Search

This review article discusses two recent books about Georg Lukács (1885-1971), offering observations on his best-known publication - History and Class Consciousness, published one hundred years ago - and positioning this work in the arc of his project as a whole. Highlighting some of Lukács's theories and arguments, the review also notes the contexts and considerations which shaped Lukács's thought. The article aims to show how Lukács's intellectual activities were related to his political commitment, both when serving as a Hungarian government minister (in 1919 and again, even more briefly, in 1956) and during the periods in which he 'retreated' to unofficial research, generating books which were often at odds with the prevailing orthodoxies of 'dialectical materialism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Logos: Anales del Seminario de Metafísica (1575-6866) is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper presents partial results of a broader investigation and focuses on describing a process of reification that took place at the heart of an immigrant community in Sant Mateu (Castelló, Spain), and that crystallised through the construction and management of a mosque. The theoretical framework draws on social learning theories, with a particular focus on situated learning and communities of practice. Regarding the method, the study follows an ethnographic, qualitative approach. We present the fieldwork procedures (participatory observation, interviews and focus groups) and analytical procedures (content analysis) followed in the research. The results recount the process this immigrant community followed to build the mosque, and the meanings for the community of the process followed and its culmination. Finally, the discussion and conclusions characterise this immigrant community as a community of practice where situated learning processes arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a heuristic framework based on processual sociology to analyse policy interventions aimed at change within conflict contexts. Such a framework is valuable because it creates an opportunity for a more open approach to empirical research that may allow us to research evolving processes and to see things we might miss otherwise. The article aims to complement goal-oriented and predominantly relational approaches and to contribute to debates that warn against the reification of actors and structures in research. It also points to a lack of attention to politics in the analysis of policy interventions. The argument derives from a discussion of transitional justice and peacebuilding and is empirically illustrated for the context of the Tunisian transitional justice process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disease ecology has the potential to help build a new society where the contradictions of our time are recognized and confronted in the pursuit of a more considered, and just, understanding of the interrelationships of organisms with the environment. Unfortunately, the discipline is facing a major dilemma as the advent of new technologies, access to remote data, and lack of engagement with the contexts where diseases emerge and are transmitted, has resulted in the creation of Blame Local Indigenous and Peasant Populations (BLIPP) narratives that align with hegemonic globalizing agents and processes. Here, in the first half of a two-part essay about reifications in disease ecology, thinking with dialectical materialism, we demystify BLIPP narratives around land use change in disease emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An application of Generative Diffusion Techniques for the reification of human portraits in artistic paintings is presented. By reification we intend the transformation of the painter's figurative abstraction into a real human face. The application exploits a recent embedding technique for Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM), inverting the generative process and mapping the visible image into its latent representation. In this way, we can first embed the portrait into the latent space, and then use the reverse diffusion model, trained to generate real human faces, to produce the most likely real approximation of the portrait. The actual deployment of the application involves several additional techniques, mostly aimed to automatically identify, align, and crop the relevant portion of the face, and to postprocess the generated reification in order to enhance its quality and to allow a smooth reinsertion in the original painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the artwork's opacity and purposively purposeless quality are a tacit refusal of the compulsory division between intellectual and manual labor, which afford the artwork a unique capacity to access an otherwise occluded totality. By analyzing conceptual work by the artist duo Claire Fontaine—who deploy Alfred Sohn-Rethel's notion of market exchangism in their work—in relation to twentieth-century intellectual debates around representation, abstraction, and social synthesis, the essay develops a model of totality in a descriptive rather than prescriptive register. At issue is the artwork's potential for dereification, whereby a given work of art may provide perceptual experience of the transactional logic that underpins and structures the social field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Poligramas is the property of Universidad del Valle and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For Jean Herbison, learning in her early 20th century childhood world was relatively uncomplicated and predictable. Life was shaped by unambiguous family, faith and settler colonial prescriptions about how children should behave and what they should become. Approaching the centenary of her birth, children today must