Through the lens of psychoanalytic thought about sexuality, the book examines changes in the area of procreation and generation, the disjunction between sexuality and procreation introduced by biotechnology and some new methods of reproduction, and their impact on the essential moments of existence (birth, illness, death) and the most intimate aspects of personal identity (sexuality, procreation, body). At the centre of this book is the thesis that the disjunction between sexuality and procreation brought about by biotechnology represents a new scenario and introduces elements of discontinuity. What kind of effects on individuals will the modifications introduced by biotechnologies in the field of procreation have? How can these changes affect even the most profound aspects of personal identity, including body and sexuality? How might they interfere with the sphere of desire? The book investigates the new scenarios and the consequences which are emerging, such as an alteration of personal boundaries, both in spatial and temporal terms, which is reflected in our way of thinking about ourselves and our relationships and the assertion of an unconscious fantasy that the limits imposed by sexuality and death can be surpassed. Offering a psychoanalytic reading of changes introduced in this field, this book will appeal to training and practising psychoanalysts, as well as philosophers, psychologists and gynaecologists.
Through the lens of psychoanalytic thought about sexuality, the book examines changes in the area of procreation and generation, the disjunction between sexuality and procreation introduced by biotechnology and some new methods of reproduction, and their impact on the essential moments of existence (birth, illness, death) and the most intimate aspects of personal identity (sexuality, procreation, body). At the centre of this book is the thesis that the disjunction between sexuality and procreation brought about by biotechnology represents a new scenario and introduces elements of discontinuity. What kind of effects on individuals will the modifications introduced by biotechnologies in the field of procreation have? How can these changes affect even the most profound aspects of personal identity, including body and sexuality? How might they interfere with the sphere of desire? The book investigates the new scenarios and the consequences which are emerging, such as an alteration of personal boundaries, both in spatial and temporal terms, which is reflected in our way of thinking about ourselves and our relationships and the assertion of an unconscious fantasy that the limits imposed by sexuality and death can be surpassed. Offering a psychoanalytic reading of changes introduced in this field, this book will appeal to training and practising psychoanalysts, as well as philosophers, psychologists and gynaecologists.
Paola Marrati considers the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as a guiding thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works.
This book explores the political-aesthetic practices of transgender women in Lima, Peru, and how they use these to survive and fight for recognition and full citizenship, through drawing on ethnographic research and on decolonial feminist and aesthetic theories. Chapters analyze how the vulnerability and precariousness of trans women coexist with modes of feminist agency, resistance and resilience, as well as with proposals for political action to transform a heteropatriarchal society toward a more diverse and accepting one. Finally, the author draws on the Viennese artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s metaphor of the five skins, whereby the first skin is the epidermis; the second is the clothes; the third is the house; the fourth is identity, which refers to primary socialization spaces such as the neighbourhood; and the fifth is the world environment. The author uses this metaphor to analyze the corporal practices of trans women in a cumulative way, paying special attention to the different stages of their lives, to those skins that embody and accompany them from childhood to adulthood. This book will be of interest to scholars of transgender studies, decolonial feminist studies, and aesthetic, particularly those with a focus on gender and sexuality in Latin America.
From the Atom to Living Systems represents an original historico-epistemological approach to follow the passage, in the microscopic analysis of reality, from the atomic to the molecular to the macromolecular levels and then to the threshold of life itself. Naturally, some parts of this journey have been developed in other works, some highly specialized and others of a more general nature. However, although this journey has often been traced in specialized scientific detail, the philosophical implications of the journey have not been discussed to any satisfactory degree. This scientific journey does have important philosophical consequences that constitute an integral part of this book, which is framed within the perspective of systems science and the so-called sciences of complexity, which are areas fundamental to 21st century science. In fact, the possibility of studying and understanding the material world through levels of complexity opens a great philosophical space that proposes to provide systemic and complex explanations, rather than reductive accounts that pretend to explain all phenomena through the interactions of elementary particles while considering all phenomena implicit and deterministic. The systemic and complex approach implies substituting unique bottom-up explanations, which move exclusively from the microscopically simple to the macroscopically complex, with a series of explanations that are horizontal within planes of complexity, vertically bottom up between various levels of complexity, vertically top-down, as well as circular in a manner that renders all levels of reality and the disciplines that study them as both autonomous and interconnected.
