Critical Theory

Our ambition in this essay is to challenge received wisdoms about the importance of "useful" management scholarship. Suggesting that usefulness and uselessness are contingent on issues of temporality and power, we advocate caution in assigning terms such as useful and relevant -they are inherently problematic, we argue, and should be viewed more as ideology than as empirical statements. We conclude by a call for reflexivity about what it is we are doing when we do "useful" research, along with a greater concern for the values for which business schools stand.

Our ambition in this essay is to challenge received wisdoms about the importance of ‘useful’ management scholarship. Suggesting that usefulness and uselessness are contingent on issues of temporality and power, we advocate caution in assigning terms such as useful and relevant – they are inherently problematic, we argue, and should be viewed more as ideology than as empirical statements. We conclude by a call for reflexivity about what it is we are doing when we do ‘useful’ research, along with a greater concern for the values for which business schools stand.

Aborda as implicacoes da politica  democratica no ambiente social diante do fenomeno da globalizacao e do transnacionalismo.  A partir da critica formulada por Jurgen Habermas quando da instalacao da zona do euro,  discute a  conformacao da gestao dos Estados nacionais frente aos  novos desafios quanto aos seus elementos constitutivos, em especial  no tocante ao aspecto da homogeneidade necessaria a uma nova repactuacao do sentido da cidadania.

is a MontrCal playwright who won the General Governor's Award this year for his play Littora1.l Also an actor and a director, he has been appointed artistic director of the Thbdtre de Quat'Sous, in MontrCal, in January 2000. He was born in Lebanon in 1968. His parents left Beirut in 1978, fleeing the civil war, to Paris, where they lived for eight years, and from there moved to MontrCal, where Wajdi went to cegept before entering the National Theater School. This interview is extracted from a larger series of interviews that I conducted with him to be published this year in book form. In this interview, Wajdi Mouawad reflects on his experience as a walker in the city in general, and in Montrial in particular. One will find expressed here thoughts that can be understood as an artist's relationship to his creativity, as it is mediated by this experience of walking in the city. What makes it singularly interesting, in my perspective, is that this experience does not have much to do with the usual way of understanding the artistic experience of the city-as Baudelaire so aptly described it in the middle of the nineteenth century, 209

A prototype multi-purpose index is proposed for use in the evaluation of practices for adaptation to climate variability and change. The Index of Usefulness of Practices for Adaptation (IUPA) allows the user to assign weights and scores to a set of user-defined evaluation criteria. Individual criterion scores are aggregated into a final index value. Both the final value and the individual parameter scores provide useful information for improved decision making in the context of climate change. An innovative aspect of IUPA is that guidance is given to the user through the inclusion of recommendations on evaluation criteria and criterion-specific weight factors. These have been defined by a panel of experts from the Latin-American and Caribbean Region (LAC). Application of the index is demonstrated for an existing adaptation practice from the Coquimbo Region, Chile. The IUPA tool is recommended for use in the evaluation of P. Debels (&)

Despite decades of feminist critique, historical realism retains a powerful hold on historiography, sustained not only by disciplinary convention but by the imaginative investments that realist norms simultaneously require and disavow. This article argues that feminist historiography cannot escape this impasse by critique alone: it must embrace imagination as a necessary condition of its own practice-not as an embellishment but as the instituting power through which genuinely new historical meanings come into being. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation and Cornelius Castoriadis's radical imagination and social instituting imaginary, it challenges evidentiary norms that render certain lives illegible and redefines historical rigor as an ethical responsibility to configure traces, silences, and possibilities into politically accountable narratives. Critical feminist historiography becomes, on this account, both an exposure of archival violence and a world-making endeavor that institutes new social imaginaries to animate action and judgment in the present.

Self-directed learning is often embraced as an important educational goal, although for quite different reasons, from the improvement of school learning to the critical assessment of the claims of democracy. Most reasons imply that self-direction is important in learning throughout life. Therefore process-oriented teaching, which aims to foster self-directed lifelong learning, needs a broad and multidimensional theoretical basis. The important role of experiences in the social and cultural context, prior knowledge, and the emotional aspects of learning are highlighted, and related to self-directed learning in life. Important aspects of process-oriented teaching are summarized in four principles. A multidimensional approach to learning also provides a conceptual basis to teachers' learning. Developing a process-oriented approach in teaching presents a major challenge for teachers as well as for schools.

The City, like Man and Nature before it, is one of capitalism’s sacred intellectual objects: a fetish that mistakes the part for the whole and serves the ruling-class drive for technocratic management. The Urban Theory Lab’s Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization is the dialectical alternative. Neil Brenner’s planetary urbanization thesis is nothing short of a Copernican revolution in geohistorical thought. It refuses the tired antinomies of city and country, society and nature, core and periphery, showing instead how capitalism’s “metabolic churn” (their words) materializes through operational landscapes that dominate and imprison planetary life. These are not the inert backdrops of “globalization” but the spatial-metabolic infrastructures through which empire, capital, and webs of life are continuously co-produced. This essay situates the Lab’s breakthrough within the longue durée of capitalist world-ecology, from 1492 to today’s capitalogenic climate crisis. The stakes are political no less than intellectual. The Sustainable City is ground zero for “net zero” fantasies that protect the planetary superclass. Planetary urbanization shows us where the weak links lie – and why biospheric liberation depends on shattering the City fetish.

