Nietzschean modes of gender construction in a post-feminist age

An arrogance of certainty besets discourses of gender in today’s culture, and denigrating as well as overly affirming accounts of masculinity leave theindividual man at risk of either self-loathing or self-aggrandizing. This article will look at various lay accounts of masculinity and the dynamics of itsconstruction in opposition to culturally dominant moral codes, and will interrogate the underlying philosophical positions at work through Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. In doing so, we propose that it is helpful to see Nietzsche as an early philosopher of difference, and embrace a less fixed approach to ontologies of gender accordingly

Performing the paradox: collaboration as intervention in Eis o Homem

After the economic crisis of 2008, Portugal, like other European countries, underwent a readjustment programme based on neo-liberal principles. This programme widened the gap between rich and poor and elevated the economic over the social, the political and the affective. This paper analyses the devised performance Eis o Homem (Behold Man) as both an artistic and intellectual intervention in this context of crisis. It suggests that collaboration between artists on an explicitly non-hierarchical basis functioned as a coping mechanism for both the artists involved and the audience. The material generated during rehearsals contrasted the powerful reality of life as lived by Portuguese citizens during this period with the Real, that, as Slavoj Zizek has argued, masked this reality with social discourses that emphasized that there was no alternative to the dominance of the market. It concludes that such forms of theatrical collaboration, which explicitly contemplate the right to dissensus, can lead to complex, transformative responses to social situations and to dialogically-informed performances

Philanthropy or solidarity? Ethical dilemmas about humanitarianism in crisis afflicted Greece

That philanthropy perpetuates the conditions that cause inequality is an old argument shared by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde and Slavoj Zizek. I recorded the same argument in conversations regarding a growing humanitarian concern in austerity-ridden Greece. At the local level a number of solidarity initiatives provide the most impoverished families with humanitarian help. Some citizens participate in such initiatives wholeheartedly, while some other citizens criticize solidarity movements drawing primarily from Marxist-inspired arguments, such as, for example, that humanitarianism rationalises state inaction. The local narratives presented in this article bring forward two parallel possibilities engendered by the humanitarian face of social solidarity: first, its empowering potential (where solidarity initiatives enhance local social awareness), and second, the de-politicisation of the crisis and the experience of suffering (a liability that stems from the effectiveness of humanitarianism in ameliorating only temporarily the superficial consequences of the crisis). These two overlapping possibilities can help us problematise the contextual specificity and strategic employment of humanitarian solidarity in times of austerity

"Meaning" as a sociological concept: A review of the modeling, mapping, and simulation of the communication of knowledge and meaning

The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the communication of information is studied in the information sciences and scientometrics, the communication of meaning has been central to Luhmann's attempts to make the theory of autopoiesis relevant for sociology. Analytical techniques such as semantic maps and the simulation of anticipatory systems enable us to operationalize the distinctions which Luhmann proposed as relevant to the elaboration of Husserl's "horizons of meaning" in empirical research: interactions among communications, the organization of meaning in instantiations, and the self-organization of interhuman communication in terms of symbolically generalized media such as truth, love, and power. Horizons of meaning, however, remain uncertain orders of expectations, and one should caution against reification from the meta-biological perspective of systems theory