scholarly journals The Poetics of Schism: Dostoevsky Translates Hamlet

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Arpi Movsesian

F.M. Dostoevsky (1821–1881) never translated Shakespeare’s works into Russian, at least not in the common sense. His fascination, however, with Hamlet and his choices, led him to interrogate the cult of Hamlet in his own culture to better understand the political and philosophical schism of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, torn between Western and Populist ideals. Translatio, in the broader sense of “carrying over” Hamlet’s character, caught on a threshold, into the Russian context represents an important aspect of Dostoevsky’s re-interpretation of modern ethics. More immediately, this translatio is a call to the “old morality” of the 1840s generation of Russian intellectuals, who rejected notions of rational egoism and of the means justifying the ends. Dostoevsky’s schismatic hero, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, is Dostoevsky’s reimagining of his own culture’s translation of Hamlet that produced extreme and radical forms of Hamlet. Raskolnikov mimics Hamlet’s conscience-stricken personality at war with itself but achieves a more ambiguous ending typical of Dostoevsky’s regenerative paradigm.

Author(s):  
Ruihui Han

Guanxi circle play a critical role in ancient China politics. Based on guanxi, two kinds of guanxi groups formed: formal guanxi circle and informal guanxi circle. The former refers to the group centered the emperor; the latter refers to the groups with the powerful and charismatic figures as the core, except for the emperor. In order to consolidate the political power, the emperors in different periods would try to prevent the informal guanxi circle in political structure. Besides, various scriptures also denounce the informal guanxi circle, deeming such circle as harmful. The judgement of informal guanxi circle appeals to research, as there is no previous researcher has address such problems. This study set out to examine whether the informal guanxi circle is harmful to the whole political structure. Results show that the informal guanxi circle, in the antecedent of satisfactory communication, can be extremely meaningful to the whole political structure. This study implies that the fact of informal guanxi circle is on the contrary of the common sense derived from the scriptures and the superficial ancient political activities, such as the emperor’s order to prevent the informal guanxi circle. The findings can contribute a better understanding of the ancient informal guanxi circle in ancient political structure in China.


2021 ◽  
pp. 25-71
Author(s):  
David Todd

This chapter investigates the political economy of French informal imperialism, revealing a little-known facet of the intellectual origins of globalization, and confirming that the pursuit of empire and the emergence of global consciousness were inextricably linked. It highlights lesser known thinkers, which helps recover what the prevailing attitudes of the informed liberal-leaning public towards empire actually were. After 1815, once the word “liberal” entered the political lexicon, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the Abbé Dominique de Pradt, and Michel Chevalier described themselves as liberals — with some justification, since they admired Britain's balanced constitution and were stalwart advocates of free trade. Recovering their views on empire therefore helps to suggest that French liberals did not become imperialistic in the mid-nineteenth century, but instead consistently harboured imperial ambitions, even if, for pragmatic reasons, they tended to shun territorial expansion after 1815. Focusing on these neglected but influential figures also helps correct the common perception of France as having withdrawn from the international stage after the fall of Napoleon.


Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd

This chapter explores representations of silence, and perceived absences, in the WPS stories analyzed here. Specific silences and absences have a formative effect on the political affordances generated by the WPS agenda; the “common sense” of WPS is that these dimensions should be left unspoken lest they provide cynics and skeptics with critical ammunition to undermine the agenda. Examining these silences and absences as constitutive of the WPS agenda, and therefore as implicated in both its failures and its successes, reinforces the plurality and polyvalences of WPS as it emerges as a knowable policy agenda through its narration. The suppressed frustrations and the barely detectable influences and influencers are as much part of the formation of the WPS agenda as the indicators, audits, and action plans. This chapter surfaces some of these silences and secrets and describes the sensibilities that emerge through the storytelling.


2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Paul A. Rahe

When Benjamin Franklin suggested that man is by nature a tool-making animal, he summed up what was for his fellow Americans the common sense of the matter. It is not, then, surprising that, when Britain's colonists in North America broke with the mother country over the issue of an unrepresentative parliament's right to tax and govern the colonies, they defended their right to the property they owned on the ground that it was in a most thorough-going sense an extension of themselves: the fruits of their own labor. This understanding they learned from John Locke, who based the argument of his Two Treatises of Government on the unorthodox account of providence and of man's place within the natural world that Sir Francis Bacon had been the first to articulate. All of this helps explain why the framers of the American constitution included within it a clause giving sanction to property in ideas of practical use.


