Philosophical-Political Hecate-isms : The Rule of Three [1 ed.] 9781443889780, 9781443885409

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Philosophical-Political Hecate-isms

Philosophical-Political Hecate-isms: The Rule of Three By

Viorella Manolache

Philosophical-Political Hecate-isms: The Rule of Three By Viorella Manolache Translation: Ian Browne; Am Browne Romanian Revision of the Text: Doina Manolache This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Viorella Manolache All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8540-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8540-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Triple Hecate and the Spectres of Politics.......................................... vii Angelo Mitchievici Philosophical—Political Hecate-isms: Arguments of the Three ................ xi Ian Browne Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Antaia–or Welcoming Desire 1.1. Third-Degree Technicalities 1.2. Fragmentary Micro-Narratives: the Third Way 1.3. Tri-phased Intersections: Pro–jects,–grams,–sections Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 35 Theoretical Trinocular Recaptures 2.1. Societas Starts with the Third 2.2. One+One=Three 2.3. From One to Three Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 52 Hecate-isms 3.1. Distance 3.2. Power as Folding and Unfolding 3.3. Security 3.4. Postmodernitarism and (Other) Three Alternative Technicisms 3.5. Three Ecological Registries Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 84 Visual Representation of the Three 4.1 Between Two and Three: Intermediation 4.2. The Three Faces of Eve (1957) 4.3. Three Survival Island (2005) 4.4. Thr3e (2006) 4.5. Media Culture: a Televisual Technicism 4.6. From Language to 3D Vocables

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Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 114 Parallaxes Perspectives: From the Three to the Multiple 5.1. Oedipus–Ante-Oedipus–Post-Oedipus 5.2. A Particular(izing) Case: Fighting the Three-Headed Dragon Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 129 Annotations and Brief Conclusions 6.1. The Deceiving/Enigmatic Faces of Hecate 6.2. Concluding Notes–or the Way in which Hecate-isms become Philosophical–Political Arguments 6.3. Hecate and New Categories of the Monstrous Some Afterword Notes: On the Stairs of the Triad’s Theatrical Temple ..................................................................................................... 177 François Bréda General Bibliography .............................................................................. 179 About the Author ..................................................................................... 196

THE TRIPLE HECATE AND THE SPECTRES OF POLITICS ANGELO MITCHIEVICI

A monstrously Chthonian deity living inside a phantom nocturnal universe, the triple Hecate is used as a symbolic figure by Viorella Manolache–a key-concept, a philosophical-political platform for both the divergent and convergent tendencies animating Western society. This appeal to Greek mythology reminds us of Sloterdijk’s endeavour in revaluing the thymos, or fury, a reclaimed term for analysing (post)modern society. As such, what does tricephalous Hecate have to offer? The derived concept, technicism, represents the results obtained after decanting mythological, teratological and contextual impurities, simultaneously absorbed and neutralized. At the same time, although not avoiding the pejoratively-malefic dimension of chthonian deities, another–beneficent and apotropaic– dimension of all the symbols belonging to the goddess is brought to the fore, in order to integrate a positive dimension into the concept. Its integrity reveals, as is the case for other terms borrowed from Greek culture–such as pharmakon–a territorial ambiguity. The concept elaborated upon by Viorella Manolache configures an anthropological structure presiding over the apparition of homo triplex by integrating a series of necessary characteristics; thus simultaneously defining postmodern society and constituting a device, apparatus in Foucaultian terms, able to create and offer a trinocular perspective. Hecatism is an operator inside a vast semantic field: an anthropological, political, social, ideological operator that is vectorializing a whole field of socio-political forces. In this sense, it indicates a crossroads of senses, an inflexion point, a disjunction, an amphibology. We have here a vast playground for the conceptual relevance of the proposed term, a space which, in a wider sense, can be called political. Lastly, Hecatisms configure a metaphor of the political inside post-modernity, or inside a certain type of Utopia–projected society placing us all in post-humanity. Society develops using a series of redundancies, growths, proliferations–

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what Georges Bataille called, in one of his remarkable essays, “The damned side”: but it also accepts series of challenges which a superposed, multifaceted, multicultural, almost metastatic replicating system presents to that homo novus already anticipated by Theo Bell. In the vast area of the monstrous, Hecatisms appropriate for themselves, inside an interstitial, generically political area, any exorbitant principles such as those Jean Baudrillard offers in his Fatal Strategies– consumerism and all its redundancies, Russian neo imperialist expansionism, the re-emergence of Islamic fanaticism, etc. Hecatisms configure a monstrous belonging to post-modernity’s metabolism but not needing a visibly monstrous syntax or any attention-demanding deformities. From this point of view, Philosophical–Political Hecate-isms: The Rule of Three is also a book about the monstrous transposed at the level of political philosophy. But this concept needs also a new form, a new body, an existence beyond the frontiers of mythology. Its tri-phased character generates its dynamism and constitutes this figure’s representational force, in the attempt to identify a third way paradoxically placed between the faces of the coin, on the edge, in the interstice. Viorella Manolache’s perspective targets both a saving third seen as a mediation instance or an alternative, a possible solution for dismantling any blockages through referring to a crisis which proves to be global–and also the presence of the three as a way of bringing order to the real–as seen in the triads formed by socialpolitical components–prosperity–security–liberty, distance–power– security. In a way, this book’s endeavour offers a rethinking of the Hecatean monstrous within a geopolitical scale using an analogy system that functions on the principle of communicating vessels and allowing transitions from within the corporeal towards the political and the cultural. In the first instance, the third subsumes the qualities of non-generality, non-generic and non-particular presents a neutral appearance, represents a vacated position available for any kind of association. As in the case of a jury, parity is avoided and the included third becomes a deciding party, representing the solution to any blockage. After all, Viorella Manolache’s work targets just this free position seen as a geometrical place for different contextual possibilities. In this sense, The Third functions as a non-person, a verbal form, for Robert Esposito; in the same way, Alexandre Kojève theorizes the intervention of the third person in a binary dialectics, an impartial, disinterested three able to nullify the reactions of one and two. Alexandre Kojève translates on the

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political level the third’s relevance, materialized in the existence of a third party ensuring objectivity and neutrality. The second use Viorella Manolache bestows upon triadic ordering-role Hecatisms is that of illustrating Kojeve’s theory about the three types of justice as illustrated by the categories of Master–Slave–Citizen. This problematic, mediating-role third is actualized in some instances. Thus, it appears as perfectly integrated in the concept of a Third Europe, Mitteleuropa, placed between Western and Eastern Europe, an interference zone, buffer-zone, part of the binary political logic of cold war reloaded now in new geopolitical contexts as West vs. East, capitalism vs. communism, market economy vs. centralized economy, etc. Hecatism constitutes an inflexion point and a tension-releasing space even in this instance. Mitteleuropa accepts a mediating role in the conflict between the EU and Russian autocracy–Putin’s expansionist politics–a role which can be also played by the whole of Eastern Europe, already an expert in left-wing totalitarian political regimes. In this sense, the political relevance of Hecatisms finds an expression in re-evaluating the third capable of dissolving incompatible dichotomies, and repossessing a communicative basis. Hecatisms are distributed in three categories, configuring an ontology characteristic for both consumer societies and the hyper-technological societies of the not-so-distant future: the cyborg, the recycler and the algosophical. The cyborg demands a monstrous syntax through an alloy between the organic and inorganic offered by its structure or through prosthetic mechanisms associated with the organic. What is of interest here is the model of a cyborg society in the acceptation given by Donna Haraway to the term communitas. Beyond the utopian postulates of such a society, Hecatism explores possibilities and connections that allow civilization to evolve exponentially. Thus, it becomes a form of percipience using the vehicle of worlds projected in the futuristic screenplays of Ray Kurzweil who follows the identity cyborgization process and that of fluid identities in a post-human dimension. A whole corpus of SF literature, starting with the cyberpunk current, illustrates the theories of Paul Virilio, Donna Haraway etc. Hecatism gets inside this interstitial fold where tradition is considered monstrous and becomes just another dimension of a post-human society. Viorella Manolache politically reappraises Hecatism’s dimensions, following that divergent-convergent tendency of dismembermentreunification where distance becomes proxemics in the acceptation Edward T. Hall bestows upon the term as a disciplining mode in which

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civilization uses body-centric spaces, power–a reflex, and security–a warning assemblage. The investigated, Hecatized body is a political body and any Hecatism also has an expression in direct accord with the dimension of the political. Consumer communities reclaim the second category of Hecatic manifestations, the recycler. The recycler appears within redundancies belonging to residual regimes, what is left after excessive consuming. Needs are overtaken by market offers, and the surplus is not directed towards consuming per se but becomes an exhibition space of public abundance. The amorphous mass, global nomadism, thematic entertainment, the spectacular character of consumerism inside large commercial centres, the advertised image with kitsch potentialities are already appropriating a form of excess at the limits of the monstrous. This hyper-consumerist society, as Gilles Lipovetsky calls it, with its engendered shows of welfare and generalized abundance, generates its own spaces, and new forms of socialization such as Baumanian neotribalism or a politically-cultural metabolism targeting the recycling of a vast residual area. The algosophic aims at attaining and overtaking bearability thresholds, administering tensions and intensities starting from a social organism’s capacity to absorb challenges, difficulties, and tensions. In its tolerated pacifist instance, the algosophic offers the solution for defusing crisis states. In this case too, the metaphor of the political functions by sliding from provocations offered by the presence of pandemic-potential diseases and their handling, to tragedies such as that of flight MH17, seen as “a European 9-11, and a pivotal element in strategic thinking”. Both situations represent not just the appraisal of bear-ability thresholds, of frontiers, but also new opportunities of testing the efficiency and pertinence of new European security politics. Hecatisms target and configure possible crisis screenplays for postmodern society, revalue the dimension of the monstrous in new contexts and in new forms, and at the same time offer possible solutions which evolve from the almost-magical gesture of the three figure, which organizes tension fields by detaching mediation instances and offering alternatives to the binary logic of confronting and facing adversities.

PHILOSOPHICAL—POLITICAL HECATE-ISMS: ARGUMENTS OF THE THREE IAN BROWNE

I still remember the excitement with which I read Claude Levi-Strauss in the 1970s. He seemed to be offering a framework that could be used to analyse and understand a whole range of phenomena, from the cultural to the political. Levi-Strauss identified the core elements of conceptual structures, not simply by what was included within a concept, but, just as significantly, by what was excluded, thereby using concepts which operated according to a logic of binary oppositions–things being either one thing or the other. One of Levi-Strauss's intentions, as a theorist and structural anthropologist, was to examine the ways in which myth provided a form of reconciliation between the apparently irreconcilable opposites found within this binary structure. In this book, Philosophical–Political Hecate-isms: The Rule of Three, Viorella Manolache echoes Levi-Strauss's use of the idea of myth, in this case the mythological figure of Hecate, but she seeks to go beyond a set of binary oppositions, and to map out what could be called, with apologies to Anthony Giddens, a third way. Her intention is not so much the Levi-Straussian one of finding a way of reconciling opposites, as finding a conceptual space that exists both between and beyond apparently polar opposites. The mythological figure of the goddess Hecate is offered as the incarnation of this framework of a third possibility, where in place of the familiar conceptual and theoretical landmarks of oppositional and binary structures, a pattern of third degree multiplications is offered. Hecate is the goddess of changing and unstable forms, of the monstrous–the goddess of the place where roads intersect, and where a new direction becomes possible; the place where journeys neither begin nor end, but where they continue in ways not previsioned. Hecate is offered, like Derrida's spectre of Marx, as the spectre haunting the place where paths cross-in short, as a third option interposing itself between the poles of binary conceptualisation.

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Viorella Manolache offers the image of Hecate as a cure for diplopia, the double vision induced by a schematic of binary oppositions. Like Wittgenstein she believes that “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably”. Her remedy for this diplopia is to offer Hecate both as a metaphor and as a tool of thought, because when pictures hold us captive, metaphors cease to be aids to thinking and become instead structures that mark out the range of possibilities of thought. Hecate-ism is, in this Wittgensteinian sense, a new picture, a picture of the 'monstrous' Goddess, the Goddess of nightmare, misfortune and frightening visions. What is 'monstrous' about Hecate-ism is that it offers as a possibility, a conceptualisation that is neither one thing nor the other, and yet at the same time contains both the one and the other within itself. The monstrous falls outside the received concepts, unsettling our ideas of what things are or are not. It represents, as Foucault noted, a sort of “confusion (which) comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil, canon, or religious law”, it is “the kind of irregularity that calls law into question and disables it”, and is at the very bottom, something that falls outside the scope of binary oppositions, it is unclassifiable, and represents “the transgression of natural limits”. This third space opens up possibilities rather than closing them down, but the possibilities it opens up are, seen from the perspective of diplopia, a confusion of categories, and a 'monstrous' mixing of opposites. From the Hecatian perspective, it is the journey, not the arrival that matters. It is the process not the conclusion. So in this book we see Viorella Manolache steer a course away from any meta-narrative, from any theory offering a golden road to understanding, any one of the countless isms on offer to the theorist. Citing Felix Nicolau, she warns postmodernity’s descendants of the impossibility of “sitting on the father’s throne”. In the context of the triphased conceptual structure of Hecate-ism, the throne will inevitably remain vacant, as a Hecatian possibility will be there to provide a third possibility where binary structures intersect and vie for hegemonic status. As Viorella Manolache says, “What is lost in two is gained in three”. This avoidance of meta-narrative, of arriving at an end point, is not a flaw, but rather a virtue, and in a variety of ways, citing Jerome K Jerome's idea that neither the start nor the end of the journey is the point of travelling, but rather it is the journey itself which is the point of the journey. Against Fukuyama's idea of the end of history and the Last Man, Hecate-ism denies the finality of an achieved telos, asserting as Flaubert did in one of his letters from Egypt to his friend Bouilhet, that “Stupidity

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consists in wanting to conclude. We are a thread and we want to know the pattern... Now one spends one's time telling oneself we are completely finished, here we are at the very end, etc. But what mind of any strength– beginning with Homer–has ever come to a conclusion”. Like Baumanian sociability, enquiry, in this Hecatian tri-phased sense, serves as its own end, and by denying a telos, it shares that characteristic of sociability in that it has no fixed destination, it “does not know where it is heading”. It is linked to the spirit of enquiry, to finding new ways of thinking, not to arriving at a preordained conclusion. It can be seen from this that Viorella Manolache's purposes are abstract, complex and highly political. She wants to offer us something at the conceptual and metaphorical level, “a new picture”, one which does not foreclose on possibilities but opens them up. Her book is both a practical exercise in this and an exhortation to look for the interstices, the space between or the space beyond those diplopia options that would seem to foreclose on conceptual possibilities. She seeks to steer a course between any ideological straightjackets and offers as one possible picture, in the Wittgensteinian sense of an image, the image of the Möbius strip, where twisted upon itself, the binary distinction between inside and outside vanishes as the inside and outside become one - a union of contraries which in a Lyotardian note draws attention to the ever present tendency towards oppositional thinking reflexes, which are perhaps at their most prevalent when political analysis is in question, where the distinctions of left/right, contemporary postEnlightenment/medieval obscurantism, capitalist/statist and so on, still shape our ways of thinking. The value of Philosophical–Political Hecateisms: The Rule of Three is that it enables us to transcend such reflexes and look for a way forward that enables us to escape from this kind of oppositional approach. The focus of the book is to employ a tri-phased Hecatian analysis to engage in a wider, sustained political analysis of a variety of contemporary phenomena, political and cultural. It is impossible in a brief introduction to do justice to the complexity and depth of this analysis. But the real value of Viorella Manolache's books lies not just in going well beyond the bipolar approach that has its origins in Levi-Strauss and structuralism, but in laying out the structure of the tripartite framework which is used to undertake the analysis and then demonstrating through the employment of that framework how a penetrating and insightful analysis can be conducted by employing this triphased Hecatian framework.