navigate a very different society of 'unlimited can'; an achievement society that generates a debilitating compulsion to self-improve (Byung Chul-Han). In this Herbison lecture, I offer a personal reflection on the contemporary 'triangle' of education research, policy and practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Viewed as a culturally and historically specific 'form of life' (Rahel Jaeggi), I ask whether, over the last thirty five years, this triangle may have unwittingly contributed to a collective failure to give adequate recognition to children's learning. Despite our best intentions, have we simply reified students and in doing so alienated them from learning in all its complexities and dimensions (Knud Illeris)? More than mere acknowledgement of 'the other', recognition theory highlights the importance of socially developed qualities such as confidence, respect and esteem (Axel Honneth) to each child's capacity to develop meaningful relationships to or 'resonance' with an ever accelerating and uncontrollable world (Hartmut Rosa) and the people and communities in it. In practical terms, then, what can we draw on that is already immanent in our research, policy and practice triangle to transform children's institutionalised learning? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments have highlighted the tension between democracy and late capitalist economics. In the wake of the Great Recession, international market forces have increasingly taken de facto control of politics. My basic thesis is that a modified version of Jürgen Habermas' colonization thesis, which opposes the takeover of social and political life by the forces of power (administration) and money (economics), productively conceptualizes these developments. I argue that this framework can help to both diagnose and combat the dangers associated with the overexpansion of functional systemic forces, as well as the broader instrumentalization that they promote. By drawing on his political writings on the future of the European Union after the crisis of the Eurozone, I oppose interpretations of Habermas as a pacified liberal by demonstrating that he shares Karl Marx's commitment to combatting naturalized views of economics and material reproduction as a force that lie outside of human control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper excavates the practice-oriented background and therapeutic significance of emptiness in the Madhyamaka philosophy attributed to Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao. Buddhist emptiness unravels experiential and linguistic reification through meditation and argumentation. The historical contexts and uses of the word indicate that it is primarily a practical diagnostic and therapeutic concept. Emptiness does not lead to further views or truths but, akin to yet distinct from Ajñāna and Pyrrhonian skepticism, the suspension of assertion. This sense of emptiness as a practice can be traced in the intercultural transmission of Madhyamaka from Nāgārjuna, its paradigmatic philosopher, to Sengzhao 僧肇, its first pivotal indigenous Chinese representative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The training regimes which are associated with boxing are thought to impart lessons in discipline that are particularly valuable for social groups often associated with the sport. This leads to a variety of sport for development programmes that seek to leverage this potential in one way or another. Research which is conducted on such programmes is often produced internally without academic support. We argue it is possible, and perhaps likely, for such research to evidence, justify and recreate sporting myths. To this end, we explore the allure and apparent utility of boxing as a sport for social development. We then consider how people involved in such programmes attempted to evidence their passionate beliefs in boxing's positive potentials. Rather than considering myths as being completely unfettered from objective reality, we have explored how they are part of an interactional process that can produce stubbornly persistent accounts of the world. We present this analysis as evidence of the ways that myths can become embedded in people's lives and, as such, must be conceptualised accurately, accounted for empirically and explored using considered research strategies. Our observations paint an awkward picture of the validity of the evidence-base upon which boxing programmes boasted of their success. That is, embracing personal biases and avoiding rigorous, critical research methods were being financially incentivised, with no external accountability for challenging pre-conceived ideas and a priori conclusions. Our concluding remarks situate these claims within ongoing ontological, epistemological and axiological debates which sport development scholars have developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent's motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing normativity at the core of life and mind; all cognitive activity is a kind of motivated activity. It has rejected representational architectures, especially their reification of the role of normativity into localized "value" functions, in favor of accounts that appeal to system-level properties of the organism. However, these accounts push the problem of reification to a higher level of description, given that the efficacy of agent-level normativity is completely identified with the efficacy of non-normative system-level activity, while assuming operational equivalency. To allow normativity to have its own efficacy, a new kind of nonreductive theory is proposed: irruption theory. The concept of irruption is introduced to indirectly operationalize an agent's motivated involvement in its activity, specifically in terms of a corresponding underdetermination of its states