Andrew John Mitchell

In the 1950s and 60s, Martin Heidegger turned to sculpture to rethink the relationship between bodies and space and the role of art in our lives. In his texts on the subject—a catalog contribution for an Ernst Barlach exhibition, a speech at a gallery opening for Bernhard Heiliger, a lecture on bas-relief depictions of Athena, and a collaboration with Eduardo Chillida—he formulates his later aesthetic theory, a thinking of relationality. Against a traditional view of space as an empty container for discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as already beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness. Heidegger suggests how we can still find room to dwell therein. Filled with illustrations of works that Heidegger encountered or considered, _Heidegger Among the Sculptors_ makes a singular contribution to the philosophy of sculpture.

To give oneself over to the essence of pain is to give oneself over to the world. Pain is a fact of the world and in accepting this fact, in entering that world, we break with the tradition of metaphysical subjectivity that dates back to the Greek determination of the human as zôon logon echon. For Heidegger, pain is the surest sign that we wholly belong to this world; in fact, pain is nothing other than our contact with the world and our “openness” to it. In what follows I will first present those aspects of Heidegger's view of pain…

Ende Oktober 2014 organisierte das Martin-Heidegger-Institut in Wuppertal die erste internationale Tagung uber Heideggers "Schwarze Hefte" in Deutschland. Im Fruhjahr desselben Jahres hatte die Veroffentlichung der "Uberlegungen," der ersten Reihe der "Schwarzen Hefte," gezeigt, dass Heidegger zwischen 1938 und 1941 in seinen Aufzeichnungen antisemitische Gedanken auftreten lasst. Es war und ist die Frage, welche Motive den Philosophen dabei leiteten. Wie sind jene Ausserungen zu verstehen? Wie weit betreffen sie Heideggers Denken uberhaupt? Der Band versammelt die Resultate dieser Tagung. Er enthalt Aufsatze von Jean-Luc Nancy, Donatella Di Cesare, Francoise Dastur, Danielle Cohen-Levinas u.a.

Heidegger's later thought is a thinking of things, so argues Andrew J. Mitchell in The Fourfold. Heidegger understands these things in terms of what he names "the fourfold"--a convergence of relationships bringing together the earth, the sky, divinities, and mortals--and Mitchell's book is the first detailed exegesis of this neglected aspect of Heidegger's later thought. As such it provides entré to the full landscape of Heidegger's postwar thinking, offering striking new interpretations of the atomic bomb, technology, plants, animals, weather, time, language, the holy, mortality, dwelling, and more. What results is a conception of things as ecstatic, relational, singular, and, most provocatively, as intrinsically tied to their own technological commodification. A major new work that resonates beyond the confines of Heidegger scholarship, The Fourfold proposes nothing less than a new phenomenological thinking of relationality and mediation for understanding the things around us.

All of Derrida’s texts on Joyce together under one cover in fresh, new translations, along with key essays covering the range of Derrida’s engagement with Joyce’s works. Bringing together all of Jacques Derrida’s writings on James Joyce, this volume includes the first complete translation of his book Ulysses Gramophone: Two Words for Joyce as well as the first translation of the essay “The Night Watch.” In Ulysses Gramophone, Derrida provides some of his most thorough reflections on affirmation and the “yes,” the signature, and the role of technological mediation in all of these areas. In “The Night Watch,” Derrida pursues his ruminations on writing in an explicitly feminist direction, offering profound observations on the connection between writing and matricide. Accompanying these texts are nine essays by leading scholars from across the humanities addressing Derrida’s treatments of Joyce throughout his work, and two remembrances of lectures devoted to Joyce that Derrida gave in 1982 and 1984. The volume concludes with photographs of Derrida from these two events.

Likert scales are useful for collecting data on attitudes and perceptions from large samples of people. In particular, they have become a well-established tool in soundscape studies for conducting in situ surveys to determine how people experience urban public spaces. However, it is still unclear whether the metrics of the scales are consistently interpreted during a typical assessment task. The current work aims at identifying some general trends in the interpretation of Likert scale metrics and introducing a procedure for the derivation of metric corrections by analyzing a case study dataset of 984 soundscape assessments across 11 urban locations in London. According to ISO/TS 12913-2:2018, soundscapes can be assessed through the scaling of 8 dimensions: pleasant, annoying, vibrant, monotonous, eventful, uneventful, calm, and chaotic. The hypothesis underlying this study is that a link exists between correlations across the percentage of assessments falling in each Likert scale category and a dilation/compression factor affecting the interpretation of the scales metric. The outcome of this metric correction value derivation is introduced for soundscape, and a new projection of the London soundscapes according to the corrected circumplex space is compared with the initial ISO circumplex space. The overall results show a general non-equidistant interpretation of the scales, particularly on the vibrant-monotonous direction. The implications of this correction have been demonstrated through a Linear Ridge Classifier task for predicting the London soundscape responses using objective acoustic parameters, which shows significant improvement when applied to the corrected data. The results suggest that the corrected values account for the non-equidistant interpretation of the Likert metrics, thereby allowing mathematical operations to be viable when applied to the data.

"Torture and Photography: Abu Ghraib" attempts to think the mutual relationships between torture and photography, addressingissues of objectivity, publicity, and distance. In a world where bodies have been divested of human rights, the objectification of the camera seems the perfect complement. Exploring the "prophylactic" character of film, the author proposes human "touch" as always in excess of this objectified state of affairs. Along with memoranda from the Bush administration on the issues of detainee rights and the role of torture in interrogation, the essay engages with the theoretical work of Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Erwin Straus, and Giorgio Agamben in staking out the intersection of torture and photography.