CHAPTER ONE ANTAIA–OR WELCOMING DESIRE

The present book’s introductory chapter re-values the descriptive/ interpretative trajectory which the goddess Hecate’s mythological profile has to travel before being invested with novel significations, expressed in a new concept–Hecate-isms–which we propose as a dynamic, transporting way of shifting tri-phased theoretical re-evaluations through a theoretically innovative formulation which does not implicate the status of either an alternative or an interference, but asserts itself as a theoretical redistributive experiment in the service of tertiary multiplication networks. In this sense, the present endeavour intends to articulate the arguments and to engage in all the necessary rewritings in order to define the specific properties of third-degree technicalities, to reposition a theory of the third way/dimension/perspective/direction within the open segment of fragmented micro-narratives, with an accent upon tri-phased intersections already inherent in pro–jects,–grams,–spections. In the same theoretical registry, we suggest three political-philosophical remedies for diplopia, not forgetting permanent references to the contemporary world’s compelling problems, which can be subsumed under the generous limits of these useful concepts, and thus can become hermetic. While debating basic subject ideas, we also activate the recourse to interdisciplinarity and interconnectivity, both accepting multiple connections impossible to separate or isolate from either imaginary or utopian projections. Re-discussing goddess Hecate’s mythological profile–considered by Homer as a chthonian symbol of Asia Minor, and also known as Antaia– the welcoming one–and imbued with the pertinence of crossroads/ junctions as a new third-order option (Trioditis–the goddess with three heads: a dog head, a snake head and a horse head) the present book proposes to launch the soldering concept of Hecate-ism as a possible technical(izing) pact signalling an(other) physiognomic change (either philosophical-political or cultural).

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Chapter One

A first controversial, functioning statement refers to the erroneous perception positioning Hecate exclusively under the sign of magic/ witchcraft and evil; afflictions belonging to the monstrous domain. From Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness (2007) one can infer the idea that even if the monstrous cannot be considered a model of beauty, not all its manifestations should be perceived and labelled as dangerous and reprehensible. Hecate is the product of religious fantasy (with the necessary addenda stating that Homeric poems almost never dwell upon her presence or existence1) but is also identified with the female spirits of popular Infernos (Gorgyra, Gorgo, Mormo, Lamila, Gelo, Empusa, the midday spectre), as both appearances and metamorphosing entities of the same Hecate; while for Erwin Rohde (1985) the goddess is a marginal apparition, incapable of overtaking the limits of a domestic–particularized cult. Short-changed figurehead of an ancient rite once practised next to the home hearth (and living “deep inside the hearth” together with underground–Hermes, her male equivalent), Hecate remains a chthonic numen who, by betraying an unpredictable, free, voluntary and unchained spirit “finds much easier than other chthonian gods a way towards people’s hearts” by creating a familiar relationships with earth dwellers and yet not allowing itself to be affected by any discomfort or fear which might be generated by such impure actions (initially a beneficent, wellmeaning, success, prosperity and victory-giving deity). The cultural practices/“Hecate’s banquets” are maintained by a whole armoury of horrors, acknowledging and accepting the pattern of the savage hunter and his accompanying wild pack; Hecate resides in the subterranean world, and she also is the patron of souls still attached to the telluric; an altogether nocturnal spectre, but also prone to appear as “the overwhelming loneliness of midday heat”, with terrifyingly changing and unstable forms, capturing restless souls inside its flying whirlwind and juxtaposing them to her retinue of demoniacal hounds (hence a terrifying imaginary tableau including apostrophic sacrifices–throwing the remains of lustra sacrifices at the crossroads while turning one’s face away; symptoms of delirium, epilepsy, nightmare, misfortune, frightening visions). Within Eco's perspective of a contextual repossession of the monstrous, the latter has to be accepted as just a design of the subterranean 1

The second Homeric hymn, narrating Persephone's return to Demeter, remembers Hecate (en-lightener of the searcher's path with the help of her torches) as embracing Demeter's daughter and thus forever remaining in Persephone's proximity/court.

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area, close to the “accessorizing model of nice imitations of ugly things”– an Aristotelian import. By establishing the judicial-biological registry as a domain/field of theoretical proof, the monster (as postulated by Foucault, 2001) is defined as the uncomfortably rebellious element encouraging contempt for and disrespect of both nature and laws, and represents a tri-phased germinated category of [triple] elements particularized and dissociated in the 18th century, in order to be re-joined in the 19th -three circles, three figures: the human monster, the behaviourally-deviant or mentally/physiologically handicapped individual in need of a “cure”, and the masturbating child. The monster substitutes for a spontaneously-brute form, and is seen as an anti-natural attitude: he is identified with a territory of small irregularities, a growing model and a background of deviance, while being disputed by both nature and society, the cosmological and anticosmological models (Andrei Oi‫܈‬teanu proposes the term chaosmos); with an absolutely needed mention of the fact that a monster stays subsumed to a politically-judicial generalizing frame, belonging to natural history as it focuses upon a tri-phased distinction between species, genders and reigns2. Two metamorphisms myths definitely state Hecate’s preference for the animal kingdom–the dog and the polecat (possibly as Hecuba and Galinthis) while at the same time complicating its confused descent as a mysterious divinity (Hecate is believed to be either the daughter of Perses and Asteria, or Zeus and Demeter/Pheraea as Hera, or even Leto’s or Tartar’s child; sometimes she surfaces as one of the titans, involved in defeating the giants–by killing Clytius). With no intention of reloading (by deepening) an already-consecrated rift between godly signs/symbols3 or repeating any allusions or literary–

2

This perspective is not left adrift within the grounds of political philosophy; clearly separating itself from Leviathan's terrifying attributes, the monstrous becomes, for Hobbes, a pretext for reviewing the artifice of the state's sovereignty, in order to decree the occurrence of a mortal God or, in a Nietzschean perspective, to analyze the coldest monster of all–the state. 3 See in this context the following selections: Tara Sanchez, The Temple of Hecate– Exploring the Goddess Hecate through Ritual, Meditation and Divination, London: Avalonia, 2011; Joy Reichard, Hecate: Queen of the Witches or Wise Crone? (Celebrate the Divine Feminine; Reclaim Your Power with Ancient Goddess Wisdom), San Francisco: Bush Street Press, 2011; Sorita d'Este and David Rankine, Hecate Liminal Rites: A Study of the Rituals, Magic and Symbols of the Torch-Bearing. Triple Goddess of the Crossroads, London: Avalonia, 2009.

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Chapter One

especially dramatic4–comments regarding it, and willingly limiting itself to the method of concept transportation/welding/ juxtaposing, the present book rebuilds Hesiod’s theory signalling (when referring to Hecate’s tridimensional powers/actions) the triad of privilege bequeathed upon the goddess on earth, on/in the sea and in the air, a trump card which she converts into a tri-phased dynamic (philosophical-political) relationship as distance–power–security. Metamorphosing (mentioning the inspiration Ovid the poet invested it with) the proposed way of approaching the subject cannot avoid a large array of beneficial symbols displayed as different forms of hekataia, either for protection outside habitations, or demonising crossroads through sacrifices (food for the poor, dogs, black kids or honey). Crumbling earth, dancing trees, howling dogs–these are some of the premonitions Virgil poetically expressed in the verse Ere Hecate venit! Attaching the –ism suffix to a crossroads deity’s name can only imbue it with an abstract(izing), generalizing tendency while at the same time allowing the referent to be imbued with the statute of an organized system (and not of chronological divisions) [McHale, 1987], of overbid but not, in Dan Mănucă’s terms, of “subjective intransigence”. As suffix–affixed interventions, the “-isms” (here, completely detached from any framing of the -ism within an ideological straitjacket) question both the signifying and the carrying mode for the vehicle to which it attaches itself, taking into account the fact that they do not articulate a language of facts, do not answer to any real-order ideate need, and are not considered effective transcendences or/and intentional correlations (Marica, 2009). Not at all by chance, Felix Nicolau (2013) notes that today’s world is saturated by -isms, and warns postmodernity’s descendants about the impossibility of “sitting on the father’s throne” while certifying the existence of a hiatus at the top and announcing that, for the moment, “the throne will remain vacant”. Thus we can explain the impossibility of sedimenting any crossroads formulations–technicisms5–which, far from clarifying the fate of currents/movements, complicate them by involvement in false alternative options–nothing more than non-synthesizing detours confirming, in a 4

See, for example, Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, the plays of Shakespeare or the eroticizing efforts of Pierre Jean Jouve or Paul Morand. 5 See, in this sense, for instance performatism, postmortemism, digimodernism, globalism, planetarism, hypermodernism, altermodernism, or the receptivity of postmodernism's esthetic operations towards a generously alternative prefixoidal arsenal (hyper-, meta-, trans-, cos-, para-, etc).

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Hassanian (1987) way the (lexical) in-determinant sense (in the case of postmodernism, an interaction in close proximity to its own contradictions). These assaulting concepts essentially process an ambilectic, allencompassing aspect by re-launching the vice canon6 as a transitional norm, a rule guaranteeing the dynamics of post-alternatives and stating that the unconditional transgression of one’s own condition/state of fact (even if sometimes acknowledging mixed states) only manages to create a jamming interference with the only avowed purpose of producing parasitical signals of identical wavelengths, but with specific differences. Such evidence only serves to confirm the fact that no conceptual combination can definitely affix itself either inside the core of space to which it offers identity, or on its skin–but will simultaneously entertain a crossroads identity–an inside and an outside, a verdict defining interference as a reflex/tendency of dissolution/amalgamation for/in the category of the new. Based on previous observations one has to mention another aspect/state of the Hecate-an profile, that of a shadow/ghost haunting the place where three roads cross, with each of its heads7 looking towards another (certain) direction, and an admission of Hecate-ism as a transporting, dynamic mode of starting tri-phased theoretical reevaluations through the use of a formulation implying neither an alternative status nor a jamming interferential one, but affirming itself as an experiment of replacing theoretical landmarks within a pattern of third degree multiplications. It is from this perspective that one can justify the volitional analytic eludings of any religious signals emanating from the three, of any reirrigating numerology or triumvir(ate) formulas, through re-planting the crossroads concept within the fertile soil of post-postmodernism–a sense transporter (but not in any elucidating sense) which, in a philosophicallypolitical registry, could offer a certain direction to those crossroads already fuelled by misappropriated multiplications operating within the frame of contemporaneity.

6

The vice canon's local secondary-order causality does not imply fragmentation, diversifying mechanics or de-canonizations of aseptically modernist theories or totalizing mediation–but rather a transitional recourse to re-signification. 7 The imaginary cookbook of monstrous presences cannot avoid the Romanian mythological profile of the three-faced dragon–water (fountain), earth (“from the Armenian country”) or air (a type of dragon controlled by the solomonari–a variety of Romanian warlock) offering the image of a mixture between snake, crocodile and lion, a creature able to hypnotize with its stare.

