The Kingdom and the Glory: The Articulated Inoperativity of Power

The starting point of this essay is the internal difference in the concept of power, the issue of authority and its relation to the act. The authority operates as both the assumed perfect coincidence of act and law, and as the pure externality of authority to law. This complex structure is the real essence of power in the West, government, whose main signature, The Kingdom and the Glory will go on to argue, has been that of oikonomia or economy. Finally, the paper will examine the notion of inoperativity, concept that reveals the total structure of the system. What we can say however is that until the signatures of power are themselves revealed in their inoperativity, the oft promised key to the totality of the Homo Sacer project, remains unintelligible. It is for this reason that The Kingdom and the Glory may come to be seen not only as one of Agamben’s most important statements, but as the fundamental work of political philosophy of our age.El punto de partida de este ensayo es la diferencia interna en el concepto de poder, la problemática de la autoridad y su relación con el acto. La autoridad opera a la vez como la coincidencia perfecta supuesto de acto y ley, y como la pura externalidad de autoridad a la ley. Esta compleja es la esencia real del poder en occidente, el gobierno, cuya signatura ha sido la economía, como El reino y la Gloria defenderá. Finalmente, el ensayo examinará la noción de inoperatividad, concepto que revela la estructura total del sistema. Podemos decir que hasta que las signaturas de poder son ellas mismas reveladas en su inoperatividad, la prometida clave de totalidad del proyecto de Homo sacer permanece indistinguible. Por eso el Reino y la Gloria nosólo es uno de los libros más importantes de Agamben, sino la obra fundamental de la filosofía política de nuestro tiemp

Motion Control for Legged Robots with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Tohoku University博士（工学）博士学位論文 (Thesis(doctor))要約のみthesi

The Profanation of Revelation: On Language and Immanence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben

This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agamben’s work holds for theology. It aims therefore to examine his (re)conceptualizations of language, in light of particular historical glosses on the ‘name of God’ and the nature of the ‘mystical’, as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanity’s ‘religious’ quest to find its Voice. As such, we see how he challenges those standard (ontotheological) notions of transcendence which have been consistently aligned with various historical forms of sovereignty. In addition, I intend to present his redefinition of revelation as solely the unveiling of the ‘name of God’ as the fact of our linguistic being, a movement from the transcendent divine realm to the merely human world before us. By proceeding in this manner, this essay tries to close in on one of the largest theological implications contained within Agamben’s work: the establishment of an ontology that could only be described as a form of ‘absolute’ immanence, an espousal of some form of pantheism (or perhaps panentheism) yet to be more fully pronounced within his writings

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care

A Mathematised Archeology of Ontology. Agamben’s Modal Ontology Mapped onto Badiou’s Mathematised Ontology

This paper looks at the central portion of The Use of Bodies called An Archaeology of Ontology. Specifically, it concerns itself with Agamben’s historiographic approach to ontology as regards the construction of ontology via the concepts of presupposition, relation and mode. Placing these comments within the frame of the whole book, the study of use of bodies in part I and form-of-life in part III, the paper suggests that, contrary to Agamben’s own assertions, it is possible for an ontology to escape the historical destiny mapped out for it by First philosophy and foreclosed by Kant. This possibility makes itself known if one accepts that Agamben’s definition of the ontology to come as a modality of the use of bodies as a habitual form-of-life, is indeed another way of stating that said ontology is directly mappable onto Badiou’s work on existence as categorical functional relations between objects in Logics of Worlds. For use of bodies read functions be-tween objects, and Agamben’s modal and Badiou’s mathematised ontologies suddenly fall into a powerful if restless alignment

Letter from William Ward Watkin to Mr. E. T. Sullivan, December 22, 1910

Letter from William Ward Watkin to Mr. E. T. Sullivan regarding the rental of a house to be used as bachelor quarters

"A Bit of Rice Institute Contemporary History Prepared for the Annual Industiral Edition of the Houston Post", 1921

Written by William Ward Watkin on "Rice Records in War Service" and "the Rush to College