Search Results

This chapter discusses Stalin, who died of a stroke on March 6, 1953. It reviews the reactions of the British and Americans to the death of Stalin, and even looks at several Soviet leaders in relation to the Soviet dictator. Eisenhower's speech, which was dubbed ‘Chance for Peace’, was revealed to have gone through a series of drafts. The resulting speech stated that the West welcomed peace with the Soviets, but blamed the Soviets for the Cold War.

Chapter six argues that many of the themes and concerns that preoccupied thinkers during the Cold War persist after 1989, a persistence that it visible both in the ways the conflict is explicitly thematized, and in the ways that chance is tied to the sorts of narrative concerns animated by the Cold War. It begins with a discussion of Paul Auster’s writing, which is concerned with questions of chance and coincidence. By reading Auster in light of the preceding chapters, it becomes clear that his preoccupation with chance and his metafictional tendencies are related. From Auster’s writing, the chapter analyzes Chang-Rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker (1995), which brings tropes of accident and espionage into the present in order to analyze causal systems underwritten by the Cold War. The chapter ends with a look at My Life in CIA (2005), by Harry Mathews, a long-time expatriate and the only American member of the French avant-garde literary group, Oulipo. I show how the book turns on questions of chance and coincidence to show, in retrospect, their thematization was of a piece with the fabric of Cold War logic.

This chapter introduces the novel Chance as the current central focus of this book. Serialised in the New York Herald Sunday Magazine in 1912, and aimed at the women readers of the paper, the novel represented a turning point in Conrad's career, his first economically successful venture in reaching a wider audience and addressing the themes of gender and romance that would occupy later fiction. Conrad's creation of a central female protagonist has often been heralded as the moment when his artistic powers began to diminish. The novel has also received negative responses from those critics who see it as an unsuccessful attempt to emulate Henry James. This chapter demonstrates that Chance was a new direction in Conrad's fiction, one in which he engages in a theoretical debate with ‘The Master’ on the relationship of vision and epistemology in the presentation of women in romance.

This chapter looks at the genesis of Chance in greater detail. By studying three texts of Chance — manuscript, serial, published novel — one can gain a sense, not merely of the length of Conrad's commitment to the project, but also the nature of the experiment he engaged in. The history of Chance offers a paradigm for Conrad's artistic development from the early years of rites of passage narratives of an exclusively male discourse, through the responses to gender and genre in the late work, revealing a greater continuity in Conrad's career and establishing a serious alternative to the bifurcation of his fiction.

This chapter describes popular marketing of Conrad's fiction in highly visual contexts. In spite of the modernist emphasis on the fragmentation of vision, the new media of glossy magazines, photographs, and films ensured the endurance of hegemonic codes — of perspective, framing devices, and portraiture. Conrad examined the survival of these codes in a literal sense, looking at the ways in which traditional structures of vision contribute to the limitation of female identity, particularly within the popular genres. Conrad's unexpected contribution to an ongoing debate about female identity, in novels like Chance, Victory, The Arrow of Gold, The Rover, and The Rescue puts him in a much closer dynamic with his contemporaries, with the work of authors ranging from Warthon, James, Bennett, Galsworthy, Ford, and with the inexpensive editions of neglected popular writers.

This chapter confronts the ‘Challenge from Chance’, which has always been the main difficulty faced by libertarianism. The problem is that it is difficult to see how the mere truth of indeterminism might make room for the kind of control over the future we feel we might not have if determinism is true—in some ways, indeed, indeterminism appears to make things even worse. In this chapter, it is argued, focusing in detail on Mele’s formulation of the problem of luck, that the libertarian should make an important concession to the compatibilist, and that having made it, the way is clear for a better understanding of the sorts of alternative possibilities which really are required for agency, and therefore, for freedom. The incompatibilism which results, it is argued, can meet the Challenge from Chance.

This chapter deals with various objections to the solution to the Challenge from Chance that is offered in the previous chapter. The suggestion that a newly formulated version of the Challenge can simply be raised again against the position offered is considered and rebutted. Objections stemming from so-called ‘Frankfurt-style’ examples are also considered. It is argued that Frankfurt-style examples do not succeed in showing that a power of refrainment is not essential to agency. The idea that the wanted power of refrainment is insufficiently ‘robust’ to constitute anything more than an insignificant ‘flicker of freedom’, as charged by Fischer, is also considered and rejected.