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Chapter One

The option of starting from a few texts already submitted for publication or signalled as interventions in national or/and international communication sessions is subsumed to the obstinacy with which (any) daily press releases of our old continent unite the three European principles–prosperity–security–freedom–under the ever-changing designs of tri-phased Europe, marked by the limits of its performing–unified eurozone, by the unstable landmarks of the forwards-backwards reflex or by being placed outside-the-circle; hence, the lack of perspective for any horizon of synchronizing real chances mindful of its imposed horizons. Under the same symbol of three, three years after its creation, the European troika (metaphorically represented in the European press as a three-headed organism) estimates (in advance) its crossroad options (by launching, in Brussels, a debate about any problems which might arise in an after-troika period) although its guidance/piloting is ensured, as a formulation, by a solidly-productive relationship in the innovating spirit of a too-serious adventure. About the destiny of post-Lisbon Europe (Leparmentier, 2009) Le Monde states that any reorganization included in the Lisbon Treaty will not simplify the functioning of the Union: it will just create a threeheaded-monster, making Europe even less amenable to control. Such comments actualize and decode the monstrous symbols already offered by Voltaire (2000) in a projectively philosophical screenplay identifying in/through the gigantic nature (a geographically dependent and dimensionally disproportionate earthly globe, deficiently built, irregular and ridiculously geometrized) a term of comparison (physicalmathematical, a measure of the inefficiency already attributed to the multiplication by three–Saturn possesses 30 substances and 300 properties) and relativity/efficacy in deepening the Swiftian dichotomy between large-small. Hence an equivalation of the monstrous, as a report, with an inadequacy of ethics/aesthetics for the examining person, with an incapacity to relate or deepen inherent capacities, with an illusion of absolute size and dimensional relativities, inadequacy of pattern (the real cannot always adapt to different modes of perception, senses evolve, and a maximization of nature can seem a Sisyphus solution). Accepting the immanence of any imperative–corners/crossroads has to be reinvented–or the unusual way of artistic resettlement for signals from one corner to another (Polgár, 2003), the crossroads can be particularizing and prophetically invested with Walter Benjamin's reflex of places with projective powers (facilitators of looking-into-the-future) registering, as a tri-phased impact within attitude–strategy–reporting, in fact correcting the

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accidental vision/solution (in Voltaire's acceptation) for globalism (and all its isms). This way of dealing with the problem endangers the bridge between geopolitics and geopoetics (Holmes, 2011), by applying a simultaneous, non-synthesizing double question, while operating within neo-liberalism, of the modes of forming and disappearing the world, and of its opportunities for resettlement within a fragile/neutral balance of discrepancies between Central and New Europe. From a project of consolidated regional blocks as a globalizationterritorial stability compromise formula, “civilization shock” borrows the metamorphosing contour of phase changes for any cultural-political neoconservative profile, with the avowed intention of actively preserving any neo-liberal principles. Brian Holmes (2011) suggests as an alternative solution the social science–type of tri-operational interferences (already emancipated from within their own neutrality)–economic geography (as a reaction to precarity)–research (in the domain of technology-sociology), and organizational and social psychology (meant to deal with observations about the functioning system of power or the structure of actual hegemonies). Hence the necessity of overtaking any simple statute of discipline, through “dissolving in the experiment” an almost cartographic endeavour which, through recourse to social self-elaboration, has to keep the narrative–metanarrative and real-aesthetic proportions equal at all costs. In Holmes' note, “geopolitical tides cross through living bodies and become an integral part of the haptic conscience, entering what some of us have already dubbed “the felt public space” or “geopolitics is more and more often felt in the flesh and the imaginary is traced upon the collective skin. Geopoetics becomes a vital activity, a promise of release” (Holmes, 2011). Therefore, a concept such as the cartography of sensation must perforce be rewritten through experimentation. The natural consequence of this type of comment resides in a return to poiesis, a proposal implying an analysis of the contemporary phenomenon, as a real absolute repositioned within post-dialectic spaces; in this way, a need to operate certain methodological-terminological clarifications arises, and will be dealt with by the present book. One must acknowledge the fact that any conceptual assault is perceived more from the perspective of two: a statement which, on the grounds of political philosophy, has already built an entirely misleading functional system (see left vs. right) mostly on metaphorical grounds. If

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Chapter One

one considers metaphor as defined in an Aristotelian sense–as transferring the name of one object upon another object–then one can easily accept that any registry of philosophical-political interventions notes the precedence of mental, scientifically-expressive operations. If such a perspective is dependent upon the act/process of prolonging modernism into postmodernism, any option for the alternative of technicism has to take into account third-degree multiplications, renouncing the rule of versus and choosing the “and…and” mode, with a transporting effect upon the pressure of an object upon itself, by applying the primacy of the experimental and its provisos. In a Sloterdijkian sense (Sloterdijk, 2004) as a double citizen, man needs both proportion and the monstrous, the un-synthesizing melange of metaidentities within the paradigms of ecstasy–construct/restraint, measure, monitoring, control–unlimited/unmeasured, non-censorship, freeing/unchaining, domination/authority–subordination/submission, poiesis– panic. Conferring an alternate statute upon Hecate-isms will reclaim their commitment and not any remedy for presentism’s identifications, confirming once more the fact that distance–space abandons its orientating check-ups, becoming an un-clarifying opening, vacuum, exposure, filling of its own elements/containers: power absorbs old techniques/mechanisms, and places them within the economy of proportion in order to annihilate/calibrate a counter-force; and security constitutes one type of reaction to imminent risks. In a (casual) interpretation of motivational nihilism’s horizon, with an interest in actual philosophy’s penchant for the non-given and the disfounded, Sloterdijk (2004, 75-76) admits the existence of tri-phased directions as expressed by the crossroads option (present/palpable nothingness has its own intersections!) – the one which, paradoxically, seems to re-circulate metaphor whilst weighing it against technicisms, by a recourse to the scientifically-expressive registry. In the direction of metaphorical images pushed to the extreme, Michael Ende’s (1995: 55-57) The Never-Ending Story projects Atréiu’s encounter with three more-than-strange gnomes/sylvan in/upon the monstrous Hecate-ian effect scene: over-excited Atréiu is warned about the forward extension of the nothingness. The first gnome lacked legs and lower body, and had to walk upon his hands; the second one had a hole in his chest, and the third was cut in two across the middle (anticipating, in a philosophical-political way, the Giddensian development of the third way!) and was missing (exactly!) the left side.

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Monstrosity imposes its plagues during sleep, when nothingness and instants grow, in the afterglow of surprising affirmations and as an impossibility of running towards any refuge points/zones. Tri-phased monstrosity does not hurt (this is not a metaphor anymore, but passes into experimental and provisional technicism)–it does not feel anything, but acknowledges the fact that some segments are missing, deepening their absence with every passing moment: an occurrence causing/provoking (even) the irreversible disappearance of its parts. On visually architectural coordinates, the concept of monstrosity is explained by Émile Gallé in terms similar to Roger Marx’s critical formulations of homo triplex (a metaphoric profile already involved in perfect harmony/resonance with homo sapiens) symbolizing the reunion of three artistic endeavours–carpentry, pottery and glass works–through the appropriation of the three essential elements–earth, glass and wood, seen also as three essential modes of controlling raw matter and objectifying threefold aggregates, finalized by tracing a perfectible interaction model. Homo triplex represents in this context the unified marginal syntagm of liminal amalgamation for these three different techniques (GabrielLoizeau, 2012). Thus one can trace a first analogy and evidence: the distance between power and security can be accepted as formulations, construction instruments, raw matter, pre-casts, compulsory bench-marks for the creation of homo triplex, detached from his own architectural vocation and becoming a construct upon himself, by uniting noble art–liberal art–art and craft. Connected to the idea of double loss (an allusion to the Deux fois perdue paper) homo triplex’s attributes target the game of re-irrigation–a loss of distance and territory, but a gain in the right to access another language, able to sustain the superiority of a threefold relationship by affirming that all that is lost in two, is gained in three. Thus the revaluation of homo triplex can be justified as the craftsman-artist inside romantic popular imagery, himself seen as an artisan product, as both the industrial and post-industrial builder, in demand for creating “new/other interiorities”. Perceived from an analytical Freudian and Galléian perspective, the homo triplex concept outweighs the Durkheimian import of the homo duplex, the one with two levels of consciousness–an organic, animalistic one, dedicated to satisfying personal needs and characterized by limited appetite, an inclination towards disorganization which is only able to react in an instinctually imperfect way; and a superior one, collective, morally-

10

Chapter One

intellectual, focused upon a collective elaboration of the norm program and objectification of society’s norms seen as regulating elements. We can now discuss the problem of cohabitation of two beings insidethe-one; the individual (representative of psychological states referencing both themselves and personal events) and the social being (made of a system of ideas, feelings, habits which determine its belonging to a group of moral-religious beliefs and practices, of collective traditions and opinions). From “genus homo” to private society, social conditioning imprints the rhythm, the formation and the modelling of any individual, flaunting the uniqueness of each person without avoiding a separation of the one from its double formulation “because each being is an infinity, and infinity cannot be measured” (Durkheim, 2002), but also the constant referencing through an appeal to the middle way (via Hobbes–Rousseau–Spencer), the social factor (naturally-external constraints) and its own independent existence. Acknowledging the prevalence of homo duplex within European space, Serge Moscovici (1999) does not hesitate to underline the fact that this concept has a dynamic-type significance, hard and well-funded, with a tendency to enlarge its own affirmation sphere, in the sense of a double that is marked not only by a doubling of identity, but also by estimated differences between lived-in society and conceived society, which means more than just having an individual conscience. If for Joseph Conrad the condition of homo duplex is multiply significant, in the acceptation of Mead and Tarde, the self is involved in individual tensions; or, in a psycho-analytically Freudian note, the two multiplies the one into three, for Serge Moscovici (1999), the concept’s new semantic value states that any cultural tensions arise from live syntheses between symbolic and normal life. Any treatment prescribed for European space with clear references to homo duplex’s profile would imply, on Moscovici’s channel, a (positive) redirection upon fragmentary representations–nation, linguistic entity, ethnic minority–placed within a network of cultural connections/matrices as an expression of complex, not entirely accessible psyché but within whose intimacy Europe is asked to intervene, by proposing a link between individuals and society, between the future and the past. Any technique applied during present interventions that is easy-tonote, will be an objective-changing one through abandoning the duality high beam–low beam and the binocular and favouring a triocular perspective applied to the contrasting effect of a third-degree ZoomObjektiv.

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The triocular concept cannot ignore a visualizing of utopias that is volitionally interrupting any reality-connected theories, by decreeing in a Hecate-ian predisposition (changing delirium, unstable, nightmare or vision) a receptivity for (im)possibly accepted methods [seen here as mental exercises with an impact upon lateral possibilities of construction/deconstruction for any possible worlds]. This option partakes its arguments from the domain of political philosophy, confirming what R. Nozick (1997) presented as a subtraction tactic for any utopian influences and a detour upon its own finality, triggering a break in integrity; some worlds can become stabilizing, an occurrence Nozick identifies as an atomizing process for stable (associated) communitary worlds at a micro-social level. Utopia subsumes therefore all the different, diverging communitary utopias, constituting a metautopia/transutopia (we note)–a laboratory environment for utopia experiments. Our conviction, acknowledged from the initial phase of the present book’s endeavour, is that Hecate-ism can be accepted as a remedy for diplopic, facilitating the translation from the double (already pathological) towards a tri-phased punctum of observation.

12

Chapter One

1.1. Third-Degree Technicalities Clifford A. Pickover (2013) uses a technicizing proof in order to underline the fact that, if the surface of a sphere is bidimensional, topological categories accept an unlimited number of dimensions, in the sense in which the second-degree variation borrows the local topology of a plan, and the third-dimensional one represents the multiple characteristics of tridimensional space. Seen from this perspective, the space of the third is a model/plan availing itself of an imperfect dimensional variety, which comprises superior intersectional areas and can be considered a third-dimensional torus–a border-less object, joining together frontal and dorsal faces, a mirror–inverted image. Reactivating the paenultimus in its clutch–like incarnation suggests an image similar to a Möbius strip, in which points from the inner surface and those from the outer surface belong to the same bidimensional pattern, a frame-model allowing us to reach from one end to the other while travelling upon the strip’s surface, but without over passing its edges. Clifford A. Pickover (2013) explores varieties of Möbius strip forms, with an accent upon forms of chemical chirality–molecules which cannot be superimposed over their mirror image-and stating the impossibility of establishing any perfect correspondence between them, through translation or rotation movements. From the perspective of non-ambidexterity, Möbius type molecules are topologically non-equivalent: through deformation, none of them is reduced to identity with the others. With an interest for the present theme, and under the sign of homomorphism, the first can be transformed into the second through establishing correspondences between/in adjoining points; or, the translation of one sphere into the fourth dimension would imply its readmission to the third state. Surfaces can be knotted or knot-free, and their margins, either linked or unlinked. In the case of a Möbius strip, if the “paper side” in the centre disappears, and the edge is visualized as a string, through its stretching/ elastic effect, the edge becomes a circle. Visually, in the case of a thrice-twisted strip, even if the surface itself vanishes and the edge turns into a string, the latter will be knotted. Introduced as white and black triangles–left-hand or right-hand triangles–the Möbius type barycentre coordinates constitute indications related to a reference triangle, actualized through three-number sets which could relate to any mass placed at the triangle’s points.

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In order to verify the already-enunciated theories, and in a fictionallyutopian note, Clifford A. Pickover (2013) offers the image of Möbius' extra-terrestrial beings included in and inhabiting the surface of the Suibom universe, a bidimensional stake chosen in order to underline the disproportion between the two factors, by stating that the universe is too big compared to the dimension of its inhabitants’ bodies. One of the planet’s scientists–Einsteinoid–considers space as both finite and curved in the direction of a third dimension, “up” and “down” representing inventions for executing movement in the invisible thirdorder dimension. The story of Einsteinoid’s journey underlines the fact that space covered accepts shortcuts also, and Suibom is just one of many curved worlds floating in three-dimensional space. A product such as a Klein bottle, selected from a series of inventions that is fundamentally and theoretically based on the philosophy/geometry of the three, is a one-side surface, with no edges and with a twisted neck– and illustrates an imperfect model of architecture in/through tridimensional space, suggestive of introspection, the ego’s return to its own universe, self-reconciliation, and being tagged as a frontier-less construct. Considering both the Klein bottle and the Möbius strip as topological variations, Clifford A. Pickover's (2013) conclusion is that a thirddimension variation displays the local topology of a three-dimensional space. If one applies this to the experiment of a solid cube–a third- dimension topological variation–with an edge on all its sides, one can prove that through stretching the cube and gluing the right wall to the left wall, or by gluing the front wall to the back wall, or the upper wall to the lower wall, a ball thrown to the right would roll towards the left (on condition that the distance between the walls is not too great). Such a rolling launches a new type of topological variation–the thirddimension torus–or, in the context of a cellular simulation, an experiment confirming the fact that a cell is activated/born if three of its neighbours are activated; or a cell stays active (lives) if two or three of its neighbours are active. In the same spirit of innovation pushed to the edge–at the crossroads– in a politically-undertone magical show, the “Ljubljana Ribbon” experiment offers the idea of three half-turns: cut in/through the middle, it turns into a clover-like node, with three dimensions/ undercrossing. The trick (close to a Hecate-ian vision) is meant to recount the benefits European countries enjoy after their unification and the creation of the European Union (Pickover, 2013: 38).

