A room with a view:window images and 'open immanence' in the writings of adolphe retté and G.K. chesterton

Adolphe Retté and G.K. Chesterton often use the image of a window, a paradox given the widespread view that Catholic writers are usually closed minded. This article asks whether Charles Taylor's philosophy of the individual could explain this paradox more satisfactorily. Chesterton's windows express a realist epistemology, while Retté's windows express the illumination of faith. The themacity of the subject in their writings, however, shows that their windows give expression to Taylor's 'open immanence', rather than Taylorian 'porosity'. Their reactionary character can be interpreted as a kind of Taylorian 'buffering' which is necessary for believing writers resisting secularity

Réflexions pour 1985:a study in the vernacular of progressive compliance

"Réflexions pour 1985", a prospective report published in 1964, envisaged what France might look like in 1985. This article argues that the blend of "probable" and "desirable" in its imagined vision of the future reveals an agenda of enforcing social compliance with its techno-scientific assumptions. To test such an assessment of the text, this article offers a study of the shaping factors and shaping actors of the report, before analysing the language of the report itself

Techno-rationalities and the motherhood trilogy of Fabrice Hadjadj::Beyond the reaches of Kaufmann’s médico-religieux

Vincent Kaufmann’s Ménage à trois: littérature, médecine, religion (2007) sets up the category of the médico-religieux as a tool to understand the intersection of medicine and religion within French literature. This article aims to contest this paradigm, not only in the spirit of Felski’s hostility to the hermeneutics of suspicion (2015) but also because Kaufmann’s account of the religious is too dependent on a Weberian model of the instrumental-rational and thereby insensitive to patterns of religious self-understanding. To illustrate and deepen this objection to Kaufmann’s notion of the medico-religious, the article offers a reading of three plays by Fabrice Hadjadj, contemporary France’s most prolific Catholic author, especially by using the concept of the theandric encounter (a meeting of the divine and the human) which is sensitive to the possibility of the value-rational in a medico-religious imaginary but does not exclude the instrumental-rational. Massacre des innocents (2006), Pasiphaé (2008) and Jeanne et les posthumains (2014) all evoke in different ways elements of the medico-religious, including the evasion of pain and the instrumental uses of religion. Nevertheless, they also attempt to articulate an axis of the imagination that traverses the purely instrumental through experiences of religion that are epiphanic and transformational

Learning from histories:a systematic review of historical industrial transitions

The transition to sustainability coincides with an industrial digitalization. While this latest industrial revolution creates new challenges, it also revives historical ones encountered in previous transitions. Through two parallel systematic reviews, challenges are identified for the current digitalization transition and historical transitions: mechanization, electrification and computerization. The aim of this research is to identify lessons from history that may help overcome the challenges of industrial digitalization. The paper provides illustrative examples of social factors that are either internal to a technology adopting organization or external, related to wider societal change. These factors suggest actionable insights that may support the adoption of Industrial Digital Technologies

Inner screens and cybernetic battlefields:Paul Virilio and RoboCop

Padilha’s new Robocop film can be read in the light of Paul Virilio’s theoretical work, notably Desert Screen. Robocop serves as the city’s warrior but also as a munition in the hands of global media forces. Still, even if the film presents the fallibility of robotic technology, its true failure is in sustaining the progressivist myth of technology perfectly under human control

Video-rate fluorescence diffuse optical tomography for in vivo sentinel lymph node imaging

We have developed a fiber-based, video-rate fluorescence diffuse optical tomography (DOT) system for noninvasive in vivo sentinel lymph node (SLN) mapping. Concurrent acquisition of fluorescence and reference signals allowed the efficient generation of ratio-metric data for 3D image reconstruction. Accurate depth localization and high sensitivity to fluorescent targets were established in to depths of >10 mm. In vivo accumulation of indocyanine green (ICG) dye was imaged in the region of the SLN following intradermal injection into the forepaw of rats. These results suggest that video-rate fluorescence DOT has significant potential as a clinical tool for noninvasive mapping of SLN