A charming epistolary novel that chronicles the love story between Emma and Frederico, former high school sweethearts who meet again thirty years later. At Dreams & Desires, 50-year-old Emma's quaint bookshop in Milan dedicated to romantic fiction, the passionate bookseller serves coffee and tea to her customers and completes order slips in pen rather than using a computer. One day, she finds a mysterious handwritten note stuck between the pages of a novel. The message is from her high school sweetheart Frederico, who is now a successful architect in New York and whom she hasn't seen in thirty years. When she finally meets Frederico again, Emma is convinced that her life is about to turn into a romance novel - an intercontinental fairy tale between Milan and New York, between two post office boxes and two lovers that are separated by the Atlantic Ocean and half a life. But Frederico is married, and their epistolary romance, punctuated by once-a-year sojourns on the island of Belle Ile, seems to have no future. Paola Calvetti's PO Box Love is an ode to old-fashioned relationships (the ones that last a lifetime), old-fashioned habits (such as writing letters by hand in fountain pen) and old-fashioned notions (such as politeness, and the great lost art of conversation), and will enchant readers of such perennial favorites as 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff and Same Time Next Year by Bernard Slade.
This book deals with a wide range of techniques used in the urban design process. It then goes on to relate these techniques to a unique, comprehensive account of method. A method of urban design is developed which has sustainability and environmental protection at the centre of its philosophy. Previously, literature regarding the urban design method has been almost totally neglected; this book introduces the topic to the reader. This revised Second Edition encompasses the latest techniques including the development of geographic information systems and financial techniques which help evaluate projects. A number of techniques are illustrated by example or case study. Where techniques are discussed they are located within the structure of the design process. The book develops a logical framework for a process, which includes problem definition, survey, analysis, concept generation, evaluation and implementation. It is this framework which leads toward the development of an urban design method. This book is a practical guide for students or professionals in the early part of their careers. It is organized so that each chapter provides guidance which readers would have otherwise had to discover for themselves, often with some difficulty.
Examines the place that Lucrezia Marinella holds within the dominant literary tradition of seventeenth-century Italy as a writer, as well as a woman who lived within a predominantly patriarchal culture.
What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, the author places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France's colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations. This work provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, the author provides a ground-breaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.
This book addresses the intersections of entrepreneurship, innovation and sustainability in food systems, and presents high-quality research illustrating the central role that food consumption and production play in achieving sustainability goals. Entrepreneurship and innovation have become particularly relevant aspects in the European Union (EU), especially since the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were announced in 2015. In many cases, innovations tend to arise from small and medium-sized enterprises, and from completely new entrepreneurial endeavors. This book represents essential reading for researchers and young academics seeking to reduce disparities and inequalities in food production and consumptions patterns. By encouraging sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation, it will also help young scholars find support for their startup ideas.
Why are we so fascinated by beauty?" is a question many of us have asked ourselves, as have many who came before us. This book investigates the moment of ecstatic solitude in which everyone can experience emotions through films, works of art or natural phenomenon, when, even if for a "magic" instant, we feel "alive" and masters of our own Self. Expanding from the author’s personal experience, this book is a series of applied psychoanalytic essays on film, literature, and aesthetic pleasure. It explores the complexity of loss and mourning, destructivity, perversion, and revenge, as well as an exploration of what can facilitate transformation and how to lead a blocked healing process back to motion. This fascinating and insightful book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, teachers and students, and all those with an interest in psychoanalysis and the arts.