14

Chapter One

Close to magical tricks and/or mathematical ones at the same time, the perspective of the three, half-twisting the ribbon towards actual theories acknowledging a third-way Europe, any formulated suggestion would certainly reference the recommendations stating that European solutions should disengage themselves from the two–one cannot choose between technocracy and utopia–because these dual entities have already closed the possible solutions available for European space inside blocking, unbalanced structures (an inter-governmental union will never become a political union, and a federal union is not the same thing as a federal state). One has to deal with the acute problem of reclaiming Europe’s future, a projection with certain echoes in expected intersections between/ for political negotiations/involvements/reassessments of integration, which accepts compromise as a third-degree option. The alternative would maintain an affirmation of traditional federal Europe united through a Central European Parliament, with a European Commission - an expression of political majority – considered to be an actively (re)knotted factor already–(a reference to the present book’s completion, 2014) presenting a finished list of candidates for the European Commission presidency. This option triggers a whole set of questions regarding the measure in which EU technicisms, applied to 28 states with demographic asymmetries and linguistic-cultural differences as well as economic- political ones, can sustain a transformation trick turning them from a transnational union into a conglomerate of national type parliamentary states. Jürgen Habermas’ interventions in the European press (signalled between 2011-2012) do not seem so far off the mark when one notes they presciently warned about the fact that we are witnessing a collision between functional and systemic landmarks, and stated that, under the “pressures of the crisis” a strategic separation from those objectives which can generically be classified as “European ideals” is bound to occur. The crossroads–intersected proposals target a re-positioning of Europe between the open strata of the three–to reverse, to advance or to stop–a third-order oscillating situation emphasizing the accidental result related to an ambidextrous observation: the first banks upon the fact that none of its members will either accept or opt for an abandonment of its own democratic sovereignty–expressed in the power of taxation and spendingand the second states that, in a situation of burn-out diagnosis, only two (three or four) states are still able to sustain the rhythm, the capacity and the resistance needed for progress (Josef Joffe, 2013). European stagnation (i.e. blockage) in an “extremely unfavourable moment” and is caused by the general hostile/contaminating context of the

Antaia–or Welcoming Desire

15

economic and institutional crisis, by the division between a “virtuous North” (with an exhausted solidarity capital) and a “defective South”, by the stalemate of integration processes already conditioned by crossed vetoes, by an antagonistic double sense of the rule of versus pressures–to fall back–to confront–or by a refusal of affective involvement from its citizens (Accardo, 2013). The problem of European crossroads is apparently stagnating in/on a tri-cephalic option–the third Europe–which, on analytical Romanian and East-European ground, anticipates the construct of Central Europe, perceived as too hypothetical, and defines a third Europe as geo-political topos, a mentally-affective matrix and cultural model, an area of intersection for collaborations/confrontations and multiple creativities, without giving up the exercise of centre-edge relationships [Babe‫܊‬i, Ungureanu, 1997] (akin to a Klein bottle whose surface is reunited with itself as a frontier-less construct). The differences between Central Europe–Mitteleuropa–Ostmitteleuropa– Eastern Europe are pertinent, and contribute to a particularizing definition of limiting stages in the concept’s evolution. A compact, anticipative program of research approximated interrogations about the existence of (yet) another Central Europe, of when, since when and how an intellectual discourse about Central Europe can be articulated, involving a series of specific modulations for possibly technicizing inventories. Under the sign of European dilemmas–there are two or three Europes– , Lucian Boia (2013) notes a variety of continental landscapes, unaligned geographical forms, many seas and varied climate areas for European countries-and concludes by finally abandoning a search for perfectly homogeneous spaces, taking into account the fact that Western cells energized this region unequally and in-consequently, with the West flaunting its self-assumed role of area/regional/territorial/state uniformization in this way. In the same sense, the West and the rest of Europe are non-rigorously separated by an elasticized transition zone–Central Europe–a unifying, but also separating concept increasing the number of Europes from two to three. Europe was forced to opt for unification (under the pressure of modified realities after WW2, and availing itself of NATO support for its defence policies) a unification originally meant, in its pacifist-unifying variations, to be a communitary–economic and political gathering tolerant

16

Chapter One

of all exceptions8 which might ensure progress for an unified Europe (a unified corpus) with inherent temporary constructive pauses. The extension of the European project towards the East means the unification of two parts, which implies a positioning of successive circles (Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Turkey) around and under the influence of the Western nucleus. This perspective reflects and proves the model of cellular simulation, by maintaining an active (live) cell if two or three of its neighbours are activated (welded/united). At the moment of this chapter’s writing (March, 2014) Europe was constrained to opt at the crossroads of delicate situations allowing it to regain lost ground–see recent Ukraine developments–as a consequence of weakened forces of attraction from the centre towards the orbit. The prompt and excessively critical US reaction towards Western attitudes was expressed in acknowledging the West’s incapacity to offer prizes or to punish, to sacrifice anything or to rely on economic solidarity principles; all these accusations being justified, up to a point, by the nonexistence of instruments for measuring the quality of European democracies. In this context, a triple pressure arose upon the EU, through: the Ukrainian crisis–dysfunctional European constructs favouring perturbed economics–Switzerland’s alarming vote in the referendum against immigration threatening to collapse the whole bilateral accord structure between Switzerland and the EU–and, last but not least, to compromise every European ideal. Connected to the dynamic tableau of European events, Barack Obama stated that Europe is not at present either the trigger or the manifestation field for any new East-West conflict, with reference to Europe’s moderate reactions towards Ukraine crisis (political support for Kiev, signing political chapters of the accord for Ukraine’s admission to the EU), and to cautious attitudes seemingly reflecting the signs of a division inside the Western nucleus; and underlined that one must insist upon the idea of reconsidering the Eastern front as a priority, for both Europeans and Americans. Adding possible solutions to tri-phased arguments, Zbigniew Brzezinski underlines that Ukraine needs three compromise points in order to stabilize its situation: the political compromise/pact between political parties; the regional geopolitical compromise/pact between the European Union, Ukraine and the Russian Federation; and the global 8

Switzerland and Norway–as exceptions to a common political and economic space; Great Britain, Denmark and Sweden, as parts able to resist the adoption of a unified European monetary system.

Antaia–or Welcoming Desire

17

geopolitical aim exponentially expressed by the relationship between the US and the Russian Federation9. All of these immediate order aspects betray European inclinations towards temporary solutions, guided by the temporary principle which Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, defined as a process of subtle advancement. At the crossroads, the tri-phased process solutions depend upon a reorientation of economic integration as a secondary point of a politically reunified Europe, a transparent reassessment of unitary dimensions important on a global plane, and a reclaiming of common, unhesitating spaces through a reappraisal of distances to/between European places and spaces. Such conditionings bring into focus the tri-phased clarifications of distance–power–security. In a short phase conclusion one cannot avoid enthusiastically- accepted singular initiatives, such as those of Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe's (1982), realized inside Romanian space in the 80s through a dialogue with researchers and the public of a country “embracing the sense of Socialist solutions” and orienting itself along three fundamental dimensions– institutionalized society (the object)–live culture society (the subject)–and its transformation processes, with any multiplications arising from it (with a special mention for particular societies and cultures). The proposed blueprint does not abandon arguments already used by the Frankfurt school in stating that, in the post-industrial state, economic and political crises are maintained by a crisis of the rational as such, with a special Habermas’ emphasis upon a legitimacy crisis of late capitalism. With an interest in the present chapter’s technicalities, De Lauwe (1982: 341-342) offers a few examples of psycho-social transformational processes; attempts at graphical research, made with the collaboration of Celso Lamparelli, an architect and professor. A representation of society in three moments of its history (S1, S2, and S3) reactivates equal self-intersection areas–three superposed squares–in perfect correspondence to one another/with superior pseudo pods. A blueprint of technological and social transformations (TT; TS) reproduces the circulatory system of two-headed twisting, establishing correspondences between neighbouring points and a possible knotting of the third transforming state. Through the prism of va-et-vient circulation/knotting, the essential, for De Lauwe, is the braking process of

9

http://www.ispri.ro/stiri-rusia/compromisurile-lui-brzezinski-pentru-ucraina/. Accessed 15 March 2014.

18

Chapter One

social transformation (dominant) or the cultural dynamics of the social, orienting and controlling technological transformations. From the perspective of imposed or volitional transformations included in the third dimension, transformational processes would take into account: the relationship between man–nature–society (linking discoveries, inventions, technological transformations; concentration, acceleration, expansion; urbanization, industrialization, informatization; contradictions within the production–means sphere and the environment, the opposition between growth-development, uncontrolled demographic expansion, competition, opposition, imperialism); transforming contradictions within social structures (tension, distancing, manipulation, passive and active discords, anomic, dominance, conflict); a dynamics of aspirations–with an accent upon psycho-social processes (conscience, expectation, need, transforming projects/decisions, demands, acting subjects or transindividuals); volitional transformation and revolution (mutation, revolution, class conflict, decolonization, new social structures, institutional transformation, political projects); the volitional relationship between/inside the psychosocial and institutional transformation (economic potential, institutions and conflicts, ideological oppositions, possible conscience/action, accelerated action understanding, aspiration convergence/divergence). Functioning after the rule of three, any project-decision-action implies, in a Lauweian vision, the elaboration of a program’s option/creation, because in order to attain two objectives, a unification of both into a thirddegree vision is needed–a general way of reuniting all its elements. Within the sphere of social life, for every given datum/event/fact of social life one can discern two observational angles/two identified dimensions within codified/institutionalized society and lived culture. Constructed space and lived culture guarantee a submersion into the third dimension (of social transformation) as a mode of reconstituting dialectical relationships creating new practices/structures. Under the sign of dynamic totalities time would represent the exclusive guiding factor of the third dimension. Already understanding the problem De Lauwe (1982) states that the third group (considered to be the genesis of psycho-social processes and responsible for their retroactive actions) constitutes the central point of research focused upon a dynamics of aspiration. In this sense, the third group banks upon the role of acknowledgement and circumstantial representation inside social transformations, with direct influences upon orientation, reproduction and creation, counterbalancing any technical determinism or individual will- power. A technicizing option

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19

hailed by socialist reality (see in this sense Fred Mahler’s introductory notes–A humanist theory of cultural emancipation) and successfully used for monitoring both industrialized and third-world countries, capitalist and socialist countries. With all due enthusiastic resonance to such models…

1.2. Fragmentary Micro-Narratives: the Third Way In the chapter La nature du lien social: la perspective postmoderne, Jean Fr. Lyotard (1979) acknowledged the fact that a division of models destined for social ties benefits also from reflected oppositional thinking that is separated from postmodern dynamics, but which had to accept the existence of strategies or language games. In the present period of capitalism, the parameters of power and state functions are estimated depending upon postmodernism’s novelty, which launches the idea that the old attraction poles of nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, or of representing famous–name personalities (heroes of contemporary history) are not interesting anymore, but have become more and more vulnerable/contestable. In fact, postmodernism breaks down all grand narratives and redistributes them inside communication circuitry-nodes, thus allowing the atom/cell to become the target of permutations inside any games practised by a society of shared communication. These mutations (unable to generate counter moves) reclaim not just a new theory of communication, but also a new theory of linguistic games. If institutions are the ones establishing the points of the games and establishing the multiplicity of inter-partner moves, postmodern society is not bothered by their presence. In this sense, the institution is reconverted in a provisional result while becoming a token of language strategies conceived within and without their own limitations (Lyotard, 1979: 34). Thus, the Lyotardian preoccupation for research dialectic of contemporary knowledge pragmatism can be explained, through noting the existence of two types of conflict-legitimizing knowledge: narrative knowledge (savoir narratif) and scientific knowledge (savoir scientifique). An inquiry into narrative knowledge (a characteristic of traditional knowledge) is based upon the following central ideas: popular narrating histories, either positive or negative, imbue institutions/society with their own legitimacy, by being considered either positive or negative models of integration into (pre)established institutions; the narrative form of admitting a plurality of language games brings together denotativeevaluative assertions; narration implies an imposition of certain rules through the science-of-talking, the science-of-listening and the science-of-

20

Chapter One

doing; the narrative form, free from any imposed rhythm, does not invoke history in order to legitimize itself but confirms its own social linking essence not only by the significant histories already narrated, but also by the very act of their recitation. These notes lead to the conclusion that a society claims and wields its cultural proficiency as long as it practices narration, in the sense of rewriting within the perimeter of institutions of knowledge (Lyotard, 1979: 42-43). As for the pragmatics of scientific knowledge, Lyotard notes that every phrase affirms and adjusts its veridicality through a double set of rules-the first being the rhetorical-judiciary (as long as I can prove it, it is permitted to believe that reality is exactly how I describe it)–and the second belonging to the metaphysical registry (the same referent cannot provide a plurality of contradictory samples). This double rule imposes an evaluative method known in 19th century science as the verification method–launched by scientific postmodernism as a falsifying term. Scientific knowledge approves of isolated language games and distances the denotative from the connotative, with the intention of excluding all others, and is thus inoculated inside the endeavour-profession of institutional building as represented by qualified partners: the professionals. The exterior relation between knowledge and society flaunts the relationship between scientific institutions and society, while suggesting a tri-phased approach: the rules of research games imply the existence of competence as the exclusive province of the end producer; scientific statements are not self-validating through the simple fact of being finished (the case of narrative knowledge), cannot be protected from possible fakes, and the ludicity of science always implies a diachronic temporality, a memory and a project. After Lyotard, legitimacy can be considered a problem in itself, a heuristic way of acknowledging (recent) modes/models of treatment/ treatise through inversion. Scientific knowledge implies solutions (obtained through situational breakdown torques from before the time of positivism) suggesting a return to procedures and, through these, a recapturing of narrative knowledge. Thus scientific knowledge cannot be considered true knowledge as regards any statement of truth, without mentioning the type of narration perceived as non-knowledge, in the absence of which it will just be constrained to self-definition by manipulating concepts (principled positions and prejudgements) customarily rejected and condemned.

