Through an ecocinema lens, an unconventional corpus of photographs of Carysfort Reef, one of seven iconic coral reefs along the Florida Reef Tract, represents something of an extreme time-lapse series. In the absence of a cohesive underwater documentary record at the time when the Florida Reef Tract is undergoing the most extensive reef restoration in the world, speculation allows us to search for patterns in damaged places with incomplete information and practice a form of multispecies storytelling of our encounters. Taken in 1966, 2003, 2014, and 2019, these images are evidence of cultural moments in our changing relationship with this reef in the context of anthropocentrism, the emergence of an alternative environment spectatorship of awareness, and a baseline for localized social change.
The Alchemy of a Corpus of Underwater Images
Locating Carysfort to Reconcile our Human Relationship with a Coral Reef
Deborah James
American Quarantine
The Right to Housing in a Pandemic
Bonnie Honig
Abstract
In the US, quarantine requires we stay home, but many do not have homes to stay in or may lose theirs due to job or wage loss. For this reason, moratoria have been put on evictions. At the same time, after the latest police killings, and during ensuing protests against racist policing in June 2020, some were arrested for curfew violations, many pulled off the streets but others out of their homes or off their stoops. A real right to housing addresses both homelessness and uncurbed police powers that round up and break in. To address current emergencies and correct larger wrongs of American life, a rent jubilee would better protect tenants than a moratorium. It could be construed as a “taking,” allowed by the 5th Amendment, compensating landlords for their properties’ being taken to serve a “public use.” Popular takings, too, are rising up on behalf of a right to housing that goes beyond rent moratoria for some and the provision of low-grade “public housing” for others.
Artificial Intelligence
Faith in Machine or Man?
Jan Martijn Meij
Lovelock, James. 2019. Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
McKibben, Bill. 2019. Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? New York: Holt.
Babies and Boomers
Intergenerational Democracy and the Political Epidemiology of COVID-19
Toby Rollo
Abstract
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how public health decisions in mass liberal democracies always reflect a political trade-off between protecting privileged groups and leaving more marginalized groups precariously exposed. Examining the “political epidemiology” of COVID-19, I focus on the ways that the lives and well-being of children are sacrificed to secure adult interests. I argue that in our efforts to protect older adults we have endangered children and abandoned the future of today's youth. This, I conclude, is indicative of a liberal preoccupation with adults and adult forms of agency, a defect that can only be adequately challenged by working toward more robust forms of democratic inclusion that include children and youth.
Being-for-itself and the Ontological Structure
Can Being-for-itself Avoid Bad Faith?
Ronald E. Santoni
In this paper, I pay tribute to Jonathan Webber, one of the most dependable interpreters among recent Sartre scholars. I do so by challenging both him and Sartre on an issue that has long frustrated my work on Sartre. In short, Sartre contends that the For-itself’s desire to be (and to pursue) Being-in-itself-for-itself (i.e., God) is in bad faith. This raises two issues: (1) Is this desire to be ens causa sui part of the ontological structure of the For-itself? (2) If so, is bad faith an essential part of the human being? I contend that the desire to be the In-itself-for-itself is, on Sartre’s premises, part of the ontological structure of an existing human being (pour-soi). As our original flight from freedom and “fundamental project,” this constitutes bad faith’s “coming into the world,” and remains part of Being-for-itself’s “natural” disposition to bad faith.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 40–50
Between social footprint and compliance, or “what IBAMA wants”
Equinor Brazil's social sustainability policy
Iselin Åsedotter Strønen
Abstract
This article analyzes an “Environmental Education Project” run by the Norwegian state oil company Equinor targeting poor women in the seafood processing industry along the coastline adjacent to Equinor's offshore Peregrino field in Brazil. The project is a prerequisite for Equinor's operating license, as required by Brazilian federal environmental authorities. I analyze the broader sociopolitical territory within which the project is implemented, how it is discursively framed and institutionally implemented within Equinor Brazil, and how this conjoins with the Brazilian state's regulatory framework. I argue that Brazilian legislation and the hands-on approach of authorities uphold Equinor's commitment to the project and bolster Equinor's CSR practitioners’ capacity to defend it within the corporate organization. The analysis demonstrates how national legislation and political context shape international oil and gas companies’ approaches to CSR.
Beyond Metaphor
Corporeal Sociability and the Language of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
Joseph D. Bryan
Abstract
Body-politic metaphors served historically as figurative vehicles to transmit assorted socio-political messages. Through an examination of the metaphors la mollesse (softness) and Adam Smith's impartial spectator, this article will show that the language of eighteenth-century French and British writers was not simply heuristic or metaphorical. Contemporaries reacted to the growth of commerce and luxury, and the concomitant creation of new public spaces and forms of social interaction, by arguing that the corporeal mediated the social. I want to introduce the concept of corporeal sociability: cognitive physiology and the network of the senses, contemporaries argued, contained the information necessary to assess novel forms of commerce and revealed that sociability was congenitally embodied.
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 29–50
Blurred memories
War and disaster in a Buddhist Sinhala village
Mara Benadusi
Abstract
This article analyzes the regimes of truth and efforts at falsification that emerged after the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, where the experience of fear, the blurring of memory, and the fabrication of identity became normalized during the course of a long civil war. By shedding light on the memorialization processes in a Buddhist Sinhala village on the border of the northeastern Tamil zones, the article shows how the tsunami has reinforced governmental devices for controlling peoples and territories, insinuating itself into the core of the enduring process of securitization of fear in Sri Lanka. Yet, however much the politics of memory tends to cloud matters, the article also demonstrates that it never goes uncontested, as long as subjects can channel their capacity for action in unexpected directions.
Sarah Horton and Adrian van den Hoven
Daniel O’Shiel, Sartre and Magic: Being, Emotion, and Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 198 pp., $79.80, ISBN: 978-1-3500-7766-9 (hardback).
Brill’s Companion to Camus: Camus among the Philosophers. Eds. Matthew Sharpe, Maciej Kałuza, and Peter Francev. (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2020), 488 pp., $180, ISBN: 9789004401747 (hardback).
Yan Hamel, En Randonnée avec Simone de Beauvoir. Boréal, Montréal, Canada, 2020. Can $25,95.