This chapter reports data collected over a five-year cycle from an ongoing professional development course in Israel, which was initiated by the Ministry of Education in response to growing concerns over poor reading scores on national exams among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The course aimed to develop lead EFL teachers' professional knowledge regarding beginning reading skills through focusing on multiple elements of language, including EFL assessment. Adopting a Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory (SCT) lens of professional development, we explored the impact of diagnostic assessment tools (DiagA) not simply for teacher knowledge of assessment but as a means for mediating their learning about beginning reading skills. To better understand the development of lead-teachers' knowledge, we applied content and thematic analysis to teachers' responses to open-ended questions and prompts. Findings point to three salient themes: (1) increased pedagogical content knowledge around teaching beginning reading; (2) increased agency and empowerment with respect to teaching reading; and (3) increased professionalism around beginning reading and spelling instruction. These themes suggest a reconceptualization of the teachers' knowledge and reported practices about beginning reading. Moreover, through collaboration with other teachers whom they taught about the assessment tools, the leadteachers appear to have solidified and internalized their understandings of EFL beginning reading. In the discussion, we address the developmental process that lead-teachers underwent as a result of interacting with and being mediated by DiagA tools.

Standardized testing systems increasingly shape access to higher education across the world, yet they are often discussed primarily in terms of fairness, efficiency, or technical validity. This short analytical piece argues that such systems should also be understood as infrastructures that reorganize authority, legitimacy, and educational recognition at national scale.

Using the Scale–Recursion–Erasure (SRE) framework, this short piece analyzes a public announcement poster for Pakistan’s Higher Education Aptitude Test (HAT) system issued by the Higher Education Commission (HEC). The analysis traces how the language of standardization, benchmarking, merit, and psychometric governance constructs a centralized admissions infrastructure that recursively privileges measurable forms of performance across micro, meso, and macro levels of higher education.

The piece further examines what becomes harder for the system to recognize as legitimate, including disciplinary diversity, multilingual educational trajectories, relational pedagogies, and locally grounded forms of knowledge and evaluation. By treating standardized testing as infrastructure rather than simply assessment, the piece contributes to broader discussions on governance, higher education reform, and the politics of educational legitimacy.

El presente volumen aborda la educación desde una perspectiva internacional como una oportunidad para la emancipación. A raíz de proyectos y continuas iniciativas de investigación con colegas del continente americano, y partiendo de reflexiones teóricas e investigaciones de campo, se proponen algunas contribuciones fundamentales para comprender las voces, los territorios y la praxis de la liberación. El concepto de emancipación, en su acepción más rigurosa, alude a la ruptura de las cadenas que atan a los seres humanos a situaciones de opresión, ignorancia y dependencia impuestas desde el exterior, o que han sido interiorizadas como un destino ineludible. La violencia, los problemas de género, las discriminaciones sociales y las exclusiones lingüísticas son solo algunas de las variables y dinámicas impuestas a la población dominada hegemónicamente. --- Il presente volume affronta internazionalmente l’educazione come occasione di emancipazione. A seguito di progettualità e continue occasioni di ricerca con colleghe e colleghi del continente americano, a partire da riflessioni teoriche e ricerche sul campo, si propongono alcuni contributi fondamentali per la comprensione delle voci, dei territori e della praxis per la liberazione. Il concetto di emancipazione, nel suo uso più rigoroso, allude alla rottura delle catene che legano gli esseri umani a situazioni di oppressione, ignoranza e dipendenza imposte loro dall’esterno, o che sono state interiorizzate come un destino ineludibile. Violenza, problemi di genere, discriminazioni sociali, esclusioni linguistiche sono solo alcune delle variabili e dinamiche imposte sulla popolazione egemonicamente dominata. --- This volume takes an international perspective on education as an opportunity for emancipation. Following collaborative projects and ongoing research with colleagues from the Americas, and drawing on theoretical reflections and field research, it presents a number of key contributions to our understanding of the voices, territories and praxis of liberation. The concept of emancipation, in its strictest sense, refers to the breaking of the chains that bind human beings to situations of oppression, ignorance and dependence imposed upon them from outside, or which have been internalised as an inescapable fate. Violence, gender issues, social discrimination and linguistic exclusion are just some of the variables and dynamics imposed upon a population under hegemonic domination.

