Poetics of the Elsewhere Notes on Peter Sloterdijk and the Question of Utopia

The paper explores the question of utopia in the work of Peter Sloterdijk from a narratological and meta-poetic perspective. The analysis focuses on a new text by the German thinker, published in 2018 as an afterword to the German edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, translated from the original Latin by Jacques Laager. In the paper I will present the text, contextualizing it in the complexity of Sloterdijk’s work. I will examine some of its thematical and stylistic features, which disclose the in-terplay between storytelling, space, and writing in the construction processes of the concepts of sub-jectivity, otherness, and community. Moreover, such an interplay allows to read the space of writing as a place of meta-reflection through which the author, by rethinking and rewriting the (hi)story of mankind from different conceptual prisms, rethinks and rereads also the peregrination of a new philosophical subject in the landscape of writing.

Encounters, in Spite of All. Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan

The paper investigates from a literary perspective the question of the ‘missed encounter’ between two crucial authors of 20th century: Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan. Although both living in Paris for the most part of their adult life, sharing acquaintances and friendships, Beckett and Celan never met in person. A last chance presented in March 1970, as the poet and translator Franz Wurm, a mutual friend, invited Celan to come along and meet Beckett. The meeting never took place; few weeks thereafter, Celan drowned unobserved in the Seine. In this paper, I propose a retrospective reading of the ‘missed’, or ‘failed’ encounter between Beckett and Celan within a psychoanalytic framework. I will analyse it as a negative event, re-elaborating thus an expression used by André Green in his interpretation of Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle (1903). What Green calls negative event does not provide a patho-biographical category. On the contrary, it bridges the reverberations of the psychic work on absence with the creative process of writing and the dynamics of sublimation. Shifting the attention from the bare biographical data to the textual dimension of such ‘missed encounter’, I aim to show how the writings of the two authors may be read as an articulation of an après-coup of a non-encounter which, instead of taking place in ‘real life’, opens new margins of representation of an alterity within the ‘life of writing’. As such, writing becomes—between poetry and psychoanalysis—that ‘thirdness’ harbouring the very possibility of an encounter beyond phenomenological categories, bearing testimony for an unknown transgenerational reader

Micro-scale modeling of Lithium-ion battery

Good energy density, long lifetime, high capacity and high voltage make Lithiumion batteries the most widespread energy storage systems, suitable for several fields of application. Nevertheless, usage leads to cell degradation which mainly results in capacity and power fade. Degradation phenomena are the result of the interaction between mechanical and electro-chemical mechanisms, which are reviewed in this paper. Lithium-ion batteries store and deliver electric energy by means of ions transport between anode and cathode through the electrolyte. The active material of the electrodes consists of micrometer particles which can host lithium ions through insertion/extraction processes. These processes are modelled as diffusion-mechanical problem, since the lithium concentration gradient within the particle due to ions diffusion generates internal stresses in analogy with a temperature gradient. The model in this work, usually referred as diffusion induced stress (DIS), can predict the stresses in the active material particles which are the driving force for damage, pulverization, exfoliation and crack propagation. Indeed, the damage induced by the insertion/extraction processes explains the capacity reduction over charge/discharge cycles: a critical issue for batteries lifetime

Shape Influence of Active Material Micro-Structure on Diffusion and Contact Stress in Lithium-Ion Batteries

Electrochemical-mechanical modelling is a key issue to estimate the damage of active material, as direct measurements cannot be performed due to the particles nanoscale. The aim of this paper is to overcome the common assumptions of spherical and standalone particle, proposing a general approach that considers a parametrized particle shape and studying its influence on the mechanical stresses which arise in active material particles during battery operation. The shape considered is a set of ellipsoids with variable aspect ratio (elongation), which aims to approximate real active material particles. Active material particle is divided in two domains: non-contact domain and contact domain, whether contact with neighbouring particles affects stress distribution or not. Non-contact areas are affected by diffusion stress, caused by lithium concentration gradient inside particles. Contact areas are affected simultaneously by diffusion stress and contact stress, caused by contact with neighbouring particles as a result of particle expansion due to lithium insertion. A finite element model is developed in Ansys™APDL to perform the multi-physics computation in non-spherical domain. The finite element model is validated in the spherical case by analytical models of diffusion and contact available for simple geometry. Then, the shape factor is derived to describe how particle shape affects mechanical stress in non-contact and contact domains

