Humanism, Anti-Humanism, and Post-Humanism

Il saggio intende dimostrare che, subito dopo la pubblicazione, da parte di Alberico Gentili, dei De iuris interpretibus Dialogi sex (1582) e delle Lectiones et Epistolae (1583-1584) i rapporti fra Jean Hotman e il giurista di San Ginesio divennero molto difficili e burrascosi. Lo dimostrano alcune epistole scritte da Hotman ad autorevoli giuristi (ad es. Bodin), e ad alcuni umanisti (Bergmann, Payne, Cuffe, Th. Savile) contenenti critiche molto dure e severe ai Dialogi gentiliani. Malgrado ciò, e malgrado le opposizioni dei puritani, Gentili riuscirà ad ottenere la cattedra di Civil Law a Oxford.Il saggio contiene anche notizie circa il tentativo compiuto, dal Gentili, di ottenere un insegnamento a Tubinga nel 1580.

The question of ethics posits, at its core, an idea of the other. But what is this other? What is it made of? What is the meaning of its power over the human subject? The paper looks at the idea of otherness as its appears in Levinas and Paul de Man – two thinkers who share a fascination with radical exteriority but could not disagree more on its meaning – and its implication on the question of freedom. With Walter Benjamin in supporting role.

This (preprint) chapter argues that the 'thick' constructivism to which many prominent Feminist Security Studies authors currently subscribe is incapable of providing this sub-field of International Relations with adequate philosophical grounding. This is the case, it claims, because the textualist framework that results from this form of constructivism is unable to provide a basis and rationale for the kind of integrative, interdisciplinary research that is required to do justice to the events/ phenomena with which Feminist Security Studies is concerned. In contrast, the chapter contends that critical realist philosophy-especially its emergentist/stratified ontology and power-/ mechanism-based understanding of causality-does pave the way for such research. Moreover, it stresses that the heterodox and synthetic/preservative nature of this philosophical approach allows it to avoid the persistent theory/praxis inconsistencies which plague constructivist work.

The first instalment of a series of novellas evoking post-artificial, post-sexual worlds in an imaginary version of the Solar System.
In this metaphysical melodrama, an existential crisis unfolds in lunar mega-city ‘Eidopolis.’ Death becomes the profound totem of a dawning post-mortal existence …

Most contemporary scholarly work on posthumanism and transhumanism rests on the idea that both perspectives are part of an ontological continuum. This article, however, acknowledges and explores the differences between them. In order to prove that evident theoretical –and, therefore, practical– differences exist between both positions, a genealogy of their development from the 1980s is proposed. The definition of the two different ontologies associated to each of the discussed positions is followed by an analysis of the consequences that this theoretical separation would have for research. This paper also lays out a revision of their epistemologies and their ethical and practical implications. To conclude, we offer a contextualized justification of why the two discussed positions are actually antithetic, and how considering them as such would be useful for future research in the field.

Resumen
El discurso posthumanista está empezando a hacerse sentir en el contexto educativo y particularmente en el ámbito escolar. Una de las primeras cuestiones que esas transformaciones paradigmáticas suscitan en este contexto se insertan en el ámbito de la ética, requiriendo mayores reflexiones sobre una posible ética posthumana en la educación. El objetivo de este artículo, desarrollado por investigación de carácter bibliográfico, fue abordar esta cuestión, delineado la emergencia del Posthumanismo en el contexto educativo y las cuestiones éticas implicadas, y presentando contribuciones del pensamiento latinoamericano para esta reflexión. Palabras clave: Ética post-humana; Educación; Pensamiento Latinoamericano.

Abstract
The posthumanist discourse is beginning to be felt in the educational context and particularly in the school setting. One of the first questions that these paradigmatic transformations provoke in this context is inserted in the field of ethics, requiring greater reflections on a possible posthuman ethics in education. The objective of this article, developed by bibliographic research, was to address this issue, delineating the emergence of posthumanism in the educational context and the ethical issues involved, and presenting contributions from Latin American thought for this reflection.