That ‘the people’ is a representative claim is accepted by many democratic theorists.  Many of these same theorists take constituent power to be the capacity of the rightful bearers of this title to express this claim and found a constitution. Accordingly, constituent power is understood as the ‘other’ of constituted power, a radical and self-legitimating collective will that is outside or beyond the law. Some suggest that this relationship is ‘paradoxical’, and so the appropriate task of constitutional theory is to conceive the appropriate democratic relation between the voluntarist constituent power and the constitutional form that it inaugurates. Though this has become a pivotal instrument for political and legal theorists engaging with constitutionalism, constituent power is cast too constrictively.
I argue that constituent power is not a capacity but is itself a political claim. Understood as a political claim, the concept of constituent power can be arranged in various ways. I will show how constituent power as claim within an argument can, by leaning upon a conceptual framework that draws upon the philosophical truth-function of origins and biblical Genesis, shore up, undercut or bracket out appeals to political power and authority. In addition, I show how, when conceptualised in a variety of ways, arguments employing constituent power assist in limiting and defining the identity of political collectives, and legitimising the sorts of political action in which they might engage, deepening the understanding of the normative commitments involved in what it means to invoke the name of ‘the people’.
To show this, I adopt a genealogical perspective, while drawing insights from Michael Freeden’s approach of conceptual morphology. In doing so, I place emphasis upon particular articulations over a general theory of the constituent power. By asking not what constituent power ‘is’, but what it ‘does’, I consider how various formulations of constituent power assist in organising political life through the relation between collective subjects, political origins and the symbolic order of law. This entails tracking various articulations of constituent power within arguments on authority during the English Civil War, and especially in the work of Thomas Hobbes, various practices of constitution-writing in America and France, through to its voluntarist reading in the work of Carl Schmitt, and the way in which this has been received by Antonio Negri. Far from the contemporary understanding of constituent power as a radically democratic concept, I argue that constituent power has an ambiguous history, enmeshed with political absolutism and imperialist European constitutionalism. In the final chapter, I step back from examining individual articulations of constituent power, and I examine Hannah Arendt’s contribution to the politics of founding. Arendt understood constituent power as a ‘stock phrase’ that serves as shorthand in political thinking, one that conceptualises founding within the strictures of European sovereignty. This illuminates further how constituent power works as a political claim, though one that also patterns our unconsciously political thinking, and organises our political practices within certain parameters.

The conciousness of critical thinking is important and should be concern for every educational institutions in Indonesia. Training students to think critically and analytically on various kinds of problems is a serious thing for educators to do. So the purpose of this research is the education for critical consiousness promoted by Paulo Freire, can be applied in education in Indonesia, in order to produce students who think critically, including in terms of Christian teaching. By using a literature-based qualitative method, the authors systematically and theoretically describe critical conciousness in Christian religious Education. This is a challenge for Christian religious education in responding to it. Therefore, the interaction space between Christian religious education and students’ critical thinking conciousness becomes a meeting room that must be nurtured. So from this research, the authors conclude that to produce critical pedagogy that places social problems becomes centra...

Whenever ruling classes feel threatened, they turn to Nature. From Malthus's response to the Haitian Revolution, through Social Darwinism's answer to working-class revolt, to today's climate emergency politics -- the return to Nature is empire's oldest playbook. Nature, in this sense, is no innocent description of birds and bees, soils and streams. It is a ruling abstraction, the most dangerous word in the modern language of power. We are living through the final iteration of this long cycle. The Sustainability of the Rich -- the eco-industrial complex stretching from billionaire foundations to the IPCC -- is the cultural weapon of an Imperial West in irreversible decline. Its climate doomism is fearmongering with a purpose: to engineer an elite-managed transition beyond capitalism while shifting costs onto the bottom eighty percent. The climate crisis is real, but not in the Malthusian sense. It is real in a Marxist sense: Cheap Nature is exhausted, Progress is finished, liberal democracy is dying. The question now is whether the coming transition will be decadent or revolutionary -- eco-fascism with a human face, or socialist democracy in the web of life.

Tekst jest recenzją książki Duch nadziei i inne eseje Byung-Chul Hana (2025), koncentrującą się zarówno na diagnozach współczesności stawianych przez koreańskiego filozofa, jak i na ukrytych metafizycznych założeniach, które kształtują jego argumentację. W recenzji podkreślono, że choć Han trafnie opisuje kryzysy późnej nowoczesności, jego filozofia pozostaje zakorzeniona w romantycznym imaginarium utraconej pełni oraz mesjańskiej nadziei. Autor prezentowanego tekstu zestawia to ujęcie z perspektywą dialektyczną, wskazując na potrzebę myślenia, które nie ucieka od antagonizmu i negatywności.

This article examines the relationship between artificial intelligence, information warfare, media manipulation, and the erosion of public trust as these dynamics manifest in contemporary debate surrounding Israel–Palestine. It argues that digital media environments increasingly blur the distinction between authentic political discourse and engineered perception through the combined effects of algorithmic amplification, AI-generated content, coordinated online influence campaigns, and emotionally driven social media ecosystems. The article situates Israel within a broader global context of state and corporate information operations while highlighting the country’s uniquely integrated cyber, intelligence, academic, and technological infrastructure. Particular attention is given to the role of narrative management, accusations of antisemitism, and the collapse of distinctions between Jews, Israelis, Zionists, and the Israeli state within online discourse.

At the same time, the article cautions against conspiratorial overreach and stresses the importance of maintaining rigorous evidentiary standards when discussing covert coordination and influence operations. It further argues that the Israel–Palestine debate has become a focal point for wider crises linked to neoliberalism, securitisation, surveillance capitalism, and the commodification of conflict. The article concludes that the central political challenge of the contemporary information age lies not only in resisting misinformation and propaganda, but in preserving discernment itself. It advocates for renewed emphasis on media literacy, critical discourse awareness, linguistic precision, and ethical distinctions as necessary tools for sustaining democratic culture under conditions increasingly shaped by AI-assisted manipulation and informational chaos.

