Janus Head

Ever since Plato's condemnation of the poets who did not deserve a place in his ideal city poetry has, in areas of the Western world, drawn suspicion as for its ability to convey the "truth." Philosophy, then, was thought to be a better candidate assuming that the truth in question could only be "discursive" as opposed to "poetic." In the West, the tension between poetry and philosophy reached a quasi-chiasmatic peak with modernism, a period during which the poem asserted in the most radical way its own mode of thinking. Alain Badiou in his Que pense le poème? (2016) qualifies the singularity of poetic thought in terms of "musical silence." Yet, in spite of the depth and beauty of the image, the poem falls short of being considered as philosophical thought proper. By moving away from a (Western) conception of philosophy centred on logos as method, the poem may conceivably reveal a profoundly philosophical nature. Such is the case with the poetic prose of French contemporary writer Christian Bobin. Starting from Badiou's conception of "musical silence" in poetry this essay reflects on the extent to which emptitude at work in Bobin amounts to a uniquely philosophical mode of thinking.

This essay concerns Heidegger’s assertion that the biography of the poet is unimportant when interpreting great works of poetry. I approach the question in three ways. First, I consider its merits as a principle of literary interpretation and contrast Heidegger’s view with those of other Trakl interpreters. This allows me to clarify his view as a unique variety of non-formalistic interpretation and raise some potential worries about his approach. Second, I consider Heidegger’s view in the context of his broader philosophical project. Viewed this way, Heidegger’s decision to neglect the poet’s biography seems quite reasonable and consistent with his inquiry into the being of language. Finally, I consider Heidegger’s suggestion that Trakl is a kind of mad genius. I recast this paradigmatic figure in terms of what I call the ‘wretched prophet’ and consider some ways in which its appeal sheds light on the crisis of modernity and the aestheticization of politics.

Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture The First Cry (c. 1914; cast 1917) asks questions that overlap with the concerns of contemporary existential phenomenology, namely, temporality, the relation between art and truth, the nature of embodiment, and the lived experience of perception. In this paper, I put Heidegger and Merleau- Ponty’s writings into dialogue with one of Brancusi’s many ovoid sculptures. Even though Heidegger is not commonly included by those involved in body studies, his writings—especially the later writings—sketch out a philosophy that is at least open to the materiality and physicality of artworks and beholders. We will move through several entrances into this moving work: the work’s shining, listening, mirroring, and temporal dimensions. The phenomenological method employed follows Heidegger’s fundamental claim that art opens up entrances to the truth of the world around it. Brancusi’s work allows us to experience Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm, Heidegger’s idea of the fourfold, and reveals the ways in which philosophy needs art. When we stay with First Cry in our philosophizing and in the gallery, we experience the motion and movement within Brancusi’s work; the experience is at once essential and sensuous.

This paper explores how the poetic speaks to philosophical treatments of post-truth. In doing so, it reconsiders the relationship between poetry and philosophy, and the aspects of the poetic that are pertinent to the performance of rumour. It examines classic performances of rumour in both philosophy and poetry, through the lens of Nietzsche’s account of poetry as a rhythm that creates an economy of memory. In doing so, it suggests that the poetic can alert us to the ways in which different dimensions of rhythm and memory are at work in the ‘post-truth age.’

In this paper, I aim to articulate, at least in part, what makes Sara Ahmed’s uses and analyses of metaphors fruitful for thinking about problems in the social world. I argue that Ahmed’s these metaphorical concepts perform three functions. First, her analyses improve our understanding of the social world precisely because we already understand the world through metaphors. They draw out the metaphors we use to think about ourselves and others and, in doing so, allow us to think more carefully about those metaphors. To support this claim, I will draw on the insights of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their seminal Metaphors We Live By. Second, one thing that Ahmed’s analyses of metaphors often allow us to see is that the movement and arrangement of bodies in the social world can be analyzed in poetic terms. To be clear, it is not just that we linguistically express and understand bodies through metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and the like, but also that the movement, arrangement, and reactions of our bodies are (1) themselves experienced as metaphorical and metonymical, and (2) that they provide the foundation for understanding social reality in metaphorical terms. Finally, as a result of the first two functions, Ahmed helps us imagine ways to intervene so that we can change how we live and interact with others. Specifically, to work toward positive social change, we might both (1) rework the metaphorical concepts we use to understand the social world and (2) alter our practices of movement that, all too often, reify existing social boundaries and inequalities.

This essay explores connections between the fourteenth-century “Black Death” and the current COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the ways in which prejudice and inequality exacerbate their impacts and considering how the upheaval created by catastrophe creates opportunity for greater equity and community, but also exploitation and oppression, depending on human response.

