Interview with Endre Szemerédi

Endre Szemerédi is the recipient of the 2012 Abel Prize of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. This interview was conducted in Oslo in May 2012 in conjuction with the Abel Prize celebration

John Templeton Foundation: Capabilities Report

This annual report, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the foundation, includes letters from its leaders, a history of the foundation, details of current grantmaking and other activities, financial statements, and lists of trustees

Tarrying with Sexual Matters. Thinking Change from Lacan to Badiou

This dissertation interrogates the significance of Alain Badiou's traversal of the antiphilosophy of Jacques Lacan, and the implications of that traversal for Badiou's thinking on the preconditions for the subject and possibilities of radical change. It focuses on the function of sexual matters in Badiou's philosophical works. Its basic presupposition posits that thinking radical change depends on an appreciation of the relations between sexual matters and an ethics of the act of subjective constitution, in the continuation of how psychoanalysis thinks the subject. While the encounter with sexual matters constitutes a key point for the psychoanalytic conception of subjective constitution and the act, sexual matters are less pronounced in the case of Badiou's philosophical works. In order to come to terms with Badiou's traversal of Lacan, this dissertation thus proposes a closer interrogation of the function of sexual matters in Badiou's philosophy. Its main thesis claims that a key to the appreciation of the significance and implications of Badiou's traversal of Lacan is located at the junctions where Badiou's ethical thrust is motivated in seemingly unwarranted conjunction with sexual matters. It argues that a key to Badiou's thinking of radical change is found at the points where his works cannot avoid a certain 'tarrying with sexual matters'. More precisely, the issue is the conceptualizations of truths and subjects as procedures of novelty within a situation that follows from Badiou's mathematical gesture, his elaborations of a materialist dialectic, and how these conceptualizations can be effective for thinking about the possibilities of change. This issue is addressed by way of the analysis of the points at which sexual matters intrude upon Badiou's argumentations. The thesis takes the psychoanalytic reference to sex as real and the definition of the real as the impasse to formalization literally, and states that the intrusions of sexual matters in Badiou's text mark especially dense and significant points in Badiou's confrontation with the Lacanian framework. Reading for the claim that 'sex marks the spot' is first and foremost a methodological thesis, where the analysis of the symptomal knots where sexual matters intrude becomes a method for the elaboration of the consequences of Badiou's philosophical project for thinking the subject of politics and the possibilities for change. The overall question is what it signifies to proceed from the non-object of sexual matters to thinking the possibilities of change by way of a mathematical ontology of multiplicities and a materialist dialectic of universal truths produced in the continuous process of a subject as borne in the division of an evental rupture? This disseration analyzes the mark of sexual matters as it resurges on three occasions in Badiou's work. Firstly, it analyzes the function of sexual matters and the feminine other in relation to Badiou's concept of the generic multiple in L'Être et l'événement, such as it is developed in critical dialogues with Lacan's feminine logic of the non-all. Badiou denotes the generic multiple by way of a reference to the feminine non-all, apparently, but my main claim is that this decision can only make sense if one recognizes the division of the concept of the generic multiple in two: an initial indiscernible of nothing that answers to the nomination of an event, and a consequent generic multiple proper that answers to an actual truth procedure. Secondly, this dissertation analyzes Badiou's conjoining of the real of sex and the real of class in Théorie du sujet, and proceeds to interrogate how Badiou turns to tragedy in order to elaborate on this conjunction. My main claim is that the figure of Prometheus the firebearer communicates Badiou's notion of an ethics of confidence, as the process in which radical change can be carried out. Lastly, this dissertation analyzes the function of the feminine other in relation to Badiou's conceptualization of antiphilosophy in general, in the seminar series on L'Antiphilosophie from 1992-1996. Lacan is there posited as a double exception, as the one to bring contemporary antiphilosophy to its conclusion and as the one to avoid the distinctive criterion of misogyny. My main claim is that these two exceptions have to be read together in order to grasp how Badiou's philosophy proceeds to think radical change from the point of impossibility. In conclusion, I argue that the mark of sexual matters in Badiou's traversal of Lacanian antiphilosophy can be read as nothing less than the mark of Badiou's traversal of Lacan as such. It is not the case merely that Lacanian antiphilosophy deals with sexual matters and that Badiou thus also deals with it, to the extent that he deals with Lacanian antiphilosophy. The moments at which sexual matters intrude upon Badiou's argumentation are also the moments at which the decisive elements of Badiou's arguments meet up and where his elaborations on the subject, its ethical portents, and the possibilities for radical change beyond Lacan reach their climax. It is not simply the case that the Lacanian real of sexual difference necessarily marks the move from psychoanalysis to philosophy. Also Badiou's elaborations on the implications of this move, through the concept of the generic multiple through the ruminations on the status of tragedy to the misogyny of the antiphilosophical act are marked by and carried out in an intricate relation with the issue of sexual matters