Whether we like it or not, celebrity culture fills our media landscape. Celebrities populate our social media feeds, the magazines we flip through while waiting in line at the checkout counter, and our radios and film and television screens. Most of us will never meet these celebrities, but we often feel like we know them as we see them posting photos of their pets on Instagram and sharing charming anecdotes on late-night talk shows. As intimately connected and knowledgeable as we may feel toward the celebrities we follow, for most of us, celebrities are just a collection of texts – red carpet photos, interview snippets, favorite scenes they act in or songs they sing, and quippy posts on social media. In this lesson, students will use critical theory to analyze celebrities as sets of texts. Along the way, they will practice intertextual analysis as well as consider medium/platform specificity

According to C. G. Jung, cryptomnesia is a psychic process where an automatic creative force causes lost and long forgotten memory traces to reappear in consciousness with photographic fidelity. Those forgotten memories play a role in creative endeavors and are perceived as the creator's own work. When we study John Beebe's eight-function model, we discover that Jung had already identified the four symbols attached to the position of cognitive functions as well as the four symbols representing the shadow. These notions were published in the Notes of the Seminar given in 1925 (Jung 1926/1989) and in AION, Researches into the phenomenology of the Self (1951). These two previous occurrences contradict Beebe's assertion that his model is an innovation. This article examines the facts surrounding this possible case of cryptomnesia.

Signal Kingdom: When The Medium Becomes Reality

In McLuhan Is the Message, part of THE MISCOMMUNICATION TRILOGY: “The Entropy of Communication, Vol. II,” the investigation moves beyond language as a simple system of words and enters a deeper territory where media, technology, and communication become the hidden architects of human reality. Drawing inspiration from Marshall McLuhan’s revolutionary insights while expanding them into a broader philosophical framework, this work explores one of the defining crises of modern civilization: the planned obsolescence of language. Human beings often believe they control technology. We imagine media as passive instruments created merely to carry information from one place to another. Yet beneath the visible flow of messages lies another process unfolding silently. Communication technologies do not simply deliver content; they reshape perception itself. They reorganize memory, transform attention, restructure social life, and alter the conditions through which reality becomes meaningful. Before changing what we think, they change how we think.
As digital environments increasingly dominate existence, language itself begins to mutate. Words circulate with the speed of commodities. Meanings emerge and disappear with unprecedented velocity. Signals replace narratives. Reaction replaces reflection. Human beings now inhabit a world overflowing with information yet increasingly threatened by fragmentation, noise, and symbolic instability. Communication expands while understanding contracts. Connectivity intensifies while coherence weakens. The result is a civilization where language risks becoming disposable—a symbolic environment designed for replacement rather than permanence. Through philosophy, media theory, linguistics, mythology, communication studies, and cultural analysis, this volume follows the hidden structures shaping contemporary existence. From McLuhan’s concept of media environments to the collapse of symbolic continuity, from technological acceleration to the erosion of shared meaning, the book examines how modern communication increasingly produces entropy rather than understanding.
McLuhan Is the Message argues that humanity now faces a challenge far greater than technological innovation itself. The true struggle concerns preserving the conditions under which meaning, memory, and identity remain possible. In an age where messages multiply endlessly, the deepest question may no longer be what we communicate, but whether language itself can survive the environments we have created.
When the medium becomes reality, the fate of communication becomes the fate of humanity itself.

Transcript of the lecture, as presented on Saturday 21 January 2017 at Moderna Museet, as an exploration of the themes featured in the exhibition The New Human (21.5 2016 – 5.3 2017). The lecture was part of a two-part lecture series on the science and philosophy of the human condition, What is human?, organised in collaboration with the Stockholm School of Economics Art Initiative. For more information, please visit the event’s website: https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/event/what-is-human/ .

Please do not quote this transcript; it is intended solely to help you follow and understand the lecture as presented.

Resumo: o artigo analisa a posição ocupada por A sagrada família no itinerário intelectual de Marx e Engels, explicitaremos como que há nessa obra um aprofundamento na crítica à sociedade civil-burguesa e à natureza classista dessa sociedade. Posteriormente, ao enfocar a análise, presente no livro abordado, sobre a Revolução Francesa, veremos como que se tem na política francesa, não tanto um modelo positivo, mas algo que esclarece os próprios limites daquilo que foi chamado por Marx de entendimento político. Por fim, chega-se ao ponto em que se percebe que não há qualquer concepção instrumental de Estado e de política em Marx e Engels, sendo possível que a vida civil-burguesa, bem como a sociedade civilburguesa se vejam fortalecidas na medida mesma em que há, em determinados momentos, uma oposição à classe burguesa.

Contemporary societies are increasingly characterized by chronic psychological exhaustion manifested through burnout, cognitive overload, emotional depletion, and declining capacities for sustained social and political engagement. Although sociological scholarship has extensively examined rationalization, neoliberalism, acceleration, emotional labour, and self-governance, exhaustion itself has often remained theoretically fragmented and analytically secondary. Existing approaches typically interpret fatigue either as an individualized psychological condition or as an unintended by-product of contemporary capitalism. This article argues instead that exhaustion should be understood as a structurally productive condition embedded within late-modern institutional power. The objective of the study is to develop a new sociological framework for understanding how contemporary institutions increasingly govern through the continuous production and management of exhausted subjectivity. The article introduces the concept of exhaustive governance, defined as a mode of institutional power in which cognitive overload, emotional self-management, temporal fragmentation, and compulsory self-optimization become central mechanisms of social regulation and institutional stabilization. Methodologically, the article adopts a purely theoretical and conceptual approach grounded in reconstructive social theory. Through conceptual analysis and theoretical synthesis, the study integrates key insights from Max Weber's theory of rationalization, Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality, Hartmut Rosa's theory of social acceleration, and Byung-Chul Han's analysis of psychopolitics and self-exploitation. Additional contributions from critical sociology and cultural theory are incorporated to examine emotional labour, therapeutic individualization, institutional flexibility, and capitalist realism. The analysis demonstrates that late-modern institutions increasingly depend upon permanently responsive yet chronically depleted subjects capable of sustaining participation despite ongoing psychological fatigue. Exhaustion emerges not merely as a consequence of institutional arrangements, but as a socially functional condition that weakens reflection, solidarity, political imagination, and long-term resistance. The article further argues that exhaustive governance contributes to declining institutional trust and the fragmentation of democratic agency by narrowing temporal and cognitive capacities for collective action. The study concludes that exhaustion should be treated as a central sociological category for understanding contemporary capitalism and institutional life. The concept of exhaustive governance offers an original theoretical framework for future sociological research on power, subjectivity, governance, and democratic participation under conditions of chronic depletion.

