Jesuits and Jews, and the way we dare to think: A Jesuit’s reflections on James Bernauer’s Jesuit Kaddish

This essay explores James Bernauer’s Jesuit Kaddish as an extended reflection on the centuries-long troubled relationship between Jesuits and Jews, with attention to egregious instances of moral failure on the part of Jesuits. It investigates too Bernauer’s highlighting of instances of Jesuit spiritual resistance both to evil and to the undue prudence of cautious institutions. Forthright in weaving his own intellectual journey into the book, Bernauer movingly renders himself a theme for reflection, a scholar’s life-long interrogation of his own religious community, as gratitude, loyalty, and critical distance stand side by side. The concluding statement of Jesuit Repentance perfectly marks the transition from understanding to a performative expression of responsibility for the personal and systemic failures to which we are heirs.

The Hearing Test: Evidence of a Vegetal Entity

The author's artistic experiment The Hearing Test focuses on detection of high frequency clicking sounds that are emitted by the tips of plants' roots. Scientists have claimed that plants' roots produce high frequency clicks between 20 and 300 kHz by bursting air bubbles. But while the phenomenon has been described, its cause remains unexplained. This lack of knowledge opens up possibilities for multiple interpretations and invites experimental approaches as well as speculation concerning plant intelligence, the role of species-specific hearing and sound as evidence. The article is an extended reflection on the experiment.

Demonstration of > 2π reflection phase range in optical metasurfaces based on detuned gap-surface plasmon resonators

Plasmonic metasurfaces, representing arrays of gap-surface plasmon (GSP) resonators and consisting of arrays of metal nanobricks atop thin dielectric layers supported by thick metal films, constitute an important subclass of optical metasurfaces operating in reflection and enabling the realization of numerous, diverse and multiple, functionalities. The available phase variation range is however limited to being $$<\! 2\pi$$ < 2 π , a circumstance that complicates the metasurface design for functionalities requiring slowly varying phases over the whole range of $$2\pi$$ 2 π , e.g., in holographic applications. The available phase range also determines the wavelength bandwidth of metasurfaces operating with linearly polarized fields due to the propagation (size-dependent) nature of the reflection phase. We suggest an approach to extend the phase range and bandwidth limitations in the GSP-based metasurfaces by incorporating a pair of detuned GSP resonators into a metasurface elementary unit cell. With detailed simulations related to those for conventional single-resonator metasurfaces and proof-of-concept experiments, we demonstrate that the detuned-resonator GSP metasurfaces designed for beam steering at $${900}\,\,\hbox {nm}$$ 900 nm wavelength exhibit the extended reflection phase and operation bandwidth. We believe that the considered detuned-resonator GSP metasurfaces can advantageously be exploited in applications requiring the design of arbitrary phase gradients and/or broadband operation with linearly polarized fields.

On transience and other hatreds

This article originates in a free associative extended reflection on what the author sees as the many faces of our relationship to transience in Western culture. It begins with the image of plastic flowers in graveyards, wild flowers pushed to verges and marginal spaces, women, migrants and transient communities. Our relation to life, death and their relation to movement and limitation are key aspects being reflected on and taken up for further analysis. The result of the free associative experiment is to invite reflections on the Freudian concepts of Eros and Thanatos and revisit the highly controversial question of whether these should be viewed in terms of a dualist or a monistic understanding. What is being presented here is a way of working with free associations outside the consulting room and group processes, using free associations as a reflexive research tool within a psychosocial hermeneutic approach.

‘Let Us Cease’: Early Reflections on the Spectacle’s End

Chapter 3 focuses on the two major episodes of Book 7, both of which have often been criticized as ill-motivated and disconnected, and both of which feature prominent scenes of divine viewing and discussion: the formal duel between Hector and Aias; and the truce for the burial of the dead, during which the Achaeans build a defensive wall. The chapter shows that the two episodes can in fact be read as both well-motivated and connected, if seen in metaperformative terms: as an extended reflection on how the Iliad’s battlefield spectacle ends. The second duel offers a mise en abyme, by which the poet dramatizes tension between two types of response to the conflict at this point: desire for Achaean victory, and pity for the doomed Trojans. The duel is normally seen as the second of two formal duels, but is best understood as the second of three ‘spectacular duels’, the third being between Hector and Achilles in Book 22. Then, through the building of the Achaean wall as viewed by the gods, the poet reflects upon tension between (a) the Iliad’s insistence that its central spectacle is playing out in real time, before our eyes, and (b) its equally powerful investment in the idea that its action is not ephemeral, but permanent.

