Search results for ""Author Philip Armstrong""

Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.Analyzing a wide range of Jean-Luc Nancy’s works, Reticulations shows how his project of articulating the political in terms of singularities, pluralities, and multiplicities can deepen our understanding of networks and how they influence community and politics. Even more striking is the way Armstrong associates this general complex in Nancy’s writing with his concern for what Nancy calls the retreat of the political. Armstrong highlights what Nancy’s perspective on networks reveals about movement politics as seen in the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the impact of technology on citizenship, and finally how this perspective critiques the model of networked communism constructed by Hardt and Negri. Contesting the exclusive link between technology and networks, Reticulations ultimately demonstrates how network society creates an entirely new politics, one surprisingly rooted in community.

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The Egyptians worshipped them, the Romans dressed them in fitted coats, the Christians made the shepherd synonymous with their divine saviour. In Sheep, Philip Armstrong traces the natural and cultural history of both the wild and domestic species of Ovis: from the Old World mouflon to the corkscrew-horned flocks of the Egyptians, to the 'Trojan sheep' of Homer's Odyssey, to the vast migratory mobs of Spanish merinos - all the way to Dolly the cloned ewe and the sheep-human hybrids of Haruki Murakami. Above all else, Sheep demonstrates that sometimes the most mundane animals turn out to be the most surprising.

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From Plato’s Symposium to Hegel’s truth as a “Bacchanalian revel,” from the Bacchae of Euripedes to Nietzsche, philosophy holds a deeply ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication. At the same time, from Baudelaire to Lowry, from Proust to Dostoyevsky, literature and poetry are also haunted by scenes of intoxication, as if philosophy and literature share a theme that announces and navigates their proximities and differences. For Nancy, intoxication constitutes an excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy’s sober ambitions for appropriate forms of philosophical behavior and conceptual lucidity. At the same time, intoxication displaces a number of established dualities—reason and passion, mind and body, rationality and desire, rigor and excess, clarity and confusion, logic and eros. Taking its point of departure from Baudelaire’s categorical imperative to understand modernity—“be drunk always”—Nancy’s little book is composed in fragments, quotations, drunken asides, and inebriated repetitions. His contemporary “banquet” addresses a range of related themes, including the role of alcohol and intoxication in rituals, myths, divine sacrifice, and religious symbolism, all those toasts to the sacred “spirits” involving libations and different forms of speech and enunciation—to the gods, to modernity, to the Absolute. Affecting both mind and body, Nancy’s subject becomes intoxicated: Ego sum, ego existo ebrius—I am, I exist—drunk.

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Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “the inoperative community”—Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community. Stemming from Jean-Christophe Bailly’s initial proposal to think community in terms of “number” or the “numerous,” and unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot’s text, Nancy’s new book addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot’s thinking, from Bataille’s “community of lovers” to the relation between community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; to Marguerite Duras, to the Eucharist. A key rethinking of politics and the political, this exchange opens up a new understanding of community played out as a question of avowal.

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Originally written for an exhibition Jean-Luc Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, this book addresses the medium of drawing in light of the question of form—of form in its formation, as a formative force, as a birth to form. In this sense, drawing opens less toward its achievement, intention, and accomplishment than toward a finality without end and the infinite renewal of ends, toward lines of sense marked by tracings, suspensions, and permanent interruptions. Recalling that drawing and design were once used interchangeably, Nancy notes that drawing designates a design that remains without project, plan, or intention. His argument offers a way of rethinking a number of historical terms (sketch, draft, outline, plan, mark, notation), which includes rethinking drawing in its graphic,filmic, choreographic, poetic, melodic, and rhythmic senses. If drawing is not reducible to any form of closure, it never resolves a tension specific to itself. Rather, drawing allows the pleasure in and of drawing, the gesture of a desire that remains in excess of all knowledge, to come to appearance. Situating drawing in these terms, Nancy engages a number of texts in which Freud addresses the force of desire in the rapport between aesthetic and sexual pleasure, texts that also turn around questions concerning form in its formation, form as a formative force. Between the sections of the text, Nancy has placed a series of “sketchbooks” on drawing, composed of a broad range of quotations on art from different writers, artists, or philosophers.

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Originally written for an exhibition Jean-Luc Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, this book addresses the medium of drawing in light of the question of form—of form in its formation, as a formative force, as a birth to form. In this sense, drawing opens less toward its achievement, intention, and accomplishment than toward a finality without end and the infinite renewal of ends, toward lines of sense marked by tracings, suspensions, and permanent interruptions. Recalling that drawing and design were once used interchangeably, Nancy notes that drawing designates a design that remains without project, plan, or intention. His argument offers a way of rethinking a number of historical terms (sketch, draft, outline, plan, mark, notation), which includes rethinking drawing in its graphic,filmic, choreographic, poetic, melodic, and rhythmic senses. If drawing is not reducible to any form of closure, it never resolves a tension specific to itself. Rather, drawing allows the pleasure in and of drawing, the gesture of a desire that remains in excess of all knowledge, to come to appearance. Situating drawing in these terms, Nancy engages a number of texts in which Freud addresses the force of desire in the rapport between aesthetic and sexual pleasure, texts that also turn around questions concerning form in its formation, form as a formative force. Between the sections of the text, Nancy has placed a series of “sketchbooks” on drawing, composed of a broad range of quotations on art from different writers, artists, or philosophers.

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This book charts the development of capitalism in the post-war period and describes the challenges that the system has faced since 1945. It describes the measures that were taken to deal with the post-war slump and the ways in which most capitalist economies achieved steady growth and affluence in the 1950s and 1960s. It goes on to show how this boom was undermined by unemployment ensued.

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