by their material basis. This implies that irruptions are associated with increased unpredictability of (neuro)physiological activity, and they should, hence, be quantifiable in terms of information-theoretic entropy. Accordingly, evidence that action, cognition, and consciousness are linked to higher levels of neural entropy can be interpreted as indicating higher levels of motivated agential involvement. Counterintuitively, irruptions do not stand in contrast to adaptive behavior. Rather, as indicated by artificial life models of complex adaptive systems, bursts of arbitrary changes in neural activity can facilitate the self-organization of adaptivity. Irruption theory therefore, makes it intelligible how an agent's motivations, as such, can make effective differences to their behavior, without requiring the agent to be able to directly control their body's neurophysiological processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arete Journal of Political Philosophy / Arete Politik Felsefe Dergisi is the property of Arete Journal of Political Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay is concerned with allegory and thinking in The Faerie Queene. An enduring critical tradition interprets Spenser's poem along oppositional lines—allegory/narrative, ideal/material—casting allegory as a violent form of classification and reification, intent on suppressing the contradictions on which it depends. With and against this tradition, I approach Spenser's 'continued allegory' as a mode of narrative figuration that is characterized instead by the mutual conditioning and reciprocal interplay of its poles; a poetics of the material that is a poetics of mediation. I offer new readings of three well-known gardens—the Bower of Bliss, the Temple of Venus, and the Garden of Adonis—showing how they provide especially rich expressions of the entanglement of and movement between concept and experience. The first two facilitate sustained critiques of the unyielding abstractions so capably supplied by their martial visitors, who damagingly abjure the difficulties of thinking and experience. The third, the Garden of Adonis, exhibits and invites a different kind of thinking—both critical and speculative—in the form of arboreal "inclination." Neither entirely abstract nor intuitive, "inclination" affords an uncertain, expectant, moving concept, which refuses the suppression of its constitutive contradictions (the violence with which we are so familiar), and evokes, instead, the hope for a possible solidarity between them. [N.R.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I analyze the contents of voices heard by people diagnosed with schizophrenia in China. Rather than pathologizing these contents as symptoms of psychiatric disease, I examine them as a form of disinhibited voice and articulation. Drawing on the literature on ideological reification and articulation, I show that the specificity and contents of heard voices are connotatively or evocatively linked to the "China Dream," particularly ideologies of the Dream that distort reality. Through these voices, those with schizophrenia articulate their dissent or divergence from the illusory collective world depicted by "China Dream" discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument in Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (López, 2019) suggests that Lukács' attempt to supersede Hegel failed. Ironically, Lukács' concept of praxis reproduces the logical structure of Hegel's bad infinity, concealing its own finite historical origins in October 1917 (and Lukács' philosophical reflection thereupon) while also mystifying the conceptual-logical content of praxis itself. In short, Lukács' concept of praxis is a mythology that relapses into the antinomies he identified and criticized in others. If Lukács' philosophy of praxis is critically reconstructed in light of Hegel's speculative understanding of the infinite and the finite, Lukács' concept of praxis may be recovered and reconstituted on a more rational basis. The resulting speculative concept of praxis makes it possible to overcome the interrelated pitfalls of nihilism and dogmatic positivity that Lukács referred to via Heraclitus. Further, this will assist the development of a more reflective, critical Marxist Hegelian concept of praxis that may better orient socialist practice and contribute to the reformation of Marxism that Gillian Rose called for in Hegel Contra Sociology (Rose, 2009). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moving between autobiographical and biographical reflections on Lukács and the embeddedness of lives, his and briefly mine, in historical time, the persistent influence of his readings of culture and questions of form, science and a philosophy of praxis is to be reflected on. There is, in some quarters, a dominant Lukácsian reading of modernism, which he apparently dismisses as fragmentary and debilitating. However, there is much to be said about the ways his writings, especially the ones from the 1920s, leave traces and recurrently propel inquiry lines in less discussed areas: namely, thermal analyses of alienation and reification as picked up in Frankfurt School and Situationist thinking; synthetic color production, and communist self-activity. To observe this persistent generativity in the name of self-organization and dialectics is to value something under attack in the revival of anti-Semitism and anti-Communism in Hungary today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Lukács' early Marxist thought in the 1920s, crisis is understood as an expression of a deeper dissonance of social life that reveals the violence inflicted upon humans even in "normal" social conditions. The experience of crisis can thus lead to new forms of social consciousness and, consequently, to a "revolutionizing praxis." However, this transition is in no way mechanically necessary, as crisis can also be perpetuated and temporarily "overcome" through the restoration of dominant power relations. However, the relative instability of the system during a crisis calls us to think about the appropriate forms of organizing collective political practice to effectively intervene in the historical continuum, instead of letting historical automatism be restored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Alustath is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