The Social Production of Gentility and Capital in Early Modern England: The Newtons of Lincolnshire.

This thesis has two principal aims; first, to examine and illuminate the social production of gentility and capital which was experienced by the Newton family between the early part of the seventeenth century and c.1743. Secondly, to ask larger questions about the social production of identity and capital in this period. The approach to these aims has been to blend the conceptual paradigms offered by complexity, post-structuralism and social constructionism in a new way, applying that new interpretive scheme principally to the letter-books of the family between c.1660 and c.1743. Previous gentry and social mobility studies have been governed by philosophical and linguistic tenets which have been radically challenged in the last few decades by post-structuralism, social constructionism and complexity. This thesis begins with the proposition that English society was a complex social network in a wider complex adaptive system. At the micro-level all social individuals had certain inseparable imperatives which follow from the pre-conditions for socialised human beings to form a complex adaptive system, and were expressed as five imperatives. These imperatives, expressed in everyday iterated exchanges in a social network, articulated inert resources into capital in the form of real estate, currency and credit - physically, discursively and reflexively. Gentry identity was likewise a recursive social production, which articulated a neutral social individual into a gentleman, esquire, or baronet. The same repeated social processes produced a tenant, almsmen and women, rector, burgess and spouse. The gaps, dynamic chains of substitutions, and variation (which characterised the complex material space and the social network) made these productions broadly stable, but also contingent, contested and uncertain. Capital and identities were flows rather than things; they were economies, characterised as a flux of valencies in a state of unstable equilibrium. The economic and status mobility demonstrated by the Newton family in the period was made possible because capital and identity were these economies

