To use Alan Badiou's words, "It is no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy." The present book, Time Without Becoming, is the text of a conference that Meillassoux gave at Middlesex University in London in May 2008. Following his seminal After Finitude, Meillassoux proceeds here to further explore his notion of absolute contingency, which is able to produce and destroy, without a reason, any becoming. In her contribution, Anna Longo challenges this idea by confronting Meillassoux’s speculative materialism with emergentism.

“The time is out of joint”. This famous line from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet helps to describe the impression of de-centering, of deconstruction, which we currently live and experience. This phenomenon is caused by various factors and while it is happening worldwide, partly as a result of globalization, it is perceived in different ways in the various cultures and countries in the world. We find ourselves in front of an hybrid individual, the product of different cultures blending together. Such is the novelty and the spread of new means of communication and of social organization, that we might be witnessing the rise of a new type of subject: a bearer of transformations, the extent of which is difficult to measure. The contemporary world is dominated by radically new media, virtual space, technologies that subvert the perception of our body, post-humanism tending towards the cyborg, a cult of the body and youth, new definitions of sexuality, of procreation and of the family – all this reveals to us an overflowing of the subject in the direction of a dislocated fragmentation, lying far beyond its traditional boundaries and identity.

An overview of the complex world of John Donne's poetry and specifically of his reflections on the theme of the journey of the soul. Donne's Metempsychosis and his Anniversaries are analysed from both a literary and philosophical/theological perspective, in the context of the rising new science.

This volume offers a close analysis and textual study of Vico’s complex intellectual trajectory before the Scienze Nuove. Particular attention is devoted to the three books of Diritto Universale, as they mark a significant step in the redefinition of the relationship between metaphysics and philosophical questions of law. In Vico, we witness the connection – rather than the juxtaposition – between natural and historic law, and a new notion of the natural right of people that theorizes the historic right of nations. The modernity of Vico’s thought originates from his attempt to unify human and divine knowledge. As thoroughly discussed in this volume, Vico’s conception of the ‘verum’ aims precisely at combining history with those ‘human ideas’ that constitute a human history lived ethically in the experience of religion.

What is the current status of the human body in the digital era? Taking this question as a starting point, the book explores how our perception of the body has been modified by the advent of new media (videogames, transmedia platforms, ARGs), by the rise of recent devices such as wearable technologies,Virtual Reality, cosmetic surgery and by the creation of different narratives such as science-fictions, and TV series. Which kind of identities emerge within this context? How is our body image disseminated? In the ‘Post-Cinematic’ or ‘Post-Media’ condition, the body becomes a changeable, flexible, ‘unstable object’. The first part of this volume analyses the presence of body in the field of television/film and in social media (changes, aesthetics, new spaces); the second part focuses on the relationship between the digital media and the viewer/user, showing how the spectator’s body is subject to a constant shape modification.

Who is the Subaltern in the current global frame? Has neoliberalism changed the experience of subalternity? How do subalterns write history and what kind of history is written about subalternity? Cinéma& Cie's special issue addresses these and other questions through various theoretical approaches. The essays argue for the importance of a multidisciplinary perspective and address issues of media representation from a variety of perspectives, such as visual culture, history, philosophy, and postcolonialism. They focus on contemporary subalternity, especially on the migrant – characterized by diaspora and condemned to invisibility by hegemonic power – and the postcolonial subaltern – who has now the possibility to express her/himself in unexpected ways, in particular by using new media. The scattering and pervasiveness of media devices and gazes is discussed in depth in these essays, which delve into the dialectic between subaltern cultures and agency embodied in the subjects of representation.

Many voices today call for a profound rethinking of European identity. If we wish to answer their call, however, it is necessary to start with a reconsideration of the notion of boundaries, particularly as they are at work in the Mediterranean region. The knowledge and cultural values of the Mediterranean may be the driving force able to overcome the impasse from which Europe seems unable to free itself. This volume focuses on the opportunity to employ Mediterranean knowledge and cultural values as a stimulus for the review of European policies, in the interest of creating a solid bridge between different cultural legacies and over the daunting challenges of our shared future. This means being able to stay – simul – outside and inside the borders, within and beyond the “un”- limit; looking for an image of Europe which finally stops thinking about the Mediterranean as its internal vulnus, as its lesion and contamination. This volume suggests how it is possible to think both inside and outside of borders, combining the ‘foreign’ forces of promiscuity, exchange, latency, expectancy and hope, with a ‘domestic’ circulation of thought and knowledge, in the interest of a defense of all cultures and of an egalitarian recognition of the right to dignity.

