TIEDE & EDISTYS 1/1999 SUMMARIES

JAKKE HOLVAS: Of the limits of economy in Aristotle's thought: the good life of a munificent man. Commentaries of Aristotle's economic thought are generally focused on two aspects, namely on the first book of Politics, where Aristotle makes his distinction between value in use and value in exchance, and on the fifth book of The Nikomachean Ethics, where Aristotle discusses justice and equitable measure in exchange. This article, however, takes its standpoint from the fourth book of The Nikomachean Ethics (and of chapters 1-3 in the fourth book especially), where Aristotle's approach to the limits of economy can be found. The article tries to show that in Aristotle's writings certain ethical habits take priority over economy. It examines exchange, wealth and usefulness with regard to the matter of household management (oikonomike) and with the art of obtaining riches (khrematistike). Then the article points out that in Aristotle's philosophy the 'good life' includes a so-called 'munificence' that asks for certain specific habits; munificence cannot be found in 'bare life' that is led by someone well skilled in the art of obtaining riches. Finally, the article studies the non-economic characters: the high-minded and the noble. These almost bataillean sovereign figures prefer honourable death to life in perpetual shame.

ANITA SEPPÄ: The ethics of body and speech in the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas. The article discusses the views of ethics of Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas. It argues that the views these two thinkers have of subjectivity, the other, loving, corporality and language are considerably less divergent than what is commonly thought to be the case. Both Sartre and Levinas think that on the most fundamental level ethics is related to a sensible subjectivity that gives away its own being for the sake of others. From this standpoint they discuss the very challenging and still very present questions of how to communicate with others and how to meet them ethically. The article also criticizes some of the established interpretations on Sartre, and those made of his views of ethics, especially.

ILONA REINERS: Film, history and the memory of the body. The article discusses representations of traumatic historical events. The central argument put forward is that because of its ability to express bodily gestures, the film is a special medium for the expression of such suffering that is related to a certain kind of conflict, namely the kind of suffering that Jean-François Lyotard has described as being based on a feeling of the differend. This will be shown in a detailed analysis of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, in which the bodily gestures, songs and places have a special role in activating the bodily remembrance of the traumatic history of the holocaust. The relationship of body and traumatic past is further analysed through an analysis of memory and traumatic events, whereupon it can be seen how the film can be interpreted as an approach to involuntary memory.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 2/1999 SUMMARIES

KARI SAASTAMOINEN: Aesthetical political philosophy. The article is an introduction to Franklin Ankersmit's political philosophy. Ankersmit maintains that the mainstream ethical political philosophy practiced by John Rawls and his followers (and many adversaries as well) fails to increase our understanding of current political problems. This is the case because in reality every significant political decision has many unintentional consequences, which make it impossible to derive such decisions from some coherent set of moral principles. Instead of trying to reduce politics to ethics, Ankersmit analyses our political system and its prob-lems in aesthetical terms, concentrating especially to the concept of representation and its central role in our political culture.

MIKA OJAKANGAS: Liberalism, democracy and the total state. Carl Schmitt between identity and re-presentation. The article is an analysis of Carl Schmitt's concepts of liberalism, parliamentarism, democracy, the qualitative and the quantitative total state, identity, re-presentation, dictatorship and myth. The central argument is that it is impossible to examine these widely used concepts and conceptions without knowledge of Schmitt's basic question that concerns the fundamental nature of power. Liberalism's basic error is to conceive power as something evil and repressive. It fights against power with individual freedom as its weapon. It substitutes ethics for politics and subordinates it to the sphere of economy. Parliamentarism, on the other hand, tries to replace power with discussion. The so-called quantitative total state - unable to set a limit to its power and to distinquish between political and non-political matters - tries, in turn, to substitute material abundance for power. All this does not, however, annihilate power; instead, it just hides it. Nevertheless, the necessary pre-condition of a political unit (Einheit) is the visibility of power and this visibility or publicity is possible only through representation. According to Schmitt, every political unit is based on representation. What is represented is not, in the first place, however, the natural interests of an electorate as in a parliamentary system, but an idea. The idea, in turn, is something higher than the mere natural existence of men. However, there is no contradiction between the idea and the natural existence, insofar as, at the deepest level, they presuppose each other. What there is between them - between the transcendence and the immanence - is an irreconcilable tension. Schmitt's sovereign dictator is the figure that represents this tension, and the myth - for instance the myth of the people - is the form through which it is represented. The qualitative total state is the state (status) of that people.

