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This short chapter provides an overview of Queer exceptions: solo performance in neoliberal times, and locates the study in relation to debates concerning solo performance, individuality, neoliberalism and the politics of exceptionality.

This chapter examines subsequent developments in idealist metaphysics. It begins with a discussion of Personal Idealism, paying particular attention to Pringle-Pattison's objections to Absolute Idealism, and to McTaggart's timeless world of individual and loving spirits. Noting that Absolute Idealism too continued to develop, close attention is given to the metaphysical system of Bosanquet. These two accounts are brought together in a detailed examination of the Aristotelian Society debate that took place between Bosanquet and Pringle-Pattison. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the various ways in which Idealism responded to the ‘new realism’ of such figures as Russell, Moore, and Samuel Alexander which have often but erroneously been thought of as ‘refuting’ it.

The introduction traces the relations between burial practices and the rise of the polis in ancient Greece to show that the creation of the city-state was accompanied by an exclusion of dead bodies from urban zones. The city, it seems, was grounded in the difference between life and death. The chapter also describes the importance of tragedies to the civic life of fifth-century Athens, since they were spectacles that staged the state's origins and pondered the legitimacy of its legal structures. In a dissimulated way, the status of the individual and the value of his or her private life played a crucial role in these deliberations. Sophocles's Antigone exemplifies these issues, and to better understand the relations between tragedy, the city, death, and individual life, we should consider not only the play and its historical context, but also the long and rich history of its exegesis, especially in the wake of Hegel's pivotal analysis.

As has been remarked by Hegel, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and others, Antigone stages a tension between two different formulations of individuality, one more archaic and mythical, the other more modern and political. Chapter One shows how that basic antinomy simplifies tensions in the play, which themselves expressed a cultural moment in which the notion of individuality – and the means for conceiving it – were elusive and often contradictory. Beginning with a description of the civic importance of tragedies that includes a reading of Aeschylus's Eumenides, the chapter situates Hegel's readings of Antigone within that historical context and then focuses on Sophocles's play itself.

By examining the notion of philia in fifth-century Greece and Antigone's fascination with her own death, Chapter Five refines our understanding of the ways in which Sophocles's play struggles to identify the value of a living individual. The key to this value, hinted at but never entirely expressed in Antigone, would lie in the affection felt for a person in his or her uniqueness. Desire – and especially feminine desire – would thus express that value, but within the play the importance of interpersonal desire can be validated only through the death of the heroine herself. Once again, the significance of an individual life can be asserted only through its extinction. The reading in this chapter contextualizes Sophocles's play through reference to Aeschylus's Seven against Thebes and Euripides's Suppliant Women. It also includes an extended analysis of Hegel's notion of war in relation to tragic representations of the city.

Chapter 8 is the first of three chapters that make up ‘Part III’ of the book. This part focuses on issues of lyric subjectivity. As the first chapter in this part, Chapter 8 builds a conceptual and theoretical basis that will underpin the poetic case studies offered in the subsequent two chapters. This chapter sets up a frame that positions aestheticist lyric between the legacy of an introspective Hegelian lyric subjectivity that surfaced in British Romantic poetics, and the growing anxiety that prompted the discovery of more communal poetic forms within lyric. Complicating scholarly narratives that see mid-century dramatic monologues as the quintessential nineteenth-century response to such anxieties, this chapter proposes the model of ‘desire lines’ (taken from urban geography) to recognise the capacity of lyric poems of the period to invoke models of lyric chorus, rather than lyric solipsism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson preferred to think in general and cosmic terms – a scale that he called ‘the old largeness’ – rather than restricting his thought to corruptible national forms. This chapter argues that Emerson’s fundamental concern was the development of individual consciousness, not the separation of American literature from ‘the courtly muses of Europe.’ His most nationally oriented book, English Traits (1856), actually rejects the pursuit of national identity in England as ‘narrow,’ reactionary, and deadly to individual personality. Emerson’s aversion to nationality grew out of his horrified response to the national institution of the Fugitive Slave Law, against which he lectured on several significant occasions during the 1850s. His admiration for the ‘poetic’ imagination that Abraham Lincoln displayed in his work of emancipation in the 1860s renewed his faith in the United States.

This chapter focuses on the main contents and themes developed in the blog. Here, the body is identified as the recurring theme in blogger’s identity construction. Indeed, the blog is conceived as an attempt at recollecting the scattered pieces of the body, as it allows the description of feelings and emotions, which are considered the true attributes of one’s individuality. At the same time, the body is re-imagined in the forms of animals, objects, Egyptian goddesses and small children, as a means of taking refuge from the constraints of daily reality. While autofictional authors worldwide are often accused of exhibitionism and narcissism, the study argues that for these Egyptian bloggers, writing the body is political because it displays in public how power is imposed on their bodies. The chapter also elaborates on the fact that writing the body on the blog was conducive to the exposure of the body in the 25^th January uprising, as evidenced by the mobilisation for Khaled Said’s (Khālid Saʿīd) murder at the hands of the police, the public discussions on sexual harassment, and Aliaa al-Mahdi’s (ʿAlyāʿal-Mahdī) nude pictures on her blog Mudhakkirat Thaʾira (A Rebel’s Diary, 2011–).

This chapter—the first in a two-chapter section, “The Individual and the Mass”—views the 1611 city comedy The Roaring Girl through the lens of the two most influential modern commentaries on mass entertainment: Walter Benjamin’s essay “Work of Art” and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s essay “Culture Industry.” These Frankfurt School theorists help us recognize The Roaring Girl’s stake in exploring the crisis for individuality that its own mass audiences provoke. But The Roaring Girl also anticipates and critiques the Frankfurt School’s bias toward a totalizing vision of the mass audience.