Although he has been publishing since the early 1970s, François Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy has only recently received any sustained attention in English-language scholarly work, spurred in large part by the writings of Ray Brassier (along with Alexander Galloway, Katerina Kolozova, John Mullarkey, and Anthony Paul Smith, amongst others). Yet Brassier’s nihilistic anti-humanism has tended to colour this reception in a manner inimical to Laruelle’s stated intentions. The purpose of this article, then, is to focus upon one of the most important, but perhaps also one of the least discussed aspects of Laruelle’s fascinating (if abstruse) non-philosophy: his theory of man, and his claim to have recovered a truly ordinary mode of thought, which he associates with the figure of the One. The task of non-philosophy, Laruelle claims, is not to think about the One (which would be to reduce the human individual to Being), but to think according to the One, whereby the auto-positioned sufficiency of philosophy is suspended, and it is instead understood as occasional material that is determined-in-the-last-instance by the radical immanence of the One, which is not a subject in the philosophical sense, but a living human ‘in flesh and blood’. Over the course of this article, we will examine Laruelle’s (non-)humanist intervention in relation to Michel Foucault’s announcement of the forthcoming ‘death of man’, perhaps the single most notable example of philosophical anti-humanism.

The Seventeen Contradictions is an x-ray of tensions, trends and tendencies in capital and capitalism that empowers us to look forward. Taking the still ongoing 2008 economic crisis as a starting point, Harvey investigates how the capitalist economy that produces such crises is embedded in contradictions. Seventeen of these are discussed throughout the book.

Androids, if they were to come into existence, would be the outcome of scientific and engineering ingenuity and thus be products of past living labour. Although the androids might be Turing-compatible, Voight-Kammpf cheating and Asimov-law abiding, they would be dead labour. Indeed as outcomes of a capitalist production process they would surely be commodities, objectifying a quantity of value and have particular uses for business, comfort or pleasure. In other words, androids would be very advanced machinery and Marx is quite clear that machinery cannot produce surplus value.

Drawing on John Johnston’s (2008) analysis of artificial life theory and experiments, this paper will explore whether androids or artificially intelligent robots can create surplus value. It will do so by interrogating and critiquing the key Marxist categories of labour and value. In this science-fictional quest to discover value producing androids, I will consider Marx’s problematic vitalism or whether there is something else specific to Man that is necessary for his value theory. I will consider Marx’s vitalism, and the android from the point of view of the labour process and valorization process before suggesting that under certain conditions androids can in fact produce value. These conditions have nothing to do with the peculiarity of either Man or machine, but rather with what value is and how it functions in Marx’s theoretical framework. Although Marx could be charged with vitalism, I will conclude that this aspect of his theory can be understood as referring to the life of capital and that in this context labour is negentropic to capital’s entropy. An implication of this exploration is that capitalism is alive and that it could reproduce itself without the existence of the human race.

This paper suggests that humanism is a decisionism in contemporary critical political theory. Despite obvious and multiple differences, leading critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Jürgen Habermas, among others, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the political. This stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, this paper argues, because it uncritically reproduces conceptual affinities between the notion of the human being and sovereign authority. By investing in the stability and centrality of the human being these theorists perform what will be called, paraphrasing an often neglected argument by Carl Schmitt, a decision to be human. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not merely circumscribed to sovereignty’s juridico-political dimension, but that it also includes a peculiar commitment to God’s decision to become human in Christ. Against this decisionism as humanism the essay draws on Walter Benjamin, Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida to propose an alternative politics that destabilizes humanity and sovereignty through the emergence of the animal, or what will be called melancholic lycanthropy.

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are today acknowledged as a classic of the human and social sciences in the twentieth century. The influence of his thought in numerous fields of scholarship is only exceeded by the diverse interpretations and readings to which it has been subjected, resulting in often contradictory 'images of Gramsci'. This book draws on the rich recent season of Gramscian philological studies in order to argue that the true significance of Gramsci's thought consists in its distinctive position in the development of the Marxist tradition. Providing a detailed reconsideration of Gramsci's theory of the state and concept of philosophy, The 'Gramscian moment' argues for the urgent necessity of taking up the challenge of developing a 'philosophy of praxis' as a vital element in the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.

7/31 small additions: p 8 Weber, and p 98, both ref. academic freedom.  p 176 Fried and photography. and minor fixes
1/28/23 minor fixes.  1/12/2023 pages 110-121 are new.
2/3/22  small mistakes. a couple of missed photos.  3/31 On Saint-Simon. and the history of the phrase "avant-garde"  p 12.. (short but obviously needed) 3/24 On Frears' The Queen p163
1.../24...1/10...
1/05: I can't quit. More on Weber as "private reason", p.8. Arendt contra Chomsky, p. 34.
12/28 Again: this has has turned into a series of essays, posted here as a last resort. I'm taking a break. I've been working on it for a long time.


