Cunning Intelligence

This paper argues that Euripides' Medea is characterised by μῆτις (cunning intelligence), and reveals significant analogies with Homer's Odysseus, the πολύμητις hero: the plot of the tragedy itself seems to be modelled on the Cyclops' adventure in the Odyssey; also, Medea's tendency to deliberative monologues (as many as five in the drama) is to be considered a defining element of her μῆτις. This aspect of Medea's character should be weighed in relation to her 'spirit', that is, θυμός (rage), especially since θυμός and μῆτις are seen as more or less polar opposites in the Homeric poems. Medea's monologues in the tragedy (including her 'great monologue' at ll. 1021-80) are then analysed on the basis of such assumptions.
Sommario 1 Medea nelle discussioni antiche di 'psicologia'.-2. La Medea di Euripide e i personaggi dell'epica: Achille e Odisseo.-3. Medea eroina di μῆτις.-4. La Medea e l'Odissea.-5. Odisseo e i processi deliberativi.-6. Θυμός e μῆτις nei monologhi di Medea.-6.1 Il primo monologo deliberativo di Medea (364-409).-6.2 Il secondo discorso di Medea.-6.3. Il terzo monologo di Medea.-6.4 Il grande monologo di Medea.-6.5 L'ultimo monologo.-7. Conclusioni.

This article studies the structures of domination put in place by the courtly society of the 12th and 13th centuries, as they appear throughout its literature, by questioning the motif of female characters condemned to be burnt at the stake. That punishment, at a time pre-dating condemnations for witchcraft, is depicted as a mean of oppression against women who are outside of patriarchal social control, and who show their independent way of acting, often through the use of deception and the display of a free sexual live, or – to put it in terms of literary archetype – by behaving as "female heroes" rather than "heroines".

But these texts do not only denounce burnings at the stake as unjust punishments inflicted upon women, who are often shown to be the collateral victims of a male fight for domination. Literature from around 1200 also sheds light on how the punishment by fire, while having little to do yet with heresy and witchcraft, testifies to the strong anxiety towards uncontrolled female otherness, which, by seeking to escape from masculine domination, ends being assimilated with a monstrosity, a manifestation of evil to be destroyed.

Thus, while medieval courtly literature showed patriarchal domination at work against an oppressed female figure, it also anticipated by nearly two centuries how the early modern imaginary (if not also our contemporary one) represented women and their sexuality as oppressive, and the consequences thereof. Moreover, it appears that the condemnation of witchcraft or female deception as inspired by the devil was not so much the reason for condemning them to death, as an expression of the need for a valid reason to invalidate their behaviour outside of sanctioned norms.

Since his Bronze Age revision, the Joker has consistently served as an archetypal trickster, alternating between clever, nonviolent whimsy and vicious malice. Like Trickster, he is well-versed in social engineering and stagecraft, practical jokes, and idiomatic verbal humor, employing each to maximize his sense of schadenfreude. This behavior, which typifies the Joker ethos, is generally misconstrued as sociopathic but actually prizes cleverness, inventiveness, and Dadaist absurdity as much as the destabilization of social and emotional expectations. This convoluted dynamic is principled on the ludic rationality and anomic subversiveness that govern the monomania for which the Joker is best known. As the Joker evolves from prankster to psychopath to anomos personified, his character continually embodies the disrupter culture intrinsic to both trickster mythology and contemporary phenomena such as hacker culture and trolling. The success of modern disrupter culture is measured in " lulz, " most simply characterized as pleasure derived from disturbing another's emotional equilibrium (Schwartz, 2008, para. 8). As the central organizing logic of the Random-/b/ board of the imageboard 4chan 1 , " doing it for the lulz " mirrors the Joker ethos: it too seeks to transcend conventional rules of engagement, interrogate restrictive order, create social disjuncture, and above all take pleasure in provocation. Like Trickster, /b/ users expose the arbitrariness of social structures and perpetuate online culture in doing so; like Joker, these users don't require a motive or catalyst for their actions or for the acquisition of lulz. The Joker ethos is thus an especially applicable paradigm for understanding the 4channer as trickster-troll, especially on /b/, where trolling 1 The website 4chan, located at http://www.4chan.org, is a bulletin-board system for discussion and image-sharing. It is divided into approximately fifty themed discussion boards designated by letters within backslashes, such as Anime-/a/, Comics-/co/, and Random-/b/, where subject matter is literally random (" 4chan FAQ, " n.d.)

“YOU, the U-Bomb, or ‘YOU-Bomb goes Kabloom’: An Essay on Anonymity, Risibility, & Quantum Subjectivity,” published without author page-proofs ∴ with many odd glitches and with sections that had been deleted in the final draft (oh well!) in The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature Vol XXIII, Issue II, 1996, pp. 426-455 (submitted just prior to beginning a Masters/M.A. in Comparative Literature).

