychosis and his Anniversaries are analysed from both a literary and philosophical/theological perspective, in the context of the rising new science.

“The time is out of joint”. This famous line from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet helps to describe the impression of de-centering, of deconstruction, which we currently live and experience. This phenomenon is caused by various factors and while it is happening worldwide, partly as a result of globalization, it is perceived in different ways in the various cultures and countries in the world. We find ourselves in front of an hybrid individual, the product of different cultures blending together. Such is the novelty and the spread of new means of communication and of social organization, that we might be witnessing the rise of a new type of subject: a bearer of transformations, the extent of which is difficult to measure. The contemporary world is dominated by radically new media, virtual space, technologies that subvert the perception of our body, post-humanism tending towards the cyborg, a cult of the body and youth, new definitions of sexuality, of procreation and of the family – all this reveals to us an overflowing of the subject in the direction of a dislocated fragmentation, lying far beyond its traditional boundaries and identity.

Philosophical News is the official publication of the European Society for Moral Philosophy. It is a semi-annual journal of philosophy born from the collaboration of a number of international scholars as well as an intense editorial effort. The aim of the journal is to promote research and reflection with special regard to the contemporary debate in all its different cultural manifestations.

The Odyssey is rightly celebrated as a story that goes far beyond the scope of epic poetry. It is an open window to an entire era and its social systems as well as its theological, cultural, economic and political structures, while running simultaneously in the register of the earthly and of the divine. Within The Odyssey, the episode of the Sirens stands out as an exceptionally evocative example of this kind of achievement. This volume is dedicated to exploring the myriad levels of analysis that are allowed by this famous episode, following in the footsteps of celebrated readers of The Odyssey such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Lukàcs, Auerbach, Kerény, Bloch, Auden, Pound, Tolstoj, Elster and Steiner. By looking at the brief encounter between Ulysses and the Sirens, the reader of this volume will discover the roots of our modern concept of middle class rationality and its profound ramifications stretching between economy, politics, and the divine.

Over the last 30 years, the Chinese system of art museums has enjoyed an unprecedented pace of development. Following a general and ongoing renovation of China’s entire system of national art institutions, there has been an impressive proliferation of meishuguan (art museums) all over in the country. Many different types of institutional statuses for art museums have recently been launched (notably small, private art museums) while others have developed rapidly (especially state-owned museums). This volume explores this range of different approaches to exhibiting and curating art, while also investigating the crucial question of the cultural sustainability of art museums in China. Through four case studies on museums and art collections in the cities of Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Shanghai, this volume provides an important contribution to the debate on the past, present and future of art museums in contemporary China.

Since antiquity, Epicurus’ thought has been compared to a powerful drug able to cure the pains of the soul that have always tormentedman preventing him from living a peaceful existence: but we know that the Greek term pharmakon can be interpreted in its two opposite meanings of medicine and poison; and indeed, the same duplicity animates Epicurus’ philosophy which, by acting as a medicine for the human soul, also has the effect of a poison, destroying from within, philosophy traditionally conceived as a disinterested contemplation of truth. The philosophical revolution undertaken by Epicurus as a fracture with respect to all the previous tradition, from Thales to Aristotle, coincides with an inversion of the traditional relation between man and cosmos, between theory and practice: the classic question “what is reality made of?” is replaced by the Epicurean question that is at the basis of his philosophical anthropocentrism: “how must reality be made and how should one understand it in order to be happy?”. Each specific articulation of Epicurean philosophy is subordinate to the task of achieving a happy existence that is in no way inferior to any of the divine realities’.

How can we restore fundamental values on a political and cultural level? Taking this question as a starting point, the book identifies the notion of sociological imagination as a suitable method to address the widespread disorientation within the human and social sciences. In particular, the three essays included in this volume focus on the role of sociology as a tool to achieve a constructive representation of reality. Through a sharp analysis of the current, growing dismissal of cultural structures and the lack of an ethical view in the interpretation of social phenomena, the author offers new perspectives in order to recover authentic human commitments that are able to re-establish meaningful relationships between people.

Roberto Marchesini presents a timely proposal within post-human philosophy in order to overcome the centuries of separation between human beings, non-human animals and technology. This book highlights the inspiring nature of the relationship with non-human beings – what Marchesini calls “Epiphany” – and how its enhancement can open new existential dimensions. Technology is also reinterpreted, no longer as a performative tool, but as a virus that infiltrates the human dimension and changes its predicates. Technopoietic events are not just the product of human intelligence, but they arise from an epiphany (a becoming alterity), thus positioning technology well within the ontological and somatic dimension of human beings. This book lays the foundations for a new and non-anthropocentric Humanism, which is able to recognize the essential role that non-human alterities have had throughout our history.