"We need, finally, to separate Modernism from modernity. They are not synonyms. Modernism is an ideology and modernity merely a situation: it’s where we’re at. The dream and lie of Modernism was the fantasy and the nightmare of disenchantment, of the fiction of the scientific or revolutionary vanguard, free from history, the instrument of reason alone. Modernism celebrated the range of fantasies that modernity inspired: Marx was a Modern, engaging contradictions, including his own; Marxists were Modernists, dreaming of the end of contradiction. These fantasies have aged badly, devolving from idealism to reaction and now farce. Modernism is dead; its defenders aren’t."

"Contemporary 'Singularity' thinking has its origins in Vernor Vinge’s influential proposal of the emergence of greater-than-human artificial intelligence (AI) as an ‘event horizon’ in human history. This notion finds its technological basis in the exponential development of information technology during the 20th century, as expressed in 'Moore’s Law'. However, the pace of development of information technologies is uncertain, and the predictions for the date of emergence of a 'Singularity' are pushing it farther into the future. An analogy can be established with religious eschatology and its trademark anxiety for a form of Rapture.
'Singularity' thinking's ancestry can be traced back to the utopian thinking of Campanella, as well as positivistic utopianism, the works of eschatological thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin, and the speculative writings of computer scientists.
More recently, it has become a common trope in speculative fiction. This heritage is acknowledged in the writings of V. Vinge, which have laid the conditions for the rise of a 'technological singularity'. As an heir to the utopian tradition, 'singularitarianism' espouses a theory of human history as progress towards better forms of existence.
Scientific and technological development would be destined to accelerate humankind into a post-human condition, with the creation of artificial intelligence as the milestone signalling the beginning of that new era.
The acceleration thesis of ‘singularitarianism’ and its inherent uncertainty have given rise to a variety of positions, ranging from the enthusiastic (as, for example, N. Bostrom, R. Kurzweil, or H. Moravec), to the sceptic (including B. Joy, J. Lanier, R. Penrose). Rarely have they been the object of a sustained philosophical approach (an exception would be D. Chalmers’ “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”).
The 'Singularity' scenario integrates images, metaphors, notions, and hopes also present in cyberculture: the central element of technology, its interfaces with humans, hybridization, mind-body dualism, the moral nature of AI, and the coexistence between humanity and AI. As a result, this paper addresses a needed critical characterization of 'Singularity' thinking, exploring some"

1. Introducción: Giros y paradigmas críticos en la antropología y en las ciencias sociales
2. El giro pos-(macro)sociológico de mediados de los sesenta
3. El giro de la antropología crítica o dialéctica de los tardíos sesenta (y su resurgimiento)
4. El giro hermenéutico de los setenta.
5. El giro posmoderno y poscolonial de los ochenta.
6. El giro posestructuralista de los años noventa: Deconstrucción, rizomas y épistémès.
7. El giro decolonial del siglo XXI.
8. Las antropologías del mundo y de la periferia, el giro (psicodélico y shamánico) hacia las antropologías indígenas y su fallido enlace con el giro ontológico
9. El momento pos-fundacional de la pos-verdad: El giro pos-normal, pos-humano, pos-social y pos-político de la antropología.
10. Nota sobre la arqueología pos-humana y pos-posprocesual y sus contrapartidas en la auto-etnografía.
11. Culturas de la cancelación, funa o escrache: Diagnóstico de lo sucedido y predicciones atinentes a lo que ha de suceder

Dans leur ouvrage controversé de 1985 intitulé La Pensée 68: essai sur l'anti-humanisme contemporain, Luc Ferry et Alain Renaut réclament avoir cherché à opérer une critique avant tout philosophique et non idéologique  des penseurs regroupés dans la construction du type idéal de ce qu’ils ont nommé « la pensée 68 ». Or, si leur « essai sur l’anti-humanisme » aborde une problématique dont on ne peut nier la nature essentiellement philosophique – visant, entre autres, à critiquer la déconstruction de la subjectivité opérée par des penseurs tels que Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu et Lacan – ; néanmoins, il paraît difficile de détacher cette problématique de la visée manifestement polémique dont elle est investie, comme continuent de le soulever la plupart de leurs critiques et leurs commentateurs . C’est pourquoi nous pouvons nous demander dans quelle mesure le choix en partie désavoué du pamphlet, et donc de ses stratégies rhétoriques, contrevient à leur projet d’élaborer une critique proprement philosophique de l’anti-humanisme contemporain.