Trump and his administration brought with them an inflammatory rhetoric that reduced complex issues into the simplified polarity of "us" and "them." With this as the dominant paradigm, racism was encouraged and spread like a virus throughout the nation, appearing in heightened jingoism against other nations, anger towards fellow citizens and violence towards neighbors. When the pandemic Covid-19 spread throughout the nation and the world, it became politicized, used by Trump as a novel corona vehicle help inflame intolerance. He repeatedly associated China and Chinese people with the virus to forward his political agenda regarding US trade with China and he used the resulting demonization of China as a foil for his complicity with Russian crimes. In response to increased and well-publicized acts of violence against Black Americans, systemic racism against Black people is finally being noticed. However, anti-Asian violence has largely been disregarded. This paper discusses both the increased violence against Asian Americans and the lack of attention to it. Dividing the paper into three sections, I correlate an artwork to the main issue in each section: the state-of-affairs provide a context in which to understand the artworks. Reciprocally, because artworks evoke an embodied understanding, involving our senses as well cognition, artworks change our relationship with issues from topical to personal. The artworks recontextualize what we thought we already knew and present possibilities for constructing the world differently.

Trendwatchers have spotted some seismic shifts in relations between business and politics. Particularly, Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are increasingly weighing in on greater good issues. Although a global phenomenon, current CEO activism scholarship reflects a Western focus; an ideological bias for modernist perspectives; a preponderance of White male CEO voices, and the relative elision of female activist CEOs. While, generally, no empirically-based typology of the sociopolitical issues that matter to activist CEOs exists, the specific range of causes of particular concern to non-Western CEO activists is neatly absent. This paper addresses all of these concerns, offering an inquiry into the emerging CEO activism phenomenon in the Ghanaian non-Western sociocultural milieu. Data collection entailed three separate rounds of fieldwork that saw long interviews with a corps of 24 self-identified informants, featuring an even split of men and women activist CEOs. The hermeneutic phenomenological theme-based approach guided data analysis. Following extant brand activism models, a typology of six clusters of CEO activism issues is offered that highlights the weightier matters of sociocultural activism, environmental activism, business/workplace activism, political activism, legal activism, and economic activism. Sociocultural issues include Ghana’s fight against COVID-19, where activist CEOs pooled resources to construct and equip a new multimillion dollar 100-bed infectious diseases hospital facility, embarked on risk communication campaigns, donated critical health supplies, funded the screening and testing of employees, provided food and essential supplies to vulnerable groups, and called out the government for lapses in the management of this health crisis. Besides internationalizing CEO activism studies for the strategic communications, leadership, business ethics and responsible management fields, the results suggest the need to consider the perspectives of CEO activists in non- Western societies. This paper contributes mainly to current discussions in CEO activism (aka corporate social advocacy) and brand activism. It contributes to other theoretical and conceptual streams, including covenantal notions of public relations, Caritas, Ubuntu Philosophy, Africapitalism, and postmodern values in strategic communication. This paper contributes to the upper echelon perspective; insider activism; sustainability transitions; and current discussions concerning how to address issues of diversity, equity, inclusivity, and social justice in the public relations literature. Policy implications are laid out, and areas for future research are indicated.

This essay uses Hannah Arendt’s theory of action and her critique of modern politics to explore the themes of predictability and unpredictability in human affairs, and the political meaning of interruption and refusal. It draws on the life and literature of the Russian avant-gardist, Daniil Kharms (1905- 1942), alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky and several contemporary theorists, to offer a reading of action as taking the form, specifically, of playful interruption and generative refusal. A marginal figure whose deeds and writings were disruptively strange, Kharms is taken as an exemplar of action in this ludic mode. This serves to elaborate upon Arendt’s concepts of plurality and natality, while challenging some weaknesses in her theory of action as a whole.

A number of writers have recently challenged the notion of the demonic as mere superstition, arguing for a need to understand the demonic in terms of the often-obscured ways in which it operates in relation to contemporary thought and critique. Building on this, this paper offers an analysis of the demonic as a rhetorical concept. Moving beyond the notion of the demonic as simply a trope at the disposal of a speaker or writer, the paper explores how the expression of the demonic performs a more foundational, repetitive, and indeed, deceptively banal role in shaping the discourses it inhabits. This precedes and frames the ethico-political discourses on evil commonly associated with demonology today.

In view of intensified danger from multiple causes manifesting what Heidegger understood as the rule of planetary technology and the possibility of pitting meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken) against the dominant calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken), there is enhanced need to think further Heidegger’s turn to the poetic word of Hölderlin. Here Heidegger’s attentiveness to Hölderlin’s “The Ister” is engaged with a view to clarifying the significance of “becoming homely” and “dwelling” as part of the task of thinking required of Western humanity if it is to appropriate a “second beginning” such as Heidegger intimates possible. Absent this thinking, the “first beginning” initiated in Greek antiquity promises a thoroughly techno-cratic world order.

In the 1990s, Julija Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek developed a unique discourse within psychoanalysis - the psychoanalysis of the Balkans. Their cultural and political analysis represented the Balkans as a pathological region of nations suffering from the syndrome of an “archaic mother.” They propose in their different ways that the subject (nation) must radically separate from oedipal attachment to the attachment to nationalism as unemancipated Oedipus and subordinate to the authority of the symbolic father, that is, to the West. At the heart of such an approach is a conservative policy of labeling the Balkans as primitive behind Kristeva and Žižek loom self-orientalization and geopolitical de-identification with the Balkans as a precondition for their cosmopolitan and universalist identity.