Duplication occurs at all levels of phenotypic organization. It was among the first developmental phenomena to attract the attention of biologists interested in phenotypic transitions during evolution. Duplication and repetition of similar segments, or metamerism, appeared in the writings of Aristotle, Cuvier, Owen, and Darwin, and many early twentieth-century authors discussed it (reviewed in Lauder, 1981). More recently it has become a major theme in discussions of genetic diversification (e.g., Ohno, 1970; Weiss, 1990). Nijhout (1991a) considers iteration or redundancy of parts followed by divergence of the replicates “the major principle of morphological evolution.” But it is not easy to rank modes of origin in order of their importance, because it is so easy to reclassify examples from different points of view. Just as heterochrony can be emphasized by focusing on the timing aspect of any regulatory change (as discussed in chapter 13), duplication can be emphasized by focusing on the iterative aspect of repeated expression at different times, places, or contexts. Phenotypic recombinations classified in these chapters as heterotopy, heterochrony, cross-sex transfers, or correlated shifts could be reclassified as duplications, since many are reexpressions of the same trait in a new place or context without loss of the original trait. Similarly, pleiotropy can be described as the duplicated expression of genes (Hamburger, 1980). This chapter focuses mainly on adjacent duplications that result in serial repetitions—serial homologues, or “iteration” (Nijhout, 1991a). Heterotopy, or nonadjacent duplication within the same individual and life stage, is discussed in chapter 14, even though the separation is somewhat arbitrary. The differences in position and surroundings that result in differences in phenotypic pattern are, in their effects, regulatory differences, and it is just such local differences that cause developmental processes to diverge. It is a difference in regulation, then, that causes duplicates to diverge phenotypically and ultimately renders them subject to diverging selection and divergent evolution. One could reason from this that divergence between duplicates is virtually inevitable given enough time, because the local developmental environments on all sides of duplicate parts would rarely be absolutely identical over long periods.

Some of the best evidence for combinatorial evolution comes from studies of molecular evolution. This chapter discusses combinatorial molecular evolution and shows that it is facilitated by the same properties of the molecular phenotype—modularity and flexibility—that facilitate combinatorial evolution at higher levels of organization. This is not a review of molecular or genomic evolution, and I am aware that by the time it is published it will lack the latest references even on the few topics discussed. I suspect that continued progress will only make the main point of this chapter more obvious: in many respects, evolution at the molecular level follows the same pattern as that seen at higher levels of organization, for it involves modular reorganization and developmental plasticity as architects of evolutionary change. A combinatorial view of structural change has long been commonplace in chemistry, since all of the materials of the organic and inorganic world come from different combinations of only 112 elements listed in the periodic table. Since biochemistry and molecular biology focus on the fundamentally modular structure and behavior of biological molecules, it is perhaps not surprising that they arrived early at a combinatorial view of evolution, and that it was a molecular biologist (Jacob, 1977) who described evolution as “tinkering” with preexisting pieces. The lowest level of combinatorial evolution is based on the “changeability” of the genetic code— its ability to undergo rearrangement without loss of functionality (Maeshiro and Kimura, 1998). A reorganizational basis for some kinds of mutation was also proposed by premolecular geneticists like H. J. Muller (see discussion of this work in Huxley, 1942, p. 92), who saw minute rearrangements as a kind of mutation distinguishable from “substantive” change of the chromosomal-damage type caused by ultraviolet radiation. More recently, Dickinson (1988) refers to a “combinatorial” model for the evolution of gene regulation. And genetic engineering makes extensive use of combinatorial principles in creating novel substances and genes.

Modularity, like the responsiveness that gives rise to it during development and evolution, is a universal property of living things and a fundamental determinant of how they evolve. Modularity refers to the properties of discreteness and dissociability among parts and integration within parts. There are many other words for the same thing, such as atomization (Wagner, 1995), individualization (Larson and Losos, 1996), autonomy (Nijhout, 1991b), dislocation (Schwanwitsch, 1924), decomposability (Wimsatt, 1981), discontinuity (Alberch, 1982), gene nets (Bonner, 1988), subunit organization (West-Eberhard, 1992a, 1996), compartments or compartmentation (Garcia-Bellido et al., 1979; Zuckerkandl, 1994; Maynard-Smith and Szathmary, 1995; Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998), and compartmentalization (Gerhart and Kirschner, 1997). One purpose of this chapter is to give consistent operational meaning to the concept of modularity in organisms. Seger and Stubblefield (1996, p. 118) note that organisms show “natural planes of cleavage” among organ systems, biochemical pathways, life stages, and behaviors that allow independent selection of different ones. They ask, “What determines where these planes of cleavage are located” and suggest that a “theory of organic articulations” may give insight into the laws of correlation, without specifying what the laws of articulation may be. Wagner (1995, p. 282) recognizes the importance of modularity and proposes a “building block” concept of homology where structural units often correspond to units of function, but concludes (after Rosenberg, 1985) that “there exists no way to distinguish an adequate from an inadequate atomization of the organisms.” Here I propose that modularity has a specific developmental basis (see also West-Eberhard, 1989, 1992a, 1996; see also Larson and Losos, 1996). Modular traits are subunits of the phenotype that are determined by the switches or decision points that organize development, whether of morphology, physiology, or behavior. Development can be seen as a branching series of decision points, including those caused by physical borders such as membranes or contact zones of growing or diffusing parts (e.g., see Meinhardt, 1982; see also chapter 5, on development). Each decision point demarcates the expression or use of a trait—a modular set—and subordinate branches demarcate lower level modular subunits, producing modular sets within modular sets.