Ce mémoire de maîtrise déposé à l'Université de Bologne et à l'Université de Strasbourg en 2014 propose une analyse de L'œuvre au noir de Marguerite Yourcenar (1968) dans le cadre d'une étude théorique portant sur les modes de représentation de l'humanisme au XXe siècle.

Ce mémoire est tout d'abord constitué d'une étude étymologique portant sur les différents usages - souvent contradictoires - du terme "humanisme", essentiellement compris comme un modèle pédagogique (les "humanités") ou comme une philosophie de l'homme. Il réunit par la suite une généalogie de la critique heideggérienne de l'humanisme en divisant celle-ci en quatre phases (1929-1946 ; 1946-1966 ; 1966-1985 ; 1985-aujourd'hui), avant de distinguer trois axes permettant de définir cette notion selon les débats des historiens de la Renaissance, soit un axe identitaire, un axe pédagogique et un axe religieux.

Cette étude replace par la suite l'évolution de la pensée yourcenarienne depuis Les mémoires d'Hadrien (1951) jusqu'à Un homme obscur (1981) dans le contexte de ces débats autour de l'humanisme, en démontrant que celle-ci suit une trajectoire opposée à celle de la genèse de la critique heideggérienne. Cela me permet ensuite d'aborder, par l'entremise des théories de la réception et de la lecture de Wolfgang Iser, les problèmes liés à la représentation de ce concept dans un roman historique ayant pour toile de fond la Renaissance, dans un chapitre qui tente de mettre en lumière certains liens qui peuvent exister entre la production littéraire contemporaine et l'histoire des idées.

Ces réflexions m'incitent à me pencher davantage, dans la seconde partie de mon mémoire, sur les liens entre "texte" et "contexte", en m'intéressant tout d'abord aux enjeux linguistiques que représente l'écriture réputée "classique" de Marguerite Yourcenar, que j'oppose aux expérimentations langagières d'un collectif d'auteurs bolognais qui ont fait paraître leur premier roman, Q, en 1999 sous le nom de Luther Blissett. Je tente de démontrer, en confrontant les stratégies auctoriales déployées à travers ces textes, qu'ils peuvent constituer deux pôles de représentation opposés de l'humanisme dans un roman historique, selon une tradition "illusioniste" et "anti-illusioniste".

Pour finir, la dernière partie de ce mémoire constitue une analyse plus approfondie de la figure de Zénon dans L'œuvre au noir, en cherchant à comprendre dans quelle mesure ce personnage peut être lié à l'historiographie portant sur l'humanisme de la Renaissance.

In Nihil Unbound and other shorter works, Ray Brassier develops his contemporary transcendental realism by adopting the nihilistic aspects of thinkers such as Laruelle, Sellars and Badiou, while leaving behind their anthropic residuals. What is surprising is that Brassier has yet to publish any critical analysis of Nick Land despite their striking similarities and interactions at Warwick University (notwithstanding Brassier's introduction to Land's collected writings and a 2010 talk on Land). This paper aims to fill in this gap by showing how Brassier adheres to Land's initial philosophy of the negative while rejecting its humanist political corollaries in favor of an epistemological turn to science. I will first show how Brassier adopts Land's idea that we must come to terms with our future extinction as the transcendental condition for thinking a non-conceptual reality beyond our anthropic delusions of grandeur. Unlike Brassier, however, Land goes on to identify capitalism's destructive processes as the organon for death's transcendental critique. Consequently, Land's recent work develops a pro-capitalist, neoreactionary politics with deeply narcissistic tendencies insofar as it rests on gratifying individuals' basest passions and greed. Conversely, Brassier maintains Land's initial notion of death as the transcendental critique of anthropocentrism, but instead links it to cosmology's insight into the solar system's eventual demise beyond anthropic political processes within our control. Although Brassier thereby believes that he is able to appropriate Land's useful conceptual resources for de-anthropomorthizing philosophy while stripping him of his humanist political remnants, this paper will conclude by drawing on the suggestions of Mark Fisher and Reza Negarestani to proffer a Landian rejoinder to Brassier: even if capitalism is anthropomorphic, it is necessary to politically fight against it rather than abandon politics altogether in favor of science, if only to rid science of its ideological servitude under the reign of capital.

Dal 23 al 27 settembre Lesbos ha ospitato la Conferenza Internazionale sul Postumanesimo: “Audiovisual Posthumanism. Aesthetics, Cultural Theory and the Art”, organizzata dall'Universitá dell'Egeo insieme all'Eurosa (The European Society for Aesthetics). Cinque giorni di sessioni mattutine, pomeridiane e performance serali, ospitate presso il Museo Archeologico: un perfetto invito lacaniano a riflettere sul ruolo dell'umano...
Molti i nodi tematici affrontati. Innanzitutto la differenza tra Postumanesimo e Transumanesimo - che crea spesso confusione - è stata interpretata e discussa da svariati punti di vista: teorico, artistico, storico.