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21

With an interest in the present theme, a possible approach would focus upon fragmentary alternatives overtaking the left–right dichotomy through a third-way politics–a Giddensian offer (2001) of micro narrative valuation-neither resurrecting an older idea belonging to start-of-thecentury British Neo-liberalism, nor representative of a median axis between decayed socialism and the philosophy of the free market; but rather a restructuring of social-democratic doctrines, with the avowed purpose of articulating pertinent answers to the challenge of economic globalization and informatization. One can admit to an intersection of neoliberal and social-democratic ideas and a redefinition of the left depending on its actual values and not through opposition to the free market. Placed within the rich frame of “the end of history”, vanishing social contradictions, and borderless politics; the “third way politics” script ignores systematic relationships between the forces of globalizing markets and the blocking problems of interdependent arteries (of any type of isms–globalisms, ecologisms, feminisms etc.). In this (con)text, any recommendations for the left (Mouffe, 2005) form a serious discourse/endeavour, aiming to distance it from the rule of the third way’s consensual politics, and of abolishing (even) the union between social-democrats and neoliberals, a solution that has been considered to be ‘the new politics of the century”; or, in a Dahrendorf's way, a liberation from the ties of dubious histories and a deliberate avoidance of democratic liberties and freedoms (‫܇‬andru, 2001). Dahrendorf’s conviction states that the effect of the third way is one of division and that it is thus impossible to obtain a plausible answer that unites durable conditions of economic development within the perimeter of a global market without at the same time losing the coherence of democratic and free societies/institutions. Correlating Giddens’ and U. Beck’s re-launched ideas, one can state that the third way unravels the nodes of national objectives such as: economic growth through lowering taxes and increasing investment (directed towards infrastructure and education); monitoring and balancing economic and social security risks; valuing the tri-phased relationship between state-market-civil society; ideological rebuilding of political sciences; promoting transnational initiatives in a world guided by “soft sovereignty”. The model seems destined from the start to serve a deficient functionality, impeded by superposing a third possibility upon the cohabitation of two, and taking into account the equal-part mixture of neoliberal economic policies and social-democratic ones.

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The dysfunction can be increased by Edward Said’s (2004) warning, which questions neo-liberalism’s ability to resist and demand new alternative solutions for itself, while preserving both candidates for the US presidency (Clinton and Gore)–each of them a mirror image of the other– as neo-liberalism’s only chance of preserving its domination. In a Bourdieuian note (2004) such slips are perceived from within uncertain neo-liberal concepts as applying a utopia already reconverted into a political program, to any self-strengthened conception of the real. One can also speculate upon the fact that the same is patronized by pure mathematical fictional structures, abstractions mixing rationality and individual rights and imposing clarifying rules to economic and social conditions of both rational habitus and economic-social structures. Bourdieu thinks that the neo-liberal discourse–perceived as a political action program–is still a hard one, because it represents an economic system equal to its theoretical description, the equivalent of a logical machine. Not at all by chance, in 1999, the Labour (Tony Blair)–socialdemocratic (Gerhard Schroder) tandem advanced, through its Europe–the third way (The New Centre) document, new acceptations (the emperor’s new clothes!) and appraisals of the current, through which, while still preserving national values, they offered a credible renewal of (exhausted) ideas and a free remodelling of their own program, considering it to be the perfect moment for completing any combination of social justice with economic dynamism and creatively-innovative ebullient activities. Available for examination just before European Parliamentary10 elections, the document was positioned at the crossroads of socialist liberalism and new centre politics and stubbornly insisted upon evaluating European state governments’ capacity to direct the economy and control the direction of economic growth, in a context where each state, unburdened of any surplus charges, would only assume a guiding role/mission. The New Labour prescriptions would, in timely fashion, take into account the tri-phased appeal formulating radical changes in the social welfare system, educational reform and “welfare to work” systems. The model’s failure could thus be explained by André Tosel's (2004) comment about the social-democratic “welfare state”, seen as a compromise formula, a neo-liberal ontological sophism, expressed as a way of “identifying society with this institution which is its undisputed tyrant, a market taken over by animal spirits, equating an aspiration 10

After the document's publication, the Social-Democratic Party (only) obtained votes from Austria, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

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towards work force freedom within an ever-expanding civil society besieged by the market’s dominating forces”. This turns the “welfare states” own contradictions upon themselves, but also hides the market’s own despotism and any inherent conflict between rival multinationals acting under the guise of free expansion and releasing social energies repressed by the state engine. The option reassesses scientific knowledge’s capacity to offer solutions, and its inability to avoid recourse to proceedings or, in a Lyotardian manner, recourse to narrative knowledge. Thus, all reactions already conglomerated around a non-acceptance of the model can be justified–a third way–as true knowledge, opinions fuelled by the simple fact that printed matter cannot mention a type of narration which might be perceived as non-knowledge, and is thus constrained to a self-definition/self-report through the manipulation of those same elements it avoids/rejects/accuses. With specific reference to the question, a third way?, Peter Burke (1999) asks himself in what proportion an intersection of the two models– belonging to Marx and Spencer–could guarantee a synthetic product, an alchemically complementary combination, and a union of contraries which would only affirm in a Lyotardian note the perpetual nature of oppositional thinking reflexes. Thus one can appeal to a compromise solution, acknowledged in the concept of a third-degree construct and seen as an intermediate-welding formula received through a Tocqueville network (as a mediation of both evolutionary and revolutionary changes); an E. P. Thomson network (reactivated reciprocal rituals); or a Habermasian network (at the MarxWeber crossroads of convergent signals). P. Burke (1999: 174) does not hesitate to expose the faults in both models, considering that a model of traditional society (Spencer) and one of feudal society (Marx) would only represent residual categories, mirror worlds, with frequent over turnings (by appealing to a pre-industrial, pre-political or even pre-logical registry) of modern capitalist society’s properties. For Burke, the third way is the transmission axis for Marx and Spencer’s theories, a way of revitalizing the 80s historical sociology, with its three main exponents, Giddens (1985), Mann (1986) and Tilly (1975)– more concerned with political, economic and war stakes than with anything else. If Giddens favours allocative resources and the economic domain and de-emphasizes the political, Mann and Gellner are centred upon the relationships between production–coercion–knowledge, and demand a history of power which would rethink the modern state’s fundamental

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principles in non-domestic terms, based on violent geopolitical relationships; as for Tilly, he is still focused upon the capital and its coercive problems. Such seductive sophisms bank upon an interpretation, definition and displacement of individuality within the “free market”, and allow Tosel (2004) to confirm that we are in the presence of a reloaded utopia, with the potential to enable the producer-citizen to distance himself from any regressive neoliberal utopia which would, ethically and politically, sacrifice him rather than the market.

1.3. Tri-phased Intersections: Pro–jects,–grams,–spections Re-launching and rebalancing the dual’s cohabitations within its equilibrium positioning (a third order) on the edge of the coin, the present subchapter identifies in the third perspective a vice-category balancing both the more-prominent and the more-excavated faces of the same problem. The two sides of the coin preserve, in a philosophically-political note, the Homo Sacer’s hard matrix [Agamben, 2006: 73-84] (an unexpected figure of captive, sovereign exiled life and a perpetuated memory of the original expulsion through which the political dimension was created, a referent of sovereign decision, a live statue, a double or unique colossus); and the weak matrix of the Arendtian Homo Laborans marked by the supremacy of natural life over political action, and with consequences in the reconfiguration and decadence of modern public spaces. Nevertheless, modes of spatialization can be still configured on the coin’s edges, announcing a third perspective–(alter)position relating to the two faces of the same coin–an operation allowing political fact to be placed outside any rapport(ation) form/formula. The crushingly dual perspective (with an overinflated literary, political, philosophical and cultural career–two cities, two hands, two sexes etc.) was meant to nuance/denounce, in a metaphorically Aristotelian registry, the professional status of sailor-citizens (undertaking a lucky expedition) whose job is not singular, but implies multiple endeavours (one is a rower, another–a second, another–a steersman, and the fourth has another name, after his work) [Aristotle, 1999: 77]. Annotating such an approach and correlating it with the double milestones of a stable, measurable and rational Apollonian dimension as opposed to the Dionysian dissolution of the flux of becoming, one can conclude that duality amplifies the idea of recessivity expressed in/through principal/secondary, central/marginal, interior/exterior, or egocentric/alteric

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relationships. And we would also like to add the fact that the other’s statute has become doubled, any vacant space being defined as space which, in an Aristotelian manner, bears another name–(here) the third space. This ideate exegesis recommends the soft landmarks of any “ideology of nothingness” and defines them as nihilo-centric models facilitating access to certain alternative formulas in/through a continued “anxiety of falling from the centre”/“on the coin’s edge” by presenting a third state, ecstasy (on a Baudrillardian direction) as a property of any body rotating around its own self until all sense is lost and it is finally re-delivered as a pure void. Launched by Jacques Ellul in 1967, the concept of an “ideology of nothingness” (as a way of accepting nihilo centrism, considered to be ontologically prior and less social, an expression of bourgeois culture in its last phase) expresses a desire for completion in individual personality, but also the personal right to resort to negation (through absorption, reelaboration, re-identification). When correlated with all kinds of apocalyptic signs and visions easy to decipher in any contemporary theoretical approach (of all manner of endisms used by both postmodernity and/or any trends timidly and hesitatingly trying to impose continuing alternatives to it) the nihilo centric model accepts a double face, a sealed destiny within its cohabiting factor–an ending and a beginning, an affirmation and a negation, a recognition/acceptance and a denial. The situation favours a positive landmark/argument11 which can be diagnosed on cultural grounds as a Thoth Complex (Soviany, 2008). It defines the sum of psychic functions necessarily determined by text praxis and implemented within the blank of phase development from an anthropocentric model of modernity to an apocalyptic one; thus, the space of “falling on the circle” decrees that every point on its circumference can (episodically) assume the condition of a “weakened” centrality, interpreted as a virtuality with all its possible senses, or explained as a way of accepting a text already valued from the perspective of a productivity quotient. The cultural and philosophical landmarks of any philosophy of nothingness cannot be distanced from the warning provided by the 11 In the situation of simultaneously accepting the Apocalypse as both beginning and end, Northrop Frye (1999) admits the existence of two metafictions: one, of the “panoramic Apocalypse” projecting a vision of “extraordinary miracles placed in a near future” or even “before the end of time”; and the other, of an “inner Apocalypse”.

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theoretical endeavours of the three conjoined arguments: dissolution of metanarratives (J. Fr. Lyotard)–the postulates of power (M. Foucault)–the ontology of decline (G. Vattimo). Re-analysing the theories which almost universally consider political space as a combination of power, identity and order, Andrew Gamble (2001) insists upon spaces which define and justify the prerogatives of the political; power–decisional space for accepting the-one-within or deciding to place him without; identity–space of choice between values and principles, with an emphasis upon loyalty; order–determining space for the general lines of social activity, by creating and strengthening (social) ties. Concerned about the dissolution of the metanarrative, J. Fr. Lyotard (1979) signals the fact that any report towards modernity must not be mistaken for the art of rewriting/the technique of remembering, because this latter implies a placing of event reality within the folds of modernity while still able to engender its projective capacities. From comments such as these one can derive one of postmodernity’s main characteristics and nihilo-centric appetence-consisting in an ability not to override, but to instead re-establish, future connections suggested by the triple phased derivations of the pro (–ject, –gram, –spect). Any specific difference between projects is reappraised through an inversion process with direct implications in knowledge’s and science’s hard metanarratives (a dialectic of the spirit, a hermeneutics of the senses, an emancipation of the rational subject) and which ensures a favourable frame for an intense overtaking of metaphysics inside its own unmanageable crisis, along Heideggerian directions. The contemporary hermeneutic discourses that germinated from such a presupposition display a sense and a direction which demand to be known and which imbue both history and knowledge with legitimacy. Culturally, the status of knowledge is (non)balancing, revealed as marked by a more segmented speculative unity (Lyotard, 1979: 59). At the intersection between hyper modernism and the postmodern utopia/contra-utopia, certain voices characterize Lyotard’s arguments as another hyper-self-legitimating chance for metanarratives, able to delegitimize all others (Crăciun, 2001), or a consistent reply for any nihilism offered by utopias supporting the idea that philosophy cannot accept being controlled by endisms while still in the process of being concerned with self-legitimating discoveries. Lyotard’s findings represent in fact a negative definition of an event which is commented upon using radical experimental and non-directional rules, allowing the un-programmed/unexpected to assert it.