Law, Politics and Paradox : Orientations in Legal Formalism

The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the significance of the logical phenomenon of paradox for law and its relation to politics. I examine a selection of formal legal and political theories that in different ways understand law as a totality of norms, communications or behaviors, how paradox emerges in these theories, and what implications their understanding of paradox has for the relationship between law and politics. I argue that these legal and political theories can be meaningfully and in a novel way grouped according to their orientation to legal totality and paradox. To my knowledge, there is no research systematically mapping orientations to paradox in legal theory. It is the objective of this dissertation to fill this lack. Paradox presents challenges for formal thought, i.e. thought that analyzes the logic of totalities. Law, considered as a totality or form, gathers a plurality of entities under a common denominator and into a legal order. It is in reflecting on such formalization that we encounter paradoxes. This work aims to contribute to a growing literature on the implications of formalism for contemporary social and political thought by providing a legal theoretical perspective hitherto missing in these discussions. I use as a heuristic device a grouping of formal thought presented by the philosopher Paul M. Livingston. According to this grouping, there are three main orientations in contemporary formal thought to totality: the constructivist-criteriological, the paradoxico-critical and the generic orientation. These orientations arise on grounds of the “metalogical choice”: they prefer to view totality (such as law as a system or order) either as complete but inconsistent (the paradoxico-criticism), or as consistent but incomplete (the constructivist-criteriological and the generic orientation). I will apply, and modify when necessary, this categorization in order to analyze the theories of Hans Kelsen, Niklas Luhmann, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Hans Lindahl, and to provide a systematic mapping of how the nature of law as a totality is understood in contemporary formal legal-political thought. Accounts of modern law encounter a paradox, I argue, if they observe law as an autonomous, self-referential totality that claims for itself the right to draw a distinction between itself and non-law. The paradox of autonomous law is that it cannot consistently show that it is itself legal as a totality. The basic problem that this implies is that the legal system or collective is unable to legitimate its existence and identity in response to challenges in any other way than by drawing on its own resources – which precisely is what the challenge targets in the first place. If we think of law as offering a framework within which questions of justice and injustice can be answered, the paradox emerges when we question the justice of this framework itself. The dissertation defends the paradoxico-critical orientation. It argues that the legal system is a paradoxical totality, which implies that there is no neutral metalanguage, such as natural law, that could solve the problem of law’s self-reference for good. This challenges legal theory to show how the problem of nihilistic relativism, the mere perpetuation of the self-referential legal system, can be mitigated and law’s normative authority in society rethought. In Chapter 1, I define the notion of paradox, explicate its meaning and role in formal thought and motivate its application to legal theory. In Chapter 2, I show that in his theory of the basic norm, Kelsen can be understood as oscillating between the constructivist-criteriological position and the paradoxico-criticism, between an attempt at guaranteeing legal order’s consistency in a metalanguage, i.e. legal science, and an acknowledgement of law as an inconsistent totality. In Chapter 3, I interpret Luhmann as a paradoxico-evolutionary thinker: he observes the legal system as constitutively inconsistent but emphasizes the ways in which the system seeks to make this inconsistency unproblematic for functional reasons. In Chapter 4, I show that in systems theory, just like in Kelsen’s pure theory, the politics of the paradox remains unarticulated. I also