SUMMARIES 1/06

Søren Kierkegaard: Prefaces. An Extract of the preface. This book, published under the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene, consists of a preface, a postscript and eight short chapters, each of which is like a preface of its own. Nicolaus Notabene claims that the most important task of a philosopher is not to present a complete system of thought, but to challenge readers to think on their own. The “prefaces” of Prefaces do not precede any particular works, but stand as their own small pieces of writing and function as invitations to or experiments in thought. The style is satiric, the author makes fun of Hegelian philosophy as well as contemporary Danish cultural life. The translated chapter is an extract from the book’s preface, where the concept of “preface” is defined, and the first chapter, where the author reflects on the preconditions and possible consequences of publishing a book.

Roberta Sassatelli: Contested Commodities. Commoditization, De-commoditization and their Limits. In this paper I consider commoditization and its twin, de- commoditization, as two entangled registers of meanings and institutionally embedded frames of relevance, to the point that the cash nexus is intertwined with, rather than opposed to, trust and intimate relations. To capture the complexity of the processes of consumption, I thus propose to consider consumption as a context of ‘re- framing’ whereby goods are ‘keyed’ as other than commodities: through a variety of de-commoditization practices social actors enter into a dialog with the market, and even battle against it, to appropriate standardised commodities and to transform them into goods with personal meaning. While not an essence, the commodity frame is thus hegemonic in contemporary culture: and this is not because it ‘colonizes’ all as apocalyptic views maintain, but because it sets the (often negative) reference point against which the identities of consumers are constituted. I will also look at some examples of how, on the background of the object/subject dialectic which is expressed by the notion of consumer sovereignty, commoditization is bounded and consumption as de-commoditization is normalized.

Markku Koivusalo: The Dispersed Immateriality of Thought. Today many social scientific studies claim to be “foucaultian”. Foucault’s one and only properly methodological book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, which after almost 40 years from its original publication has now been translated to Finnish, has become a kind of classic of discourse studies. However, it is clear that Foucault’s archeology of discourses is something very different from what is usually done under discourse analysis. What kind of discourse analysis is then the subject mater of Archaeology of Knowledge? What were the fields of discourse and the archives of knowledge (savoir) that formed its own conditions of discourse? What was the discursive effect that the book tried to create? The article explores the archaeology of The Archaeology of Knowledge. It maps the fields of discourse and the strategies by which the book tried to separate itself from other historical and philosophical studies. It relates its theories to the discursive struggles of the 60’s and places it in the context of Foucault’s general philosophical project.

SUMMARIES 2/2006
 

ILPO HELÉN: Deposits on Future Life. The Political Economy of Molecular Medicine. The paper presents a few observations of political aspects of biobanks and molecular medicine in general. It is argued that the biobanks epitomise the promissory character of today's high-tech medicine, since the collected tissue samples and the health and genomic information stored in da­tabases stand for potentials of both life itself and of medical technology. Starting by this premise, relationship of the bio­banks and personalised medicine is discussed, as well as the role of biobanks and the expectations of molecular medicine in the making of both public health policy and innovation policy. 
  

AARO TUPASELA: Tissue Economies and Commercial Models -The Changing Terms of Biomedical Research. This article explores the ways in which the biomedical use of human tissue collections are becoming increasingly premised on commercial mo­dels.  Using the case of the Finnish Genome Information Center, a major research center project that is in the final planning stages, I argue that researchers and government experts are con­textualizing their arguments within a commercial paradigm which they present as necessary for economic development.  Interestingly, however, the commercial paradigm is strongly linked to notions of reciprocity towards both research patients and tax payers in general. The article concludes by questioning whether commercialization and privatization represents reciprocity.

MIANNA MESKUS: The promise of genetic knowledge. Genetic knowledge has brought with it promises of making illness and deviance, as well as health and normality, knowledgeable and governable in a more profound way. The far-reaching effect of human genetics has become evident in particular in the field of medicine: in efforts to find genetic causes of ever more diseases and to develop new medicines and gene therapy. Here, genetic knowledge and the medical promises it offers are discussed in the context of the welfare policy of the 1990's. I explore the ways in which new biomedical technologies are viewed and legitimated in relation to the reorientation of welfaristic health services towards im­prov­ed cost-effectiveness. The article shows that genetic knowledge is viewed as a means to enhance individual capacities to govern one's own life and to make risk assessments concerning the health of one's own and one's potential children. As a conclusion, the pro­ble­matics of promise is discussed from the perspective of government through freedom and the production of spectacles of self-control.

THEME: Nancy and image. These articles aim at clarifying the notion of "image" in the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. The conceptual genesis of "image" has a central part in the history of philosophy. These articles are following the way  Nancy's  thinking of image upfolds as a "de­con­struction" of that history. In brief, in this context the notion of image only emerges by viewing a "real" image as a particular pictorial configuration, not as an image in general or as an idea. As such, the  notion of "image" has moved to the center of Nancy's thinking only during the last few years. It can be related to the ontological reflection, which Nancy has taken up concerning the notions of body (corps), sense (sens), and exposition. Further, the notion of image  brings to the fore something that cannot be reduced to the "onto­logy of bo­dies". While the "ontology of bodies" was con­centrateing on the way the bodies touch each other, the theory of image reflects on the image in so far as it is irreducebly distinct and disconnected from the world of bodies. According to writers in this issue, image is no not touching, rather it urges to consider the distance, which the touch is presupposing, and in fact creates. Possibly, as the writers suggest, henceforth the distance of the image might also be the condition of possibility of thinking.