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Starting from Lyotard’s assertion about the need for systems and ideologies (nihilo-centric ones, our note) one has to accept that assumed non-ideological postmodernism is an ideology in itself, in the context of form-content clarifying comments (Glucksmann, 2012). Not by chance, Linda Hutcheon (2002) notes that postmodernism holds and cultivates a historiography metanarrative program for extracting its subjects from history and projecting them within a spectre of irony, ludicity and fiction, and the poetry of postmodernism is able to order and valorise (in its consecrated Lyotardian sense) actual cultural knowledge; in a stage conclusion, one notes that postmodernism saves and imposes the concept of metanarrative as the cultural logic of late capitalism, multiplying and consolidating the socio-economic pillars of postmodernity (Jameson, 1984). On the other hand, one must note Foucault’s option (2005) for the strategic formulas of power in its endeavour to establish itself as more than a philosophy obsessed with power relationships more than language games, power relationships (like language) “playing” within given terms, for strategic/tactic reasons. Foucault discerns between limited power games, small, singular, marginal and hard-structure power games while stating that marginal power games are, more than state or institutional battles, the object of unrest and multiple theorisations. Marginal power, diffuse and de-centred, represents a way of resisting whose essential objective is constituted by power facts and power instances with immediate action and which, starting from the 19th century, will assume obvious economic power levers. As Foucault says, power means one action after another. Influenced by the dialectical crisis as well as the difference one, the ontology of decline (in a Vattimoian sense) approximates the repercussions of a reclaiming/healing process actualized, by recoil, within a weakening of the being as it is drawn further from the centre. The Heideggerian Ge-stellt is re-enounced by Vattimo (1993) by confirming a fulfilment of nihilism as the only chance of accepting the limits of ultra-metaphysics. In other words, being positioned in front of the limit (as it is traced from a Nietzschean perspective) the man of compromise is forced to reinvent and relearn living with nothingness (Vattimo, Rovatti, 1998). Concerned with theoretical signs and designs of pro –jects, –grams, – spectives (re)configured as nihilo centric ideologies and perceived as third-degree technicisms, the present endeavour contains comments which can be verified directly, by relating–in just one instance–to hot items of

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the moment (March 2014) as transmitted by the Russian publication “Russia Today”, in its metaphorically-shocking statement “there are no more gods in Washington”. As such, recent Crimean events seem to bank on a reawakening of the gods, since they assert the reinvention of a European centre with a concentrating role of answer/reaction towards currently-in-deployment events: a centre able to function under the benevolent guidance of a safer world, if both the US and Europe work together and the West stays united. One would also have to accept the Lyotardian type assertion of the fact that inside any event reality the centre still retains the capacity to project something. Deciphered from the perspective of the “fear of falling from the centre”, of endings and beginnings, with an accent upon recognition/acceptance and negation at the same time, recent equidistantdosed events in Ukraine–Crimea–Transnistria maintain the possibility that the un-programmed/unexpected will manifest itself suddenly. The imminence of a conflict brings to the fore the compromise profile, easy to note in president Obama’s Brussels speech, perceived as signalling a new beginning within the EU and interpreted as a message of reevaluating clear distinctions between nations, functioning at present as statutory security guarantees or even as simple insurance (see the status of non-NATO countries such as Ukraine and Moldova). A Foucaultian imposition of power as one action after another seems not to be found in the equation of prolonged expectations (this is not the case for a new cold war; Russia is not the Soviet Union and as such cannot assume the position of centre for a block of nations or global ideology), maintained by a (col)lateral mode of reaction (NATO And Russia are not ready for a head-on collision); what is being re-evaluated here is a whole credibility-maintaining arsenal. Re-analysing the filling of the blank by accepting the Maidan as a symbol of the passage from the status of empty place, space of Baumanian rambling/vagrancy towards the political condition of “weakened” centrality–being seen inside the fighting grounds–the Ukrainian Maidan can be identified with a space on the edge of the coin, a productivepolitical mode (manipulate spaces–the Orange Revolution, 2004; or spontaneously, 2013-14) of demanding a change in power. Approaching the problem from this angle acknowledges marginal power as either a way of resisting [with a declared objective both in facts/power instances] or a way of accepting a different ideology.

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1.3.1. Three Philosophic-Political Cures for Diplopia The present subchapter appropriates the statement already apparent in the introductory notes, that Hecate-isms can be considered a remedy for diplopia, as they perform a translation between the (already ill) double towards a three-phased punctum of sight. Reactivating the whole registry of the double (with all its incumbent third-order slides between modernism-postmodernism/postmodernismspostmodernity) perceived in a tragic rather than ironic note, in the sense of those doppelgänger12, one can easily note the existence of an assault from within a translation of the dual and its integrated expression in a literarypsychological registry (with emphasis upon the relationship between the hero and his companion, or between him and his negative double) towards its fragmented reception or even an exclusive interdependence of the double itself (a concept invested with parody Baroque nuances). Indebted to these concepts, postmodernism betrays its propensity towards self-mystifying either through an Aristotelian duality of unified ethical visions or through its connection to unified private life. The same acceptation can also explain the sliding process that the double undergoes: from within the Cartesian concept of a unified, indivisible, continuous self, with a fixed/fixated identity, given to division and discontinuity, towards the non-centred self, through a separation between the signifier and the signification; the being becomes a place of contradictions, or contradictory discursive practices. A possible counter-direction of the double and an intersection with the tri-phased could accent the double’s dysfunction13: identity, as a false category in the sense in which, if two are alike, none of them has a unique, self-asserting and well-defined identity; the double imprints everything with the psychological and social disorder of inequality, by plunging outside the value structures of the dominant system. The alternatives, as brought together in this subchapter, are conditioned by an experience of pluralism (Ihab Hassan), off-centre politics (Masao Miyoshi) or of the other head (Jacques Derrida). Without any doubt, any option for such a tri-phased melange (this and no other) could be used as a basis for a previously elaborated model of the

12 Nietzsche announced in Ecce Homo, that their profile is marked by two, even three faces, subsumed to dual experiences, belonging to separate worlds, impossible to appease and unify. 13 See, in this context, John O. Stark or Rosemary Jackson in Gordon E. Slethaug, The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction, Illinois University, 1993.

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crossroads, with easy-to-find elements within the (bio)logical building of an alternative–platform (pluralism)–body (asymmetry)–the other head. Resorting to non-mathematical extensions, seen as an opportunity to use cultural languages as a pattern of discourse dispersal, Ihab Hassan (1987) proposes the building of a postmodernist platform with 11 (+7) nodal points in: indeterminacy (by repositioning Thomism claritas in the centre of the debate, with reflections within the random, hazardous, ambiguous), fragmentation (a reassessment of integras through discontinuity), decanonization, a lack of self and exponential multiplication of selves, referent disappearance, irony, hybridization, dilated proteism, constructionism and immanence. Hassanian negative categories complete a moving puzzle by adding the categories of urbanism, technologism, dehumanization, eroticism, experimentalism and antinomianism14. All these notes describe the qualities for off-centre politics with an accent upon restoring asymmetry–neither neutrality nor objectivity–which influences the tri-phased valences apparent in the following relationship: efficiency (profit-power relationship)–trans-nationalism–utilitarianism (Miyoshi, 2010). Reflecting upon the image of future democracy and placing it under the sign of semantic articulations of the I decipher–I bet–I hope type, Derrida adds to the Miyoshian tri-phase and recommends the acceptance of hope as a possibility, of obligation as responsibility and of duty as a prescriptive factor. In a Derridean way, Europe does not represent just geographical lines in search of its own representation as a ‘spiritual haven-infinite’ project, mission or idea–but also compares/equates its own image and place with an advanced edge. One can afford to advance, through a sense-filled analogy, the image of Oblio(sizing) Europe with its reference point in the Oblio fable (1971)– which depicts a character in exile, sentenced to live outside the city/law which acknowledges as citizens of the realm only those people with a point on their head. Insisting upon the same triangular approach (exiled by the Maleficent count because he had beaten his son in the triangle game) and fuelled by King Apathetic measures, Oblio, guided by Arrow–the dog substituting for road signs–discovers in the Pointless Forest that the direction of the road is always more important than its end. If Oblio–the only exception to 14

The latest particularizing extant of postmodernism-antinomianism–notes the book's interest in the simultaneous presence of contradictory tendencies, ones which never deny their own counter-cultural implosions: from emancipation movements, feminism, oriental philosophies, to mysticism and witchcraft.

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the rule of the place–finally gets his point on the head, under its masking cap, all the others are flattened, space/buildings become rounded, and thus one can see how the circle replaces the triangle. Starting from an axiomatic double, the theory of the other head enounces/announces either an end to ideological and philosophical appreciations of Europe (flattening-rounded)–of discourses recommending Europe as advanced head/edge/point of civilization-culture, a beacon of the universal or a place for expressing humanity’s telos–or as an overvaluing of the reasons for this burn-out (the Oblioian growth of the point). Such an interpretation re-launches, within the grounds of political philosophy, the idea stating that a history of head changing estimates the relationship with the other head through openness and non-exclusion, while paradoxically demanding a return to the double; this implies on the one hand a conservation and a deepening of differences; and on the other, a plunge inside what is beyond of modern tradition, by building and assuming another margin structure (Crépon, 2006). The propagating result of this double is expressed in the production of a multiplied three (9–the proof of the undecidable) imitating that model of technicalities easy to recognize in repeating and breaking operations, continuing and opposing ones; Europe’s re-identification, an opening towards/through alterity, not giving up unconditional hospitality by a mechanism of integrating the foreigner, freeing oneself from the pressures of dual capitalism-communism alternatives, involvement in critical European programs, without giving up deconstructivist political arguments, a reinvestment of democracy with the value of a promise, harmonizing idiomatic exigencies with the imperatives of universality, adapting to the Enlightenment heritage and deciding places for assuming responsibility in word and thought (Derrida, 1993). Not at all risqué, and perfectly integrated into Japanese narrative structures (The Story of Beautiful Hacikazuki, Japanese Fairy Tales, 1976: 272-274), the story of the spare head is recharging itself from ironicallyludic sources of double-sense narratives: the adventure of the rich prince, on a falcon hunt, travelling in a golden palanquin carried by his servants, and the insistent falcon which keeps soiling the palanquin, the golden robe and the gold sandals of the prince. With lots of doubles on hand, the prince’s suite will gradually replace each soiled element with a new, clean and pure one. Looking out of the palanquin and getting his forehead soiled, the prince will have his head replaced with a spare one, kept in a basket by his faithful servants. The carefully planned and practised ritual is disturbed by the hasty replacement of the soiled head, so the prince can– pompously and solemnly–continue to travel upon his pre-established route.

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Giddens, Anthony. 1985. The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2001. A treia cale: renaúterea social-democraĠiei [The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy]. Trans. Cătălin Constantinescu. Jassy: Polirom. Glucksmann, André. 2012. A Dark Vision of the Future of Europe. Spiegel 23 August. Hassan, Ihab. 1987. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Ohio: State University Press. Holmes, Brian. 2011. Deriva continentală. De la geopolitică la geopoetică [Continental Draft. From Geopolitics to Geopoetics]. Idea Artă+Societate 36-37. Hutcheon, Linda.2002. Poetica postmodernismului [A Poetics of Postmodernism]. Trans. Dan Popescu. Bucharest: Univers. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. Foreword note. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean Fr. Lyotard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Joffe, Josef. 2013. L'Euro è destinato a un inevitabile tracollo. IL SOLE-24 ORE. 16 April. Leparmentier, Arnaud. 2009. Le toujours improbable George Washington européen. Le Monde 5 October. Loizeau, Marie-Laure Gabriel. 2012. De l’édification d’une figure: Émile Gallé l’homo triplex in Image de l'artiste. In Territoires contemporains, ed. Eric Darragon et Bertrand Tillier, 3 April. Lyotard, Jean François. 1979. La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mănucă, Dan. Eminescologie/Eminescianism [Eminescology/ Eminescianism]. http://convorbiri-literare.dntis.ro/MANUCAian9.html. Accessed 13 January 2014. Marica, Sorin Claudiu. 2009. Note despre necesitatea ‫܈‬i limitele conceptelor de genul –ismelor [Notes about the Necessity and the Limits of the Concepts such as -isms]. Irregular 4: 5-8. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen. Miyoshi, Masao. 2010. Trespasses. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Moscovici, Serge. 1999. Prefaаă [Preface]. In Psihologie socială. Aspecte contemporane [Social Psychology. Contemporary Aspects], Adrian Neculau (coord.). Jassy: Polirom.

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Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. Sfîr‫܈‬itul lumii bipolare. Ce va fi de acum încolo? [The End of Bipolar World. What Comes Next?]. Idea Artă+Societate 21. Nicolau, Felix. 2013. Estetica inumană. De la postmodernism la Facebook [Inhuman Esthetics. From Postmodernism to Facebook]. Bucharest: Tractus Art. Nozick, R. 1997. Anarhie, stat Юi utopie [Anarchy, State, and Utopia]. Trans. Mircea Dumitru. Bucharest: Humanitas. Pickover, Clifford A. 2013. Banda lui Möbius [The Möbius Strip]. Trans. Diana Constantinescu Altamer. Bucharest: Humanitas. Polgár, Al. 2003. Din col‫ ܊‬în col‫[ ܊‬From Corner to Corner]. Idea Artă+Societate 14. Rohde, Erwin. 1985. Psyche. Trans. Mircea Popescu. Bucharest: Meridiane. Said, Edward. 2004. Problemele neoliberalismului [Problems of Neoliberalism]. Idea Artă+Societate 18. ‫܇‬andru, Daniel. 2001. Depă‫܈‬irea metanara‫܊‬iunilor politice [Overlapping the Political Metanarratives]. Contrast 1. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2004. Eurotaoism. Contribuаii la o critică a cineticii politice [Eurotaoism, Contributions to a Critique of Political Kinetics]. Trans. Alexandru Suter. Cluj: Design & Print. Soviany, Octavian. 2008. Apocaliptica textului (Încercare asupra textualismului românesc) [Apocalypse of the Text (A Try at the Romanian Textualism)]. Bucharest: Palimpsest. Povestea Frumoasei Hacikazuki. PoveЮti japoneze [The Story of Beautiful Hacikazuki, Japanese Fairytales]. 1976. Trans. Alexandru Ivănescu. Bucharest: Minerva. Tilly, C. (ed). 1975. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. New York: Princeton. Tosel, André. 2004. Sofismele neoliberalismului [Sophisms of Neoliberalism]. Idea Artă+Societate. Vattimo, Gianni, Pier Aldo Rovatti eds. 1998. Gândirea slabă [Weak Thought]. Trans. ùtefania Mincu. ConstanĠa: Pontica. Vattimo, Gianni. 1993. Sfârúitul modernităĠii [The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture]. Trans. ùtefania Mincu. ConstanĠa: Pontica. Voltaire. 2000. Micromégas. Paris: Libretti.

