Abstract: Under contemporary digital conditions, political myth operates through memes that collapse the temporal interval liberal deliberation requires. Reading the case of Luigi Mangione, I show how memetic speech acts convert resistance into spectacle, foreclosing the possibility of revolt. Drawing on theorists of myth, performativity, and revolt—from Sorel and Foucault to Barthes, Butler, and Fanon—I argue that authoritarian myths thrive on virality's affective compression, while oppositional myths are metabolized as engagement before they can mobilize rupture. The Mangione phenomenon confronts liberal complicity: when systemic violence is normalized as order, refusing counter-violence may become yet another alibi for sanctioned death.

This essay critiques the rhetorical displacement of empathy by sympathy in contemporary political discourse, especially within digital media ecologies dominated by memes, grievance, and identitarian performativity. Beginning with Elon Musk's claim that empathy is "civilizational suicide," the essay traces how sympathetic identification-rooted in sameness and affective fusion-has supplanted empathy's difficult labor of encountering difference. Drawing on rhetorical theory, affect studies, and close readings of memes, the essay analyzes how contemporary rhetorics (including on the Left) impede the slow, uncertain, and unsentimental work that empathy requires. Turning to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and theories of rhetorical empathy, the essay reframes empathy not as moral sentiment but as agonistic hearkening-a practice of nonidentical attunement amid algorithmic closure. Ultimately, it calls for rhetorical scholars to reclaim empathy as a counter-rhetorical and ontological necessity in the face of post-truth tribalism.

RationaleA 'patient-oriented' research paradigm, also known as patient and public engagement, has infiltrated the field of health sciences and continues to spread. At first blush, it is difficult to reprove anything labelled 'patient-oriented'; however, the patient-oriented paradigm may easily become an ideological 'good', leading to unintended consequences that may well prove more detrimental than beneficial. While patient-oriented research has its roots in more radical forms of patient and public engagement, its recent instantiation betrays its roots and forecloses on more radical forms of engagement, such as critical participatory research. Aim and ObjectivesThe objective of this article is to deconstruct the patient-oriented research narrative and to demonstrate how such a discourse imposes itself as a dominant approach in health sciences. ApproachFollowing Derrida's deconstructive approach, we bring to light the unexamined presuppositions, false pretences, and presumed 'goodness' and 'naturalness' of patient-oriented discourse. DiscussionBy deconstructing the patient-oriented narrative we demonstrate how pre-existing power structures (biomedical, economic, etc.) shape the conduct of the approach and serve to depoliticize the truly participatory aspects of research. Rather than being modelled on the evidence-based movement or seen as its natural 'evolution', patient-oriented research should resist by affirming itself as a radical form that is both participatory and emancipatory.

As a critical counter-reading of Michel de Certeau’s classic text, The Practice of Everyday Life, this essay argues that today, in the age of neo-liberal biopolitics, it is death that is quotidian. While “life” itself now figures as the paratactical and memetic ruse of our dominant order, the essay problematizes conventional forms of tactical resistance, claiming that resistance is often complicitous and has been co-opted in advance. It is death that must henceforth inform our struggles to make (a) life in the ruins. Examples of racialized deaths suggest a rhetorical agency, and a rallying cry, for political protest and resistance beyond the tactics of a progressive embourgeoisement.

Abstract Very few studies have focused on the role pornography plays in influencing and modelling sexual desire on the basis of race and ethnicity. Using sexual script theory as an analytic tool, the purpose of this empirical study was to explore indicators of the racialisation of desire based on a sample of gay male pornography users in Québec (Canada) (n = 974). Because gay male pornography use is widespread, and because it is not simply used for the purposes of education and validation but also influences sexual norms and cultural scripts in a social context where sexual racism seems prevalent, this study offers a new perspective on a timely phenomenon. Based on our findings, the final nested linear regression model demonstrates that higher levels of racialised desire attributed to gay male pornography use were associated with the following: being at least 55 years old; having a yearly income of less than $45,000 CAD; using interracial gay male pornography; not primarily using gender-diverse gay male pornographic content (heterosexual, bisexual, transsexual); having higher levels of perceived pressure to conform; having a higher preference for bareback pornography; and having higher levels of acquired sexual knowledge.

This paper opens with first-hand accounts of critical care medical interventions in which detainees, in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are brought to the emergency department for treatment. This case dramatizes the extent to which the provision of ethical and acceptable nursing care is jeopardized by federal law enforcement paradigms. Drawing on the scholarship of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this paper offers a theoretical account of the power dynamics that inform the health care of patients who find themselves caught in the custodial scaffolding of a vast immigration and detention apparatus. It offers an analysis of the display of sovereign and biopolitical power over the lives (and deaths) of detainees (Foucault), as well as the ways these individuals are reduced to "bare life" under the political pretext of an emergency or "state of exception" (Agamben). Our purpose here is both theoretical and practical: to better understand the often hidden agency or impersonal "will" exercised by the immigrant detention system, but also to equip clinicians in these and cognate facilities (e.g., prisons) with the critical tools by which they might better navigate incommensurable paradigms (i.e., care vs. custody) in order to deliver the best care while upholding their ethical duties as a care provider. This is all the more pressing because hospitals are not sanctuaries and given the incursion of federal law enforcement agents, nurses may find themselves conscripted as de facto agents of the state.

