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Tracing lines between Deleuze and Négritude: A Vitalist Ontology of Postcolonial War Machines
No full textThis chapter proposes a crossing of Western and postcolonial thought via a creative reading of the Négritude movement in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. Spanning poetry, philosophy and political writings, the Négritude writers Léopold Senghor, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire confronted racist 1930s societies with the provocative declaration of a superior Black consciousness. Black thought and culture, these authors argue, circumvent the modern Western binaries of mind/body, culture/nature and subject/object with their infusion in an ontology of emotion, creativity and vital relationality, which make them superior to the rigidity of colonial modernity. First, the chapter challenges the widespread reception, developed largely out of the legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s commentary on the movement, that such a use of African culture by Négritude produces a positively inverted racism and a ‘counter-essentialism’ which remains incapable of eluding hierarchical borders between White modernity and African heritage. Against this backdrop, the chapter mobilises Deleuze’s work to show how the engagement with Bergson, Nietzsche and Marx shared by the Négritude authors and the French thinker opens up new lines of flight that move beyond both essentialisation of being and the dialectical rejection of modern reason. The chapter argues that, for Négritude, the vitality and creativity of African cultures, expressed primarily via art and poetry, is a strategic literary war machine in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, which aims to challenge modern liberalism in its ontological underpinnings and imperialist political-economic and institutional outgrowth. The strategic use of African rhythms, sounds and imagery serves the purpose of the creative rupture that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to art and which is able to move beyond, rather than against, the shackles of white modernity. The ontological propositions of Negritude, therefore, should be read as a deeply politically
situated and future-oriented call: the embracement of an ontology of affect, relational agency and vitalist becoming in Négritude is enfolded with the strategic—and profoundly human— end of creating political life after colonialism and capitalism
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Violence and Civilization: Gramsci, Machiavelli, and Sorel
Get PDFAntonio Gramsci’s writings represent a rich repository for re-thinking the meanings of violence in relation to the political and the ethical in our present conjuncture. Despite a tendency in some quarters to reduce Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to a theory of consent, his Prison Notebooks exhibit a deep concern with the ‘armour of coercion’. Thus, in his reflections on Niccolò Machiavelli’s Centaur, Gramsci regards this figure as symbolic of a dual perspective, half-animal half-human. For Gramsci, political thought should seek to elaborate the dialectical unity of these two levels: force and consent. This chapter considers the formation of this nexus of violence and civilization in Gramsci’s writings through his encounter with two thinkers, Machiavelli and Georges Sorel. Gramsci takes up Machiavelli’s use of militaristic terminology and the Florentine’s emphasis on the military basis of political struggles, expressed in the semantic field of concepts such as ‘war of manoeuvre’ and ‘war of position’. However, Gramsci balances this tendency with a recognition of the relationship between arms and religion, or, in Benedetto Croce’s ethico-political terms, between the universal (state) and the individual (church). Gramsci also draws vitality for his re-articulation of a historical materialist framework from a second source, Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1906). Examining Sorel’s distinction between myth (a ‘body of images capable of evoking sentiments’) and Utopia (a ‘deceptive mirage of the future’), I consider Gramsci’s efforts to transform Sorel’s political myth by deploying his own reading of Machiavelli’s Prince. While Gramsci accepts Sorel’s case that only the political myth is able to mobilize the strongest inclinations of a people, to create a violent force that can cleave the social fabric, Gramsci also elaborates a constructive aspect to this process. Finally, I deploy the terms set out by Walter Benjamin in his Critique of Violence to evaluate whether we can describe Gramsci’s destructive/constructive notion of political myth as a form of mythical violence or as a form of divine power
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Where Are We When We Think From Within the Body?
No full textThis chapter probes the possibility of thinking philosophically from within the body. It starts from an assumption that we think as embodied beings, arguing against the bodilessness of the I that utters “I think, therefore I am.” This argument introduces the question of the “who” of the embodied subject, using feminist philosophical framing of this issue as its springboard. The body is understood as a border, that which, instead of putting us in a no-where, places us in the now-here. Being now and here urges us to invert the question and think in terms of “What, therefore, am I?” With a particular awareness of the bordering frame of the location, it becomes important to take stock of where we are when we think. Repositioned in such a way, the subject we embark on is not only embodied, but also situated, and located. In conclusion, the chapter examines whether such subject belongs to feminist philosophy and what happens with “border thinking,” when the borders arise in elusive spaces, such as Eastern Europe
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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