CHAPTER TWO THEORETICAL TRINOCULAR RECAPTURES

The comments in this chapter refer (as an ideate pretext for understanding the whole endeavour) to Zygmunt Bauman’s assertions in his Beyond the Moral Party chapter of Postmodern Ethics (2000) and especially to those comments which focus upon particularizing properties and valorising connotations of the third. Not confined to such a sociological Baumanian registry, the notes in this chapter are meant to offer explications and terminological clarifications, and thus to complete the theoretical part of our endeavour. If in a Baumanian assertion, societas begins with the third, then one+one=(possibly) three, an operation which implies a certain preestablished settlement/order, with nodal points representing the fellow man–overhead, the semblant–underneath, and the mirror-image of the monstrous placed in the middle. Actually, in a tri-phased context, Žižek-Lévinas-Jankélévitch, the present chapter will prove that: between two there can be no approach lacking/unmediated by a third; they are both subordinated to a third factor=different from my fellow man=the fellow man of my fellow man; because the third represents “just another one”. Such theoretical correlations will be commented and annotated, while stating that on the way from the one to the three, the fiction of a third road, the landmarks of a third wave and the stakes of a first and last man will be used as theoretical resting places. Offering a radically new approach to the disappearance of the Big Other (via Žižek and Fukuyama), the conclusion of the present chapter will serve to confirm the fact that, assaulted by the three, the Big One loses its monopoly upon unicity forever, in the process of self-replication.

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2.1. Societas Starts with the Third Any Baumanian assertions about to be verified take into consideration the immediate-order observations pertaining to the fact that societas starts with the third, in the sense of a priority of being before and to the detriment of a being better. Fixed upon ethical grounds, the occurrence of the third proves that any moral association transcends natural size and converts itself into society. The third’s quality of being the Other is articulated within an abandoned framework of really-existing morality and implemented as entry into the area of social Order governed by Justice (and not by morality) in Lévinas' mode, but still controlled by the domains of State, Justice and Politics. In Bauman’s opinion (2000), the third’s essential quality is the attribute of distance, clearly different from the other’s moral proximity; or, in a Simmelian sense, it represents the sociological significance of the third element, situated at such a distance from the other two that there are no interactive sociological interferences between them and the three elements cannot simultaneously interact. Eluding the third or ignoring him would take into consideration just this loss of proximity and its investment with the role of a disinterested third party (ergo an objective one): an advantageous position in which any moral association becomes a group/entity/totality much bigger than the sum of its parts. Hence the placing of the third in the position of judge/coach, in the situation of the one opposing objective criteria to interests and advantages. In the case when any asymmetry of moral relationships vanishes, the partners become equals and can be replaced: the third element, the mediation one, depletes conflict pretensions of their affective properties, guided by the task of both self and group preservation. Within an atmosphere of confusion, vulnerability and loss of sense, society offers much needed help, indicating the name of the place where rules exist (one makes offers, the other cannot accept refusals) by clarifying the place of source–spaces for norms and the perimeter where these rules apply. The third occurs in situations where a moral association between two transforms the couple/pair/dual state into an unit where the object can be described as it is, accepts to be manoeuvred, compared to others, appreciated, valued and–last but not least–dominated (Bauman, 2000: 122123). As Bauman asserts in The Moral Party of Two, postmodernism itself is the currently forced to (self)retreat from modernism’s own radical

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ambition impasse, and postmodernist ethics are reclaim the Other by imbuing him with the status of psycho-physical sign: it ensures a dual approach by instituting morally-autonomous governance. Modern-type emancipation described socialized man, ruled by rationally–conceived laws, as a dream ideal of any society. If, following in Lévinas’ footsteps, one can accept that proximity is based upon the exponential force of moral law demanding it be responsible, the term [proximity] is reinvested by Bauman with the sense of the sole quality of an ethical situation which would accept a suppression of distances, an excess of rapprochement, and a state of permanent attention (Bauman, 2000: 87). In the state of proximity, the Other represents the founding authority of responsibility and thus becomes the force, the resistance monitoring otherthan-moral existence, suggesting a world of conflicts and seeking solutions within the limits of rules. Before any conflict, an aporia of unconditional demands asserts itself, a tangled, difficult and complicated situation is created, and it can only be explained through the ego’s involvement quotient in relationship with another, because the ego is responsible for the Other’s status. The conceptualization of distinctive spaces–cognitive, aesthetic or moral–reloads the operational difference between communitas and societas as a nodal interest point of the present study. Inheriting such a dichotomy from Victor W. Turner, Bauman considers it to function only in a well-structured society, every time an individualgroup passes or is moved from one structure to another, in fact, from a structure to an anti-structure. If societas is characterized by heterogeneity, inequality, statutory differences or nominal systems, communitas is marked by homogeneity, equality, the absence of statutes; anonymity. The opposition physical space vs. social space states that the latter, through its formulations (cognitive, aesthetic and moral) cumulates the notions of proximity and distance, closeness and opening, but Bauman notes that these “mechanisms” of space production differ in both their praxis and their results. The main characteristics of the two spaces are easy to recognize within the following definitional statements: cognitive space is built in an intellectual way, through acquiring and distributing knowledge; aesthetic space is affectively represented, by curiosity-channelled attention and by seeking the intensity of experience itself; moral space is a construct resulting from/in an uneven distribution of felt/assumed responsibility. One has to mention in this context that the global effect of postmodernity is marked by a “desocialization” of potentially social

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spaces; or by preventing physical space from mutating into social space–a change which, according to Bauman, would impose “false techniques” of another space accepting other rules of involvement and interaction. The actual divorce between state–focused politics and the moral existence of its citizens or between state–supervised institutional socialization and collective sociability seems to have irreversibly vanished. On the social plane, the proportion of socialization to sociability corresponds to the most recent antithesis between the Illuminist, progressoriented modern project and the un-centred postmodern one. In an brief enumeration of the differences, Bauman's research states the following suppositions: if socialization anticipates the state which is going to be actualized “in nuce”, monitors it and reinterprets it as it goes along, then sociability is totally disoriented, and has no direction, “does not know where it is heading”; if socialization can be evaluated in time and anticipated, sociability remains firmly anchored in the present, “for as long as the form it takes lasts”; if socialization represents a cumulative process, based in the past and reaching towards its goals in the future, sociability is flat, moving imperceptibly, without changing places, endeavouring to start again in every present moment. Sociability has no biography, and interrupts the course of events by refusing to make history, Bauman notes. If socialization diminishes the number of “still available” options, sociability triggers these possibilities. Within such a theoretical frame, in which one of the constants is a negation of the social itself, postmodernism encourages the assertion of tendencies which seem to be mostly centripetal. With avowed intentions, Giovanni Sartori (2007) monitors the societas–comunitas road and admits as essential attributes of an open society, in a Popperian note, the very limits traced by changing frontiers, which can be crossed through an appeal to plurality, and perceived as a derivative formulation from the sense of the syntagm “a-little-more-thanone”, or considered to be a specific type of social structure substituting simple equations for notions of structural complexity. In Sartori's acceptation, communitas means a partaking/an engagement, a primary unification of all socio-political constructs, a Tönniesian mixture of concrete and abstract, designating equal elements of the operational corpus and being accepted as identity markers1. 1 Hence the approximation, more in a philosophical-political registry and less in an economic one (the false sustainability of the “needed categories of Gastarbeiter” idea), of the new European physiognomy, importer of immigrants, neither conjectural nor cyclical, but still confirming a European spleen which maintains the automatic attraction of restructured migratory tides, comprising sedentary

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39

When completing the two complementary analyses (Bauman's and Sartori's), our conviction is that, by placing itself beyond the theoretical dispute societas vs. communitas, the option of the third (that other about which Sartori improvised) forces dualities, defining itself as a third-order coagulating mode/group, as a diversity surplus; with the necessary mention that the term “third place” often traces the lines of that communitas that Giddens revisited (2000) within permutations already operating in re-combinations/re-encapsulations and/or solved through reflexive re-orderings of the social. Seen as the meeting place of sociability and a means of retying into outside–public and/or private space reality (Fize‫܈‬an, 2010), the third-order option has all the characteristics of a communitas already invested with the mission of self-distributing the tri-phased particularities found in the zone of interference of the three spaces: interface space, social space and/or metaphorical space (Gotved, 2002). In fact, the option of a third uses a recapitulative narrative exercise which internalizes the relationship between the centre and the periphery, perceived as a contested mode of binary oppositions, almost an undecidable space (Derrida, 1997), rebuilt by neutering deconstructed opposites, as a “third space” of interstitial identities2. A space of enouncement in the Homi Bhabha (1990) acceptation acknowledges the third as it transforms the relationship between sense and reference into an ambivalent process, and in so doing targets a crossroads place/moment and the opportunity of meeting/crossing differences with other differences. Society creates and perpetuates a world of difference, number, knowledge, limit, time, here-and-now space and freedom, truth and falsity–landmarks considered to be characters in their own right, included in the luggage of moral righteousness which is/becomes mostly intuitive. In a note of transgressed mutilating dualities, Basarab Nicolescu (2009) annotates the Ecoian perspective (from The Limits of Interpretation) stating that a coincidental and amplified superposition of contraries does not exclude identity and non-contradiction, but substitutes, through a transreductionist prism, the included third for the excluded third. Offering the two-headed cane as an alternative model, Basarab Nicolescu (2009) maintains that the logic of the included third is privileged by the very fact that it affords a coherent translation within guests of the past, poor urbanites or excessive numbers of new-borns (Sartori, 2007: 91). 2 See, in this context, Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge Classics London, 1994, or Nation and Narration, Routledge, London, 1999.

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different domains, creating an open Gödelian structure for the totality of Reality’s levels. In this context, a concept such as Homo sui transcendentalis (re)opens the dispute between the excluded third–the included third, in the sense in which the excluded third is responsible for the principle of One, giving birth to a multitude of mutually incompatible worlds (Manolache, 2012). In Nicolescu’s acceptation (2009) the principle of the included third decrees the existence of a third term T which is simultaneously both A and non-A, an opinion which questions the problem of identity for the three terms and concludes that the relationship between subject and object depends upon a flux of the unnamed–third. Hence the welding of the intimate rational–trans-rational relationship in Morin's acceptation (2008) of a new rationality which would necessarily imply a mode of salvation from imminent disintegration into nothingness, by re-articulating the included third; a trans-disciplinary method recharging the undivided man with dynamic knowledge already in movement, translatable in a double sense; a forward movement from the parts towards the whole, and a backward movement from the whole towards the parts. In Agamben’s language, the act of third–degree localization can (be) superimposed upon an exceptional state, in which new philosophical, cultural, political, social, and economic forms/formulas converge towards the postmodernist-extraction secondary, diversifying and tri-phase decanonizing it. The theoretical ideas already enounced are not to be separated from the Foucaultian triad security–territory–population, which identifies in the third (in a philosophically political note) a state acquired by either eroding distances, spaces and thresholds within which both modernity and postmodernity operate, or by the emergence of the third, this time guided by third-degree rules/laws/morals; and also by establishing the tri-phased mechanisms of power.

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2.2. One+One=Three Conceptualizing a mediation of dual poles beyond the symmetry of reciprocal recognition between/from the Subject and the Other, Slavoj Žižek (2005) presented, along Derrida–Critchley lines, the politicalphilosophical significance of “the decisions that the other-within-me takes”, estimating that any solicitation formulated by the other necessarily implies political invention and imposes the birth of new norms, or the acceptance of new decisions. Such a perspective cannot be limited by a structure of the double based upon the equation of [double] movement which altogether confirms the simultaneous presence of the other’s decision as well as one’s own, with the avowed purpose of operating a pragmatic political intervention, and serving as an answer, and justifies the instant approach to effective intervention occurring in the process of inventing new sets of rules that are still un-separated from a series of pragmatic and strategic considerations. This type of analysis is interesting for our present study, because it emphasizes the imaginary–symbolic–real aspects that illustrate the triphased Lacanian concept of a borromean node, and establish a certain order in deciphering the stages of passing from two to three or in decreeing three as a result of the interaction between one+one; the first is the imaginary other, involved in mirror-competitive relationships of acknowledgement, competition and recognition; the second is the symbolic other, social substance guided by a set of impersonal coordinating rules; the third–“the inhuman partner”–represents that category which does not tolerate either symmetrical dialogue or that type of mediation usually attributed to the Symbolic Order. As concerning the endurance needed in order to live with the Thing, the intervention of the qua-Tertium cannot be minimized; this is the pacifying mediator, the one guiding The-Other-Thing, infusing it with the status of a normal-human being, in the acceptation that both of them are answerable to a third factor (the Impersonal Symbolic Order). Hence a triple implication/fall into the monstrous, by Žižek's (2005) launching of a ménage à trois concept which is both atypical and tributary to the monstrous; if the functioning of the Big Other is suspended, the fellow man coincides with the monstrous Thing (Antigone); in the absence of any coordination with its human partner, the Symbolic Order becomes the monstrous Thing (Schreber); besides symbolic rules established with others, communication games also imply a flat aseptic universe, advocating a distancing from the hybris of excessive passion (Habermas).

