Ghosting Politics: Speechwriters, Speechmakers and the (Re)crafting of Identity

Despite public awareness of their role, speechwriters occupy an anxiously liminal position within the political process. As the ongoing dispute between former Australian prime minister Paul Keating and Don Watson over the Redfern Speech suggests, the authorship and ownership of speeches can be a fraught proposition, no matter the professional codes. Crafting and re-crafting identity places speechwriter and speechmaker in a relation of intense intimacy, one in which neither party may be comfortable and from which both may well emerge changed. Having written speeches for Jack Layton, former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, I know just how complex, uncertain and productive that relation can be. This article conceives of identity as transindividual, formed in the intensity and flux of encounter, and weaves together the personal and the critical to examine politics’ speechwriting ghost

Ruyer and Simondon on Technological Inventiveness and Form Outlasting its Medium

A summary is provided of Ruyer's important contribution, also a reversal from some conclusions held in his secondary doctoral dissertation, about the limits inherent in technological progress, and an attempt is made to show the coherence of this position to Ruyer's metaphysics. Simondon's response is also presented, and subsequently analyzed especially as it culminates in a concept of concretizations. As Simondon indicated, and with a displacement in Ruyer's limitating framework on unconditional growth, we end up searching for what represents the category of the ultimate for those two philosophers of the cyberworld

Un altro illuminismo: immaginazione e mito in Spinoza

In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer observe that the Enlightenment constitutes itself by rejecting myth as subjective. Yet, once the Enlightenment has dominated the entire world with its abstract categories, it cannot but turn into pure subjectivity, and thus into myth. How can we escape such a negative dialectic? The aim of this investigation is to show that Spinoza’s theory of myth and imagination provides us with the tools for doing so. Despite being an Enlightenment thinker, Spinoza distances himself from all the presuppositions of the negative dialectic described by Adorno and Horkheimer. To show this, I will first say a few words on what it means to be ‘within’ the dialectic of Enlightenment, by focusing on the ontological and epistemological assumptions that led Kant, together with other theorists of the Enlightenment, to fully endorse it (§. 1). I will then explore Spinoza’s peculiar understanding of imagination, by first focusing on its ontological and epistemological aspects (§. 2), and, subsequently, on their ethical and political consequences (§. 3, 4). It is Spinoza’s peculiar ontology that enables him to recognize that myth and imagination are already a form of Enlightenment, because they play a crucial cognitive, ethical and political role. This will also shed some light on why Spinoza can be considered as the initiator of ‘another Enlightenment’ and thus fruitfully be used to rethink the role of critical theory today

Attention-seeking: technics, publics and software individuation

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Organizing for individuation: alternative organizing, politics and new identities

Organization theorists have predominantly studied identity and organizing within the managed work organization. This frames organization as a structure within which identity work occurs, often as a means of managerial control. In our paper our contribution is to develop the concept of individuation pursued through prefigurative practices within alternative organizing to reframe this relation. We combine recent scholarship on alternative organizations and new social movements to provide a theoretical grounding for an ethnographic study of the prefigurative organizing practices and related identity work of an alternative group in a UK city. We argue that in such groups, identity, organizing and politics become a purposeful set of integrated processes aimed at the creation of new forms of life in the here and now, thus organizing is politics is identity. Our study presents a number of challenges and possibilities to scholars of organization, enabling them to extend their understanding of organization and identity in the contemporary world

Q’s General Intellect

I would claim that the main feature of the general intellect, in all its forms, is its indeterminacy. Neither defining individuality nor a specific group, the general intellect represents a sort of passage between the singular and the multitude. Until now, the discussion of the concept of the general intellect has been the prerogative of economists, sociologists, philosophers and historians. I intend to demonstrate how this notion has also influenced the literary field, and, in particular, how the general intellect is an active element in the narration of Q, the novel written in 1999 by the writers’ collective ‘Luther Blissett Project’

Relationality and Individuality in Spinoza

Spinoza foi um dos primeiros filósofos modernos a definir o indivíduo não como um sistema fechado, mas como uma pluralidade unificada mantida por suas trocas com o ambiente. O foco de Spinoza na relacionalidade dos indivíduos tem permitido variadas interpretações de sua teoria da individuação. O propósito deste artigo é discutir algumas destas distintas interpretações e demonstrar como sua ontologia é mais claramente compreendida quando investigada em associação com sua epistemologi