2014 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoltán Bajmócy ◽  
Judit Gébert

According to the common sense, experts, backed up by scientific methods, describe the “possible states of the world” in a value-neutral way. Then, in the political arena, delegates build on these proposals, but also consider values and interests. The present paper attempts to revise such an understanding of local economic development (LED) and argues that many of the deficiencies deriving from such a view can be remedied by deliberative participation, which is not merely a theoretical necessity, but also a practical possibility.With regard to the issue of public participation and deliberation, the paper identifies two main approaches in the LED literature: the “political” and the “apolitical”, of which the latter is mainly characterised by economic theorising. We take a closer look at the “apolitical” approach and demonstrate that in fact it is very much political. Therefore, we call for the transgression of the borderline between politics and expertise in LED, and suggest a joint democratisation of these interrelated terrains. We argue that deliberative participation is able to contribute to the quality of both the expert proposals and the working of the politics.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN DYDE

AbstractThis article examines the history of two fields of enquiry in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland: the rise and fall of the common sense school of philosophy and phrenology as presented in the works of George Combe. Although many previous historians have construed these histories as separate, indeed sometimes incommensurate, I propose that their paths were intertwined to a greater extent than has previously been given credit. The philosophy of common sense was a response to problems raised by Enlightenment thinkers, particularly David Hume, and spurred a theory of the mind and its mode of study. In order to succeed, or even to be considered a rival of these established understandings, phrenologists adapted their arguments for the sake of engaging in philosophical dispute. I argue that this debate contributed to the relative success of these groups: phrenology as a well-known historical subject, common sense now largely forgotten. Moreover, this history seeks to question the place of phrenology within the sciences of mind in nineteenth-century Britain.


2019 ◽  
pp. 551-590
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman

This chapter discusses the development of criminal law in the second half of the nineteenth century, covering the statute law of crimes, crime rates, insanity, punishment and correction, and victimless crimes. The formal criminal law in the late nineteenth century was by and large a matter of statute. The concept of the common-law crime had been wiped out in federal law. The concept also decayed on the state level. As of 1900, some states still technically recognized the possibility of a common-law crime. Other states, by statute, had specifically abolished the concept. Only acts listed in the penal code were crimes, and nothing else. In some states, the courts construed their penal codes as (silently) abolishing common-law crime. Where the concept survived, it was hardly ever used; the penal codes were as a practical matter complete and exclusive—the total catalog of crime.


1956 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner Baer

This timely account of the hunching of the Suez Canal project reveals both sides of the coin of innovation. It is, on the one hand, a study of the character and methods of one of the most famous innovators of the nineteenth century. Ferdinand DeLesseps was not a politician, a financier, an engineer, a promoter (in the common sense of the word), or a businessman. Yet he succeeded brilliantly in a venture requiring consummate mastery of all these professional fields. On the other hand is revealed the waterway itself — vital to one civilization, useless and neglected in another, and then of transcendent importance as world history marched on. Realization of the grand scheme envisaged by the Pharaohs came at last when economic and political factors momentarily aligned in a pattern of opportunity for a unique set of entrepreneurial qualifications.


2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Moore

AbstractNeuroscience is commonly thought to challenge the basic way we think of ourselves in ordinary thought, morality, and the law. This paper: (1) describes the legal institutions challenged in this way by neuroscience, including in that description both the political philosophy such institutions enshrine and the common sense psychology they presuppose; (2) describes the three kinds of data produced by contemporary neuroscience that is thought to challenge these commonsense views of ourselves in morals and law; and (3) distinguishes four major and several minor kinds of challenges that that data can reasonably be interpreted to present. The major challenges are: first, the challenge of reductionism, that we are merely machines; second, the challenge of determinism, that we are caused to choose and act as we do by brain states that we do not control; third, the challenge of epiphenomenalism, that our choices do not cause our actions because our brains are the real cause of those actions; and fourth, the challenge of fallibilism, that we do not have direct access to those of our mental states that do cause our actions, nor are we infallible in such knowledge as we do have of them.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174387212098711
Author(s):  
Máiréad Enright ◽  
Tina Kinsella

This paper considers how an artwork might play a role in the political, legal and aesthetical ‘working-through’ of historical injustices. With specific reference to Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones’ participatory performance project, The Touching Contract (2016), we consider how traumatic affects from Ireland’s past continue to shape the present. Drawing primarily on the work of Jacques Rancière and Bracha L. Ettinger, we argue that The Touching Contract has the capacity to transform participants’ relation to legal history in two ways. First, by juxtaposing unspoken histories of female bodily vulnerability in relation to law with legal form during an encounter with participatory performance, this art project generates ‘mystery’, producing a productive ‘interval’ (Rancière) between the common sense of legal history and its potential re-calibration. Second, in its production of a relational ‘affectosphere’ (Kinsella), The Touching Contract provokes participants’ capacity to engage with that interval, to be genuinely affected by the transmission of legal history and respond to it in new ways.


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