show that, for Agamben, a paradoxico-critical thinker, the paradoxical articulation of law and politics is exposed in the state of exception, which, in his analysis, has become the new normal, requiring “messianic” politics to deactivate the whole nihilistic sovereign-legal apparatus. For Badiou, the representative of the generic orientation, which I discuss in Chapter 5, what can be said within a language, and by implication a legal system, is pre-determined by that language. Politics, the desire to say the unsayable, is thrown fully outside the language and the legal system to a position from which law’s incompleteness, its incapacity to offer space for justice and politics, can only be disclosed. Both Agamben and Badiou, thus, think about politics as “post-juridical.” In Chapter 6, I show that the very inconsistency and paradox at the heart of the legal order is, for Lindahl’s paradoxico-criticism, the site of the politics of its limits. This dissertation, then, concludes that the paradoxical limits of the legal totality can be understood as the site of politics in law. Taking law’s paradox into account allows for a non-nihilistic conception of politically contestable law and legal authority.Väitöskirja selvittää paradoksin käsitteen merkitystä oikeudelle ja oikeuden ja politiikan väliselle suhteelle. Analysoin oikeusfilosofian alaan kuuluvassa tutkimuksessani, miten valikoimani oikeus- ja politiikan teoreetikot ymmärtävät oikeuden normeista, kommunikaatioista tai toiminnasta koostuvana kokonaisuutena, miten paradoksi ilmenee heidän teorioissaan ja mitä seurauksia sillä on heidän käsitykselleen oikeuden ja politiikan suhteesta. Väitän, että oikeus- ja politiikan teorian kenttää voi uudella tavalla hahmottaa selvittämällä suhtautumistapoja oikeuden paradoksiin. Aiemmin oikeusteoriassa ei ole systemaattisesti selvitetty käsityksiä oikeuden paradoksista, ja väitöskirjan tavoitteena on täyttää tämä aukko. Se osallistuu kasvavaan filosofiseen keskusteluun formaalin ajattelun merkityksestä yhteiskunta- ja poliittiselle teorialle ja tarjoaa oikeusteoreettisen näkökulman, joka keskustelusta vielä puuttuu. Paradoksi hahmottuu oikeusteoreettisena ongelmana, kun oikeutta teoretisoidaan kokonaisuutena eli oikeusjärjestyksenä. Käytän tutkimuksessani heuristisena apuna filosofi ja loogikko Paul M. Livingstonin kehittämää formaalin ajattelun jaottelua kolmeen, konstruktivistis-kriteriologiseen, paradoksis-kriittiseen ja geneeriseen suuntaukseen. Nämä suuntaukset käsittävät kokonaisuuksien luonteen eri tavoin ja siten tekevät erilaisen “metaloogisen valinnan”: ne käsittävät kokonaisuudet, kuten oikeuden systeeminä tai normijärjestyksenä, joko täydellisinä mutta paradoksaalisina tai konsistentteinä mutta epätäydellisinä. Sovellan tutkimuksessani tätä jaottelua ja analysoin sen avulla Hans Kelsenin, Niklas Luhmannin, Giorgio Agambenin, Alain Badioun ja Hans Lindahlin oikeus-poliittista ajattelua. Tavoitteena on systemaattisesti selvittää, miten nykyaikaisessa formaalissa oikeus-poliittisessa ajattelussa ymmärretään oikeuden luonne kokonaisuutena. Väitöskirja puolustaa paradoksis-kriittistä suuntausta. Väitän, että moderni oikeus voidaan ymmärtää paradoksaalisena, jos se käsitetään autonomisena, itseensä viittaavana kokonaisuutena, joka pidättää itselleen oikeuden vetää raja oikeuden ja ei-oikeuden välille. Autonomisen oikeuden paradoksi on se, ettei oikeusjärjestys pysty itse ristiriidattomasti oikeuttamaan itseään. Oikeusjärjestys mahdollistaa riidanratkaisun sekä oikean ja väärän, laillisen ja laittoman erottamisen toisistaan, mutta oikeuden yritykset ratkaista tarjoamansa riidanratkaisun oma oikeutus ja laillisuus johtavat paradoksiin. Seurauksena on, että oikeusjärjestelmä ja -yhteisö kykenee vastamaan kohtaamaansa kritiikkiin vain omasta näkökulmastaan, mikä juuri on kritiikin kohteena. Väitöskirjassa esitetään, että oikeusjärjestelmän ymmärtäminen paradoksaalisena kokonaisuutena merkitsee sekä ”metakielen”, kuten itsenäisen luonnonoikeuden, hylkäämistä ratkaisuna oikeuden itseensä viittaavuuden ongelmaan että luopumista täydellisen ja konsistentin oikeusjärjestyksen ideasta. Tästä seuraa, että oikeusteoria joutuu kohtaamaan oikeuden poliittisuuden, nihilistisen relativismin ongelman sekä etsimään uusia tapoja käsittää oikeuden normatiivisuus ja auktoriteetti yhteiskunnassa

