Pursuing the allure of combat: an ethnography of violence amongst Iraqi Shi’I combatants fighting ISIS

The social sciences speak of violence through its meaning, performances, manifestations and representations; however, the inner workings of violence are less explored. In order to suggest a different mode of seeing violence, I explore the inner workings of violence through the pleasures of and fun among Shi’i volunteer combatants. I apply Walter Benjamin’s motion of pure means to explain how violence becomes self-referential and non-representational via combat-zone ethnography amongst Iraqi Shi’i militants who fought against ISIS in Iraq. I address the fine line between pleasure and fun in order to highlight the inner workings of violence during combat and to encourage a fresh bottom-up anthropological perspective in assessing the parameters of the persistence and resilience of volunteer combatants. My approach advocates moving beyond recruitment and ideological interpolation by questioning the allure of combat through an ontological framework that includes combatants’ perspectives and narratives.     

对法律事实建构论的初步阐释——以主体间性为分析进路的思考

诉讼法学界关于客观真实与法律真实的争论是针对法律事实的认定标准所产生的分歧,但是,争论并没有跳出主观与客观、事实与价值、形式与实质这种二元对立的思维模式。而要探究法律事实的形成,必须重新考察诉讼活动的性质,进而实现分析进路由主体性向主体间性的转换。法律事实建构论的提出就是这种分析进路转换之后的结果,但值得注意的是,我们必须对法律事实建构论的限度保持必要的警醒。     

The Concept of Appropriation and The Offence of Theft

The English law of theft is confusing and problematic in principle. Since the introduction of the Theft Act 1968 there has been inconsistency in the interpretation of appropriation as court and commentators have grappled with the intuition that appropriation must entail some subjective element and cannot be purely objective. Although subjectivity is traditionally associated with culpability rather than with conduct, it is argued that some acts can be subjective and yet factual and stand as causes to effects. Appropriation is such an act, its necessary and sufficient condition being a mindset, here termed proprietary subjectivity, on the part of the actor. It is argued that clarification of the concept of appropriation can help to resolve misperceived problems. Such clarification will also reveal other problems in the law of theft. Some tentative comments de lege ferenda are made suggesting how these problems can be addressed.     

人的道德主体性与主体道德教育

人是道德的主体，人的主体性是一切道德活动的内在依据。人的主体性在道德活动中的具体化，构成人作为道德主体的主体性，包括为“我”性、求善性、内在超越性、自由意志性、自我约束性。道德教育本质上是一种主体性的活动，是教育和受教育通过以道德化为中介的交往而实现的受教育德性自我建构的活动。主体道德教育反映了时代的要求，它以教育和受教育主体性的发挥为前提，以民主、平等的教育关系为保证，关注个体的需要，以培养生活中的道德主体为根本。     

论定罪中的“主客观相统一原则”——解读刑法理论中的主观主义与客观主义

我国定罪中的“主客观相统一原则”以我国犯罪构成中的主观要件与客观要件的有机统一为基本逻辑支撑点,是犯罪成立条件体系中所应遵循的原则。因此,其与在犯罪本质论层面上所出现的主观主义与客观主义之间无内在的逻辑关系,也不是对主观主义与客观主义之缺陷的扬弃。主观主义和客观主义是关于犯罪本质为何物的理论争论,因此不应在犯罪成立条件层面上对它们进行解读。定罪中的“主客观相统一原则”不是静态的要件之统一,而是定罪过程中复数主体间的共识。     

Enjoy their symptom: of woman,men and other interesting figures in Greek literary texts

Voela and Tamboukou use Slavoj ?i?ek’s notion of the symptom as a lens through which to look at representations of female figures in Greek literary texts of the early twentieth century by Gregorios Xenopoulos. In mapping the construction of the figure of the modern woman in the matrix of discourses, fantasies and power relations of fin-de-siècle Greece, they draw on psychoanalytic insights, interrupted by Foucauldian interventions. Following Judith Butler’s move of making trouble they attempt to open up a dialogic space between psychoanalytic and Foucauldian approaches to the female subject, contextualized in a specific social, historical and cultural milieu. It is in this context that they discuss, first, how feminine and masculine subjectivities are represented in man’s speech; second, how unintended excesses and interruptions occur in the problematic representation of women; and, third, how madness and ultimately death come to play a significant role in the power relations between the sexes.     

