Rewriting the Text of the Soul

The chapter is about the radically text-centered form of meditation that emerged in and around the Devotio Moderna movement toward the end of the fourteenth century. In working with written text, adherents of the movement believed they were simultaneously working on their souls, especially because these too were believed to resemble a text, susceptible of being rewritten in a new and better order. Schemes for meditation by Florens Radewijns and Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen, two leading exponents of the Devotio Moderna, require their readers to implement them by reproducing in the virtuality of thought one or other of the compositional principles by which the schemes were constituted as texts in the first place. With the Cordiale, seu quatuor novissima, a devotional tract on eschatology written around the same time as the exercises of Radewijns and Zerbolt, readers are similarly exhorted to meditate by transferring the “process” of the text—its unfolding as a rhetorically composed argument—to the process of their reflections on death and the afterlife.

War and Religion: The Iran−Iraq War

Religion has historically played a central role in motivating rulers to start and individuals to participate in war. However, the decline of religion in international politics following the Peace of Westphalia and the inception of the modern nation-state system, which built and highlighted a sense of national identity, undermined the contribution of religion to politics and consequently, conflict. The case of the Iran−Iraq War, however, shows a different pattern in which religion did play a crucial role in motivating individuals to participate in war. Although the evidence suggests that religious motivations by no means contributed to Saddam’s decision to launch the war, an overview of the Iranian leaders’ speeches and martyrs’ statements reveals that religion significantly motivated people to take part in the war. While Iraqi leaders tried to mobilize the population by highlighting the allegedly Persian-Arab historical antagonism and propagating an Iraqi-centered form of Arab nationalism, Iranian leaders exploited religious symbols and emotions to encourage war participation, garner public support, alleviate the suffering of the people, and build military morale. The Iranian leadership painted the war as a battle between believers and unbelievers, Muslims and infidels, and the true and the false. This strategy turned out to be an effective tool of mobilization during wartime.

The Cares of a Corporate Self

Here, finally, the book turns to consider what is more conventionally called Athenian “government,” namely the activities of Demos, the council of 500, and the sundry poliadic “officials.” As the chapter stresses, Demos, the ultimate rule-making agency in Attica, was fundamentally different from a modern “state” in at least three ways. The first of these differences concerns their respective quiddities as social objects. Whereas a modern state is conventionally seen as a machine-like material assemblage of practices and individual persons, Demos was a kind of deathless corporate person in its own right, one that both pre-existed and outlived the particular individuals who happened to embody it at any given time. Second, by comparison with the conspicuously activist, highly interventionist states of modernity, Demos was a peculiarly inert kind of agency. In its primary incarnations in assembly meetings and law courts, its function was to serve as a purely deliberative rule-making body, in that it materialized to produce binding resolutions to issues raised by “civilians,” whether they were its assembly “advisors” or the prosecutors in court cases. Third, given that Athenian households were assumed to be largely responsible for governing themselves, both individually and collectively, the competence of Demos was necessarily limited. Essentially, it was responsible for producing binding decisions only on those matters which households could not already manage for themselves, like polis-wide cults, diplomacy, and warfare. In short, to summarize chapters 12-14, demokratia in Attica was not a modern-style “state-centered” form of rule. It was an ongoing exercise in self-management by the unitary social body of Demos, whether acting as its constituent parts or as the totality of the whole.

The emergence of motives in liminal hotspots

The concept of “motivation” commonly constructs as a psychological essence what is really the paradoxical imposition of a required desire. While the resulting impasse blocked theoretical development for around four decades, pragmatic motivational techniques evolved regardless. These could be (probably to no avail) dismissed for not taking account of the deep theoretical problems. This article suggests instead to rearticulate them with the conceptual repertoire of liminal hotspots, which directs attention to the emergent nature of activities and collectives, and thus motives. This is done as part of an ongoing collaboration with counselors who experiment with different ways of helping young drug users without taking motivation as premise, in the sense of a prerequisite, for interventions. Data from recorded counseling sessions are analyzed and rearticulated, first in terms of the classical motivation–resistance contradiction; then through pragmatic approaches in counseling, i.e., the prevalent cognitive-client-centered form and the “solution-focused brief therapy” approach—and finally as motives emergent in liminal hotspots.

The Memory of the National and the National as Memory

This essay seeks to illuminate a different, more encompassing kind of transition than that from dictatorship to post-dictatorship (and its attendant forms of memory of military brutal force and human rights abuses) often privileged by studies of political violence and social memory. The focus is twofold: first, to describe a transition from the world of the social to that of the post-social, i.e. a transition from a welfare state-centered form of the nation to its neoliberal competitive state counterpart; and secondly, to analyze its attendant memory dynamics. The double articulation of collective memory under neoliberalism, the deep and recurring violence it has involved at both the social and the individual level, and its self-articulation as a social memory apparatus are apparent in two Chilean films exploring the logic (Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero) and the history (Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz) of the implementation of this neoliberal memory apparatus in Chile. Este trabajo intenta iluminar una transición más amplia que aquella entre dictadura y post-dictadura ( y sus correspondientes formas de memoria sobre la violencia militar o los abusos a los derechos humanos) que suele ser el objeto de estudio de los trabajos sobre violencia política y memoria social. Mi interés es doble: primero, describir una transición del mundo social al post-social (es decir, una transición desde una forma de estado-nación centrada en el estado de bienestar a su contraparte neoliberal y competitiva; y en segundo lugar, analizar sus correspondientes formas de memoria. La doble articulación de la memoria colectiva bajo el neoliberalismo, la profunda y recurrente violencia presente, tanto a nivel social como a nivel individual, y su autoarticulación como un aparato de la memoria social son evidentes en las dos películas chilenas Tony Manero de Pablo Larraín y Nostalgia de la luz de Patricio Guzmán que exploran la lógica y la historia de la implementación de este aparato de la memoria neoliberal en Chile.

From a teacher-centered to a student-centered approach

There is a common belief that, owing to the highly teacher-centered form of education, Chinese students are passive learners. As a result, a student-centered approach such as process writing is believed to be difficult to implement in classes that consist mainly of Chinese students. This study tested these beliefs by introducing peer feedback, the backbone of process writing, to Chinese students enrolled in university writing classes and by measuring the effectiveness of the feedback both quantitatively and qualitatively. The study showed that, with proper training, Chinese students could quickly adapt to a student-centered approach, and also provide rich and useful feedback on the writing of their peers. This study has promising implications for educational contexts where students are considered passive learners, teacher-centered learning is the norm, or the process approach to writing faces daunting challenges to its implementation.