This paper argues that when it comes to thinking about work and labour, Marxism experiences a continued difficulty in holding theory and politics together without reliance on the concept of 'social labour': a humanist ideological concept which mystifies the role of social relations in explaining work under capitalism (Althusser, 2003). The evidence for this is collected through a reading of a number of important contributions within the Marxist sociology of work (Braverman, 1974; Gorz, 2012; Hardt & Negri, 2001; Thompson, 1991). At its conclusion, the paper turns back to Althusser (2014) and his critique of work and ideology in order to point towards the framework for an alternative critique of work that makes a conceptual move away from humanist ideas of alienation and social labour, towards materialist notions of interpellation and social relations.

The purpose of this article is to interrogate Marx’s analysis of the circulation of capital through the ‘new materialist’ communications and media theory of Friedrich Kittler. It explores the connections between Marx’s commodity fetish and how Kittler posits human beings as components of an information system alongside technologies and institutions. The article ask whether a ‘non-human’ Marxist theory is possible, i.e. if it is possible to remove the human being from its privileged position in Marx’s political economy. Specifically the paper argues that human beings are programmable human matter that serves to aid the communication of value through capital’s circuit. This stance necessitates adopting the point of view of capital and the fetish, bracketing the social and moving away from categories such as labour, production and class consciousness in favour of the value form, circulation and programmability.

I argue that the philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard and the film "Brazil" are mutually enriching and illuminating when read in conjunction, particularly around issues of technocapitalism, private selfhood, nostalgia, and the concept of The Human

Edmund Husserl and Michel Foucault are two philosophers quite different from each other in terms of style and themes. While one may appreciate the first for a humanistic motive which materializes in an appeal to self-determination, such as what we find in his last great work, the second one is, on the contrary, well known for his “anti-humanism”. However, if the aim of Foucault’s research is put under examination, it's possible to discover that it is not after all so distant, in certain aspects, from the aim that animates Husserl’s reflections. For both, it is a matter of asking how we became what we are – to paraphrase Nietzsche – opening, thus, the road toward a different and free constitution of one’s self.
(Pubblicato in "In Circolo. Rivista di filosofie e culture": http://www.incircolorivistafilosofica.it/umanesimo-e-anti-umanesimo-tra-husserl-e-foucault/).

This paper is an investigation into the posthuman influence on postmodern art and the potential for art production in a posthuman context. It emphasises one particular period in art history. The period spanning from the late twentieth century to the early twenty first century is an era bent on the domination of the media and the promiscuity of technologies. It is an era that provokes the onset of posthumanism, where the distinctions that once held humanity in place have become dated; because it is no longer clear who makes and who is made in the relationship between human beings and machines. In this way, it is no longer necessary to write science-fiction since we are currently living it. Our time is a posthuman era where the body has become vestigial and obsolete; expendable under the confines of the global village, which has imploded under the weight of its own progress. Posthuman art comments on this paradigm shift, where man submits to the vestiges of hyperreality and a dependence on the media.

Draft of the paper published in Splendore Marciano. Il restauro della legatura già del codice LAT. III, 111 (=2116) della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana di Venezia, a cura di Maria Letizia Sebastiani [e] Paolo Crisostomi, Padova, Nova Charta, 2012 [ISBN 978-88-95047-14-0], pp. 15-25. This paper, published in 2012, anticipates a few conclusions of the book "Antieroe dai molti volti: Giuliano l'Apostata nel Medioevo bizantino", published in 2014.
Il multiforme aspetto della civiltà bizantina è esemplificato nella biblioteca di Bessarione dalla presenza di importanti codici testimonianti la ricchezza e la varietà culturale del mondo in cui il cardinale si era formato. Come metropolita di Nicea era un uomo bizantino formatosi in una civiltà millenaria in cui i classici erano di casa e non c'era stato pertanto un Rinascimento come quello italiano, ma, come uomo del Rinascimento italiano, voleva trarre ispirazione dall'antichità per opere nuove: tra le sue opere, è ancora oggi attiva e funzionante la Biblioteca Marciana.