Lost in technology: Towards a critique of repugnant rights

Modern law is founded on an idea of justice that is made felt through rights and entitlements legal subjects enjoy. As such, for law and its idea of justice, rights are inherently good and therefore abundant. On encounter with injustice, it has become commonplace to inquire what laws and rights have been flouted, as if injustice would disappear in encounter with rights that encode justice. But what if no number of laws and rights – even with faultless execution – is up for the task of upholding what we deem just? In this dissertation, I look at the heart of this question, and find the law’s answer not simply wanting but repugnant. The research is animated by interaction of three topoi: personhood, technology, and international law. The first part concerns how these concepts are perceived in law and by those working with laws. As part of the unearthing of the conceptual ground rules, a trilemma between effectiveness, responsiveness, and coherence familiar from regulatory research and international law rears its head. I show how setting the priority on effective and responsive solutions has amounted to derogation of justice and diminishment of law’s foundational entity, a natural person. I explore whether these outcomes could be avoided within liberal international law and answer my own question on the negative. I title this systematic outcome a theory of repugnant rights. The latter part of the dissertation concerns technology, its regulation, and tendency to produce repugnant outcomes in international law. I focus on bio- and information technologies and their legal coding as tools to dismantle legal protection provided by our quality of being human. I will show how intricate legal norms break and remake us in ways that blur the boundaries between persons and things. Once something falls beyond or below the category of a person, its legal status can be warped, twisted, and turned – all while remaining at arm’s length from the person it was once legally part of. Technological intervention to such things allows for effective circumvention of legal shelter provided by human rights, as I show through example of regulation of surrogacy and data storage. To come to terms with the repugnancy, I seek shelter from anger as a transitory category that would enable us to move across the present impasse with rights. I suggest that at the very least international lawyers ought to be angry at quotidian horrors international law upholds. And through such anger overcome the misery and repugnancy of international law.--- Moderni oikeus pohjaa ajatukseen oikeudenmukaisuudesta, joka ilmenee oikeussubjektien nauttimien ja käyttämien oikeuksien välityksellä. Näin ymmärrettynä oikeuden ja sen omaaman oikeudenmukaisuuden käsityksen kannalta oikeudet ovat itseisarvoisesti hyviä, mikä selittää niiden suuren määrän. Kun kohtaamme epäoikeudenmukaisuutta tapaamme kysyä, mitä lakeja ja oikeuksia on loukattu, ikään kuin epäoikeudenmukaisuus kaikkoaisi sen kohdatessa oikeuden sisältämän oikeudenmukaisuuden idean. Mutta entä jos mikään määrä lakeja ja oikeuksia – edes täydellisesti täytäntöönpantuna – ei riitä puolustamaan oikeudenmukaisena pitämäämme? Väitöskirjassani kurkistan tämän kysymyksen ytimeen ja löydän vastauksen, joka ei ole ainoastaan riittämätön vaan myös vastenmielinen. Väitöksessäni operoin oikeushenkilön, teknologian ja kansainvälisen oikeuden rajapinnoilla. Väitökseni ensimmäinen osa koskee sitä, kuinka oikeuden ja lakien parissa työskentelevät mieltävät nämä käsitteet. Näiden käsitteiden tarkastelun yhteydessä havaitsen sääntelytutkimuksesta ja kansainvälisestä oikeudesta tutun tehokkuuden, responsiivisuuden ja johdonmukaisuuden välisen trilemman. Osoitan, miten tehokkaiden ja responsiivisten ratkaisujen asettaminen etusijalle on merkinnyt lipeämistä oikeudenmukaisuudesta ja samalla oikeuden keskeisen subjektin, luonnollisen henkilön, merkityksen pienentymistä. Tutkin, voitaisiinko tämä trilemma välttää liberaalin kansainvälisen oikeuden puitteissa, ja vastaan omaan kysymykseeni kielteisesti. Nimeän tämän tuloksen vastenmielisten oikeuksien teoriaksi. Väitöskirjan jälkimmäinen osa käsittelee teknologiaa, sen säätelyä ja sen taipumusta tuottaa vastenmielisiä lopputuloksia kansainvälisessä oikeudessa. Tarkastelen lähemmin bio- ja informaatioteknologioita ja niiden oikeudellista sääntelyä, sekä sitä millaisia välineitä ne tarjoavat ihmisyyden tarjoaman oikeudellisen suojan purkamiseen. Osoitan kuinka monimutkaiset oikeudelliset normit rikkovat ja muokkaavat meitä tavoilla, jotka hämärtävät ihmisten ja asioiden välisiä rajoja. Kun jokin ei ole enää henkilö, sen oikeudellista asemaa voidaan vääristää, vääntää ja kääntää. Teknologinen puuttuminen tällaisiin esineisiin ja asioihin mahdollistaa ihmisoikeuksien tarjoaman laillisen suojan tehokkaan kiertämisen, kuten osoitan sijaissynnytyksen ja datan tallennuksen sääntelyn kautta. Vastauksena oikeuden vastenmielisyydelle haen suojaa vihasta. Viha tarjoaa sellaisen tilapäisen kategorian, jonka avulla voimme välttää havaitsemani oikeuksien umpikujan. Katson, että kansainvälisen oikeuden harjoittajien olisi vähintäänkin oltava vihaisia kohdatessaan kansainvälisen oikeuden synnyttämiä ja mahdollistamia jokapäiväisiä kauhuja. Turvautumalla vihaan, jonka voimme myöhemmin asettaa sivuun, voisimme selättää kansainvälisen oikeuden surkeuden ja sen vastenmielisyyden