Klugheit sorgt für Können. Auf diesen Verdacht aufbauend, untersucht Emanuel Seitz das Wesen der Klugheit von ihren Anfängen in der antiken Philosophie bis zu den Neuinterpretationen Heideggers. Er befreit Klugheit von ihrem schlechten Ruf, bloß ein instrumentelles Kalkül zu sein. Ihre eigentliche Aufgabe ist die Beratung über die Form des Lebens und den geschickten Umgang mit der Welt. Der Versuch, menschliches Handeln klug zu denken, bringt die blinden Flecken in den modernen Theorien über Moral, Politik und Gesellschaft ans Licht: Er beleuchtet das Rätsel des Übens, erforscht den Hintersinn der List und erkundet, was den Menschen jenseits des Notwendigen möglich ist.

https://www.klostermann.de/Seitz-Emanuel-List-und-Form

In this essay I examine the chapter of Thucydides’ Historieswhere the historian tries to explain the qualities Themistocles showed in his political career by solving complex problems and reaching at the same time a great success (1, 138). According to Thucydides, Themistocles showed great intelligence and skill in many ways, and his qualities were agreed upon by his contemporaries. In this chapter the historian tries to give a rational analysis of these qualities, making use of concepts such as σύνεσις, γνώμη, and also emphasising the natural qualities of his mind: he was at
the same time κράτιστος γνώμων for the present and ἄριστος εἰκαστής for the future. On one hand, Themistocles shows the traditional qualities of a man endowed with μῆτις, on the other, those shared by the best contemporaries as Pericles. In any case Thucydides emphasises the peculiar qualities of this exceptional man, who cannot be compared to any one of his time.

Pain, considered an unsharable, interior experience despite its external expressions, is a phenomenon of the visual tradition and tends to be medically assessed visually. Western biomedicine favors brain scans, facial cues, and palpation signals to configure " authentic " pain as visually locatable, confirmable, and eradicable through targeted treatment. However, these ocularcentric medical techniques account only for acute pain, which is temporary and curable, and not chronic pain syndromes like fibromyalgia, an incurable, non-progressive disorder of unknown etiology. The fibromyalgic subject experiences pain everywhere, constantly, such that pain is normalized, infrequently noticed or made noticeable, excepting unpredictable but anticipated flare-ups that are as interruptive and visible as acute pain. Both contradicting and aligning with the biomedical model of acute pain, the fibromyalgic subject obfuscates the medical gaze and is suspected of hypochondria, malingering, or drug addiction. To receive treatment, she must employ a multisensory peripheral cunning to intuit sensory expectations of how pain should appear and, accordingly, believably, perform the authentic experience of pain she stands accused of faking. Relying on mētis and kairós to deploy new modes of perceiving, knowing, affecting, and being-affected, she must strategically occupy positions that demand the medical gaze embrace multisensory perception over the solidified distance of image-based instrumental mediation outside of the body.

Lisa Landrum's paper "Modus Operandi of an Architectus Doli: Architectural Cunning in the Comic Plays of Plautus"  appears as Chapter 15.  Also in the book are essays by Karsten Harries, Marco Frascari, David Leatherbarrow, Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, and other colleages and former students of Alberto Perez-Gomez including: Ricardo L. Castro, Tracey Eve Winton, Robert Kirkbride, Paul Emmons, Indra Kagis McEwen, Santiago de Orduña, Caroline Dionne, Lily Chi, Louise Pelletier, Lawrence Bird, Lian Chikako Chang, Natalija Subotincic, Stephen Parcell, Graham Livesey, Juan Manuel Heredia, Anne Bordeleau, Peter Olshavsky, and David Theodore.

Paper summary/excerpts: "At least five of Plautus’ twenty extant comedies involve what classicists call an architectus doli, an “architect of trickery.” … Plautus’ elaboration of the cunning slave character has long been considered one of his most original contributions to Latin drama; but the “architect” terms associated with these slaves (and with Jupiter) were likely transposed from the now largely lost Greek comedies that Plautus adapted and translated into Latin. These five imported “architects” were generally ignored in early studies of Plautine inventiveness. They eventually gained attention, however, in an important 1952 study on The Nature of Roman Comedy. Since then, Plautus’ architectus figure has been interpreted in a variety of ways within classical scholarship: as a euphemism for the play’s lowly agent of intrigue; as a proxy for the scheming playwright; and as a media-reflexive figure associated with other craft imagery used throughout Plautus’ plays to qualify and vivify not only acts of scheming and plot construction, but also moral edification. Yet, there are further interpretations to be made and important questions to be asked…This essay cannot answer these questions in full, but it will initiate an interpretation of Plautus’ architectus doli with such questions in mind. By lifting this Roman dramatist up out of the footnotes of architectural scholarship (where he is sometimes merely credited with providing the earliest extant use of the Latin term architectus), the following study prepares the grounds for discovering how the cunning agents and agencies of Plautus’ comedies meaningfully illuminate the modus operandi of architects..."

Call for Papers: Cunning Knowledge and Media Technologies
Platform: Journal of Media and Communication
http://platformjmc.com
An interdisciplinary journal for early career researchers and graduate students

Volume editor: Christopher O’Neill
Abstract submissions due: 5th of March, 2016
Full paper submissions due: 20th of May, 2016

This article analyzes Niccolò Machiavelli’s use of the myth of Chiron, a half men - half beast teacher of many Greek heroes. The centaur is explicitly mentioned in the Prince (Ch. XVIII) and it appears in the frontispiece of the first edition of the Mandrake. However, contrary to Ancient and Humanist sources (such as Homer, Pliny, and Boccaccio), Machiavelli stresses the bestial side of Chiron’s nature and invites the Prince to imitate it. Many commentators, such as Innocent Gentillet, have seen this as an example of the demoniac character of Machiavellian teaching that would have mutated Chiron from a wise teacher into an evil adviser with dangerous ideas.
This article analyzes Machiavelli’s example of Chiron differently. The reference to the centaur’s double nature does not promote evil practices in politics but describes the extraordinary nature needed to overcome enemies and fortune. The image of Chiron stresses the pivotal role of animality (ferocity and cunning) in political innovation. At the same time it is a metaphor describing the ambiguity of this emerging power. Its illegitimate origin creates between the Prince and his people a conflictual relationship in which violence is unavoidable.