Nostalgias

Abstract

This paper launches a thought experiment the aim of which is to recover and defend an idea of nostalgia as something other than merely maudlin yearning after the days of yore. Much critical comment on nostalgia, in everyday parlance and in academic debate, begins from the standpoint that the time longed for was never really as it is now, nostalgically, imagined. The force and validity of this jibe is admitted in this paper, but it argues that the concept of nostalgia can be reshaped and turned in quite different less reactive directions. A distinction between Nostalgia and nostalgias is coined in order to introduce a plural and critical version of nostalgic memory. The play of memory in nostalgias is exemplified through a focus on four topoi of experience which are strained, possibly even shattered, by the digitalisation and rationalisation of contemporary culture and society. Nostalgias of and for the body, nature, thought, and modernity itself are explored by comparison to themes of melancholy and utopia which arise in Frankfurt School critical theory as responses to a similarly perceived trauma and triumph of instrumental reason. I argue that ultimately the distinction between nostalgias and Nostalgia cannot be maintained - nostalgias are rather types or tropes of Nostalgia. However, through thinking Nostalgia along the lines of this neologism (nostalgias) we might come to see its dynamic and critical mnemonic potencies. Hence, the paper concludes that nostalgia ought not be simply contemned and dismissed as the conservative freezing of memories and images of a fake past.     

Adorno's Contemplative Ethics

Abstract

This paper argues that there is an ethics of contemplation that is internal to Adorno's critique of modern functionalised and administered societies. It is argued here that ‘contemplation’ is Adorno's name for a praxis by which one is open to the other, and yet can let the other be. Adorno sees a kernel of experience in such contemplative practices, which, although increasingly being stripped bare by the modern world, is the basis for its possible critique.     

Primitiveness and the flight from modernity: sociology and the avant-garde in inter-war France

This paper examines the links between the French school of sociology and anthropology and the surrealist avant-garde in inter-war Paris by unearthing their common reliance on a cross-cultural critique of European modernity. Accordingly, the paper focuses on how both currents – and notably the Collège de sociologie – used representations of a mythical ‘primitive’ condition to produce an outside of modern society and an alternative socio-cultural universe from which Europe's pathologies could be diagnosed. This self-critique through a comparative lens aimed to radically situate, relativize and decentre the phenomena of rationalization, disenchantment and anomie characterizing modernity, which could be shown to be neither natural, eternal, universal nor inevitable, but rather the socio-historical products of developments in a particular culture during a specific period of its history.     

马克思现代性批判的理路探析

马克思对现代性的批判是建立在对现实社会生活的考察基础之上的。马克思在历史发展的语境中分析了现代性的价值,阐述了实现人的自由与解放是人的发展、社会发展的应然目标。但是,马克思并没有停留在对人与社会发展目标的道德批判,而是利用科学发展的成就,客观分析社会生产力变革的进步意义,提出人的发展的社会基础以及发展的三个阶段的理论。马克思批判现代性,以历史原则使道德理想、人本关怀与科学理性价值获得统一,确立批判现代性问题的历史立场,探寻认识现代性及其人的发展问题的正确理路。     

The environmental rights entered in the constitutions： A critique

Although environmental law is a relatively a new field of scholarship in South Africa, it is growing rapidly. The right to access to social security including environmental rights is found in the South African Bill of Rights, is being amplified by legislative and constitutional reforms, and developing case law in the courts. There is therefore a clear need to increase the understanding of the discipline through systematic research and teaching at various levels.1 The notion of including an “environmental right” in a domestic constitution is not novel in Africa. Most African countries have incorporated a constitutional provision that ensures the right to a healthy environment. Most of the problems that exist with environmental rights under the international and regional systems are absent under the domestic South African system. The way in which environmental rights have been formulated in international instruments, section 24 of the South African Constitution has been framed as an individual right and not as a collective one. Environmental degradation often affects groups of people and it could consequently argue that the right should protect groups and not just individuals.2     

单位制研究的“新传统主义”及有关争论

魏昂德的"新传统主义"概念为中国单位制研究在极权主义和多元主义范式之外为提供了一种新的分析视角,其理论前提在于国家高度集中的再分配体制垄断了重要的社会资源,而这成为国家整合和控制单位组织及其成员的手段和工具。分析梳理了学界对"新传统主义"单位制研究的批评及争论,指出单位制研究将面向多元化的具体组织情景,回归到真实的组织运作过程,由此将生发出新的理论增长点。     

语境的释义功能与翻译中词义的确定

语境是语用学的重要理论之一 ,它是理解语言必不可少的因素 ,语境对语言具有释义功能 ,翻译过程中确定词义依赖于语境的释义功能 ,在翻译中确定词义应考虑文本语境中的语言知识、背景知识、情景知识或相互知识等因素     

Feminism as Critique in a Neoliberal Age: Debating Nancy Fraser

Neoliberalism, we are told, has “seduced” feminism. What is meant is that the libertarian and democratic hopes that have scoped this radical social movement have been reconfigured and re-energised by neoliberal project that models all our freedoms upon the market. Misgivings about “seductions” and “betrayals” require that feminist theory adopts the role of the arbiter on goals and meanings and this puts strains upon its deep commitment to democratic epistemologies. The following paper finds that the leading theorist of feminism as critique in a neoliberal age has failed to fully grasp the normative tension that is involved. Nancy Fraser fails to rethink the tasks of critique in terms that is sufficient to its role as arbiter on meanings. I suggest that this rethinking might be done without betraying the demands of a democratic epistemology if we reconstruct the emancipatory idealisations that underpin Fraser’s account of a democratic epistemology. While this rendering of feminism as critique retrieves a representation of feminist ideals that might unmask neoliberal distortions, it does so without betraying the responsiveness to self-interpreted needs that is also claimed by a critical and democratic feminist theory.