Introduction

The introduction situates postcolonial language debates in a comparative perspective before pivoting into the book’s central interventions. Written for a broad, nonspecialist audience, it is designed to be approachable as a standalone essay. Rather than seeing the postcolonial language question as mainly a struggle over authenticity or commitment, the introduction argues for recognizing it as an untimely gesture of refusal of the given conditions of a literary present and as an invitation to imagine other configurations of literary culture. A revisionist reading of two landmark 1960s conferences on African literature models this approach. Drawing on unpublished transcripts, the introduction shows that efforts to institutionalize African literature at these two gatherings led to the first stirrings of the language issue. It concludes with an extended reflection on the challenges and possibilities of a practice of literary comparison that does not take for granted the universality of literature.

Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947)

Whitehead made fundamental contributions to modern logic and created one of the most controversial metaphysical systems of the twentieth century. He drew out what he took to be the revolutionary consequences for philosophy of the new discoveries in mathematics, logic and physics, developing these consequences first in logic and then in the philosophy of science and speculative metaphysics. His work constantly returns to the question: what is the place of the constructions of mathematics, science and philosophy in the nature of things? Whitehead collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which argues that all pure mathematics is derivable from a small number of logical principles. He went on in his philosophy of science to describe nature in terms of overlapping series of events and to argue that scientific explanations are constructed on that basis. He finally expanded and redefined his work by developing a new kind of speculative metaphysics. Stated chiefly in Process and Reality (1929), his metaphysics is both an extended reflection on the character of philosophical inquiry and an account of the nature of all things as a self-constructing ‘process’. On this view, reality is incomplete, a matter of the becoming of ‘occasions’ which are centres of activity in a multiplicity of serial processes whereby the antecedent occasions are taken up in the activities of successor occasions.

Kafka’s Modernism

Using ideas from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Stanley Cavell’s visions of ordinary language philosophy, this essay explores Kafka’s modernism. As opposed to Maurice Blanchot’s notion of literary language as non-referential, it is argued that the modernism at stake in The Trial centers on the question of intelligibility. While the court system in the novel signifies some sort of general skepticism, in which the use of language threatens to become unintelligible, Kafka offers the reader an extended reflection on the conditions of intelligibility and sense. At stake is language itself and our relation to it as agents seeking to make ourselves understandable to others. In The Trial, there are numerous examples of acts of communication that only seemingly make sense. The parallels with how, for Wittgenstein, our language can become emptied of meaning are made explicit.

A Novel Method to Facilitate Uterine Delivery at Robotic Hysterectomy

Minimally invasive platforms have afforded women undergoing hysterectomy the advantages of improved postoperative pain control, reduced complication rates, and shorter inpatient recovery time. In patients where malignancy has been confirmed or suspected, the necessity for uterine delivery per vagina is imperative to maintain these advantages without compromising oncological outcome.A previously unreported technique of enlarging the apical circumference of the vagina during robotic hysterectomy facilitates intact uterine passage after extended reflection of the bladder and/or rectum. Significant increases in vault circumference can be gained through even small midline incisions of the vaginal wall, with an additional 5-cm incision almost doubling the apical aperture in certain cases.We present our series of 21 cases that support this safe, reliable, and simple method for intact uterine delivery during robotic hysterectomy in minimally invasive gynecological oncology practice.

The post-Troubles art of Willie Doherty

Chapter three addresses work made in the post-Troubles era by the filmmaker and photographer Willie Doherty, one of the most acclaimed artists from Northern Ireland over the last three decades. Several significant works by Willie Doherty are singled out for close-reading: atmospheric photographic series and film narratives that are uncanny in their oblique, unnerving evocations of the landscapes of Belfast and Derry. This extended reflection on Doherty’s work considers in detail the strategic indeterminacy of his photographic art and addresses the shift in key film works made during the post-Troubles years towards explicitly ‘spectral’ themes.