Roberto Esposito claims that biopolitics characterizes the entire modernity, and that it is built on the immunity dispositive. Im-munity is the negation of the munus which animates and builds com-munity: inside the immunitarian paradigm, thinking politics and ontology is considering men as ab-solutes beings, without any kind of engagement to each other, inhabited by a vacuum to deny. Esposito believes this means shaping an anthropological paradigm (systematized by philosophical anthropology in the 20th century) in which man is thought to be distinct from the animal since he is capable of denying his own nature and, more generally, his relationship with the world and the other beings – that is, a paradigm in which community has no ‘positive’ place. In order to overcome the immunitarian paradigm, we need to define the outlines of an affirmative biopolitics, a politics ‘of ’ life and not ‘on’ life. This biopolitical shift requires the understanding of the ‘flow of life,’ of its everlasting and unprotected openness: Esposito claims that life is impersonal and intrinsically normative, over-human and perpetually exposed to the ‘outside.’ Finally, this perspective leaves open a crucial question: can over-man exist without man?

Humanism, Drama, and Performance: Unwriting Theatre examines the appropriation of theatre and theatrical performance by ideologies of humanism, in terms that continue to echo across the related disciplines of literary, drama, theatre, and performance history and studies today. From Aristotle onward, theatre has been regulated by three strains of critical poiesis: the literary, segregating theatre and the practices of the spectacular from the humanizing work attributed to the book and to the internality of reading; the dramatic, approving the address of theatrical performance only to the extent that it instrumentalizes literary value; and the theatrical, assimilating performance to the conjunction of literary and liberal values. These values have been used to figure not only the work of theatre, but also the propriety of the audience as a figure for its socializing work, along a privileged dualism from the aestheticized ensemble—harmonizing actor, character, and spectator to the essentialized drama—to the politicized assembly, theatre understood as an agonistic gathering.

In the wake of both 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008, the humanities have been offered as constituents of higher education which, if more prominent and more strenuously promoted, might have prevented both events. At the same time, the humanities have undergone an assault from governments in the West, with massively reduced or wholly cut funding as part of an attempt to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in universities. The response from parts of the humanities to these government initiatives has been strident, insisting that a thriving humanities or liberal arts curriculum is crucial to democracy, ethics and citizenship, and that the humanities should be an essential ingredient of science and business education. Contemporary semiotics' deployment of the concept of Umwelt demonstrates that the contribution the humanities might make to theory, practice and social life remains indispensable. Yet this contribution is of a rather different character to that portrayed in the traditional defence of 'humanistic' study. Indeed, the example of semiotics reveals that the humanities themselves are regularly misconceived. A personal story illustrates one of the main points in what follows. When I was about 10 years old, I was standing outside the surgery of the local general practitioner, looking at the plaque near the front door. I turned to my dad, asking why doctors need to have so many qualifications, why they have to leave school with a range of exams passed rather than simply focusing on the practice of medicine as their one and only subject. My dad, described on my birth certificate as a " wheel turner " for the Ford Motor Company, someone who had left school at 14 and was placed as one of the most lowly functionaries of late capitalism, was able to reply with a degree of insight which, unfortunately, seems to be beyond that of many senior managers in universities, education policymakers and powerbrokers. His reply to my questions was that it is necessary for doctors to demonstrate that their minds are active in other subject areas than just medicine so that their specialism is not merely a matter of niched competence, that it is informed from without and also because they need to be able to carry out the great many diverse tasks involved in their job.

Les enjeux de ce travail avant tout théoriques : il s’agit de comprendre quel a pu être l’apport spécifique des romans historiques contemporains dans la réception de l’héritage humaniste au XXe siècle. Nous nous proposons d’aborder ce problème à travers une analyse portant sur la figure de l’humaniste dans L’Œuvre au Noir de Marguerite Yourcenar, tout en replaçant celle-ci dans le contexte plus large des débats qui ont divisé les historiens et les philosophes autour de la « question de l’humanisme » depuis la parution de la Lettre sur l’humanisme de Heidegger (1946) jusqu’à la publication du roman (1968).
Notre étude vise à démontrer que L’Œuvre au Noir présente de nombreux échos de ces controverses, qui ont notamment opposé Paul O. Kristeller et Eugenio Garin sur la question des liens entre l’humanisme et la philosophie. Nous soutiendrons néanmoins qu’à la différence des principaux acteurs de cette querelle, le texte romanesque récuse toute interprétation globale de l’humanisme, en réactivant parfois de manière ironique une série de lieux communs associés à ce courant de pensée (anthropocentrisme, rationalisme exacerbé, optimisme naïf).
Le caractère novateur de cette étude consiste en son approche pluridisciplinaire d’un problème qui n’a encore jamais fait l’objet d’une synthèse susceptible de regrouper la somme importante de travaux dont l’humanisme a fait l’objet au sein de disciplines aussi variées que ne le sont la critique littéraire, la sociologie et l’historiographie.

