Tagtig gedigte en twee essays

No Abstract

From Utopia to Science: Challenges of Personalised Genomics Information for Health Management and Health Enhancement

From 1900 onwards, scientists and novelists have explored the contours of a future society based on the use of “anthropotechnologies” (techniques applicable to human beings for the purpose of performance enhancement ranging from training and education to genome-based biotechnologies). Gradually but steadily, the technologies involved migrated from (science) fiction into scholarly publications, and from “utopia” (or “dystopia”) into science. Building on seminal ideas borrowed from Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk has outlined the challenges inherent in this development. Since time immemorial, and at least since the days of Plato’s Academy, human beings have been interested in possibilities for (physical or mental) performance enhancement. We are constantly trying to improve ourselves, both collectively and individually, for better or for worse. At present, however, new genomics-based technologies are opening up new avenues for self-amelioration. Developments in research facilities using animal models may to a certain extent be seen as expeditions into our own future. Are we able to address the bioethical and biopolitical issues awaiting us? After analyzing and assessing Sloterdijk’s views, attention will shift to a concrete domain of application, namely sport genomics. For various reasons, top athletes are likely to play the role of genomics pioneers by using personalized genomics information to adjust diet, life-style, training schedules and doping intake to the strengths and weaknesses of their personalized genome information. Thus, sport genomics may be regarded as a test bed where the contours of genomics-based self-management are tried out

Empowering Signs: Writing and e-motions in Michel Houellebecq’s Platform

This article explores the working of the cultural literacy concepts of rhetoricity and textuality in Michel Houellebecq’s third novel Platform through the lens of French philosopher Frederic Lordon’s affect theory, with a view to understanding the way emotions and motion operate jointly through writing in this post-travel literature text dealing with the contemporary travel industry, sex tourism, and emotional alienation. As such, it contributes to the current reassessment of the role played by emotions in human interactions. By exploring the specific layered textuality of Platform, which purposefully recycles a series of discursive cliches and tropes, I show how Houellebecq’s writing style demands to be considered not only for its literary value but also for its potent, and perhaps unexpected, moving effects, or rhetoricity, which invite readers to reconsider their perception of alterity-i.e. the world and the other-but also of the performative power of art and literature. In order to demonstrate this, the article looks first at the failure of travel writing orchestrated in the novel; it then analyses alternative textual modalities of affect mediation trialed in the text; and finally, it considers the strategies used in Platform to “empowerise” signs and, as a result, those who read them

British Romanticism and the Global Climate

As a result of developments in the meteorological and geological sciences, the Romantic period saw the gradual emergence of attempts to understand the climate as a dynamic global system that could potentially be affected by human activity. This chapter examines textual responses to climate disruption cause by the Laki eruption of 1783 and the Tambora eruption of 1815. During the Laki haze, writers such as Horace Walpole, Gilbert White, and William Cowper found in Milton a powerful way of understanding the entanglements of culture and climate at a time of national and global crisis. Apocalyptic discourse continued to resonate during the Tambora crisis, as is evident in eyewitness accounts of the eruption, in the utopian predictions of John Barrow and Eleanor Anne Porden, and in the grim speculations of Byron’s ‘Darkness’. Romantic writing offers a powerful analogue for thinking about climate change in the Anthropocene

The 'others' amongst 'them' – selection categories in European resettlement and humanitarian admission programmes

The chapter looks at categorisations as a form of ‘othering’ in the context of European refugee resettlement. Selection categories in resettlement provide insights into states’ preferences, when given the possibility to effectively select refugees before they present themselves at the border. As such, categorisations in such programmes are ways of othering within the group of ‘others’, excluding but also including according to three logics: humanitarian, security and assimilability. The chapter provides a panoramic view of official selection categories of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), European Member States, and the European Union (EU). The analysis shows that, while resettlement is framed as a humanitarian policy for the ‘most vulnerable’, some European states’ programmes and recent EU propositions indicate that besides a humanitarian logic, security and assimilability logics of ‘othering’ also draw the boundaries of access to this privileged form of refugee protection