SULEVI RIUKULEHTO: Economists and Early Conservationism in the United States. The article throws light on the poorly known role of American economists in formulating the conceptual background of early conservationism in the United States from 1880 to 1915. The role of the Wisconsin group of economists and especially Richard T. Ely's contributions to American economics are here presented as important exponents of the conceptual framework of early conservationism. The motives behind the actual goals of the early conservationist movement, as exemplified by John Wesley Powell and Gifford Pinchot, were technical development and technological rationalism in disguised forms. The conservation programs were started in order to exploit existing resources as rationally as possible. The heralds of conservationism did not show interest in conceptualizing the phenomena of consumption and waste. The Wisconsin economists, on the other hand, made minute definitions for consumption, waste, and conservation. They made a difference between social and individual utilities and detriments. Richard Ely, for ex-ample, talks about consumption as a general term and with various attributes (such as harmful, excessive and wasteful consumption). The exact opposite for the concept of waste could not be formulated easily, for waste does not mean only the simple consumption of things. In Ely's vocabulary it consists of a further negative influence, so the exact counterconcept should suggest not only the maintenance but also a further improvement of conditions as well as justice in distribution. Such a term in Ely's vocabulary is conservationism.

JUSSI VÄHÄMÄKI: Politics, Media and Authority. What are the specific forms and structures of action and argumentation in a political system that is constituted not as a system of representation but as a system of presentation? At stake here is a system in which the thing done and the maker or author tend to take the form of a thing (authority). The structural form of communication is a paradox or "a double bind" because it communicates without the mediation of meaningful language or community the singularity; its actual expressions are alarm, dread and anxiety, its content is command and its goal is submission without discus-sion. These are the terms that determine both the functioning of the media system and the argumentation in contemporary social sciences. It is also demonstrated that as modes of control they lead to failure and that to understand the functioning of social system it is necessary to reach beyond the simple goal of submission.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 3/1999 SUMMARIES

ULRICH BECK: The Cosmopolitan Perspective - on the Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity. In the face of a widening cosmopolitan perspective, the social sciences and Social Theory find themselves embracing contrary views and starting points. The nation state paradigm is the dominant societal paradigm, but a new paradigm, that of the world society, or of the cosmopolitan perspective, is emerging. In this article these opposing paradigms are developed and discussed using a distinction between the first and the second age of modernity. By this distinction the author distances himself from the theoretical schemes of postmodernism (the emphasis here is not on the destructuring and end of modernity, but on what is beginning and on new social science categories), challenges theories which suggest that the unfolding of modernity at the end of this millenium should be seen as a linear process of differentiation, and intends to clarify misunderstandings which have emerged in the debate on reflexive modernisation - there is a structural and epochal break, a paradigm shift, and not merely a gradual increase in the significance of knowledge and reflection. Theory and sociology of the second age of modernity elaborate, therefore, the basic assumption that towards the end of the 20th century the conditio humana opens up anew - with fundamentally ambivalent contingencies and risks which, conceptually and empirically, still have to be uncovered and understood. A new kind of capitalism, a new kind of economy, a new kind of global order, a new kind of politics and law, a new kind of society and personal life are in the making which are clearly distinct from earlier phases of social evolution. Consequently a paradigm shift in both the social sciences and in politics is required. This article, however, investigates only one aspect of this shift, namely: which social science categories make the cosmopolitan perspective possible?