Sažetak: Autorka se u ovom radi bavi problemom humanizma u filozofiji egzistencije. Razmatraju se odredbe humanizma u tekstovima Jaspersa, Sartra, Merlo-Pontija i Hajdegera, te mogućnosti odstupanja od klasičnih formi humanizama ili odbacivanja pozicije humanizma. Za razliku od Jaspersa, Sartra i Merlo-Pontija, koji su jasno zagovarali humanizam kao misaonu orijentaciju, Hajdegerova filozofija otvorila je prostor za razumevanje njegove pozicije kao antihumanističke (Badju), kao transhumanističke/posthumanističke (Sloterdajk), ali i kao najvišeg oblika metafizičkog humanizma (Derida).

This text speculates on the limits of kinship towards non-human otherness via the figure of a toxic fish that migrated from the Red Sea into Mediterranean waters over the last decade. In post-anthropocentric approaches to otherness, the boundary between the human and the animal is presumably blurred, it becomes immeasurable, discontinuous or 'abyssal' – to use Derrida's phrasing – rather than a single dividing line. Conversely, the representations and treatment of this toxic fish by fishing communities consolidates, rhetorically and materially, a strong dividing line between us and them, the human and the non-human other. The constitutive fragility of this dividing line and its ongoing contestations, it will be argued, harbours the tensions inhabiting post-humanist politics and ethics, involving questions of class, anthropocentric bias, the possibilities of interspecies communication, and attempts to rearrange species-based hierarchies.

Este seminario incluye una serie de obras que podrían entrar dentro de un posible canon de lo poshumano latinoamericano. Si se entiende lo poshumano como una combinación entre humano y máquina, veremos que de un tiempo a esta parte la inclusión del imaginario de lo “cyborg” se ha ido convirtiendo en constante en la literatura latinoamericana. De suma importancia se considera el énfasis de diversas teorías actuales para la mencionada relectura en temas afines de interés teórico y literario.

This seminar will showcase a body of works that could enter into what we called "Latin American Poshuman". If we understand the Poshuman as the final combination of the Human and the Machine, we can also incorporate the "cyborg" images, which have been more constantly represented into Latin American recent novels, such as "The Invention of Morel" (by Argentinean Adolfo Bioy Casares) and "Ygdrasil" (by Chilean Jorge Baradit). For the purposes of this course, we encourage to use a group of diverse theories and points of view related to this, which include (but are not entitled to it) Feminism, Queer Theory, Post-Structuralism, Post-Marxism, and so on.

Alberico Gentili (San Ginesio 1552 – Londra 1608). Giurista di fama, esule in Inghilterra nel 1580 per motivi religiosi e regius professor di civil law a Oxford dal 1587, il Gentili è noto alla letteratura specialistica soprattutto per aver pubblicato, in particolare, i De iuris interpretibus Dialogi sex (1582), e i De iure belli libri tres (1598): due opere che hanno spesso indotto gli studiosi a considerarlo, rispettivamente, come uno strenuo difensore del “mos italicus iura docendi” e uno dei padri fondatori del diritto internazionale moderno.

Le carte manoscritte del giurista italiano sono conservate presso la Bodleian Library di Oxford: carte che fino ad oggi risultano solo molto parzialmente esplorate. Nel fondo D’Orville 610, ff. 59r-69v, è conservato l’autografo, sicuramente risalente all’ultimo decennio del ‘500, che oggi viene criticamente ed integralmente edito nelle ultime pagine del volume (Appendice, pp. 169-206).

Il testo è preceduto da un’ampia illustrazione dell’opera (pp. 1-167). Si tratta di un vero e proprio Commentario nel quale il giurista illustra il Libro IX titolo IX del Codice giustinianeo: adulterio, stupro (inteso come relazione con una “virgo” o una “vidua”), lenocinio, disparità di trattamento fra coniugi in relazione ai reati sopra indicati, status processuale della donna, pene da irrogare agli adulteri, sono i temi che il giurista affronta alla luce del dettato della legislazione romano-giustinianea, e della letteratura che per secoli se n’è occupata avendo particolare riguardo, non solo alla dottrina civilistica, ma anche alla canonistica, al pensiero dei Padri della Chiesa ed ai maggiori umanisti del XVI secolo fra i quali il Cuiacio che il Gentili aveva aspramente criticato nei Dialogi del 1582.

