A Sword Cuts Two Ways: Cold War Policymaking in the OAS

Latin American Studie

Deleuzoguattarian Thought, the New Materialisms, and (Be)wild(erring) Pedagogies: A Conversation between Chantelle Gray, Delphi Carstens, Evelien Geerts, and Aragorn Eloff

This intra-view explores a number of productive junctions between contemporary Deleuzoguattarian and new materialist praxes via a series of questions and provocations. Productive tensions are explored via questions of epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political intra-sections as well as notions of difference, transversal contamination, ecosophical practices, diffraction, and, lastly, schizoanalysis. Various irruptions around biophilosophy, transduction, becomology, cartography, power relations, hyperobjects as events, individuation, as well as dyschronia and disorientation, take the discussion further into the wild pedagogical spaces that both praxes have in common

Antiinflammatory Therapy with Canakinumab for Atherosclerotic Disease

Background: Experimental and clinical data suggest that reducing inflammation without affecting lipid levels may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Yet, the inflammatory hypothesis of atherothrombosis has remained unproved. Methods: We conducted a randomized, double-blind trial of canakinumab, a therapeutic monoclonal antibody targeting interleukin-1β, involving 10,061 patients with previous myocardial infarction and a high-sensitivity C-reactive protein level of 2 mg or more per liter. The trial compared three doses of canakinumab (50 mg, 150 mg, and 300 mg, administered subcutaneously every 3 months) with placebo. The primary efficacy end point was nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, or cardiovascular death. RESULTS: At 48 months, the median reduction from baseline in the high-sensitivity C-reactive protein level was 26 percentage points greater in the group that received the 50-mg dose of canakinumab, 37 percentage points greater in the 150-mg group, and 41 percentage points greater in the 300-mg group than in the placebo group. Canakinumab did not reduce lipid levels from baseline. At a median follow-up of 3.7 years, the incidence rate for the primary end point was 4.50 events per 100 person-years in the placebo group, 4.11 events per 100 person-years in the 50-mg group, 3.86 events per 100 person-years in the 150-mg group, and 3.90 events per 100 person-years in the 300-mg group. The hazard ratios as compared with placebo were as follows: in the 50-mg group, 0.93 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.80 to 1.07; P = 0.30); in the 150-mg group, 0.85 (95% CI, 0.74 to 0.98; P = 0.021); and in the 300-mg group, 0.86 (95% CI, 0.75 to 0.99; P = 0.031). The 150-mg dose, but not the other doses, met the prespecified multiplicity-adjusted threshold for statistical significance for the primary end point and the secondary end point that additionally included hospitalization for unstable angina that led to urgent revascularization (hazard ratio vs. placebo, 0.83; 95% CI, 0.73 to 0.95; P = 0.005). Canakinumab was associated with a higher incidence of fatal infection than was placebo. There was no significant difference in all-cause mortality (hazard ratio for all canakinumab doses vs. placebo, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.83 to 1.06; P = 0.31). Conclusions: Antiinflammatory therapy targeting the interleukin-1β innate immunity pathway with canakinumab at a dose of 150 mg every 3 months led to a significantly lower rate of recurrent cardiovascular events than placebo, independent of lipid-level lowering. (Funded by Novartis; CANTOS ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01327846.

Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis by James G. Blight & Philip Brenner (2002)

Histor

What are we doing when we do philosophy? A critical engagement with the limits of philosophical practice via Foucault, Deleuze and

M (Philosophy), North-West University, Potchefstroom CampusIn this mini-dissertation I argue that the disenchantment of philosophy – the extraction of the remnants of its idealist and transcendent metaphysical core – is not just possible, but also ethically important and existentially advantageous. I interrogate the claims of philosophy to a status it does not warrant and put forward a revised account of what we are actually doing when we do philosophy. To begin, I examine Foucault’s work, with a focus on the early archaeological period in which he describes various epistemes that serve to situate the forms, contents and interrelations of knowledge practices within specific power-knowledge assemblages. While Foucault does not apply his archaeological or genealogical methodologies to philosophy itself in a sustained way, we can employ them to perform an initial delimitation of philosophy, viewing it as an open set of imbricated heterogeneous practices taking the form of various singular historically situated diagrams. I then turn to Deleuze and his critique of the ‘dogmatic image of thought’, which gives rise, he argues, to the various transcendent illusions philosophy has long laboured under. Developing Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of ontogenesis, Deleuze eschews the ontological primacy of identity in favour of becoming and difference without identity. Difference, for Deleuze, should be seen not as a simple dialectical reversal of said primacy, but instead as a constant process of self-differing wherein we seek to encounter being and thought in their genesis, as complex processes of actualisation and counter-actualisation. I argue that this account is rigorously immanent and materialist and proposes a view of thinking as a shock to thought. Finally, I examine the work of François Laruelle and his project of non-philosophy. Non-philosophy argues that all philosophy begins with what Laruelle calls the Philosophical Decision. This is a deceptive have-your-cake-and-eat-it move whereby philosophers determine philosophy’s relation to the Real through an initial decision about how to think the split between thought and what it reflects on and then redeploy this split-structure philosophically as a description of the inherent traction a given philosophy has on the Real through the mending of this split. In closing, I argue that Foucault, Deleuze and Laruelle each develop, in their own way, a critique of philosophy that acts on behalf of real, living beings and against the domination of any abstract principle that would separate life from its radical immanence.Master

What are we doing when we do philosophy? A critical engagement with the limits of philosophical practice via Foucault, Deleuze and

M (Philosophy), North-West University, Potchefstroom CampusIn this mini-dissertation I argue that the disenchantment of philosophy – the extraction of the remnants of its idealist and transcendent metaphysical core – is not just possible, but also ethically important and existentially advantageous. I interrogate the claims of philosophy to a status it does not warrant and put forward a revised account of what we are actually doing when we do philosophy. To begin, I examine Foucault’s work, with a focus on the early archaeological period in which he describes various epistemes that serve to situate the forms, contents and interrelations of knowledge practices within specific power-knowledge assemblages. While Foucault does not apply his archaeological or genealogical methodologies to philosophy itself in a sustained way, we can employ them to perform an initial delimitation of philosophy, viewing it as an open set of imbricated heterogeneous practices taking the form of various singular historically situated diagrams. I then turn to Deleuze and his critique of the ‘dogmatic image of thought’, which gives rise, he argues, to the various transcendent illusions philosophy has long laboured under. Developing Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of ontogenesis, Deleuze eschews the ontological primacy of identity in favour of becoming and difference without identity. Difference, for Deleuze, should be seen not as a simple dialectical reversal of said primacy, but instead as a constant process of self-differing wherein we seek to encounter being and thought in their genesis, as complex processes of actualisation and counter-actualisation. I argue that this account is rigorously immanent and materialist and proposes a view of thinking as a shock to thought. Finally, I examine the work of François Laruelle and his project of non-philosophy. Non-philosophy argues that all philosophy begins with what Laruelle calls the Philosophical Decision. This is a deceptive have-your-cake-and-eat-it move whereby philosophers determine philosophy’s relation to the Real through an initial decision about how to think the split between thought and what it reflects on and then redeploy this split-structure philosophically as a description of the inherent traction a given philosophy has on the Real through the mending of this split. In closing, I argue that Foucault, Deleuze and Laruelle each develop, in their own way, a critique of philosophy that acts on behalf of real, living beings and against the domination of any abstract principle that would separate life from its radical immanence.Master

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet by James Mann (2004)

Histor

Making History: Christina Salinas

Histor