scholarly journals Happiness is Not Fun: Godard, the 20th Century, and Badiou

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-42
Author(s):  
Michael Walsh

"Godard is the most contemporary of directors, one who has never set a film in the past. Yet since the 1990s he has produced a whole cycle of works whose tones are retrospective, memorial, elegaic. These include JLG/JLG:Auto-portrait du Décembre (1995), the much-discussed Histoire(s) du Cinèma (begun in 1988, completed in 1998) 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema (commissioned by the BFI for the centennial of cinema in 1995), The Old Place (commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in 1999), On the Origin of the Twenty-First Century (commissioned by the Cannes Film Festival for the year 2000), Dans Le Noir du Temps (a contribution to the 2002 compilation film Ten Minutes Older), and the 2006 Centre Pompidou exhibition “Travels in Utopia.” This last was a retrospective in the conventional sense (screenings of four decades worth of film and video by Godard, Godard/Gorin, Godard/Mièville, etc), but was also retrospective as an installation, divided into three spaces identified as hier, l’avant-hier, and aujourd’hui (yesterday, the day before yesterday, and today), with tomorrow notable for its absence..."

Author(s):  
Alex J. Bellamy

Until recently, East Asia was a boiling pot of massacre and blood-letting. Yet, almost unnoticed by the wider world, it has achieved relative peace over the past three decades.1 At the height of the Cold War, East Asia accounted for around 80 percent of the world’s mass atrocities. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, it accounted for less than 5 percent....


Author(s):  
Alexander Gillespie

The cumulative environmental challenge of sustainable development in the twenty-first century is larger than anything humanity has ever had to deal with in the past. The good news is that solid progress is being reached in the understanding of issues in scientific terms and understanding what needs to be done. The bad news is twofold. First, although many of the environmental problems of earlier centuries are now being confronted, a new generation of difficulties is eclipsing what were the older difficulties. Secondly, much of the progress is being achieved by the wealthier parts of the planet, rather than the developing world. From population growth to climate change to unprecedented habitat and species loss, whether environmental sustainability can be achieved in the twenty-first century is an open question.


2018 ◽  

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.


Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-165
Author(s):  
Bradley J. Fest

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis's various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis's work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext's phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-340
Author(s):  
Dana L. Robert

One of the most important mission theories for the past two centuries has been the idea of the “Christian home.” Historical research, interviews with current missionaries, and studies of Christianity in the non-western world all show that the Christian home remains a central metaphor for how women conceptualize what it means to be a witness for Christ. In this paper, I will discuss why the Christian home remains important for mission practice, examine reasons for its omission from academic discussions of mission theory, look briefly at its history and changing definition, and conclude by urging that the Christian home be a renewed priority in discussions of missionary contextualization for the twenty-first century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Evangel Sarwar

Advances in medical technology have not only raised our expectations that medicine can perform miracles and keep us alive; it has also raised conflicts in allowing death to take its natural course. Many dilemmas are faced by physicians as well as families in end-of-life care and relieving the suffering. Ethical dilemmas about how to ensure individuals with terminal illness/end-of-life experience a “peaceful death,” when the meaning and perception of death has changed due to technology? In the past, death was expected and accepted, with rituals. Today, death has been reduced to an unheard phenomenon - shameful and forbidden. The advances in technology brought with it a change in culture of medicine from caring to curing, where medicine is expected to heal any disease. This advance has also acted as a double-edged sword, where longer lives come at the price of greater suffering, illness, and higher costs. While most Americans want to die at home, surrounded by loved ones - the “medicalization” of death does not allow the natural course of death to take place. Although recent studies indicate that more Americans are dying at home, most people still die in hospital beds – alone. This paper looks at the transition that took place in the concept of death and dying, and the impacts of technology, and makes suggestions for facilitating a “peaceful death” in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove

The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow. —LANGSTON HUGHES, “History,” 1934 The original Busboys and Poets sits at the corner of Fourteenth and V Streets NW, just a block north of the epicenter of the 1968 riots. A combination restaurant, bookstore, lounge, and theater, Busboys took its name from Langston Hughes, the one-time busboy at D.C.’s Wardman Hotel who gained international renown as a poet (albeit one who denounced the snobbery of D.C.’s black upper class). After it opened in 2005, it became an immediate commercial and cultural success, attracting young, hip Washingtonians who swarmed the surrounding Shaw neighborhood in the twenty-first century....


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