Reducing Boundaries offers a new perspective on an often under researched topic: what is the upper and middle classes perception of their own security? While human sciences have mainly focused on poor and low-middle classes evicted from urban space, Reducing Boundaries explores the strategies that the most privileged classes enact in order to preserved their own (real or perceived) security. In the context of an interdisciplinary framework of analysis and through a series of case studies (from Porto Alegre, to Brussels, to Venice), class-specific security measures and policies are considered both in themselves, and in terms of their impact of the urban fabric of cities and on the lives of the different social groups involved. This book crowns a four-year international project funded by the European Research Agency.

The anthology explores contemporary women’s cinema in relation to issues related to gender and globalization. The anthology gathers scholars from several parts of the world – from Italy, the USA, Turkey, Iran, Greece, New Zealand, Argentina, Germany and Canada. Such a global perspective is mirrored in the book’s content: the essays consider women’s production in the domain of cinema by looking at various films and filmmakers around the globe and by tackling the relation between national, transnational and global contexts in film production. What comes out is a multifaceted picture showing that women filmmakers, and especially non- Western filmmakers, are key social actors able to narrate the complexities of the current geopolitical condition and of its subjects. Table of Contents: Introduction Veronica Pravadelli PART I: WOMEN’S CINEMA AND NATIONAL/TRANSNATIONAL/GLOBAL SCENARIOS1. Traumatic Dystopian Futurist Scenarios: Documentary Film, Gender, an Witnessing in Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured LandscapesE. Ann Kaplan 2. Female Friendship, Globalization and Women’s Filmmakingin the MediterraneanVeronica Pravadelli 3. Gendered Borderlands: Screens as Contact Zones in Contemporary Women’s Cinema in IndiaNeepa Majumdar 4. Global Change as a Scenario in Recent Films by British Women DirectorsAntonia Lant 5. Crossingthe (Inner) Borders: Aesthetics and Identity Policies in Contemporary European CinemaIlaria A. De Pascalis PART II: WOMEN’S CINEMA AND NATIONAL CINEMAS6. Everyday Labyrinths: Bodies of Memory in the Films of Verónica ChenAdrián Pérez Melgosa 7. No Country for Women? The Place of Top of the Lake and Perfect Strangersin New Zealand CinemaHilary Radner 8. Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Greece ElizaAnna Delveroudi 9. Perceptions of Feminismin Iranian Women’s CinemaSomayeh Ghazizadeh PART III: THEORIES AND FORMS OF AUTHORSHIP10. Colonial Imaginaries: White Women and World Cinema AuthorshipPatricia White 11. The Sound of Place/The Place of Sound: Lucrecia Martel’s Acoustic ImaginaryKathleen M. Vernon 12. Out of Step with Autobiographical Temporality: The Politics of the Affective in Petra Costa’s ElenaLuz Horne 13. The Topographies of Ethnicity in Kym Ragusa’s Passing, fuori/outside, and The Skin Between UsSabrina Vellucci 14. Subversive Strategies in Lucrecia Martel’s CinemaUta Felten 15. Visual Encounters in Lost and Delirious and Blue Is the Warmest ColorMaria Anita Stefanelli PART IV: WOMEN’S CINEMA AND NEW FORMS OF PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION16. Her Blog: Women’s Cinema in the Digital AgeRosanna Maule 17. Women Make Movies and the Politics of Contemporary Feminist Film DistributionKristen M. Fallica 18. NestingInstincts? Women Filmmakers and TV Directors in TurkeyMelis Behlil Biographies

“It will then be clear that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing of which it only needs to possess the consciousness in order really to possess it.” Karl Marx One of the greatest unsolved issues that Karl Marx bequeathed to his interpreters concerns the legitimacy of practical and theoretical hope, both in the frame of his thought and in the wider horizon of philosophy. The entire Marxian work seems to be enigmatically suspended between the opposite dimensions of science and hope. The interpretative lines chosen by Ernst Bloch and Karl Löwith see in Marx a philosopher of hope more than a philosopher of science; and these reflections recognise the inevitable utopian tension in relation to which science is a secondary and functional phenomenon. They both claim that hope is at the heart of Marx’s thought; however, given the antithetic views about this feeling held in their philosophical reflections, they end up with an opposite evaluation of hope.