"For the will desires not to be dark, and this very desire causes the darkness” (Jacob Boehme). Moving through the fundamental question of this paradox, this book offers a constellation of theoretical and critical essays that shed light on the darkness of the will: its obscurity to itself. Through in-depth analysis of medieval and modern sources - Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Dante, Meister Eckhart, Chaucer, Nietzsche, Cioran, Meher Baba - this volume interrogates the nature and meaning of the will, along seven modes: spontaneity, potentiality, sorrow, matter, vision, eros, and sacrifice. These multiple lines of inquiry are finally presented to coalesce around one fundamental point of agreement: the will says yes, yet only a will that knows how to say no to itself, entering the silence of its own darkness, will ever be free.

During a period of over five years of work in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the author has examined the majority of its Arabic manuscripts in order to provide some elementary codicological data.  This monograph describes the Kitāb Ġurar al-fawāyd by aš-Šarīf al-Murtaḍā contained in manuscript MS.1665 (H 43) and other copies of the same text preserved in some Western European libraries, with regard to their historical, linguistic, artistic and bibliographic aspects.

What are the limits of tolerance in constitutional or liberal democracies today? This is a crucial question, for if there were no limits to tolerance, it would ultimately destroy itself by accepting the intolerable. The concept of tolerance has to be assessed from a political point of view, thus questioning to what extent its potential achievement does not suppose any moral mutation in humanity. For instance, if people were all already ‘virtuous’ according to a commonly held moral framework, there would be simply no need to speak of tolerance. Conversely, if it were the case that people could be made ‘virtuous’, then tolerance would be the matter of an improbable utopia. Ultimately, we need to consider how tolerance can be conceptualised in a way that is relevant to people and their societies as they actually are. In a time when a growing amount of political demands touches on themes of cultural identity and rights, and while we witness a mounting wave of religious fundamentalism, what should democracies accept and what should they refuse?

The notion of contingency plays a central role in Althusser’s attempt to recast Marxist philosophy and to free the Marxist conception of history from notions such as teleology, necessity and origin. Drawing on a wealth of published and unpublished material, Stefano Pippa discusses how Althusser’s unfaltering commitment to contingency should encourage us to revisit our understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology, politics and materialism. As grounded on contingency, Althusser’s so-called ‘Structural Marxism’ originates in fact a ‘logic of interruption’ and a notion of structurally under-determined becoming; just like his theory of ideology is radically reinterpreted on the basis of his notion of ‘overinterpellation’. Though constant, Althusser’s relationship with contingency has not been monolithic throughout his career. As observed by Pippa, it is possible to distinguish a ‘political’ and a ‘philosophical’ moment in Althusser’s late materialism of contingency. Perhaps, as this volume suggests, the problematic coexistence of these two aspects might account for the unstable character of Althusser’s late philosophical project.

This special issue of Cinéma & Cie explores the cultural dynamics, ideological aporias and political struggles that characterize the relationship between Maoism and national cinemas, from the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution to the present day. All the articles included in the special issue highlight the complexity of the process of translation and ‘reinvention’ of Maoism in different cultural contexts, focusing on subjects and historical episodes that have been suppressed in public debates and in traditional film history books.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, visual art has displayed an ambivalent nature, torn between the poles of abstractionism and realism, conceptual and postmodern, classicist nostalgia and the violent provocation for its own sake. This essay builds an argument in favour of tracing a different path for the visual arts, in which art might be able to recover its fullness and universality. The artists analysed in this volume – starting with Hopper and Balthus, singled out as precursors – appear to be following this shared path, even though they belong to different generations. Perhaps for this reason, they have for the most part been misunderstood by their contemporary critics. As in the art of Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages abstract tensions that intensify the visual field can bring simple figures to life, radically changing their meaning. This is a “sunniness” that is akin to the Claritas with which Medieval scholastics indicated the splendour of the works of their times. We’ll have to undertake a tireless process of exercising our perceptions, if we wish to be able to grasp its basic aesthetic quality.

Socialization in childhood and at a young age is marked, not only by measurable factors such as age, sex, ethnic group, religion or parents’ income, but also by variables such as depression, aggressiveness, inner calm or serenity. It makes all the difference whether a child experiences during their development an atmosphere of acceptance, gladness and emotional warmth, or one of depreciation, indifference and emotional coldness. The atmosphere in which a child is brought up shapes them as people, at least as much as the measurable factors of their social context. By discussing in detail how the atmosphere in the family, the kindergarten or at school can affect a child’s well-being, this book calls for the importance of shaping such atmospheres so to produce a positive influence on children living and learning together.