After Hermeneutics?

Recently Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux have attacked the core of the phenomenological hermeneutic tradition: its commitment to the finitude of human understanding. If accurate, this critique threatens to render the whole tradition a topic of merely historical interest. Given the depth of the criticism, this essay aims to establish a provisional defense of hermeneutics. After briefly reviewing each critique, it is argued that Badiou and Meillassoux themselves face rather intractable difficulties. These difficulties, then, open the space for a hermeneutic response, which is accomplished largely by drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur. We close with a suggested program for hermeneutic thought

Atmospheric scavenging of solid rocket exhaust effluents

Solid propellant rocket exhaust was directly utilized to ascertain raindrop scavenging rates for hydrogen chloride. Two chambers were used to conduct the experiments; a large, rigid walled, spherical chamber stored the exhaust constituents, while the smaller chamber housing all the experiments was charged as required with rocket exhaust HCl. Surface uptake experiments demonstrated an HCl concentration dependence for distilled water. Sea water and brackish water HCl uptake was below the detection limit of the chlorine-ion analysis technique used. Plant life HCl uptake experiments were limited to corn and soybeans. Plant age effectively correlated the HCl uptake data. Metallic corrosion was not significant for single 20 minute exposures to the exhaust HCl under varying relative humidity. Characterization of the aluminum oxide particles substantiated the similarity between the constituents of the small scale rocket and the full size vehicles

‘The terrible things I’ve done’: undisciplined subjectivity of the cyborg within intermedial performance practice

In 15-minute slots, theatre company Invisible Ink invited participants to enter a room by themselves, make a call on a rotary phone, and tell an answering machine about a terrible thing they had done and how they felt about it. In this paper I argue that the body of each participant, in the moment of speaking into the phone, became a cyborg body, producing a new form of cyber-subjectivity by revealing an abjected story. I examine this moment as an instance of rupture in the disciplinary processes of self-curation through the strategic use of intermediality