From the spread of kleptocracy in Venezuela at the expense of the country's economy, to President Trump's appointment of family members to high-ranking White House positions, to President Lukashenko's desperate stranglehold on power in Belarus, across the world political corruption is rampant--indeed practically too ubiquitous to keep track of. As these examples illustrate, political corruption is often associated to a variety of instances of abuse of power that either derive from a vicious trait of individual character, or develop within deeply dysfunctional institutions. To Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti, however, this piecemeal view is inadequate: individual and institutional instances of political corruption have a common root that we can understand only by treating corruption and anticorruption as a matter of a public ethics of office. Political corruption is the Trojan horse that undermines public institutions from within via an interrelated action of officeholders. Even well-designed and legitimate institutions can veer off track if the officeholders fail through their conduct to uphold a public ethics of office accountability. This book offers an analytically rigorous definition of political corruption. It also investigates the common normative root of its two manifestations--corrupt individual character, and corrupt institutional mechanisms--as a relationally wrongful practice that consists of an unaccountable use of the power of office by officeholders in public institutions. From this perspective, political corruption must be understood from within, for it is an internal enemy of public institutions that can only be opposed by mobilizing the officeholders to remain accountable and mutually answerable for their conduct. In this way, anticorruption calls on the officeholders' responsibility to work together to maintain an interactively just institutional system.
This important contribution to the study of early modern Chinese fiction and representation of gender relations focuses on literary representations of the prostitute produced in the Ming and Qing periods.
This book argues that we can find the resources to build a public perspective if we make two commitments: to respect people as autonomous agents and to endorse a shared ethics of beliefs.
The first comprehensive study on the pattern of guilt and wandering in literature, this book examines the relationship between the two complex concepts as they appear in twentieth-century novels, positing its methodological premises on archetypal criticism and both close and distant reading, but also drawing on psychology, anthropology, mythology, and religion. This research deciphers a common paradigm and literary representation whose archetype within Western literature is found in the biblical figure of Cain, while presenting a critical framework valid for boundary-crossing comparative approaches. From Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, to Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome and Ōoka Shōhei’s Fires on the Plain, this book is not merely a thematic study, but an analysis of the literary phenomena that appear in those novels where the sense of guilt is controversially subjective, or so collective as to be perceived as universal, as is often the case with war and postwar literature. Di Gennaro goes beyond the analysis of explicit rewritings of the story of Cain, in order to uncover the monomyth through its rhetorical structures and mythical methods. The wasteland with no religion; the lost, abandoned garden; the classical and religiously-corrupted city; and the tropical, cannibalistic island at war are the respective settings of these narratives, where the issue is neither homelessness nor journeying, but, rather, the desperate and futile movement toward self-consciousness, or self-destruction. After the Second World War, much was silenced rather than left unsaid. This study retraces those silent cries over history through the powerful literary marks of myths.
This book deals with a wide range of techniques used in the urban design process. It is invaluable for architecture, planning, landscape and surveying students and will also help professionals in the day to day practice. A method of urban design is developed which has sustainability and environmental protection at the centre of its philosophy. Previously, literature regarding the urban design method has been almost totally neglected; this book introduces the topic to the reader. A number of techniques are illustrated by example or case study. Where techniques are discussed they are located within the structure of the design process. The book develops a logical framework for a process, which includes problem definition, survey, analysis, concept generation, evaluation and implementation. It is this framework which is presented here as a discourse towards the development of an urban design method. This book is a practical guide, one that the authors themselves would have found useful as students or in the early years of their professional careers. It is organized so that each chapter provides guidance which hitherto, students and practitioners in this field have had to discover for themselves, often with some difficulty, since methods and techniques for urban design is a broad topic thinly spread in published form.
Paola Baseotto’s important study stresses death’s ubiquity as a concept in Spenser’s works, always present in intimate relation to life, whether in the recurring, disturbing, figures of “deathwishers,” characters who seem to belong as much to the dead as the living, or as a perspective, challenging both characters and readers, to reassess their own apprehension of death and the way in which it shapes our lives. Baseotto’s analyses of Spenser’s “deathwishers” and “living dead” focus our attention on some of the most compelling and distinctive images in Spenser’s work, illuminating our understanding of their power and significance through a combination of detailed attention to language and context, and a thoroughly informed understanding of contemporaneous religious ideas and attitudes. Through close and sensitive study of Spenser’s writing from The Shepheardes Calender, through The Faerie Queene, to such little discussed poems as The Ruines of Time and Daphnaida in Complaints, Baseotto establishes the centrality, the subtlety and the distinctiveness of Spenser’s figuring of death. Baseotto’s study offers us a new and illuminating understanding of an aspect of Spenser’s writing that is fundamental, but which has been strangely neglected in recent decades. – Elizabeth Heale (Senior Lecturer, University of Reading)Author of The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge University Press, 1987, 1999) and Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse (Palgrave, 2003).Exhaustive and succinct, rigorous and readable, Baseotto examines Spenser’s obsession with death, and shows us what a remarkable, independent and surprisingly modern sensibility he had. Here is a Spenser who engages our sympathies with unexpected intensity.– Tim Parks (Lecturer, IULM University, Milan) Novelist and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.