Analytical solution for coupled diffusion induced stress model for lithium-ion battery

Electric cycling is one of the major damage sources in lithium-ion batteries and extensive work has been produced to understand and to slow down this phenomenon. The damage is related to the insertion and extraction of lithium ions in the active material. These processes cause mechanical stresses which in turn generate crack propagation, material loss and pulverization of the active material. In this work, the principles of diffusion induced stress theory are applied to predict concentration and stress field in the active material particles. Coupled and uncoupled models are derived, depending on whether the effect of hydrostatic stress on concentration is considered or neglected. The analytical solution of the coupled model is proposed in this work, in addition to the analytical solution of the uncoupled model already described in the literature. The analytical solution is a faster and simpler way to deal with the problem which otherwise should be solved in a numerical way with finite difference method or a finite element model. The results of the coupled and uncoupled models for three different state of charge levels are compared assuming the physical parameters of anode and cathode active material. Finally, the effects of tensile and compressive stress are analysed

Analysis of fracture behaviour in active materials for lithium ion batteries

Abstract Several strong points make lithium ion battery one of the most widespread energy storage system. Nevertheless, one of the biggest drawbacks is the progressive damage which affects active materials, and influences cycle life as well. The hosting process of lithium ions causes the rise of mechanical stress in active material, which ultimately leads to the propagation of micro-flaws already present in fresh material. Finally, the damage of active material and solid-electrolyte interphase growth caused by cracks propagation result in capacity drop. The distribution of Mode I stress intensity factor is calculated along the semi-elliptical crack front on the outer surface and in the core of a three-dimensional spherical active material particle. A 3D and 2D finite element method analysis is performed in ANSYS Mechanical APDL starting from the mechanical stress state in active material computed with the electrochemical-mechanical model presented in previous works. The model is built using collapsed singular elements along the crack front, the not-singular version of these elements is used to model the outlying region of the crack area. The dependence of stress intensity factor on geometry size is deepened to evaluate the most critical condition. Moreover, the influence of current rate on stress intensity factor is investigated, in order to identify a current threshold beyond stress intensity factor is greater than the toughness of active material, and cracks start to propagate

Soglie di voci attorno all’increabile. Il lavoro del Negativo nella scrittura di Franz Kafka e Samuel Beckett

The paper proposes a comparative analysis of the question of limit in its connections with the work of the Negative (Le Travail du négatif, A. Green) in two great proses of the 20th Century: Samuel Beckett's Company (1980) and Franz Kafka's Der Bau (The Burrow, 1923/24). The contribution articulates in two main moments: within the specificity of a psychoanalytical approach, I reconsider the problem of the Work of the Negative in literature, discussing how, in Kafka's and Beckett's works, the Negative represents a radical alterity to a philosophical perspective. In a second moment of the paper, I analyse the complexity of the representational strategy of the limit in Kafka's and Beckett's writings, investigating thus the question of subjectivity and the relationship with an Otherness through the writing, the question of memory, its construction processes by means of writing, the work of mourning, and the development of poetics of irreducibility and unrepresentability towards an ethics of literature

Experimental characterization of nonlocal photon fluids

Quantum gases of atoms and exciton-polaritons are now well-established theoretical and experimental tools for fundamental studies of quantum many-body physics and suggest promising applications to quantum computing. Given their technological complexity, it is of paramount interest to devise other systems where such quantum many-body physics can be investigated at lesser technological expense. Here we examine a relatively well-known system of laser light propagating through thermo-optical defocusing media: based on a hydrodynamic description of light as a quantum fluid of interacting photons, we investigate such systems as a valid room-temperature alternative to atomic or exciton–polariton condensates for studies of many-body physics. First, we show that by using a technique traditionally used in oceanography it is possible to perform a direct measurement of the single-particle part of the dispersion relation of the elementary excitations on top of the photon fluid and to detect its global flow. Then, using a pump-and-probe setup, we investigate the dispersion of excitation modes of the fluid: for very long wavelengths, a sonic, dispersionless propagation is observed that we interpret as a signature of superfluid behavior