把知识开放出来的思想和思想者——邓正来知识批判之一

围绕《中国法学向何处去》一书以及相关文化语境展开知识批判.在高度赞赏邓正来通过论辩的方式来开放出问题的方式与能力的同时,也对其提出如下批评:在追问中国法律理想图景"是否是那些能够使中国人能够共享一种更有德行、更有品格和更令人满意的生活的原则?"的同时,却忽视了我们当下生活本身的诸多正当性缺乏与"极不可欲";在对"现代化范式"进行颠覆和批判的同时,也遮蔽了对传统的"天道观知识范式"的清算,而后者对于我们的精神和身体的型构力量要强大得多,对于重新定义中国所构成的障碍也强大得多.正是在这个意义上,邓正来所运用的知识辩难和批判论辩的方式及其所可能培育出的形式理性和制度理性,对于"主权中国"向"主体性中国"的置换将是一个不可或缺的要素和活的源泉.     

Islamophobic conspiracism and neoliberal subjectivity: the inassimilable society

O’Donnell analyses the confluence of Islamophobia and anti-government conspiracy theory in the works of the far-right think tank, the Center for Security Policy (CSP). He argues that, rather than only being a contemporary form of the religious and racialized demonologies that code ‘Islam’ as being the constitutive outside of ‘the ‘West—irrational, religious and authoritarian versus rational, secular and democratic—Islamophobic conspiracism should also be examined in the context of anxieties over the erosion of personal and state sovereignty under neoliberalization. Mobilizing an Islamophobic demonology that constructs ‘Muslims’ as inassimilable to ‘American’ subjectivity, the CSP's Islamophobic conspiracism projects this construction of absolute alterity on to American social and state systems. In doing so, O’Donnell contends, Islamophobic conspiracism takes neoliberalization's estrangement of the state and its citizens to its logical conclusion, transfiguring the societal processes that impact on the freedom of the individual—notably the state and civil society—into something inassimilable to that individual's claims to self-ownership and self-mastery.     

Roads of change: political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts

This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the district scale to entrench or transform dominant cultural codes and sedimented histories of socio-economic inequality. Preliminary research identifies specific sectors of local governance that have emerged as significant sites of struggle over the shape and meaning of ‘democracy’, namely forest management and infrastructure development. The primary contribution of the paper lies in specifying an analytical approach to the study of ‘post-conflict’ governance at the local scale via three conceptual terrains of inquiry – governance and planning, political subjectivity, and cultural politics. The ultimate objective is to develop a framework for assessing the conditions of possibility for a democratic restructuring of economy and society to accompany the official political institutions of liberal democracy.     

Interrogating the Look of the Gaze: Theorizing a Latina Cine-subjectivity

Abstract: This article concerns sexual object choice, transgender subjectivities and emancipatory heterosexuality as imaged in three films: The House of the Spirits (1993), I Like It Like That (1994) and Mi Vida Loca (1994). The author argues, through her examination of the three films, for cinematic ways to refocus and interrogate the look and gender of the gaze, thereby envisioning what the author theorizes as a Latina cinematic subjectivity. The idea of a Latina cinematic subject is presented in order to articulate how at particular moments in the films an autonomous Latina subjectivity is created through narrative and mise-en-scène. It is at these narrative and aesthetic moments that the characters look back at the objectifying gaze, thereby creating a cinematic sexual subjectivity for the characters and a model of agency for the culturally resistant spectator who is doing the looking. The House of the Spirits points to the contradiction of sexual object choice and female desire; I Like It Like That reveals the performative and fluid possibilities of gender, as well as the hybridity of black and Latino cultures; and Mi Vida Loca reflects the struggle for agency in Chicana heterosexual relationships and in their material lives. The author argues that the three portrayals begin important cultural work in the rethinking of sexualities, as they unthink the rigidity of monosexuality, destabilize normative conceptions of gender and reinvigorate agency and egalitarianism in heterosexual relations.