Various multiple-disciplinary terms and concepts (although most commonly “interdisciplinarity,” which is used herein) are used to frame education, scholarship, research, and interactions within and outside academia. In principle, the premise of interdisciplinarity may appear to have many strengths; yet, the extent to which interdisciplinarity is embraced by the current generation of academics, the benefits and risks for doing so, and the barriers and facilitators to achieving interdisciplinarity, represent inherent challenges. Much has been written on the topic of interdisciplinarity, but to our knowledge there have been few attempts to consider and present diverse perspectives from scholars, artists, and scientists in a cohesive manner. As a team of 57 members from the Canadian College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (the College) who self-identify as being engaged or interested in interdisciplinarity, we provide diverse intellectual, cultural, and social perspectives. The goal of this paper is to share our collective wisdom on this topic with the broader community and to stimulate discourse and debate on the merits and challenges associated with interdisciplinarity. Perhaps the clearest message emerging from this exercise is that working across established boundaries of scholarly communities is rewarding, necessary, and is more likely to result in impact. However, there are barriers that limit the ease with which this can occur (e.g., lack of institutional structures and funding to facilitate cross-disciplinary exploration). Occasionally, there can be significant risk associated with doing interdisciplinary work (e.g., lack of adequate measurement or recognition of work by disciplinary peers). Solving many of the world’s complex and pressing problems (e.g., climate change, sustainable agriculture, the burden of chronic disease, and aging populations) demands thinking and working across long-standing, but in some ways restrictive, academic boundaries. Academic institutions and key support structures, especially funding bodies, will play an important role in helping to realize what is readily apparent to all who contributed to this paper—that interdisciplinarity is essential for solving complex problems; it is the new norm. Failure to empower and encourage those doing this research will serve as a great impediment to training, knowledge, and addressing societal issues.

Following the mediatized death of Jamel Dunn in Florida in 2017, this paper situates the event of death within familiar cycles of moral condemnation, on the left, and the context of recursive circuits of mediatized and racialized violence, on the right. As we watch ourselves watching the boys watching (and filming) his death, the paper hopes to complicate our understanding of digital hate speech, moral subjectivity, and culpability. Between the curse of death and its recursive afterlife, it advances a tentative claim about ethical complicity across our digital media ecologies.

Introduces the central features of the book: a concentration of critical disability studies and posthuman theory; questions of embodiment and technology; the focus on twenty- and twenty-first- century literatures and twenty-first-century film. The introduction also outlines the contents of the chapters and has a particular focus on the writings of L. Frank Baum, especially The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The Conclusion focuses on debates around the end of life and transhumanist claims about the need to prolong life, in the context of debates about disability. It analyses Don DeLillo’s novel Zero K to make a series of points about cultural representation of embodiment, the end of life and disability futures.

BACKGROUND:There has been growing interest in the use of incentives to increase the uptake of health-related behaviours and achieve desired health outcomes at the individual and population level. However, the use of incentives remains controversial for ethical reasons. An area in which incentives have been not only proposed but used is HIV prevention, testing, treatment and care-each one representing an interconnecting step in the "HIV Cascade."METHODS:The main objective of this qualitative case study was to document the experiences of health care and service providers tasked with administrating incentivized HIV testing, treatment, and care in British Columbia, Canada. A second objective was to explore the ethical and professional tensions that arise from the use of incentives as well as strategies used by providers to mitigate them. We conducted interviews with 25 providers and 6 key informants, which were analyzed using applied thematic analysis. We also collected documents and took field notes.RESULTS:Our findings suggest that incentives target populations believed to pose the most risk to public health. As such, incentives are primarily used to close the gaps in the HIV Cascade by getting the "right populations" to test, start treatment, stay on treatment, and, most importantly, achieve (and sustain) viral suppression. Participants considered that incentives work because they "bring people through the door." However, they believed the effectiveness of incentives to be superficial, short-lived and one-dimensional-thus, failing to address underlying structural barriers to care and structural determinants of health. They also raised concerns about the unintended consequences of incentives and the strains they may put on the therapeutic relationship. They had developed strategies to mitigate the ensuing ethical and professional tensions and to make their work feel relational rather than transactional.CONCLUSIONS:We identify an urgent need to problematize the use of incentives as a part of the "HIV Cascade" agenda and interrogate the ethics of engaging in this practice from the perspective of health care and service providers. More broadly, we question the introduction of market logic into the realm of health care-an area of life previously not subject to monetary exchanges.

