Oedipus is So Bourgeois: ŽIžek and the Mediating Subject

This paper is a review of R.C. Smith's "The Ticklish Subject? A Critique of Žižek’s Lacanian Theory of Subjectivity, with Emphasis on an Alternative". Whereas Lacan places central importance on the Oedipal phase as a necessary step on the road to the acquisition of subjectivity, R.C. Smith views it as a fundamentally authoritarian moment in early child development. This disagreement, in turn, puts Smith at odds with Žižek’s rupture between the Real and the Symbolic, leading him to advance instead an understanding of the subject as engaged in constant mediation in concert with others. The political ramifications of a notion of mediating subjectivity are intensely gripping, for they disclose nothing less than the promise to recover a sense of effective agency – the possibility of making a difference to one’s sociohistorical conditions – from the ruins of the neoliberal deformation of the subject

Socio-Materiality as Phenomenon: Growing Transition Culture

The monograph that forms the basis of this PhD by Publication was published by the University of Plymouth Press and is the copyright of the author, Luigi Russi. A copy is available for reference in the Main Library. Please check the University Library catalogue for details.This thesis innovates on existing literature on the Transition movement by relinquishing stock academic definitions of its ends and means, which purportedly spell out what Transition ‘is’. In its stead, it approaches Transition as phenomenon, namely as an evolving socio-material formation that proliferates a cultural repertoire to sustain a growing range of concerted everyday activities. This is the difference between an instrumental focus, whereby Transition is reduced to a strategy which is oriented towards an unchanging programmatic definition, and an orientational one; the latter attuned to the contingent process by which a movement expresses form and orientation in emergent fashion. The monograph and the introductory chapter contribute to this task in different ways. Everything Gardens and Other Stories undertakes a rich description of various practical realms of Transition and, to capture the coming into being of a phenomenon, it pays particular attention to its developmental trajectory. This entails focusing on the generative movement of the culture of Transition, as it emerges from the attempt to address embodied disquiets originally elicited by information about peak oil and climate change. That initial focus, however, forms merely a station along a path in which new sources of anxiety find validation and prompt further cultural production. The monograph also describes the tensions arising in the process, as a growing body of discursive and material resources have to negotiate an accommodation, in order to become reciprocally recognisable as participant parts enfolded in a common cultural milieu. The introductory chapter supports this account by fleshing out a methodological paradigm that helps direct attention to the unfolding of a socio-material phenomenon in its dilemmatic moments and continual negotiations. For this purpose, starting from canonical sources in phenomenology, it goes on to situate the ‘unfolding’ of a phenomenon in the proliferation of entanglements between actors, human and nonhuman. In the ‘mattering’ of a phenomenon so understood, dilemmatic moments call forth an ethical questioning and an ontological politics immanent to the very process of cultural production. This, it is submitted, is precisely how an orientational focus allows to access Transition as phenomenon, beyond the bounds of academic definitions

Dilemmatic Moments and Collective Future-Making: Imagining Turin After a Fiat-Chrysler Merger?

This paper endeavors to articulate an inherent tension animating discourse about the future. Following socio-legal theorist Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, it is suggested that future-making as discursive activity contains both ‘an inscription of anticipation and an anticipated inscription’, in the sense that it oscillates between the disclosure of unpredictable imaginative spaces – on the one hand – and the enclosure in claustrophobic narrations motivated from past experience – on the other. In light of this, the paper attempts to excavate this ambiguity of future-oriented talk, by leveraging findings from qualitative fieldwork carried out in 2011 through a mix of archival research and interviews, in relation to discourse about the future of the city of Turin (Italy), in anticipation of carmaker Fiat’s move of its headquarters away from Turin: an eventuality that actually materialized following the company’s January 2014 merger with Chrysler

‘Capitalism a Nuh’ Wi Frien’ : the formatting of farming into an asset, from financial speculation to international aid

This paper deciphers the formatting of farming into an asset by tracking the modalities by which financial calculation is enabled across different sites of agency. The first focus of our analysis are commodity futures markets, which have witnessed a double spike in prices in 2008 and in 2012. In the paper, we look at these hikes as the outcome of endogenous dynamics, caused by the changing makeup of market participants after 2000, which turned futures markets into resources for hedging commodity index-linked derivative products. We subsequently analyse the increasing reliance on financial actors placed by public development agencies that channel funds through private equity initiatives to acquire and invest in farmland. To complete our analysis, we finally set our contribution alongside the alternative represented by food-sovereignty, which offers the promise of heeding to the needs engendered from within the peasant milieu, as opposed to subjugating it to extrinsic quantitative metrics