Despite their inherent seriousness, the law and those who practice it, be it lawyers, judges, politicians, or bureaucrats, are amongst the most popular objects of comedy and humour. Sometimes even the mention of the law, or the mere use of legal vocabulary, can trigger laughter. This is deeply counterintuitive, but true across cultures and historical eras: while the law is there to prevent and remedy injustice, it often ends up becoming the butt of comedy. But laughter and comedy, too, are also infused with seriousness: as universal social phenomena, they are extremely complex objects of study. This book maps out the many intersections of the law and laughter, from classical Greece to the present day. Taking on well-known classical and modern works of literature and visual culture, from Aristophanes to Laurel and Hardy and from Nietzsche to Totò and Fernandel, laughter and comedy bring law back to the complexity of human soul and the unpredictability of life.
This title was first published in 2003. In this new socio-cultural study of the history of the theatre in early modern England, author Paola Pugliatti investigates the question of why, in the Tudor and early Stuart period, unregulated and unlicensed theatrical activities were equated by the English law to unregulated and unlicensed begging. Starting with English vagrancy statutes and in particular from the fact that, from 1545 on, players were listed as vagrants, the book discusses from an entirely new perspective the reasons for the equation, in the early modern mind, of beggary with performing. Pugliatti identifies in players' aptitude for disguise and in the fear raised by their proteiform skills the issues which encouraged the assimilation of beggars and players; she argues that at the core of provisions against vagrancy was an attempt to marginalize people who, because of their instability in location and role (that is, in their theatrical quintessence), were seen as embodying potential for subversion. Placing the topic in a European context and relying on the reading of primary documents in several languages, Pugliatti discusses efforts to control beggary from Justinian's Codex to seventeenth-century statutes, locates the origin of anti-vagrancy and antitheatrical writings in anxieties about idleness and disguise, and analyzes the ways in which various kinds of representation demonized both beggars and players. Finally, by carefully distinguishing between the traditions of rogue pamphlets, conny-catching pamphlets and the picaresque, she offers fresh readings of a number of texts which appear to have been entirely disregarded by recent scholarship, such as pamphlets by Walker, Harman, Greene and Dekker.
When antebellum Americans talked about the contemporary struggle for Italian unification (the Risorgimento), they were often saying more about themselves than about Italy. In Domesticating Foreign Struggles Paola Gemme unpacks the American cultural record on the Risorgimento not only to make sense of the U.S. engagement with the broader world but also to understand the nation’s domestic preoccupations. Swayed by the myth of the United States as a catalyst of and model for global liberal movements, says Gemme, Americans saw parallels to their own history in the Risorgimento--and they said as much in newspapers, magazines, travel accounts, diplomatic dispatches, poems, maps, and paintings. And yet, in American eyes, Italians were too civically deficient to ever achieve republican goals. Such a view, says Gemme, reaffirmed cherished beliefs both in the United States as the center of world events and in the notion of American exceptionalism. Gemme argues that Americans also pondered the place of “subordinate” ethnic groups in domestic culture--especially Irish Catholic immigrants and enslaved African Americans--through the discourse on Risorgimento Italy. Thus, says Gemme, national identity rested not only on differentiation from outside groups but also on a desire for internal racial and cultural homogeneity. Writing in a tradition pioneered by Amy Kaplan, Richard Slotkin, and others, Gemme advances the movement to “internationalize” American studies by situating the United States in its global cultural context.
This book proposes and defends the practice of urban gardening as an ecologically and socially beneficial, culturally innovative, morally appropriate, ethically uplifting, and politically incisive way for individuals and variously networked collectives to contribute to a successful management of some defining challenges of the Anthropocene – this new epoch in which no earthly place, form, entity, process, or system escapes the reach of human activity – including urban resilience and climate change.
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