This article examines R. F. Kuang's Babel or The Necessity of Violence through the theoretical lens of Critical Transparency Studies in order to illuminate the novel's reconfiguration of community and resistance. It argues that Kuang's neo-Victorian reimagining of the colonial university of Oxford in the 1830s exposes how the imperial demand of transparency transforms relations of reciprocity into mechanisms of domination. Against this regime of legibility, which simultaneously anticipates contemporary anxieties surrounding visibility and surveillance, the Hermes Society emerges as a counter-community founded upon opacity and secrecy. Drawing on Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and Alphonso Lingis's reflections on community, together with Édouard Glissant's notion of the "right to opacity", the article shows how Kuang dramatises the political and ethical potential of concealment. Ultimately, Babel envisions an alternative mode of being-in-common that resists imperial epistemologies of transparency by reclaiming the unknowable as a locus of ethical relation.

This article argues that contemporary digital power cannot be adequately understood through the established concepts of surveillance, discipline, control, or code-based regulation alone. Although the Panopticon, dispositif, societies of control, and the thesis that "code is law" remain indispensable for understanding the digital age, they are insufficient for grasping a specific qualitative threshold produced by contemporary technological integration. I name this threshold the **Onopticon**. The distinctive feature of the Onopticon is not merely visibility, behavioural modulation, or technical restriction. Rather, the concept names a regime of reality in which digital infrastructures pre-configure the future possibilities that are presented to the subject through data flows, predictive modelling, identity-verification systems, platform interfaces, and algorithmic thresholds of access. The Onopticon therefore marks a shift from the regulation of behaviour after the fact to the infrastructural organisation of the conditions of possibility before action. The article repositions Plato's distinction between truth and appearance, Aristotle's concepts of telos and polis, Kant's account of autonomy and the a priori conditions of experience, Marx's analyses of capital, machinery, real subsumption and general intellect, Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and common sense, Hegelian recognition, Althusserian interpellation, Husserlian lifeworld, and Heideggerian enframing in relation to the Onopticon. This repositioning is not an attack on the founding theoretical traditions. Rather, it is an objection to the displacement, by digital infrastructure, of the conditions of subjectivity, world, labour, recognition, ideology and experience that made those traditions operative. The article also brings the Onopticon into confrontation with contemporary progressive technological paradigms: transhumanism, accelerationism, technological solutionism, and democratic technological reformism. It argues that these paradigms continue to presuppose technology as an instrument of enhancement, emancipation, optimisation or participation, whereas the Onopticon shows that technology has become the infrastructural environment that determines the field within which agency can appear. Finally, the article proposes the **Right to Opacity** not as a principle of data protection, a technical design recommendation, or a reformist policy programme, but as an ontological line of resistance against the reduction of the human subject to calculability. This right does not seek the improvement of the system; it rejects the system's claim to render the human subject entirely readable.

The paper offers a reflection on abuses of autonomy in the prospect of leaving nullity as typical
and extreme remedy. The investigated area is wide, and the possible remedies are varied; they
are examined in their meaning, scope and appropriateness, bearing in mind the well-known
problem of the contractual justice. Finally, the Author proposes, as a preventive protection, the
refusal to comply and a related new objection, ‘the objection of pre-contractual tort’.

This article makes the argument that Universities cannot pursue truth and Social Justice at the same time, and any that try, inevitably sacrifice open inquiry and robust debate for ideological conformity. Social Justice, marketed as either DEI or EDI (sometimes with additional letters), seeks to re-purpose education for societal revolution, on the basis of contemporary Critical Theory, and requires a singularity of viewpoints and political goals; a university with a mission of Social Justice dies in an environment tolerant of political diversity or where the individuals within it pursue agendas other than revolution (Haidt, 2016). Classical Liberalism, on the other hand, thrives in an environment of disagreement and debate and dies in an environment of conformity. EDI policies tell you what to think about people, power and privilege, make broad, unquestionable assumptions, and countenance no doubt, objection, nor evidence (Dei, 1995, 2019; Tate,1997; Wimmer, 2015). This is anathema under Classical Liberalism, which insists on challenging assumptions through evidence. The classically liberal role of the university is to provide students and their professors an ideology-and conformity-free forum to explore things to think about, both for human progress, and for the preparation of a new generation of academics and researchers. There appears to be no cogent or principled reason why all claims made by academics and researchers in universities are subject to scrutiny and debate except those claims made by EDI (Kaufmann, 2025). Indeed, much EDI energy is devoted to discouraging open debates, intimidating sceptics, and silencing doubters through name-calling. If any university policy is antithetical to the truth-seeking classically liberal university, this is it. Universities must face up to what amounts to a stark choice: either they are ideologically locked instruments for societal revolution that rely wholly on theory and reject evidence, or places where great minds experiment, meet, argue, and attempt to get a little closer to the holy grail of truth by the very evidence social justice and EDI reject.