Senza rinnegare quanto aveva teorizzato all’inizio degli anni Ottanta del XVI secolo, nel prosieguo della sua attività scientifica il giurista di San Ginesio ricongiunge i frutti copiosi delle Scuole dei Glossatori e dei Commentatori, con le nuove esigenze e le indiscutibili acquisizioni dottrinali dovute ai grandi giuristi umanisti, nel tentativo di ricercare un nuovo percorso tra la conservazione del grande patrimonio dottrinale dell’età intermedia e le esigenze di rinnovamento proprie del XVI secolo. È una novità che deve fa riflettere sull’opportunità di dover necessariamente collocare Alberico Gentili in una delle sue scuole (bartolisti e umanisti) che caratterizzarono un’epoca importante della storia giuridica europea.

Sommario: 1. Premessa.- 2.  Gentili e il diritto canonico.- 3. Gentili e il diritto civile.- 4. Da interpres iuris Iustiniani a simpliciter interpres iuris.-
Alberico Gentili (San Ginesio, 1552 – Londra, 1608), uno dei maggiori giuristi della prima Età Moderna, è ritenuto uno dei padri fondatori del diritto internazionale moderno. Perseguitato in patria per la sua adesione alle dottrine riformate, esule in Inghilterra dove ottiene la nomina a regius professor di civil law presso l’Università di Oxford (1587-1608), il Gentili dedica la sua riflessione al ruolo del giurista, in un momento di passaggio fra la tradizione del Diritto Comune e l’affermarsi degli Stati nazionali, in un ambiente, quello dell’Inghilterra elisabettiana, dalla peculiare tradizione giuridica. 
L’individuazione di una linea di demarcazione fra lo spirituale e il temporale, e delle corrispondenti rispettive competenze del teologo e del giurista cui dedica il I LIbro de De nuptiis (1601) intitolato "Qui est de interprete"; il ricorso, attraverso un continuo sforzo interpretativo, ai principii del diritto naturale inteso come complesso di regole di giustizia e di valori etico-sociali universali, ora fondati sulla razionalità umana; lo studio e l’illustrazione del Corpus iuris civilis e del Corpus iuris canonici (1605) anche sotto il profilo filologico, unito alla lettura delle fonti letterarie, storiche, filosofiche, teologiche e patristiche: sono queste le basi che inducono Alberico Gentili a contrapporre il metodo da lui utilizzato per la redazione dei “De iuris interpretibus Dialogi sex” (1582) ad un nuovo metodo ormai acquisito (“...Et de iuris Iustinianici interprete illic egi, non simpliciter de interprete iuris”... “Nostra non est ars, recitare quid in libris Iustiniani est constitutum, sed definire explicate, quid in quaque quaestione est iuris...”).
Ancora strenuo difensore della funzione insostituibile dell’interprete del diritto identificato nell’autentico precetto normativo – e questo lo caratterizza, pur nelle mutate condizioni politiche, come appartenente alla vecchia scuola – allo stesso tempo egli è attento e sensibilissimo protagonista della nuova metodologia umanistica protesa alla storicizzazione del diritto in quanto espressione nel tempo e nello spazio della razionalità che determina l’intelligente comprensione e applicazione delle norme e dell’intero ordinamento.

This paper discusses issues of research design and methods in new materialist social inquiry, an approach that is attracting increasing interest across the social sciences as an alternative to either realist or constructionist ontologies. New materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how assemblages of the animate and inanimate together produce the world, with fundamental implications for social inquiry methodology and methods. Key to our exploration is the materialist notion of a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising researcher, data, methods and contexts. We use this understanding first to explore the micropolitics of the research process, and then – along with a review of 30 recent empirical studies – to establish a framework for materialist social inquiry methodology and methods. We discuss the epistemological consequences of adopting a materialist ontology.

"Brower explores the way philosophers were inspired by entomological social systems and communication to reflect on human psyche, social behavior, community organization, communication, and inter-individual relationships. His essay rehearses the swarms of insects embedded in contemporary philosophy and literary theory, not only showing how many of the major concepts (or philosophemes) in continental philosophy – sexuality, politics, thinking, time, interdependence, and language – draw lessons from the world of insects, but also illustrating again how the insect world spurred human reflection."