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Bordering as the Breaking Force of Border Subjects
No full textBorder Studies scholars have long since considered borders neither as given entities nor merely as markers and maintainers of state sovereignty. They have shifted their perspective from the static notion of a border to a procedural understanding of the bordering as a process of relations between power and people (Pijpers, Van der Velde, Van Houtum, Van Naerssen, Vaughan-Williams). Beyond their function as demarcations that delineate distinct territories, they consider borders as disciplinary mechanisms of power as they are erected specifically to restrict undesirable classes of humans (Geddes, Häkli, Mountz). This paper aims to elaborate on the role of borders in everyday life and how of bordering, drawing upon Judith Butler’s thought. Based on Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Butler shows how norms operate to decide the question of who will be a human subject. The other against which the human is made by norms is a border subject, i.e. the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality. The power of norms is performative, as it homogenizes and excludes the non-conforming. However, the performativity is aporetic. On the one hand, performative power is a disciplining exercise that normalizes, configuring the normative standard, on the basis of which subjects are either recognised as normal or categorised as abnormal. On the other hand, considering that the performative efficacy of a norm depends on being repeated, an unconventional repetition can act as a breaking force, as a process involving performative bottom-up negotiations conducted by those who inhabit the borderland or are born crossing the normative border. These weak individuals at the borderline perform work that does and undoes the meaning of the borders, which can thus be accounted for in their double-function as both markers of belonging and places of becoming (Brambilla)
Judith Butler e il carattere performativo del potere
No full textButler, come Foucault, ritiene che il potere non sia più limitato alla sovranità, ma pervada il tessuto sociale
e abbia, utilizzando il lessico austiniano, un carattere performativo, in quanto produce soggetti “normali” ed esclude gli altri come “anormali”, stabilendo norme di intelligibilità sociale. Butler apprende da Derrida che una norma, come ogni segno, funziona se è iterabile, se può essere citata da tutti i membri di una comunità. Tuttavia, la ripetizione delle formule convenzionali in modi non convenzionali determina anche la possibilità di una riconcettualizzazione controegemonica della politica. Nella performatività sono inscritti sia l'esercizio normalizzante del potere sia una forza di rottura, un potenziale insurrezionale dell'immaginario collettivo, che per Butler si incarna soprattutto nelle performance plurali di protesta critica, come le manifestazioni pubbliche.
La politica performativa è una politica dell' immaginazione, che smantella il presunto ordine naturale, creando possibili alternative
Pain is Without Why. The (Non)Sense of Suffering After the Shoah
No full textThe principium 'reddendae rationis' holds in the case of pain, insofar as we
seek its reason, but not for pain, insofar as pain stands alone, without reason. The
suffering of the righteous, like Job, cannot be reconciled with either retributive or
theophanic reasons. Job embodies the ex-cess of evil, i.e., the stranger to the justificatory
logic of guilt-punishment or pain-election. The absurdity of pain breaks
theodicy. Kant first demonstrates both the theoretical weakness of theodicy and
the impossibility of integrating suffering in an order and in a meaningful sense. As
Levinas suggests, the disproportion between suffering and theodicy was shown at
Auschwitz, where suffering reveals itself as “useless.” In the camps, any justification
of evil reveals its fragility, its inhumanity as well as its immorality. After the
Shoah, what remains of the experience of pain is an ethical demand: we should
take responsibility for the suffering of the other, rather than let them suffer alone
Judith Butler’s militant nonviolence
No full textOn the basis of Levinassian interpretation of the biblical commandment “You shall not kill”, Butler outlines a possible Jewish ethic of nonviolence (Precarious Life), by taking vulnerability as a condition of responsibility, whose ethical mandate is not to preserve the self, but to protect the other. Judith Butler, in dialogue with several women thinkers, tries to find a nonviolent solution to violence.
Although it is not possible to give an unambiguous definition of violence, the fact remains that it is a way in which a human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way. Human beings as embodied subjects are exposed to violence, which is exercised both physically, by injuring, consuming, annihilating the body, and through the performative power of norms, which serve to be recognised (as citizens first and foremost), but are also the main cause of disavowal (Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences and J. Butler - G.C. Spivak, Who sings the Nation-State?). However, this same vulnerability can be mobilised, in her view, in order to derail or defuse violence (J. Butler - A. Athanasiou, Dispossesion). Butler, believing that no position against violence can afford to be naive, challenges some major presuppositions of nonviolence. First, she refutes the characterization of nonviolence as a weak and useless passivity (The force of nonviolence). Nonviolence, as Mahatma Gandhi suggested, is a soul force, which takes an embodied form. Butler points out that it is a force that emerges from a putative weakness, hinting at that Pauline teaching (2 Cor 12:9-10), of which Benjamin and Derrida are heirs in different ways. Second, nonviolence is not a principle, but a practice, fully fallible (Frames of war); it is a practice of resistance, both vigilant and hopeful. A nonviolent practice may well include a prohibition against killing, but it is not reducible to that prohibition. Nevertheless, nonviolence is an ideal that cannot always be fully honoured in the practice. Third, nonviolence has now to be understood less as a moral principle adopted by individuals in relation to a field of possible action than as a social and political practice undertaken in concert (J. Butler - D. Di Cesare, In lotta per la nonviolenza). And last, nonviolence does not necessarily emerge from a pacific or calm part of the soul. Very often it is an expression of rage, indignation, and aggression.
Butler wonders how to cultivate aggression for nonviolent purposes? (J. Butler - A. Cavarero, Condizione umana contro ‘natura’); to answer this question, she rereads the correspondence between Freud and Einstein in 1931-32 (Why war?). Following Einstein’s militant pacifism, Butler introduces the notion of “aggressive nonviolence”. In her opinion, as peace is resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war, so nonviolence is a struggle against violence (Reply to Catherine Mills e Fiona Jenkins), whose condition of possibility is being mired in violence. Butler also learns from Freud that a critical resistance to violence introduces a vigorous “unrealism” or another reality, fostering the emergence of modes of solidarity that seek to dismantle violent regimes
Lutero qui genuit Heidegger: deconstruction of subjectivity
No full textUndeniably reformed theology, that frees individual consciences, is important for the birth of the modern subject. However, we can see the young Luther as an anti-Cartesian ante-litteram, because he promotes an anthropology that rejects the subjective instance. Heidegger develops this less obvious second possibility, with his customary hermeneutic “violence”
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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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