ILPO HELÉN: The Liberation of Woman in the Theatre of Orgasmology. The subject of the article is the ontology of sexual difference, as presented by William Masters and Virginia Johnson in Human Sexual Response (1966) and Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970). The conception of sexual difference articulated in these milestones of orgasmology has had a profound influence on various political and ethical projects of sexual liberation since the late 1960s. In orgasmology, sexual difference refers to gender identity, and, as such a figure of identity, 'woman' is brought into focus by Masters & Johnson. According to them, there are three elements in the gender identity of the orgasmic woman: her sexual response is clitoral, her sexual experience is complex, and her sexuality is repressed. For orgasmology, 'woman' thus figured is a manifestation and embodiment of the inhibition of natural sexual response, considered both as a 'scourge' of western culture and as a personal misfortune. Masters & Johnson represent woman as the model of human orgasmic nature and potentials, as the paradigm of sexual self-sufficiency. She is also, however, the embodiment of Lack: woman is the victim of sexual repression par excellence, the whole of her sexual identity and personality is involved in her 'orgasmic dysfunctions' and in the pursuit for her own pleasure. Both in terms of sexual politics and sex therapy, 'woman' is the subject proper of the sexual liberation, because she is the subject proper of 'human sexual inadequacy', i.e., of Lack.

RISTO HEISKALA: The meaning of meaning - Saussure, Peirce and phenomenological sociology. Departing from the common view according to which structuralist semiology (the Saussurean tradition), pragmatist semiotics (the Peircean tradition) and phenomenological sociology (Husserl, Schutz, Berger & Luckmann, and Garfinkel) are seen as mutually exclusive alternatives, the article attempts to outline a synthesis of them all. The result of the synthesis is that a conception emerges where action theories (rational choice, Weber etc.) are based on phenomenological sociology, and phenomenological sociology is based on neostructuralist semiotics, which is a synthesis of the Saussurean and the Peircean traditions of understanding the habits of interpretation and interaction.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 4/1999 SUMMARIES

ALESSANDRO DAL LAGO: Nonpersons. The article claims that strangers that are illegitimate juridically and socially (regular immigrants, irregulars or clandestines, nomads, refugees), are the ones that are the most liable to be treated as nonpersons. Nonpersons are living beings, they live a life more or less similar to the lives of the citizens (of the nation state surrounding them), but they can be sentenced, against their will, to lose the status of persons. The article studies the concept of nonpersons in modern sociology, its genealogy, its place in the juridical system and the practical methods of reducing persons to nonpersons in modern, civilised western societies.

HOLGER WEISS: Jihad. War and Peace in Sunni Islam. The subject of this article are the concepts of war and peace within sunni Islam. In the West, jihad is often associated with violence and fanaticism. Muslims, however, emphasize that the real meaning of the concept is "effort towards a religiously commendable aim" and that it can be applied to both defensive warfare and peaceful activities for the sake of religion. Muslim scholars make a distinction between the "jihad of the sword" and the "jihad of the heart". Jihad is understood as a collective duty, never a mere means as such but rather a way to achieve the Pax Islamica. Therefore, the doctrine of jihad does not reflect upon the justification of war but rather upon the objectives of war. However, the legal debate has lead to a problem: jihad can only be declared by the leader of the community of the believers, namely the Caliph-Imam. The lack of an universally accepted authority has lead to a situation where peace treaties, such as the ones between Israel and the Arab countries, can be refuted as violating Islamic law.

TIINA ARPPE: Georges Bataille and the mutilated social. The article is an interpretation of two collections of writings from the works of Georges Bataille (the texts published in the reviews Documents and Acéphale in the 1930s). It tries to sketch a bataillean theory of the social by concentrating on two great problems left behind by Durkheim in his theory of religion: the problem of evil (le mal) and the question concerning the place and status of nature in the constitution of society. It shows how Bataille, by mutilating the idealized representation of the human figure, at the same time deconstructs the idealized "anthropomorphic" figure of society and the nature-object created in its image. The "fantasmatic", impure nature Bataille brings into the scene constitutes in his theory the hidden (forbidden) basis of the social, the "accursed part" of the sacred, the common experience of which lays the foundation of our social being (our être-ensemble).