Tim Flanagan

The digital humanities have developed in concert with online systems that increase the accessibility and speed of learning. Whereas previously students were immersed in the fluidity of campus life, they have become suspended and drawn-into various streams and currents of digital pedagogy, which articulate new forms of epistemological movement, often operating at speeds outside the lived time and rhythm of human thought. When assessing learning technologies, we have to consider the degree to which they complement the rhythms immanent to human thought, knowledge, investigation, and experimentation.In this paper, we examine learning from a humanities perspective, arguing that reading, writing, and thinking are ways of learning underscored by various genres of movement that segue with or diverge from the movements inherent to digital technologies, especially those deployed in learning systems. Using the work of thinkers such as John Dewey and Michel Serres, we examine the importance of movement in dialogue, where to truly learn involves embedding oneself in the flow of thought, accepting the flexibility of concepts, and aligning oneself with a community of thinkers.

An explicit feature of the World Health Organisation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been to ensure that naming conventions, both for the disease itself and for the variants of its underlying virus, should not have a stigmatising effect on any one population or region. An implicit feature of this undertaking is the recognition that the relation between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is heard’ involves an ongoing and even generative tension that cannot be mapped following a defined set of coordinates. The reason for this, the following paper claims, employing the work of Barbara Cassin, is that there is a uniquely performative (epideictic) aspect to language – one that takes place in a uniquely non-globalised space whose extension remains unscripted or extemporised, a space that is often distended and sometimes localisable but ultimately indivisible. Such a space, this paper shows, is one oriented by an understanding of rhetoric whereby utterances obtain according to the actual use [chreia] or decisive moment [kairos] – as opposed to any definitive place [topos] – of what is said.

This chapter proposes an extension of Georges Canguilhem's historical analysis toward contemporary concepts of milieu as flexible and dissipative territories, and as "adaptive landscapes" of living organisms such as the monarch butterfly and common swift. The chapter deploys and develops an understanding of certain vital processes in Canguilhem's account of milieu, by charting the experience to be found in various migration landscapes which cannot be understood independently of their taking place over time (and certainly not in abstraction). This is reflected in the second section where an account of dissipative images is given as a way of thinking the ephemerality of structures whose ramifications occlude the ongoing radiance of their energy. This much can be seen, as the chapter concludes, in the work of Gemma Anderson whose drawings of mitosis and epigenetic landscapes contemplate, through a set of visual "notes," how we might begin to both think and render energy fluctuations. We can thus visualize migratory patterns not as a series of fixed points but in a way that might help us to see "sky" as a unique, dynamic milieu of lived time and space.

The spiritual torsion and material complexity so characteristic of Baroque aesthetics is something that extends to (or perhaps, better, issues from) the intension of the term itself. This much is evident in the sense that, since the twentieth century, various projects have proposed such notions as a medical-baroque, a postcolonial-baroque, and a digital-baroque. Beyond any given object of analysis, then, in this way the Baroque adduces the concepts by which any inquiry into objects might take place. As such, the Baroque can be said to be that which signals the ongoing relation of thought to the world, of ‘the inside’ to ‘the outside’ (while at the same time problematising the priority of either side over the other). Indeed, following certain post-Kantian readings of Leibnizian philosophy, the Baroque is to be regarded not so much as something to be understood but rather as a frenzied development of the understanding itself.

Following the work of Barbara Cassin, this paper proposes to examine certain ways of speaking that Aristotle described as not so much human as plant-like [homoioi phutôi] and to consider whether these non-human ways of speaking might yet adduce forms of discourse that serve to model how central principles of justice can be thought. The paper does this by drawing upon Cassin’s extensive engagement with Sophistry in the classical world together with her concerted interest in the activities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. When Aristotle, in book Gamma of the Metaphysics, dismissed the speech of those spoke “otherwise” (for example, those who failed to obey the law of non-contradiction) he formalised a chauvinism that philosophy had, at least since Plato, derided as sophistry. For Cassin, however, this presumed superiority of one way of speaking over another is something that holds true only when the grounds and elemental terms of a discourse have been and remain uncontested. In this way, language in Aristotle is regulated in advance, and determines what is admissible in the court of discourse according to prescribed and recognisable forms. Accordingly, illuminated by Heidegger and yet (like Arendt) departing from his conclusions, Cassin explores the sense in which language is something ontologically constitutive but in a manner that contests rather than secures its speakers’ relations to one another. In place of a metaphysics and ethics of belonging and authenticity, Cassin’s work is oriented by figures of precarity and exile such that truth is not so much something to be discovered, once and for all, but to be contested, negotiated, and re-worked each and every time. Key to this form of discourse, the paper will claim, is the uniquely non-juridical approach to justice undertaken by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Here, as Cassin explains, rather than a logic of individual rights and wrongs, there is a performative role for those involved. This “politics via discourse” dislocates the identity of received (rational) subjects and allows for narrative testimony itself not only to bear witness to a past but to signal a future – one based not on the apportionment or allocation of justice but on its ongoing struggle (an eristics or agonistics) for a humanity to come.

​This book, itself a study of two books on the Baroque, proposes a pair of related theses: one interpretive, the other argumentative. The first, enveloped in the second, holds that the significance of allegory Gilles Deleuze recognized in Walter Benjamin’s 1928 monograph on seventeenth century drama is itself attested in key aspects of Kantian, Leibnizian, and Platonic philosophy. The second, enveloping the first, is a literalist claim about predication itself – namely, that the aesthetics of agitation and hallucination so emblematic of the Baroque sensibility adduces an avowedly metaphysical ‘naturalism’ in which thought is replete with predicates. Oriented by Barbara Cassin’s development of the concerted sense in which homonyms are critically distinct from synonyms, the philosophical claim here is that ‘the Baroque’ names the intervallic [διαστηματική] relation that thought establishes between things. On this account, any subject finds its unity in a concerted state of disquiet – a state-rempli in which, phenomenologically speaking, experience comprises as much seeing as reading.

Taking its title from the discussion of a ‘new Meno’ to be found in Difference and Repetition, through an examination of the link between learning and thinking set out across Deleuze's work this paper charts the important sense in which philosophical thought is characterised by an apprenticeship. The claim is that just as certain aesthetic and biological processes involve inscrutable and non-resembling elements that cannot be known in advance, the experience of learning is one oriented by unforseen encounters. With a view to a peculiarly heuristic use of dictionaries in the case of language learning, the paper shows how the logic of this experience is one whereby the putative meaning of things does not enjoy a priority over the immanence of their expression.