O texto Patologias do Trabalho, de filósofa Rahel Jaeggi, publicado originalmente em Women’s Studies Quarterly 2017, em minha opinião, ainda apresenta uma análise filosófica e social perspicaz sobre o significado do trabalho nas sociedades contemporâneas e os problemas decorrentes das suas transformações sociais atuais.

Gabriel Ferrater escribió diversos textos sobre arte, principalmente sobre pintura, durante los años cincuenta del siglo XX. Algunos se publicaron en la revista barcelonesa Laye, otros formaban parte de una historia de la pintura española que no llegó a editarse, y varios corresponden a textos de catálogos o reseñas de libros. El ideal de Ferrater era ejercer una crítica de arte que fuese científica y objetiva. Pero para comentar las obras de arte, tenía que encontrar un lenguaje técnico para describirlas, que contrastaba con su temperamento poético. Y aunque le interesaba más la forma que el contenido de las pinturas, a veces también las interpretaba. Estas actitudes ambivalentes son el objeto del presente artículo. Palabras clave: Gabriel Ferrater, crítica de arte, pintura, descripción, interpretación DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION IN GABRIEL FERRATER'S ARTICLES ON PAINTING Gabriel Ferrater wrote several texts on art, mainly on painting, during the 1950s. Some were published in the Barcelona magazine Laye, others were part of a history of Spanish painting that was never published, and others are catalog texts or book reviews. Ferrater's ideal was

Este texto presenta el trabajo del Núcleo de Estudios de Filosofías e Infancias de la Universidad del Estado de Río de Janeiro (NEFI/UERJ), Brasil, a partir de un programa de alfabetización filosófica en el Estado brasileño de Rio Grande do Norte. Ofrece como ejemplo de su potencia pedagógica el testimonio de unos de los alfabetizandos de dicho programa en la ceremonia de formación de las/los alfabetizadas/os.

This paper presents the outcomes of a decade-long research-based gallery project initiated in 2012 under the name Studio Brugman and later renamed Galerie Stephanie Jaax. Conceived as an experimental site of inquiry rather than a commercial gallery, the project explored the potential of artistic dialogue, primarily through exhibitions pairing two artists in collaborative or relational constellations. The central aim was to investigate whether encounters between artists could generate a “third element” beyond individual authorship: a shared work, emergent idea, affective experience, or immaterial phenomenon capable of provoking wonder or perceptual transformation in the viewer.

The study reflects critically on the tension between research-oriented artistic practice and the expectations of the contemporary art market. While the renaming of the space suggested a more commercial orientation, the project consistently resisted market-driven imperatives, leading to recurring misunderstandings regarding sales and artistic visibility. Despite these tensions, the gallery maintained its commitment to experimentation until its closure in June 2024.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Jacques Lacan, the research further examines the psychic dynamics underlying artistic collaboration. It asks why certain artists are drawn toward collaborative creation while others resist it, and how asymmetrical relational structures emerge within artistic pairings. Observations suggest that collaborative practices often involve shifting dynamics between active and receptive positions, shaped by processes of transference, projection, and identification. Lacan’s concept of the partial drive provides a theoretical framework for understanding these interactions, emphasizing the incomplete and relational nature of desire. The project ultimately proposes that collaborative artistic practice can function as a symbolic field in which subjective, affective, and metaphysical dimensions become materially and spatially perceptible within the exhibition context.

Con motivo de la publicación en castellano de El arte de la libertad. Sobre la dialéctica de la existencia democrática (2024),conversamos con Juliane Rebentisch acerca de su trayectoria, la manera singular y heterodoxa en la que propone revisitar el legado filosófico de Theodor W. Adorno, así como sus inquietudes por la escena emergente de las artes y los dilemas ético-políticos que atraviesan las democracias contemporáneas.

I argue in this paper that sport should be retained as an important part of the educational rationale for physical education. I consider Siedentopʼs critique of physical education and his alternative in the form of Sport Education. Siedentopʼs goals for youth sport and physical education and use of the work of Alisdair McIntyre are explored. It is argued that if we work to experience activities that are inherently pleasurable and intrinsically satisfying, then there is a possible future for activities such as sport. I conclude that school physical education is well placed to take up this challenge of sustaining sport as a moral practice and that the pedagogical tools already exist to do this in the form of a critical pedagogy. After all, what would be the point of work or of political brinkmanship or, for that matter, of life, if there were no pursuits we humans fi nd intrinsically satisfying that make life worth living in the fi rst place, that is, worth all the struggle and hardship that are an inescapable part of life. And since play, games, and sports are best conceived, as the philosophical literature suggests, as just such intrinsically good things, they are among the most important and serious of human activities, and they are the very activities which things like work derive whatever seriousness they possess. All of which suggests, that when physical educationists endeavour to secure the academic legitimacy of their subject in (. . .) instrumental ways (. . .) they are barking up the wrong tree. (Morgan, in press) This statement by philosopher Bill Morgan is part of an elegant and persuasive argument for physical education that runs against the grain of currently dominant instrumental justifi cations based on health, economic, and social development. While Morgan confi rms health, economic, and social aspects of life are important, he considers such derivative justifi cations to run three risks. First, physical education is always viewed as of secondary importance to these other social goods. Second, each of these social goods is merely contingent upon participation in physical activities; 04Kirk(255).indd 255 04Kirk(255).