Democratizing the Criminal: Jury Nullification as Exercise of Sovereign Discretion over the Friend-Enemy Distinction

This dissertation examines jury nullification - the ability of American juries in particular criminal cases to ignore or override valid law to be applied to defendants by acquitting them in cases in which the facts are undisputed or clear - as an exercise of sovereignty over the friend-enemy distinction as those terms are defined by Carl Schmitt. It begins with a biography of Schmitt and a description of his concept of sovereignty as ultimate decisional power. It then discusses sovereignty in the American context, with particular attention to the principles of the Founding and the nature of the fictively constructed American people. It next applies Schmitt\u27s concept of decisional sovereignty to the American context, concluding that sovereignty in America is diffuse, and its exercise by particular governmental actors is to some degree cloaked, and that the sovereignty of the American people, while crucial to the founding moment, is largely latent in ordinary times. This application of Schmitt to sovereignty in America also demonstrates the deep tension between democratic popular sovereignty and rule-of-law liberalism. The dissertation then turns to Schmitt\u27s understanding of the distinction between friend and enemy as the central political axis, and argues that the criminal in the American context is functionally the enemy, if not the absolute enemy of the polity. It then discusses in detail the mechanics and history of jury nullification, ultimately concluding that jury nullification both operates at the crucial political moment at which enemies are generated (or not) through the application of criminal law to defendants, and is an act of popular sovereignty, intended by the Founders to help preserve a balance between democracy and liberalism by maintaining a central political role for the people

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN ROMANIA

The purpose of this paper is to identify the main opportunities and limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The survey was defined with the aim to involve the highest possible number of relevant CSR topics and give the issue a more wholesome perspective. It provides a basis for further comprehension and deeper analyses of specific CSR areas. The conditions determining the success of CSR in Romania have been defined in the paper on the basis of the previously cumulative knowledge as well as the results of various researches. This paper provides knowledge which may be useful in the programs promoting CSR.Corporate social responsibility, Supportive policies, Romania

THE CINEMATIC COLLEGE PROFESSOR: CONCEPTIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS

Depictions of college professors in American films are common, and while a number of studies have investigated various aspects of college life in motion pictures, few have focused exclusively on the cinematic professoriate. In addition to being an indelible part of history, cinematic depictions of college professors are part of the national discourse on the role and function of the faculty and university. An investigation of how college professors have been represented in American films, and how these representations are read and created by real-life college professors and filmmakers may provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between popular culture images and academia. This project consists of three sections. The first focuses on the trajectories of negative representations of college professors in popular American films from 1970-2016. The second examines interview responses of film professors to on-screen depictions of college faculty. The third presents a case study of professorial depictions by a group of filmmakers who created a feature length film about a college professor. As various public stakeholders are increasingly questioning the role of the college professor and the institution of higher education, this project seeks to examine the influence of popular professor images and cultural influences on the conceptions of two interpretive communities – one that embodies the professoriate and one that creates images surrounding it. Moreover, this project considers these depictions within film marketplace and popular culture contexts