If we are to escape reification--a sort of cognitive neutrality of basic, gnosic apprehension of the world plus a fundamental disrespect of the other as free agent--we should recognize our mode of existence as always already one of existential engagement with and within experience, aiming at articulating and expressing this engagement. One way of fully inhabiting this, let's call it the proper human stance, is through recognizing a pendular space between the basic attitudes of acknowledging lived, shared interests and values and avoiding being bound to and dependent on the values of others. Both philosophy as radical critical reflection, and art, or artistic processes of production and reception, can be seen as invitations to inhabit this pendular space of human experience, by way of continually opening up our habits of sensibility to new engagements in thought and life, and successfully articulating and expressing these engagements in public forms. I take Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein's mature philosophy as an attuning to an apt attitude towards this invitation. Is this attitude one possible, non-procedural meaning of "liberalism"? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, interaction forms of people who have experienced crises and users of mental health services are examined against the background of Gramsci's and Spivak´s concept of subalternity. To this end, first Foucault´s History of Madness is analysed in terms of hegemony theory. His concept of alienation is compared with that of Laing and related to Honneth´s theory of reification in order to explain, against this background and Lorenzer´s theory of interaction forms, how Foucault´s concept of disalienation is incorporated in modified form in the practice research network VISION-RA. Findings from this network on reifying interaction forms in the field of (community) psychiatry as well as on attempts of users of mental health services to resist these are presented. Following Spivak, the latter are interpreted as subaltern rebellion.

In the first decades of the 21st century, humour has been increasingly embraced as a legitimate means by which to cover, analyse and intervene in political issues. Most frequently, this political application of humour has been interpreted through the lens of 'satire': a term that evokes an idea of humour as a politically meaningful cultural act. Such an account of humour connects satire with the long-standing theoretical tradition of 'cultural politics' that explores the ability and mechanism of cultural forms to inform, inspire or enact political change. However, while satire may appear as the manifestation or culmination of a cultural political agenda, I argue that the concept ultimately works towards the closure of cultural political possibility. Drawing on the work of Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, I argue that satire is better understood as a form of reification that prematurely resolves how, when and why cultural forms can do politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "From Constellation to Dialectical Image: Adorno on Musical Works" by Christoph Hubig discusses Adorno's considerations on music aesthetics. Adorno uses the term "non-identical" and refers to Hegel to describe the nature of music. He also analyzes Beethoven's Appassionata and considers it as a realization of identity and non-identity. The text deals with constellation as a method of philosophizing and giving meaning. It is explained that constellations serve to preserve the non-identical as its own identity and to reveal the relationships between subjects and things. The text also refers to jazz as an example of the functionalization of subjective emotional expression. It also addresses Adorno's essay on Schubert, in which constellation, emotional expression, and dialectical image are already mentioned. The text deals with the relationship between technique and content in music and examines the use of meaning-expression in the music of Wagner and Mahler. Adorno argues that Wagner reinforces reification in music, while Mahler uses meaning-expression to create a dialectical visual language. The text also discusses Adorno's engagement with material categories in relation to Beethoven and Wagner. It is argued that in his analysis of the Missa solemnis, Adorno misses the mark and does not compose in terms of dialectical development. The text also deals with Adorno's interpretation of Beethoven's question about the possibility of an objective spiritual order and its parallel to Kantian philosophy. It is argued that Adorno overlooks the naive-believing Spinozism of Beethoven as an important element. Furthermore, Adorno's interpretation of Wagner is discussed, criticizing that he inserts meaning into his dialectical images and thus does not adequately analyze the phantasmagoria of Wagner's operas. Adorno argues that within the dramaturgy of the total work of art, every person and action is defined by a leitmotif and the world context becomes a tautology. The research of Carl Dahlhaus on the transformation of leitmotifs in Wagner is cited as a counter-argument. In his monograph on Mahler, Adorno describes the thoroughly broken nature of Mahler's music and emphasizes reflection and the non-identical. The text also