Like Williamson, we are interested in a safety condition on knowledge that ties knowledge to the presence or absence of error in close cases. This chapter explores the connections between knowledge and objective chance within such a framework. It formulates a sceptical problem that does not rely on closure. The problem relies on a prima facie plausible principle connecting chance and modal closeness, which seems to be vindicated by ordinary notions of safety and danger. According to this principle, high-chance propositions are true in close cases. This creates sceptical trouble when we consider numerous subjects, each of whom believes a different high-chance proposition, and each of whom seems to be an equally good candidate for knowing the relevant proposition.

This chapter examines Empedocles’s idea of monstrosity in the early generation of life, when the earth spontaneously produces all sort of monstrous beings, only some of which will survive and generate viable forms of life. Empedocles intends to establish the norms of life on the process of generation and selection of monstrosities. Nature is not an artist that shapes normal life after many unsuccessful attempts. Empedocles rather sees Nature itself as the successful result of spontaneuous events that create limits and boundaries for viable life. The other major philosopher of the pre-Platonic period is Democritus. I explore his materialism and its relationship with necessity and chance. Atomists have been accused of paradoxically grounding their universe on both necessity and chance. I show that the paradox, however, is only such from the Aristotelian perspective, which aims at establishing teleology as the highest form of causality, in particular in the biological realm. Through the idea of monstrosity, Democritus grounds its atomism on the concept of the spontaneous formation of life. Beyond Empedocles, Democritus flattens even further the material ontology of nature, grounding it on the epigenetical production of normal and mostrous life alike. Through a reading of the agonistic process of life formation, monstrosity becomes the antidote to teleology.

This chapter argues that Aristotle’s enquiry on the nature and meaning of monstrosity is rooted in his positive attitude toward the knowledge of lower nature, which enjoy the same status of the science of higher beings. Heavens and earth are thus connected through the divine principle that is active throughout the whole nature. Gods thus become author of, but also responsible for, what happens in nature, and Aristotle’s argument provides the ground for every future theodicy. Monstrosity plays a major role in this philosophical approach. Aristotle develops the opposition between the normal and the abnormal development, through the concept of accidental necessity, namely the necessity that is at stake in natural processes that not always happen in the same way. Monsters are of pivotal importance in this ontological picture, because of their paradoxical ambiguity. On the one hand, they are the sign and symptom or a resistant nature, which opposes itself to Aristotle’s major ontological invention, namely the form and the final cause. On the other hand, without this hyatus between formal perfection and actual reality, nature would not exist in the way we experience it: there would be no diversity, no better and worse, no normal and monstrous. Monstrosity is necessary for Aristotle to explain nature and its ontological structure based on the substitition of dynamic forms and ends to both the static ideas of Plato and the exclusively material reality of atomists.

In this chapter, the author analyses Westminster’s development and its adoption of an open admissions policy in 1965 alongside an increasing national effort to recruit black students to independent schools. The civil rights movement and possible changes in federal tax-exemption policies for their institutions captured the attention of independent school leaders, and these leaders then increasingly sought to diversify their student bodies through shifts in policies, practices, recruitment programs, and scholarship funds including A Better Chance and the Stouffer Foundation. Westminster became a southern exemplar of this national agenda with its striking and political announcement of tis open admissions policy, but the school was also emblematic of the pragmatic desegregation politics of Atlanta. The first black students—the fearless firsts—who excelled academically, applied to Westminster as public school desegregation progressed slowly. The Westminster that awaited them had an environment that included racist traditions and a segment of white students who raised important, nuanced questions about the issues of the time.