A Tiny Heart Beating: Student-Edited Legal Periodicals in Good ol\u27Europe

This paper has a twofold aim: to analyze the possible opportunities disclosed by the observed growth of student-edited law reviews in Europe and to propose an innovative model of student participation to legal publication. The first part explores the phenomenon of student-edited law reviews in the U.S., focusing on its recognized educational benefits. Among others, it is observed that participation in student-edited law reviews might promote greater scholarly maturity among J.D. students, who might in turn be better equipped for a career in the academia after finishing law school, in comparison to their same-age European peers. Hence, there follows an examination of the possible beneficial repercussions that the establishment of student-edited law reviews may yield on the process of faculty education in (continental) Europe, in light of the general practice therein endorsed of academic apprenticeship under a mentor. Such benefits may consist, among others, in the enticement of larger numbers of potential academicians and in their possible greater intellectual maturity, providing new meaning to the aforementioned time-honored European practice. The second part of the paper focuses, instead, on the drawbacks brought about by excessive proliferation of student-edited law reviews in the U.S., such as alleged decrease in the quality of published scholarship as a consequence of the superficial quality control that student editors sometimes perform. In view of the foregoing, an innovative model of student publication is proposed, in order to prevent the onset of such drawbacks in Europe, while retaining the above-outlined benefits of early student involvement in academic discourse. It is suggested to complement few, authoritative sources of published scholarship in the form of peer-reviewed journals with student-edited working paper series which, if based on the guideline to provide substantial constructive feedback to authors, could ultimately help foster a quality improvement of published scholarship

A Tiny Heart Beating: Student-Edited Legal Periodicals in Good ol\u27Europe

This paper has a twofold aim: to analyze the possible opportunities disclosed by the observed growth of student-edited law reviews in Europe and to propose an innovative model of student participation to legal publication. The first part explores the phenomenon of student-edited law reviews in the U.S., focusing on its recognized educational benefits. Among others, it is observed that participation in student-edited law reviews might promote greater scholarly maturity among J.D. students, who might in turn be better equipped for a career in the academia after finishing law school, in comparison to their same-age European peers. Hence, there follows an examination of the possible beneficial repercussions that the establishment of student-edited law reviews may yield on the process of faculty education in (continental) Europe, in light of the general practice therein endorsed of academic apprenticeship under a mentor. Such benefits may consist, among others, in the enticement of larger numbers of potential academicians and in their possible greater intellectual maturity, providing new meaning to the aforementioned time-honored European practice. The second part of the paper focuses, instead, on the drawbacks brought about by excessive proliferation of student-edited law reviews in the U.S., such as alleged decrease in the quality of published scholarship as a consequence of the superficial quality control that student editors sometimes perform. In view of the foregoing, an innovative model of student publication is proposed, in order to prevent the onset of such drawbacks in Europe, while retaining the above-outlined benefits of early student involvement in academic discourse. It is suggested to complement few, authoritative sources of published scholarship in the form of peer-reviewed journals with student-edited working paper series which, if based on the guideline to provide substantial constructive feedback to authors, could ultimately help foster a quality improvement of published scholarship

‘Capitalism A Nuh’ Wi Frien’. The formatting of farming into an asset, from financial speculation to international aid

This paper deciphers the formatting of farming into an asset by tracking the modalities by which financial calculation is enabled across different sites of agency. The first focus of our analysis are commodity futures markets, which have witnessed a double spike in prices in 2008 and in 2012. In the paper, we look at these hikes as the outcome of endogenous dynamics, caused by the changing makeup of market participants after 2000, which turned futures markets into resources for hedging commodity index-linked derivative products. We subsequently analyse the increasing reliance on financial actors placed by public development agencies that channel funds through private equity initiatives to acquire and invest in farmland. To complete our analysis, we finally set our contribution alongside the alternative represented by food-sovereignty, which offers the promise of heeding to the needs engendered from within the peasant milieu, as opposed to subjugating it to extrinsic quantitative metrics

Finding Direction at the Edge of Law and Life: Islamic Fiqh, Correspondence, and UAE Takāful Insurance Regulation

Abstract The Islamic legal enterprise forms an inherently plural system that can appear puzzling to commentators looking for faithfulness to principle or precedent. When one looks at it, instead, as an ongoing search for correspondence between divine guidance, rooted in the foundational sources of Islam, and the singularity of concrete circumstances, Islamic law is revealed as a practice of discernment against the grain of the particular. This article unfolds this approach to understanding Islamic law by entering the conversation where it is currently most heated, namely in connection with the development of Islamic financial products. A case study of takāful regulation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) helps substantiate the import of our proposal for attuning to the voice of Islamic jurisprudence ( fiqh ), in the face of contemporary questions arising from the design of financial products in correspondence with the Sharī’ah . Résumé L’entreprise juridique islamique forme un système intrinsèquement pluriel qui peut sembler déroutant pour ces commentateurs qui ne recherchent qu’une fidélité aux principes ou aux précédents. Lorsqu’on l’analyse, au contraire, comme une recherche permanente de correspondance entre la direction divine, enracinée dans les sources fondamentales de l’Islam, et la singularité des circonstances concrètes, le droit islamique se révèle comme une pratique de discernement à contre-courant du particulier. L’article examine cette façon d’aborder le droit islamique, en entrant dans la conversation là où elle est actuellement la plus animée, soit dans son lien avec le développement des produits financiers islamiques. Dans cette foulée, une étude de cas sur la réglementation takāful aux Émirats arabes unis (EAU) est proposée afin de justifier l’importance de notre proposition d’adapter la jurisprudence islamique (fiqh) face aux questions contemporaines posées par la conception de produits financiers en correspondance avec le Sharī’ah