[Review] Cian Duffy (2014) My purpose was humbler, but also higher: Thomas De Quincey’s 'System of the heavens’, popular science and the sublime

Review of article: Duffy Cian, Romanticism, Volume 20 Issue 1, Page 1-14, ISSN 1354-991x Available Online Mar 201

Vestiges of the Phoenix: De Quincey, Kant and the Heavens

© Edinburgh University Press, 2011publication-status: Accepte

A hardware accelerator for k-th nearest neighbor thinning

Abstract—This paper presents an accelerator for k-th nearest neighbor thinning, a run time intensive algorithmic kernel used in recent multi-objective optimizers. We discuss the thinning algorithm and the accelerator architecture with its modules and operation, and evaluate the accelerator with respect to two different application scenarios. The first is an embedded computing scenario where the accelerator core is part of a configurable system-on-chip implemented on a modern platform FPGA. We show the resource requirements for different instances of the accelerator and report on the raw speedups achieved, which are up to 358x. The second scenario is in high performance computing where we map the accelerator core to a cutting-edge reconfigurable computer, the XD1000 system, and achieve overall speedups of up to 6.6x compared to a software reference. Index Terms—k-th nearest neighbor thinning, reconfigurable accelerator, FPGA, SPEA2

'"Intermitting Power": De Quincey's Sublime Identifications'

In an ambivalent reception, Thomas De Quincey’s writings identify with and parody Kant’s sublime in the 'Critique of Judgment' (1790). In his essays on the 'aesthetics' of murder, De Quincey mocks Kant’s rational sublime as itself murderous, but he also embraces that sublime as a phantasm of power. The essay argues that by embodying Kantian sublimity in a series of 'intermitting' identifications, De Quincey dramatises the sublime as a theatre of conflict. In this situation, De Quincey himself is empowered and disempowered, and made a subject of elevation and abjection; this means that his work throws into sharp relief the discordant politics of the sublime. Via Kant, De Quincey identifies with both potency and privation, the twin poles of the sublime, with the result that in the fields of philosophy, murder, autobiography, nationality, politics and modernity his writings enact and anatomise the ideological dissonances of sublime power. The essay shows how De Quincey exposes and dramatizes the conflicts of sublime power in his 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' (1821, 1856), 'Suspiria de Profundis' (1845), his essays on murder (1827, 1839, 1854), his commentaries on Kant, and his accounts of the ‘literature of power.’ In his writings on the antithetical effects of opium, we find a self variously empowered and disempowered, elevated and prostrated – both an imperial and a ‘pariah’ subject. De Quincey’s texts, in this sense, show how the sublime heights of Kantian idealism are collapsed by the compulsive return of what they try to repress - in De Quincey’s case, violence, murder, nightmare, dependency, materiality, the body, modernity, the Oriental ‘other.