Vera Bühlmann in this chapter inhabits Serres’s position on philosophy for architecture, suggesting that chance and necessity are not in conflict as necessity originates in chance and chance comprehends necessity. Matter in its quantum physical character is controlled by computational and chance bound calculation, but how can knowledge be new if it is rule-based. Serres’s exodic knowledge is capitalised in the case of this chapter as a way of looking at elements as coded, discretised and distributed while unaccountable and inaccessible, allowing building as an autonomous entity to be a function of rarity that is compatibility with the totality of economic and political power without dominating or being harnessed by them. Paris Hermitage project by Pa.La.Ce studio is the vehicle to discuss materiality, as this is initiated in the field of recent architectural theory, that incorporates code and a formality that is computational.

This chapter focuses on songs in which a single voice both speaks and sings. While speech is unmarked—and singing marked—in our everyday world of social interaction, the reverse holds in the world of song. If singing makes the voice conspicuous as a material phenomenon in quotidian contexts, does speech have the same effect in song? This paper seeks answers through close readings of popular-music examples across genres and eras, from Hank Williams’s recitation songs as Luke the Drifter, to Patti Smith’s literate punk, to hip-hop examples from Chance the Rapper to Beyoncé. These case studies illustrate the diverse affordances of speech-in-song, from the hipster speech-song continuums of the elite folk-revival and punk scenes, which perform their disdain for bourgeois musical decorum; to spoken passages in genres on the margins of elite taste, such as country and R&B, in which speech can index real-world vocal practices, especially those of the church; to the vocal practices of the hip-hop era, in which the boundary between speech and song is ever more permeable. Diverse as they are, the case studies as a whole reveal the ways in which speech-in-song can return opacity to the voice, disclosing its material persistence.

“Deconstruction” shares with “irony” at least one irreducible feature: in both cases, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to formalize a definition that would not by the same token disfigure beyond recognition the very thing it aims to identify for thought. This chapter approaches the chance encounter between deconstruction and irony by asking not only what is called deconstruction but also by asking whether what is called deconstruction also always calls for deconstruction. One possible response is offered by the term “la dé-construction” itself, since it can be shown to lend itself at one and the same time to a straightforward historical description and to an occasion for deconstructing the concept of history. As a disruptive occurrence or happening, deconstruction—as well as irony—can be no thing, but rather must always announce itself precisely as that which unpredictably intervenes in and alters things as they are or believed to be.

The question of the philosophical significance of irony is paradoxical to the extent that it was first posed in a theoretical manner by Friedrich Schlegel, whose own seriousness as a philosopher will always remain in doubt. This chapter examines that paradox by following the way a seminal study by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, addresses the relation between philosophy and literature within the main texts of German romanticism. Can the “non-serious” dimension of literature be addressed adequately by philosophy without being reduced to a philosophical concept of the serious that it will always also resist? The response involves a consideration of the literary “image” and the way that its appearance (Schein) both invites and interrupts philosophical comprehension. The image as it is deployed in Schlegel's texts enacts a mode of ironic fragmentation that by extension unsettles any philosophical claim to understand the limits of its own discursive practices.

The films discussed in this book are contemporary manifestations of a tradition that can be traced back to directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard – those same directors that Gilles Deleuze drew on in constructing his taxonomy of images. The appearance of a labyrinthine model of time in many of these films is particularly indebted to Alain Resnais' oeuvre, which includes such films as Providence (1977) and Smoking/No Smoking (1993). Moreover, Run Lola Run and Peppermint Candy both self-consciously acknowledge their debt to Krzystof Kieslowski's Blind Chance (1981). This book has shown, through a specific focus on particular nations, the historical shifts and resulting transformations of national identity that these films negotiate. It is no longer enough to simply posit the time-image as the European other of the American movement-image. Rather, a global picture must be considered in which these films engage with issues of national identity for both local and international markets. As a final example that illustrates the need for this localised analysis, this chapter discusses Blind Chance.

Following an extended theoretical examination of the continuing relevance of the concepts of influence and rapport de fait for comparative criticism today, this chapter provides a contrapuntal “parallactic” reading of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The focus is placed on the role of irony and “parallax” in the depiction of the main characters of these “Bildungsromane,” Wilhelm Meister and Stephen Dedalus (and, to a lesser degree, Leopold Bloom), the role and relevance of chance and coincidence in these novels, and the symbolic significance of the Icarus-motif for an interpretation of the protagonists’ development.