SUMMARIES 3/2006
 

THEME: Tocqueville's Democracy in Ame­rica in Finnish. Alexis de Tocqueville's classical work De la démocratie en Amérique  (1835-1840) has finally been translated and published in Finnish (Demokratia Ame­rikassa, Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2006). In this symposium three Finnish historians and two sociologists comment on Tocque­ville's magnum opus. Although De la dé­mo­cratie en Amérique has not been available in Finnish until now, it had influence on Finnish political and philosophical discussions already in the 19th century. The Hegelian philosopher J. V. Snellman (1806-1881) - the Finnish national philosopher - was not only Tocqueville's contemporary, but he had read the early Swedish translation (published in six volumes 1839-1846) and cited it in his principal work on political philosophy, Läran om Staten (1842).

ARI KORHONEN: Democracy to come. A Reading of Jacques Derrida's thinking of the political - or how to count one's friends? Especially in his later works Derrida treats the problem of the political. One of his claims is that fraternity is the underlying structure of western political community. The other is always excluded by this kind of community. What could then be political without fraternisation? This article pre­sents a reading of Derrida's deconstruction of the political in his later works Politiques de l'amitié and Spectres de Marx. The baseli­ne for the study is the phenomenon and the notion of friendship. According to Derrida, every political structure implicitly con­tains the frontier between a friend and the one considered not to be a friend. In western tradition, this division makes pos­sib­le the consensus of community as coun­ted votes of friends. However, this counting is not counting applied to friends as singulars but to friends defined in relation to enemies. Therefore, the question "How to count one's friends?" is the political question par excellence. It turns out that the demand of counting among singulars is ex­actly the demand of democracy: demo­cra­cy is the task of counting where counting is impossible. This is the original sense of democracy: democracy is an open, and as such, an impossible order. It is always to come.

SUMMARIES 4/2006

 

MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Power to Make Live and Take Life: The Birth of Racism. In the last part of his 1975-1976 lectures at the Collège de France Michel Fou­cault tra­ces the conditions of the birth of modern racism distinguishing between sove­reign power, disciplinary po­wer and biopower. According to Foucault the old sovereign power to take life and let live is complemented by a new regulatory biopower that consists on making live and letting die. As opposed to disciplinary power which is addressed to human bodies biopower is applied to man as living being and as a part of the human species. Foucault sets out to show how the historical and political thought of the war between races eventually becomes a part of modern biological Sta­teracism. Annihilating the biological ene­my not only removes the enemy but also improves and purifies the life of the population itself. When power fun­ctions in the mode of normalizing bio­power only racism makes killing acceptable. Fou­cault concludes by showing how racism functio­n­ed as an essential part of the mechanisms of po­wer in both the Nazi regime and socialist regimes.

MARKKU KOIVUSALO: Violence in the Era of Life. In his lecture dated 17.3.1976 "Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme" Michel Foucault related the spe­cificity of the modern racism to the bio­political technologies of life. According to Fou­cault the racism guaranteed the exercise of death in the economy of biopower. The article explores the context of this argument by analysing how and why Fou­cault treats the problematic of the discourse of war and its relation to the constitution of modern nation and society in his lectures 1975-1976: Il faut défendre la société. Fou­cault's lecture course is linked to and bears out a comparision with other theoretical readings considering the same material he is using in his argument, especially the arguments made by Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt. In the end, the article explores the relevance of Foucault's viewpoint in the contemporary world and relates his arguments to the recent discourses on humanitarian war or global war against terrorism.

TURO-KIMMO LEHTONEN: Burial as Foundation. Burial has often been regarded as one of the practices on which the generic specificity of humanity is founded. Historical and anthropological research shows, however, that the forms of this practice have varied markedly across time and space. Reading for instance Philippe Ariès' history of death in the Western world, it becomes clear that the description of the different burial practices and meanings attached to them are not able to reveal what is common to them all. In other words, the practices do not reveal their own foundational principle. Another option for studying burial as something foundational is to treat it as a philosophical question. In this article this second step is taken with Michel Serres and Robert Harrison. Their writings present rich arguments for seeing burial as something that has always already been there with the humans. Yet, it is evident that this transcendental level of argumenting presupposes the empirical cases, the concrete practices of burial; and that these practices, for their part, presuppose the trans­cendental foundation in order to be understood as burial. This reciprocal presupposition between practices and conceptualisations, manifest in the foundational discourse on burial, seems to characterise discourses on foundations more generally. All in all, the article analyses burial as a practice that in its many guises is for the human beings a foundational way to be in material relation with their own and their loved ones' death, and with the very earthliness of human life. While demarcating the sphere of the living from the sphere of the dead, burials, gravestones and cemeteries simultaneously help to define what is human, and what makes it different not only from other forms of living but also from waste and other forms of dying.

HELENA VALVE: Stabilisation of Genetically Modified Plants and the Problems of Control: a Deve­lopmental Systems View. This paper provides a heuristic understanding about stabilisation of genetically modified (GM) plants. I argue that a GM plant can survive and have the qualities expected only as a part of a developmental system which synchronises relevant biological processes and human practices into a functional order. Stabilisation of such a multilevel system is a developmental achievement and something which cannot be fully controlled. There is a risk that instability or unpredictable self-organisation follows. When sta­bi­li­sation does succeed, the outcome can be eva­luated by focusing on the possibility space the system provides. I conclude that instead of chasing some predetermined essence of a plant - as we now tend to do - it makes more sense to study the prerequisites and implications of stabilisation.