The war of 1870 in the pattern of Franco‐German relations

The worlds of the living and the dead might seem irrevocably cut off from one another. Nevertheless, an important strand of modern thought attempts to find some form of intelligibility emanating from the dead. Paul de Man's discussion of prosopopoeia suggests the possibility of giving voice to the dead, though this turns out to be a form of delusion inherent in language. Emmanuel Levinas, arguing against Heidegger, seeks to maintain a relationship with the other beyond death, and Giorgio Agamben tries to find meaning in the silent testimony of victims of the Holocaust. This article examines these various attempts to mediate with the dead and suggests that it may be impossible to eliminate the risk of imposing our own words on those who cannot speak. However, a readiness to be surprised by unanticipated meanings may be the necessary condition to finding signifying sources outside ourselves.     

‘New Public Management’ and the Academic Profession: Reflections on the German Situation

This essay considers recent implications of ‘new public management’ (NPM) strategies for the universities of Germany. It argues that NPM poses a threat to the traditional values of the academic profession, and asks what the universities should do to restore public trust in their methods and management.     

The Managerial Turn in Higher Education? On the Interplay of Organizational and Occupational Change in German Academia

The managerial turn in academia is currently broadly discussed. Based on empirical data gathered from a sample that includes all German universities, we can give a broad and fine-grained account of this turn. What we can clearly see is that whole new categories of administrative management positions have been created over the last years. Furthermore, within the non-academic staff we can see a profound restructuration. Lower-level positions like those for clerical work decreased, while higher-level positions in the administration increased. However, and in contrast to studies of countries, we do not observe a general shift from academic to non-academic positions. In addition to the statistical analysis of survey data and personnel data, we conducted seventy in-depth interviews with heads of administrative management units, in particular those being created over the last two decades, for example, on quality control, technology transfer, and career service. Although we clearly see important changes indicating a managerial turn in higher education, core characteristics of a professional organization whose basic processes are ultimately controlled by academics and not by administrators or managers have been retained. These findings call for further cross-national research.     

German Professors’ Motivation to Act as Peer Reviewers in Accreditation and Evaluation Procedures

Minerva - Acting as a reviewer is considered a substantial part of the role-bundle of the academic profession (quality assurance (QA) and quality enhancement (QE) role). Research literature about...     

Rising Above Institutional Constraints? The Quest of German Accreditation Agencies for Autonomy and Professional Legitimacy

European quality assurance has a complicated history that must be viewed as taking place on two levels: first, in a national effort to deregulate the public sector and to make universities accountable for their teaching performance; and second, a supranational endeavor to accomplish European integration in the field of higher education. Similarly, the web of institutional constraints and opportunity structures in which accreditation agencies are embedded spans two policy levels, the national and the European. In this paper, we examine how German accreditation agencies achieve some level of autonomy in a highly entrenched institutional environment. The paper is based on a qualitative study comprising archival data and over 70 semi-structured interviews. Drawing on the insights of neo-institutional theory, we argue that quality assurance agencies seek political leverage at the European level in order to strengthen their standing in the higher education systems of their own countries.     

Old Men and the Memorial Hall

At 9 o'clock on the morning of October 4th 1940, a Japanese plane approached to Quzhou City at an altitude of 300 meters. It dropped a great number of wheat kernel, soybean, millet, rag, cotton, small paper bags (each contained about 10 fleas), and flyers. From October 10, residents in the city proper found many dead mice. The plague strangled the city. In 1941, Japanese planes dropped bombs on Quzhou City day and night, driving residents to countryside. The plague had spread to rural areas     

On the Real Limits of Self‐consciousness: Gazing Back at the Subversive Subject with Marco Bellocchio

Abstract

This article looks at Marco Bellocchio’s 2002 film My Mother’s Smile to re‐assess the central feature of Bellocchio’s cinema, i.e. its attempt to delineate a subjective strategy of subversion against a social order perceived as fundamentally repressive. In line with the director’s previous output, the film takes the Catholic Church and the family as its explicit polemical targets, endeavouring to unmask the nefarious ideological pressure they exercise on the ordinary individual in today’s Italian society. However, my reading draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to try and locate the disavowed (unconscious) kernel of Bellocchio’s narrative. Deploying Lacan’s controversial musings on ‘the gaze’, ‘desire’ and ‘femininity’, I suggest that the true stance of rebellion voiced by the film’s protagonist hinges on his recognition that the inconsistency of the ideological predicament he consciously struggles against paradoxically coincides with the traumatic inconsistency at the heart of his own attitude of defiance.     

Money and moneyness: thoughts on the nature and distributional power of the ‘backbone’ of capitalist political economy

This paper contends that political economy may profit from an understanding of money that is both able to account for its systemic importance as well as money’s specific role for the contemporary distribution of wealth. ‘Money-ness’ is a strategic factor in profit-making and capital accumulation. If we accord moneyness to all those instruments that make the repackaging of credit and other financial assets and liabilities and their capitalization possible, we arrive at an understanding of money that underscores the Marxian analysis of the structural importance of the money relation for capital accumulation that is up to speed with current financial innovations. As a social structure and process, moneymaking through capital permeates society. As a public-private deal between the state, rentiers, banks, and taxpayers that has existed since the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, it binds these actors together in shifting relations of dependence. Under financial capitalism today, what counts as money and how far moneyness stretches into the realms of financial innovation has been a core object of struggle in the public-private deal of money creation.     

Structural investigations and analyses for the conservation of the ‘Arsenale’ of Venice

Systematic interventions are being planned and progressively designed on most buildings of the Arsenale of Venice, the Venetian republic’s shipyard, a very large complex of docks and sheds of peculiar construction characteristics. These renovation interventions are required in view of new uses for the revitalizing of that area, which is currently almost completely neglected. In the paper, after a general presentation of the main properties and of the most relevant deterioration phenomena of the principal parts of the monumental area, the methodology that is being used for the structural diagnosis, for the implementation of guidelines for the future interventions and for the maintenance of the restored conditions are presented. Some preliminary results, given by experimental tests performed both in situ and in laboratory on materials and structural elements, and by FE simulations, are discussed.