The three essays that comprise this volume explore literary representations of the ‘True Womanhood’ ideology, a narrative through which nineteenth-century women could invest their existence and their role in the world with meaning and purpose. In Victorian America, middle-to-upper-middle-class women were not admitted to centers of public power. Being relegated to the private sphere, i. e., the domestic milieu, they had only one socially respectable function – that of a wife and mother – while the masculine sphere of action was the public one, the realm of business and politics. This rigid role differentiation, which affirmed the social supremacy of men over women, was allegedly sanctioned by God and by nature as well. Being divinely ordained, it would tolerate no refutation: as Barbara Welter perceptively noted, "If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex virtues, which made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as an enemy of God, of civilization and of the Republic".

The starting point of Joseph Margolis’ last philosophical effort is represented by the problem of the human “gap” in animal continuity: “There appear to be no comparable variants of animal evolution [..

The papers collected in this volume deal with the explorations of Science Fiction, Fantasy and, more generally, the representation of otherness through the narrative construction of fantastic, imaginary, appalling or attractive places, stories and figures. Contributions are arranged in four main sections. The first section (Other spaces, new worlds) deals with Hindi and Arabic Science Fiction. The second section (Constructing forms of otherness) analyses the narrative and psychological mechanisms that give forms to a stereotype or archetypical image of the threatening Other. The third section ((Re)shaping style(s), language(s) and discourse(s) of otherness) is centred on the idea of language as a tool to build up styles, genres and texts, and literature as an escape from disappointing history and a cross-cultural wandering space of narrative ghosts. The fourth section (Circulating fearful otherness) tests the limits and heuristic potential of a philological approach in reconstructing the wide circulation of motifs and characters from antiquity to (post-)modernity.

The publication will investigate the multiple interactions between the written word and images. Literary works (drama, fiction, poetry, essays), films, photography and the fine arts will be studied with a comparative approach. The interrelationship between word and image will also be analysed according to the various types of occurrences: ekphrasis (narrative description of artistic objects); imagology (stereotypical images, orientalism, exoticism); cultural, rhetorical and symbolic constructs (Shakespearian imagery); filmic, digital or televised transpositions and adaptations of literary works; intermediality (mixed media works). Moreover, another field of investigation explored will be the digital world (e-archives, blogs embedded in literary worls, webliterature, twitterliterature, hipertexts).

Social life in organizations significantly relies on situations and atmospheres. Despite the high practical relevance, so far no attempts have been made to theoretically capture situations and atmospheres in organizations in a systematic manner. Aside from the difficulty of locating the situation or atmosphere within a dichotomy of subject and object, this seems mainly due to the complex interweaving of situations and atmospheres that is constitutive of organizations. While, for instance, architecture explores the atmospheric setting within which situations take place, organizations are themselves a social entity and in this sense coincide with the situation shared by its members. Against this background, this book examines the social dynamics in the formation of situations and atmospheres. Theoretically, the book is primarily based on the phenomenological works of Hermann Schmitz and Guido Rappe.

This special issue of Cinéma& Cie focuses the topic of post-cinema taking for granted the background of this notion that animated the recent debate revolving around it. The aim of the volume is thus rather to ask which ontologies, if any can, do the moving image justice in a situation in which the cinema is merely one of many configurations of film, which other theoretical frameworks may be appropriate and which modes of temporality, and of historiography and analysis can account for the steady transformation of film’s varying configurations. While the most productive accounts of post-cinema rarely trace this filiation in an explicit fashion, the label is closely related to the concept of post-media as developed by Félix Guattari in the early 1990s, later adapted into art, media theory, new and screen media. Highlighting the importance of bridging post-cinema and post-media, the volume addresses the post-what and post-when of post-cinema providing original arguments and categories enabling to envisage the next step to be taken in film theory.