If, as Jean-Michel Rabaté expresses it, the “main object of high modernism is totality just before it turns into totalitarianism,” are all modernist totalities the same? Or do we have different modalities of totality, not only those dictated by the command “to say it all,” but
also totalities dictated by commands like “to see it all,” “to eat it all,” “to be it all,” and even “to reflect or think it all”? If, when we consider the first command “to say it all,” we pay attention to the two senses that Derrida saw in its French syntax (tout dire): 1) the freedom to express everything we want, and 2) the drive to catalogue, by saying, every single phenomenon, thus totalizing the world, how does this double character (total freedom and total capture) determine the other modernist totalizing modalities, i.e., to see, to eat, to be, to reflect it all? Different modernist artists, from the Marquis de Sade to Titus Carmel, give us examples of paradigmatic double totalizing drives, but it is, ultimately, in the fold between Duchamp’s The Big Glass and Given that we find the hinge of modernism’s totalizing drive, and through it, of its totalitarian dangers.

Savia nueva da cuenta de una transformación radical de la crítica cultural latinoamericana, de su desbordada escritura, de su exuberante imaginación política. La liquidez de las plantas es savia y sabiduría, porque sus raíces, tallos y brotes testimonian toda una metamorfosis. Rubí Carreño Bolívar esparce las semillas al aire para que súbitamente aparezcan extraordinarias formas anómalas: desde majestuosas nubes y enardecidas plumas rojas, hasta bandas travestis y voces violetas. Compuesto de diecisiete ensayos, este volumen transita diversos parajes –de Xalapa a Santiago– para atestiguar en sus mil hojas, cómo renacen las mil y una formas de nuestra crítica. Más que una bocanada de aire fresco o, incluso, un soplo de vida; este maravilloso libro invoca la mismísima capacidad germinadora del aire. Javier Guerrero

In this paper I am discussing Axel Honneth's book The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal by distinguishing two key moments: (1) first, the critique of Marxian and Marxist conceptions of socialism; (2) second, the reconstruction of socialism in which the concept of "social freedom" is identified as a normative reference. I then (3) address a topic that is particularly important for Honneth; namely, the question of whether there is a structurally builtin "democratic deficit" in earlier versions of socialism that could explain the antidemocratic developments that have occurred in "real existing socialism". It is especially interesting that Honneth links this discussion to socio-theoretical problems. After a brief summary (4), in which the most important points in Honneth's argumentation are outlined and prepared for a critical review, (5) I contrast his ideas to those of the Mexican philosopher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez. The aim is to show that the major problems that Honneth finds in Marxian or Marxist concepts of socialism have already been perceived and discussed within a non-dogmatic tradition of Marxism. In line with Honneth's

In the third grade of primary school, my English teacher was Mrs. Stone. I was a voracious reader in those years, consuming nearly everything I could lay my hands on, and I spent more time in the library than anywhere else the young congregated. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I harboured ambitions, at one time, of becoming a capable creative writer. That dream was growing — until Mrs. Stone destroyed it.

This article expands the notion of slow curating by placing it in dialogue with debates on slow memory, framing it as an ethical-aesthetic methodology for engaging with interrupted and contested memories. Rather than a fixed function, slow curating is approached as a negotiated field of transformation shaped by the entanglement of objects, contexts and participants. While Johnston describes slow curating as a reflexive and context-responsive practice, here it is expanded into a temporal-political care methodology that sustains hesitation, latency and resonance within the curatorial apparatus. Drawing on curating-as-verb, together with notions of diffractive temporality and dialectical contemporaneity, the article advances a vocabulary of tactics-dis/placement, re/composition, de/ fetishisation and unlearning-tested through a critical reading of Once Upon a Time and Never Again (HLCK), an exhibition staging fragmented childhood memories in fragile co-presence. It concludes by reframing curating as a temporal-political practice through which disrupted memories endure in motion and align with slow memory as a critical horizon where the right to opacity is affirmed.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17506980251413209

AI-translated version by: Ramallo, Fernando (2026). «Relacións sociais de significación: cara a unha Lingüística política». A Trabe de Ouro, 131, 101-114 (https://www.academia.edu/145258318/Relacións_sociais_de_significación_cara_a_unha_Lingüística_política)