Stuart J. Murray shares this essay in response to the 2020 COVID-19 / coronavirus pandemic. Biopolitics—the “politics of life itself”—is a form of governance that represents both the medicalization of politics and the politicization of medicine. But biopolitics is not only about “life.” Within this nexus, theories of biopolitics are useful when we must critique the relation between the co-constitutive state powers that act “to make live” and “to let die.”

This text plots the analogical and memetic conveyances of the COVID-19 pandemic by the so-called alt-right. Arguing that the pandemic stages a complex transgression situated at the borders of Chinese global expansion, Traditionalist philosophy and online meme culture, and taking as instance Steve Bannon's War Room: Pandemic, we follow "the joke" that informs and deforms the claims of community, sovereignty and truth.

abstract :Written in late March 2020 in the early days of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, this essay represents a contingent reflection on the American pandemic response, mourning in anticipation of what would soon surely unfold. I argue that the State’s long-standing sacrificial economies have in this moment culminated in a suicidal State. The term is Foucault’s, appearing in a controversial lecture on biopolitics, Nazism, and “biological racism.” Despite Foucault’s problematic treatment of racism, I suggest that some aspects of this discourse might nevertheless be apropos in our context. The U.S. pandemic response is racism’s suicidal State legacy writ large: an extension and retooling of historically racist infrastructures deployed (once again, again) in racialized domains (as more recent reports evidence), but in this moment also across biosocial inequities and vulnerabilities marked by differential fungibilities other than race.

À la suite de la mort médiatisée de Jamel Dunn en Floride en 2017, le présent article situe l’événement de la mort, du côté gauche, au sein de cycles familiers de condamnation morale et, du côté droit, dans le contexte de circuits récursifs de violence médiatisée et racisée. Alors que nous nous regardons regarder les jeunes qui regardent (et enregistrent) sa mort, cet article cherche à complexifier notre compréhension des propos haineux numériques, de la subjectivité et de la culpabilité morales. Entre la malédiction de la mort et son après-vie récursive, ce travail propose un argument provisoire sur la complicité éthique traversant les écologies de nos médias numériques.

If this essay were to address a legal or juridical object, that object would be life itself. And if I concerned myself with law's power over life, in a particular time or place, according to a specific piece of legislation or judgment, I would certainly fail to address life-as matter, as object, or otherwise-and how life matters for us. Life is not just what we are- as living beings-or what we hold in common with other living things; life holds moral value for us, it conditions-and it is the condition of-law or any legal materialization, any materiality. This contribution does not take a legal or juridical 'object', but rather enquires into the rhetorical and mediatized conditions of possibility for 'life' to appear as a legal 'matter' -a matter that wears the mantle of a certain objectivity. And it does. I write in the context of a spate of harrowing U.S. legislation enacted to restrict women's reproductive rights, frequently voiced in the name of life. How such life matters-and whose lives matter-is here as elsewhere perhaps as much about religious belief and political ideology as it is about biology, citizenship, women's rights, men's rights, the rights of the unborn, and so on. Indeed, 'life' is at once the most molecular of phenomena and the most angelic; but law, too, has many

This essay argues that the ‘materiality’ of life and law are today technological artefacts of a biopolitical project, and that sexual-reproductive and legislative boundaries are the boundaries around which power coheres and materializes—making life law’s matter, an effect that is slyly taken up as legal ‘cause’. I offer as case studies readings of two incommensurable texts: Milan Kundera’s political fiction, The Joke, and the contemporary fertility industry, an instantiation of biopolitical techno-science. Bringing into tension the ‘materiality’ of life and law across these two sites, I hope to surface some of the vernaculars of (bio)political power—rhetorical matters of historical, political, socioeconomic, and technological concern that nevertheless claim the objectivity of ‘matter’. Both texts also concern reproduction—sexual, artificial, cultural, political—and how it is used to promote a certain ideology of citizenship and to regulate political ‘freedoms’. While Kundera’s novel, written in the 1960s, represents a critique of ‘old’ materialism as the reproduction of Communist State power, here, in juxtaposition, Kundera’s fiction occasions my critique of (legal) ‘new’ materialism—as neoliberal and biopolitical investment in the speculative futures proffered by the fertility industry.

ABSTRACT Invoking the work of Maurice Blanchot, this text is situated in the (im)possibility of contemporary debate and the impossible, but necessary, question of (un)avowable community. Arguing that identity politics today forecloses debate in the syntactical closures of the named name, we follow Blanchot to open onto a paratactical politics of community. The parataxis (polysyndeton) is here the key trope of community and communication: the side-by-side arrangement of fragments that puts into play the seeming self-evidence of contemporary conjunctions, relations of subordination, and temporal sequence. The parataxis configures relations of alterity, radicalized in death, where the (non)being-in-common of self-other and self-self are exposed. Taking as instance the disaster of Donald Trump's presidency and the digital conveyances of identity, we explore this joke, its common currents, and the possibility for a paratactical politics of community when the joke is on us.