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Castoriadis's rethinking of the living being emerges as a central aspect of his shift to a trans-regional ontology of creative physis, but also as the site of relocation for the nomos/physis problematic. Increasingly, Castoriadis began to characterize the living being as “self-creating” rather than “self-organizing” and redrew the demarcation between humans and non-humans more in terms of continuity (rather than discontinuity). However, he still maintained a line of discontinuity between human and non-human modes of being, as his rejection of Francisco Varela's notion of “biological autonomy” demonstrates. In rethinking the living being, Castoriadis developed what might be called a poly-regional ontology of the for-itself, which spans human and non-human regions. The living being inaugurates the level of the for-itself, by rupturing with non-living (that is, physical) regions of being, and creating what Castoriadis called the “subjective instance”; that is, putting the physical world into meaning. Common to each level of the for-itself, is the interrelation of imagination, world and meaning. In that the world manifests itself to the living being, Castoriadis extends—and radicalizes—conventional phenomenological approaches.

This chapter explores new conceptual models to approach the work of a new generation of experimental Galician filmmakers adopting a peripheral position, understood as a conceptual, ideological,and aesthetic positioning more than merely a geolocation, which questions the mainstream hegemonic values emanating from the center while aiming to bring visibility to the fringes. It examines the boom of the so called Novo Cinema Galego (New Galician Cinema), focusing on the border crossing and blending of fiction/documentary generic conventions, and analyses the most representative cases, such as Oliver Laxe, Xurxo Chirro, Lois Patiño, Peque Varela, Eloy Enciso, and Susana Rei.

In August 1839, Hughes buys 106 acres in Rose Hill for the future campus of St. John’s College. He spends nine months in Europe raising the $30,000 he could not obtain in New York. After obtaining a state charter, Hughes celebrates the first real graduation in 1846.

This chapter examines John von Neumann’s theory of self-reproducing automata and Christopher Langton’s self-reproducing digital loops. Langton’s theory of artificial life (ALife) as a new science based on computer simulations whose theoretical underpinnings combine information theory with dynamical systems theory is contrasted with Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s theory of autopoiesis, which leads to a consideration of both natural and artificial immune systems and computer viruses.

This chapter adopts two converging strategies in order to elaborate on the problematic view contending that emotion science tends to disregard the meaning-generating role of the body and to attribute it only to separate abstract cognitive-evaluative processes. First, the idea of whole-organism-generated meaning is illustrated by drawing on the notion of sense-making in the autopoietic and adaptive system. The notion of sense-making maintained by Weber and Varela in 2002 and Di Paolo in 2005 is interpreted here as a bodily cognitive-emotional form of understanding that belongs to all living systems, and which is present in a primordial form even in the simplest ones. Arguments positing that modern emotion science overintellectualizes our capacity to evaluate and understand are then presented, showing that this overintellectualization goes hand in hand with the rejection of the idea that the nonneural body is a vehicle of meaning.

The chapter argues that of the many Guattaris – the psychoanalyst, the philosopher, the scholar of the arts, the cultural critic, and the activist – the most lasting one will be the ecologist, and it places Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies at the conceptual centre of a schizoecological tryptich that consists of Schizoanalytic Cartographies, The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis. It then traces some conceptual origins of and inspirations for what Guattari, borrowing a term from deep ecologist Arne Naess, calls his ecosophy. Other such borrowings come from the works of James E. Lovelock, Ilja Prigogine and Isabel Stengers, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Lucretius, Michel Serres and Gregory Bateson. By way of Guattari’s notion of the machinic, it then positions Guattari’s work in relation to various forms of constructivism. After delineating his own version of a schizoecologic and machinic constructivism, it shows how this schizoecology informs the schizoanalytic practices at La Borde clinic.

The massive news coverage of the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid catapulted Reies López Tijerina to the national civil rights stage almost instantly but only briefly. In the wake of the raid, Chicano movement participants felt empowered by his insistence that Spanish-speakers had a historic claim to the American Southwest. Soon he enjoyed invitations from Martin Luther King, Jr. to participate in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. For a short while, he also benefited from the advice of Maria Varela, a veteran civil rights activist. Yet in D.C. during the Poor People’s Campaign, the glare of publicity also exposed his autocratic tendencies and massive ego. Thrilled by the post-raid attention, Tijerina’s aspirations only grew. He eagerly spoke of moving beyond the land-rights agenda of the the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, the organization he had led since 1963.

Chapter 3 pursues Chapter 2’s immanent critique of the new historicism. Whereas new historicism’s bedrock is epistemology—questions about the domain of rationality—metaphysics is the province of questions about reality. The change in Romantic poetry crystallizes in effects that resist our codes not through denial, displacement, or repression—the conditions for a hermeneutics of suspicion—but through something like indifference. We see a new kind of negativity. This version of Romanticism verges on withdrawal from the scene of interpretation, resistance to the depth hermeneutics of earlier Marxist criticism. It is enabled by Spinoza’s theory of conatus; the work of Sebastiano Timpanaro, whose Marxist historicism arises from the nature and biology side; and the notion of autopoeisis of neurophysiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The relevant patterns in Romantic poetry are then illustrated through a reading of Wordsworth’s “Old Man Travelling: Animal Tranquillity and Decay.”