This article examines the crisis of scientific writing in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) not as a sudden, isolated technological rupture, but as the inevitable consequence of a long-term structural transformation. Arguing that AI has not created this crisis but rather made pre-existing contradictions visible, the study grounds its argument on four primary axes: the historical rhetorical construction of scientific discourse, the transformation of the IMRAD (Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion) format into an unquestionable normative model, the profit-driven political economy of academic publishing monopolies, and the increasingly ambiguous status of authorship in the context of large language models. Drawing on Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of knowledge-power, Thomas Kuhn's approach to normal science, and Peter Fleming's critique of academic capitalism, this analysis reveals how the current system rewards only measurable and rapidly circulable outputs while marginalising theoretical risk-taking and critical depth of interpretation. The article highlights that the discrepancy between detected and declared AI use in academic production points to a severe transparency problem. As texts become standardised, measurability increases; AI, in turn, reproduces these forms perfectly, thereby radically narrowing epistemic and narrative diversity. Proposing three potential future scenariosfull automation, the resurgence of creative theoretical writing, and the coexistence of a dual literature structure the study concludes that a permanent solution lies not in superficial technical fixes, but in profound structural interventions. These include the radical restructuring of the publishing economy, the elimination of academic precarity, and the revalorisation of non-standard, critical forms of writing. The critique developed here is directed primarily at the empirical natural and social sciences, where IMRAD-based writing and metric pressures are most acute, though the structural forces identifiedacademic capitalism, publishing monopolies, and AI optimisationoperate system-wide.

For the young Farocki, the actual “work” of film went beyond information and entertainment. Though it could be found in the early history of film’s scientific applications, Farocki saw a need for it to be updated and mobilized for agitational purposes in a potentially revolutionary present following 1968. This preference for images at work was to remain an integral part of Farocki's approach to filmmaking and his critical engagement with visual culture.

Can societies fall ill? Can institutions die, or social practices degenerate? Must social norms be embodied? To what extent is social action habitual? Is social life part of nature or does it transcend it? This book explores the meaning and many facets of naturalism in social philosophy. It investigates the consequences of concepts such as 'second nature' and 'forms of life' for social philosophy. It analyses the ways in which social action, gender, work and morality are embodied. It surveys the conceptions of nature at play in social criticism. It provides students and experts of social philosophy with both an overview and critical analyses of the many facets of naturalism in social philosophy from Hegel to contemporary critical theory.

Contributors: Louis Carré, Fabian Freyenhagen, Martin Hartmann, Axel Honneth, Thomas Khurana, Steven Levine, Sabina Lovibond, Arvi Särkelä, Barbara Stiegler, Mariana Teixeira, Italo Testa

C'è un oggetto teorico eccentrico nell'opera di Umberto Eco. Occupa la seconda parte del Trattato di semiotica generale e prende il nome di "teoria dei modi di produzione segnica".  La posizione occupata all'interno del Trattato non è marginale, poiché, se la prima parte-la "teoria dei co dici"-si poneva già all'epoca in termini esplicitamente consuntivi, chiu sura di un periodo e sua sistematizzazione, la seconda parte si dimostrava talmente preventiva da non essere più ripresa nel successivo trentennio. 2 Si tratta infatti di discutere non più la statica delle culture, attraverso le manifestazioni che queste producono (i "codici" della cultura), ma la loro dinamica. In altri termini: invece di prendere in considerazione i prodot ti del lavoro semiotico, la teoria della produzione segnica indaga diretta mente la modellizzazione di questo lavoro, cioè i processi che portano a quei prodotti. I problemi a cui prova a rispondere la teoria dei modi di produzio ne segnica sono quantomeno tre: (i) l'immissione di una storicità della produzione nell'edificio necessariamente cristallino del "sistema" come

تسعى هذه الورقة إلى مساءلة الحدود المعرفية والمكانية لنظريات نزع الكولونيالية من خلال قراءة الحالة الحضرية للمدينة العربية، مع التركيز على غزة بوصفها فضاءً تتجاوز فيه الممارسة الاستعمارية الأطر التفسيرية السائدة في أدبيات ما بعد ونزع الاستعمار. تنطلق الدراسة من فرضية مفادها أن الاستعمار لا يعمل فقط كنظام للهيمنة المعرفية أو التمثيلية، بل بوصفه مشروعًا ماديًا وإقليميًا يعيد تشكيل المجال الحضري عبر الإبادة المدينية، وتدمير البنية التحتية، وفرض اللامرئية والحصار، وتفكيك الاستمرارية المكانية والحركية للسكان الأصليين. ومن خلال الاستناد إلى الجغرافيا النقدية، ودراسات الاستعمار الاستيطاني، والنظرية الحضرية المناهضة للاستعمار، تطور الورقة نقدًا للمقاربات السائدة في نزع الكولونيالية التي غالبًا ما تظل محصورة في مستوى “العصيان المعرفي” دون الانتباه الكافي إلى مركزية الأرض، والحركة، والتضاريس، والعنف الحضري في تشكيل السيطرة الاستعمارية.

ومن خلال تحليل غزة وتجارب حضرية عربية أخرى، تقترح الدراسة المدينة العربية ليس فقط بوصفها موضوعًا للاستعمار، بل باعتبارها موقعًا نظريًا ومنهجيًا قادرًا على نقد نظريات نزع الكولونيالية ذاتها. تظهر المدينة هنا كأرشيف مكاني مجزأ لكنه مقاوم، يكشف محدودية النماذج الكونية لنزع الاستعمار التي تشكلت أساسًا داخل السياقات الأكاديمية اللاتينية والأنغلوساكسونية. وعليه، تدعو الورقة إلى تطوير مقاربة عمرانية مناهضة للاستعمار ترتكز على المادية المكانية، والعنف الإقليمي، وتفكيك البنى التحتية، وممارسات البقاء والحركة اليومية بوصفها أشكالًا لإنتاج معرفة تحررية مضادة للاستعمار.