considers the music of Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler in the context of Negative Dialectics. It is argued that Mahler's music creates a wholeness that does not let the characteristic disappear. Mahler's music is considered a kind of protest against the prevailing ideology of the true, the beautiful, and the good. The text also discusses the music of Igor Stravinsky and argues that his music represents a static dead end that goes against the development and dialectical nature of music. The text deals with the composers Stravinsky and Schoenberg and their musical works. Adorno analyzes Stravinsky's music and sees in it a destruction of the organic and a lack of freedom due to the lack of thematic work. In Schoenberg, on the other hand, Adorno recognizes a movement between expression and order, which is based on an exemplary change of the composer to his material. This text discusses Adorno's position as an advocate of material in music. Adorno rejects the artificialization and formalization of music in thoroughly determined systems and instead emphasizes the non-identity of the material. He argues that music cannot be reduced to its images and overforming constructions, but that the material itself should be recognized. Adorno pursues a materialism that does not dissolve into the indeterminate, but rather recognizes the material as it is. [Extracted from the article]

Based on a corpus composed of normative texts from Chile referring, on the one hand, to international migrations (1975 and 2021) and, on the other, to sexgender diversity (2012 and 2018), this article aims to analyze the way in which prefigurations of the migrant subject and of the subject of gender-sexual dissidence and diversities are constructed, in addition to its implications for lgtbi+ migrants. The approach is made from the critical analysis of feminist discourse. The analysis allows us to observe prefigurations that adopt a position of unidimensional identity reification, conceiving this subject, on the one hand, exclusively as a hetero-cis normed economic migrant, and on the other, as a vulnerable gender-sexual minority, thus implying an erasure of lgtbi+ migrants and the specific inequalities that affect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up Axel Honneth's suggestion that we, in the 21st century Western world, should revisit the Marxian idea of reification; unlike Honneth, however, this paper applies reification to the ways in which humans relate to non-human animals, particularly in the context of scientific experiments. Thinking about these practices through the lens of reification, the paper argues, yields a more helpful understanding of what is regarded as problematic in those practices than the standard animal rights approaches. The second part of the paper offers ways of overcoming reification that go beyond Honneth's idea of recognition by introducing Iris Murdoch's idea of attention. This proposed strategy makes the ethical relevance of reification more salient and makes it possible to counter reification through a practice such as attention which, unlike recognition, can be consciously established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author pleads for the reintroduction of the concept of the term »Leib« into the discussion, in order to counteract the reification of existence, which is the current trend towards guidelinebased therapy. The explanations for expanding the analytical setting to include the body are illustrated in therapy vignettes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of time, dystopias have become one of the prevailing modes of approaching a critique of reality. In the 21st century we witness a new boom in the genre, in which the relationship between crisis and dystopia has become closer. The threats that loom over our times (among which military conflicts, economic crisis, ecological emergency and rising right-wing populism are the most noteworthy), are captured in these dystopias in the form of images such as those of ruins or totalitarianisms. Thus, and following the premise of the repetition of history, dystopias turn to the past of the Western world as a way of lecturing about the present, in order to avoid the same mistakes of previous times. However, in this reified repetition of history, dystopian images tend to avoid the connections that link it not only to the present crises but also to the future dystopian debacle. To this end, we understand that the recurrence of history collaborates to its oblivion, thereby reinforcing the «reflexive impotence» which characterizes our times, according to Mark Fisher (2018). In order to confirm such hypotheses, this article aims to inquire into some of the main tropes of the most successful cinematic dystopias of our times, in an attempt to elucidate the discourses behind such reification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the historical antecedents of the terminologies ascribed to the Chinese in the Philippines, focusing on the late Spanish to the early American colonial periods. Many government records, newspapers, or books categorized the "Chinese" as either sangley, intsik, Chinese mestizo, or "Chinese/Chino," in contradistinction to Christianized natives who were labeled as "Indios" and later "Filipinos." Following dominant and nationalized classifications of race, past scholarship on the Chinese in the Philippines also tended to paint the "Chinese" in the Philippines in a binarist opposition against "Filipinos." The essentialization of ethnicities has resulted in the perpetuation of a homogenized and monolithic "Chinese" identity that we see in the country today. Using government and non-government publications from the period under study, this paper seeks to demonstrate the power dynamic at particular moments in Philippine society that has led to the reification, reinvention, and reconfiguration of what it means to be "Chinese." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this paper is the influence of Emil Lask's Logik der Philosophie on the essay on Reification (History and class consciousness). Our main focus will be the concept of irrationalism. We propose the following hypothesis: while processing the concept of reification, Lukács avails of Lask's theory of irrationalism. First of all, we show the relationship be-tween irrationality and the modern conception of rationality, which is strictly connected to the reification. Afterwards, we use laskian concepts as "logical nudity", "logical impenetrability" and "alogicity" to study the lukácsian way to explore the problem of irrationality in Hegel. In the end, we show how Lukács faces up the categorial problem in Marx through the laskian concept of Gegeständlichgkeitsform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Eleuthera is the property of Universidad de Caldas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Estudios Politicos (01215167) is the property of Universidad de Antioquia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Intersecoes: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article argues that historicising the evolution of nineteenth century nationalisms in South-Eastern Europe allows us to undermine not only binary understandings of nationalism, but also the essentialist reification of a single ideal type as a dominant or exclusive manifestation of nationalism. It draws attention to the competing nationalisms that can be encountered in the area during this period, varying across the spatial and temporal axes, as well as in their espousal by certain groups within the same 'nation'. The article challenges notions of a temporal lag, constitutive of binary interpretations that identify a fundamental difference between 'East' and 'West'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The military dictatorship in Chile (1973–1989) promoted an ideology of the individual body, dismantling all social and collective matrices. The various artistic expressions discussed in the following text can be seen as practices of situated memory, that link the violence of that period to the exercise of a necessary intersubjectivity between different spaces of intervention and bodies. In doing this, and by taking as a starting point collective and the notion of alienated space, the aim is to reconstitute a conscious corporeality of memory and collectivity. This paper seeks to revise interpretations of these performative and photographic exercises and to ask how meaning can be produced without subjecting memory to a process of reification or immobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we interpret pervasive difficulties with second degree inequalities as a macro-phenomenon emerging from Large Scale Assessment. In line with the theory of reification, we link common students' difficulties to approaches they use that undermine the intertwining of processes and the ensuing emergent mathematical objects. To frame the movement from process to object, we network the theory of objectification with Duval's semio-cognitive approach. We conclude that students' difficulties can be traced back to a disruption of the dialectical movement between process and object. Thus, the students lose the link to meaning, rooted in mathematical activity, and handle semiotic transformations out of the object-sign relation. Such a phenomenon is conceived as a macro-phenomenon emerging from the Italian educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Money is something apparently known by most everyone living in exchange-dominated economies. When queried exactly what is known about it, the common response is that it is a "thing" of great worth. Implied in the notion of describing it as a "thing" rather than a piece of paper is that it must exhibit some additional abstract feature. What exactly this feature is however remains largely shrouded to many. Despite the more recent and clarifying work of Modern Monetary Theory economists explaining not only what money is but also how it operates, effectively conveying this empirically based theory to the broader public has proven to be more difficult. This paper attempts to identify the problems associated with explaining money to an audience already thoroughly familiar with the topic. Charles S. Peirce's theory of signs will be used to reconstruct money's abstract character and make visible the unknowns of money's supposed "known-ness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The body is seen today as an alter ego, fragmented in interchangeable pieces, emptied of imagery and separate from the self. Maternal body makes no exception. Mothers and children have become protheses and products, as David Le Breton puts it. The new medical discoveries explore motherhood (conception, pregnancy) as bodily experience and look for alternatives that exclude the mother's subjectivity and even the mother's body, ignoring the particular affective cohesion created between mother and infant in the womb and the consequences of its absence during pregnancy and in the child's life. The maternal body is not a vehicle, but a relational experience that define the child's subjectivity, identity and even sociability. The present study focuses on the metaphors of the maternal body in Ioana Nicolaie's trilogy. These representations of the maternal body belong to a spectacular imagery that restore the symbolic dimension of the maternal body, stollen by hyperreality. Moreover, drawing on Bracha Ettinger's matrixial paradigm, the study argues that maternity and the inner structure of the maternal body could offer a relational pattern able to substantiate our sociability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]