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From this tri-phased argument one can see that if one works, then it can be theorized inside, and the second and third become categories of the outside. Such an opinion is not contradicted by a theory of the rest, or of equalizing multiplications, or, on the contrary, by inequity mutations; it serves to establish equal positions for inside and outside (an option for the adding operation) the result being three–the same, added to yet another one. Leaving behind Zižek's assertion that in a Habermasian universe the subjects are reduced to simple lifeless pawns, one can easily reassess the basic theoretical Habermasian recipe book, which states that complementary social relationships, based upon interest and authority, engender different types of (inter)action, proving the dual influences between the ego and the other. The solution would target a rebuilding of that everyday institution on which impartial evaluation of moral action conflicts relies. Doubly coded, this application of norms suffers from a return towards both convictions/sanctions and the relationship between understanding/power. The communicative term is invested by Habermas (1983) with implicative interactions in which the actors coordinate, through a common consensus, their action plans, through inter-subjective acceptance of their own availability pretensions. The contexts of communicative actions acknowledge a self-substitutive organization. From a list of communicatively-acting subjects, Habermas (1983) singles out the actual sceptic, the radical sceptic (practising a refusal of arguments based on empty argumentation) and the second-chance sceptic (who marks the passage from a communicative action towards a strategically one). The fundamental principles of discourse ethics will necessarily reference a procedure (discursive respect of any normative availability pretensions) of formal order (Habermas, 1983: 95-107). Practical discourses maintain an internal relationship with both aesthetic critics and with their own therapeutic version: they cannot be separated from conflict pressures, the way of understanding being suppressed by/through the instruments/exponents of power. The world of institutionally-regulated relationships is moralized, akin to the way in which the world of situations can be theorized. Moral judgements avoiding de-contextualized problems/solutions and de-motivated answers only attempt to obtain a process of equalization. In fact, with reference to the social world, passing from communicative actions to discourse always involves a moralizing of extant norms–a

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devaluing of actually functioning institutions–and demands a sociallycognitive transformation of conventional states into moral notions. With the necessary remark that, read in this analytical way, social dynamics correlated with different stages of interaction will always justify the attribution of stages to certain forms of moral conscience. Under the sign of proximity, Emmanuel Lévinas (2000) studies the effects of multiplicity starting from the One and notes that, theoretically, its multiple is the double, altogether seeing/seen, thinking/thought. With an interest in the triad distance–power–security, these Lévinasian assertions state that the first exteriority (as related to the One) is not multiplied only by the distance separating them; power can be accepted with the risk of taking someone else’s place and exiling the other in a third or a fourth world, in the perspective of a responsibility which preserves the secret of sociability and allows one’s placing “before the other’s face”. For Lévinas, within the open universe of culture in/through knowledge, the assimilating human confirms the possibility of returning both the Identical and the Other to the unity of the One. Within the field of political philosophy, such an assertion implies a review of any interpretations of the three, seen as a reunification of human multitudes, a common participant to unity, a consolidating principle and a token of moral law which draws citizens together, a part of pre-established unity of the whole; the presence of the other does not mean anything more than the logical alterity of its parts within a fractured whole, whose reciprocal relationships are exclusively guided by their own unity (Lévinas, 2000: 186-187). In Lévinas’ note, the human multitude does not allow the Ego to forget the third, as a germinating mode of formulaic responsibility within original sociability: the third=another, different from my fellow man=still my fellow man=the fellow man of my fellow man. The unification of the unique–those who already exist for one another– triggers and maintains the moment of justice, constituting an arbitrary mode of postulating through objectivity, thematic and synthesizing, acknowledging of a political maintenance authority. From this point of view, human uniqueness can be superimposed upon the condition of citizenship, identifying itself with it, representing a motivating derivative from the principle which advocates an inscription within the other’s rights. The totally conscious act is motivated by the presence of the third who, in its stead, guides the rapprochement. In Lévinas’ (2006) vision, le tiers modulates the inter-subjectively–conceived relationship–a Husserlian dual/bipolar proportion–as a relationship between the ego and the alter ego; any widening of this concept occurs through the intervention of a

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third term, between the being and the other. With the third’s knowledge and exchange, politics, economics and history begin (Lévinas, 2006: 54). Replacing the other’s problems within the frame of justice and utopia, Lévinas (2000: 228) was concerned about a clarification of its [utopian] condition regarding a definition of notions such as reward and gratuity, and also about explaining a situation of apparent political neglect of ethical exigencies, through a recourse to the third, in the sense in which the order of responsible individual justice does not establish any reciprocity between the self and the others, but is restored through the agency of the third–the one still considered to be “yet another”. The European’s yet amorphous conscience, in the context of a Europe not yet at peace with itself, brings back into debate the notions of centrality and excellence; is unsettled by social inefficiency which threatens the being’s hard status; and contests its own philosophical privileges. This endeavour cannot be separated from V. Jankélévitch’s (1997) classification which presents the equation of conscience’s three exponents–the first exponent would belong to the registry of the supernatural, being guided by obligation and duty; the second would illustrate the cynical and egotistical concept reclaimed as rights; the third exponent would represent that concerted adherence replacing naivety and announcing that there is no reason for us to stop here, because nothing can stop a fourth conscience from overtaking the third in its turn, by involving itself in a “once this way, once another way” type of relationship, ad infinitum (Jankélévitch, 1997:62-63). Under the sign of a “good middle way” Jankélévitch (1997) reinvests the middle axis with all the reflexes of the “nearly”, perceived as alternative proximity, as a neutral factor, impure and fallen, and reaffirming the status of a homo duplex–the one who reloads otherness as a regimen through a regularity of rhythm, through indispensable equity or through the simplicity of periodicity. True ambivalence exemplifies the coexistence of the simplex and the duplex, but also the possibility of its breaking in two and of attracting/repulsing each of its parts within its own private space, relaunching the option of “one from two”, in the event of contraries not able to tolerate order one after the other, but simultaneously manifesting themselves together. Reanalysing the metaphorical dimension and the intentionallyqualitative signifiers of a novel cohabitation within predestined space, in Jankélévitch’s vision space is disputed by two inverted options (forward–

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back), and two intentionality indicating senses as direction of passage from one indication to another. From a combination of the pure and impure, availability and alteration, the world of intentionality recharges the excluded third as a disjunctive mode of choice: Which of the two? One or the other?

2.3. From One to Three Considering distance to be a field of tension in/between the proclaiming mechanism of two truths–the truth of facts and the truth of concepts–Adorno (2007) approximates the three-step distance towards what one erroneously believes to be the totality of the world, as an element which has always been this way. Annotating such an approach in a literary-humorous registry, via Jerome K. Jerome, the third, as an unbalancing factor, is inserted either in the structure of the one (three in a boat, to say nothing of the dog) or of the two (three on two bicycles) reconfirming the fact that third-order unity borrows pretext coordinates from any adventure in/within its own brackets. In fact, one deals with a generalizing trip projected at once within and without personal memory and/or common memory, which recalculates the distance between three and one by burning stages (luggage preparation, getting food for the trip, various stops along the way, meetings and waits, losing one’s toothbrush more than once) and which recalculates the three– one distance by returning to the first frame–abandoning the boat and feasting at a rich banquet. Mature, the main characters are now involved in another adventure, this time via Bohemia and Germany: a literaryhumorous registry which serves to remind one of the permanent or/and episodic differences between the two models–the German one and the British one. Abandoning this registry and penetrating the flux of a dynamical, inmovement world, (although the Jeromeian insert advocates abandoning the voyage and only accepting it as a pretext, a symbol) not at all stagnant, the open landmarks of the first and last categories seem to maintain clearly–traced limits of the dual, forcing one to rethink the incipit and reevaluate an undecided caput. Displacing the accent from the end towards the beginning, if one is to follow into Fukuyama’s footsteps (1992) the profile of the first man can be defined from a Hobbesian, Lockean and Hegelian perspective by placing it within a natural state (life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”) called a latent-general state: which is consummated whenever civil society

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is at an impasse or in danger of disintegration, through its involvement in a Hegelian bloody fight for survival. Turning back upon a first profile would reaffirm the fact that any abrupt jump towards the last man, by appealing to a whole array of defective potentials of the first, would be marked by parallel historical processes (the logic of desire and the fight for recognition) and by the end of history. Starting from this type of assertion, A. Toffler’s (1983) interpretation signals the passage from the death of industrial civilisation to the maturing of the informational one, as a third-order option, and reinvests The Third Wave with attributes already apparent in: revolutionary spirit and defiance of old forms/formulas, dogmas and ideologies–an unconventional, restless state/space; new political instruments obtained through technology, and able to solve the crisis of representative democracy, conflicts between power and society, and to fill any power void placed at a great distance from the three non-functional vices (the efficiency of authoritarian regimes; the need for a political Messiah; avoiding the principle of what is considered to be a virtue today and a “catastrophic weakness” tomorrow), already offering a quick answer, transmitted through highly-efficient decisions to the system’s demands. The Third Wave demassifies by liberating diversity and complexity, banking upon the coordinates of a revolutionary process as an explanatory way of unravelling the consensus and imbuing the expired institutions of the Second Wave with an excess of rhythm by accenting the essential characteristic of any third degree political theory– representation. Upon travelling the political road, with its three phases: “premajoritarian (The First Wave)–“majoritarian” (The Second Wave)– fusioning construct “mini-majoritarian” (The Third Wave)–records, as third-degree attributes, semi-direct democracy, a division of decision, recruiting (other) new elites/under-elites and the coagulation of family structures that are different from the nuclear family. The battle of political Jericho anticipates the clash of two civilisations with dual–triple attachments and proclaims that the third wave has already won because it availed itself of the most efficient reaction formula to any perturbations in domains, sectors and aspects such as: energy, war and poverty, ecological degradation, rigidity of the political frame, rethinking the nuclear family, restructuring the learning system and mass union movements, reorganizing giant corporations, national centralized states and pseudo-representative governments. If, on a Kojeveian note, Man as such is fated to disappear, for Fukuyama, The Last Man (still) benefits, near the end, from access to

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event history’s transformations. Such an assessment operates almost paradoxically with an opening of the double towards possible multiplications, while acknowledging that such an apparently hermetic action of the dual can be extended, even assaulted by something coming from beyond the end… and the most readily available option in overtaking both the first and the second (the last) is the third or the postultimate. One must mention the fact that postmodernism–as an inverting process–speculated upon just this dual perspective, validating a form of manifestation (demolishing, fragmented/split, broken, confused/mixed) of the aesthetic principle/regimen, which attached itself to the simple teleology of historic evolution/separation by the triggering of political reactions based upon essential conditions of change, either through a metapolitics of political subjectivity or by affirming different futurological virtualities. In the words of Slavoj Žižek (2001), the fiction of a third way would represent the only point in which social antagonism would not be demolished. Postmodernism’s critical endeavour would be to designate and to structuralize all ideological elements within the framework expected for any given social order which, under the mask of utopia with reflexes in possible/failed alternate histories, distances itself from its own established identity. Any theoretician of modernism and postmodernism keeps him/herself, as a rule, within the limits of clear distinctions that are generally centred upon the hypothesis of a fundamental discontinuity; if in the contemporary political world the concept of politic(s) is identified with the concept of power, in postmodernism one can speak of displacing its sense towards the social, i.e. one can note a diminution of spoken sense. In a Žižekian note, what comes between citizens and their surveillance is the third figure category subsumed to the Big Other, a figure which, within the present context, maintains power acts and dictates–volitionally– the social order. The fall of the Big Other would correspond to a fracturing of appearances. Opting for the documentary method (destined for the dismantling of communist Eastern bloc) and with the intention of illustrating the few seconds leading to the collapse of a whole social system, Žižek considers the revolutionary events of 1989 Romania as a clear example of power being overthrown by ordinary people, who reverse the imperative of obedience towards Power and replace it with arguments allowing them to oppose it.

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Žižek (2001: 228-230) dwells in detail upon two ambiguously debatable elements: Ceau‫܈‬escu’s gesture when he lifts up his arms in a tragicomic manner, amazed by his own impotent paternal love, “as if he wanted to embrace everyone”; and the impossibility of predicting such a mass reaction which engendered symbolical mutations within the depth of the symbolical texture of social unity (with no changes in the balance of power and no perturbations of psychological reality). The comment is reloaded by Fukuyama (1992) who sees in the epilogue of history an end to wars and revolutions, considering that the revolutionaries who fought against Ceau‫܈‬escu’s security service were the artisans of a democratically stable society in which work and strife, in the terms’ old acceptations, will no longer be necessary, and the fighters’ chance to become more free and more human would be annihilated alongside their own revolutionary strife: meaning, happy until a certain level is reached, or, why not, surfing the third wave. Both approaches avoid a triple observation: revolution does not represent a final objective, but can/has to be perceived as a triggering factor of the transitional process, a circulatory, intermediate and mediating phase; far from spontaneous in the sense of extracting energy from an original source, revolution was anticipated by the relaxation of Gorbachev's discourse, by an intense esthetical-concerted resonance with change and by the system’s (self) involvement in a structural crisis. The Big Other (with a sliding status from symptom towards source)– constitutionally legitimized through its position of leader in society, the party becomes a national institution, and political capital, the privilege of a limited elite–undertaking the progress in history against history, but necessarily with history, inoculating it with another idiom. A construct such as the solstitial/fractal theory brings to the fore of our analysis actors, events, actions, designating the ritual main characters of the December 21st show: the organizers, the surveillance team, the performer, the suite members and the participating masses. In fact, a decadence of ritual to the point of perturbing any cult ceremonies (Manolache, 2009). Far from the tragicomical image promoted by Žižek, ritual order can only be totally inflexible; it excludes any other modifications besides those the performer willingly accepts inside his messages. The surveillance team loses its role, and its object, ritual order, vanishes. Replacing sporadic prescribed answers with a compactly destabilizing way of reacting, the mass passes from the role of co-participating receptor to that of performer; thus it takes the individual performer from his non-transferable role and prevents any celebration of his personal cult, forcing him to

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accept a role of individual receiver of a message emitted by the new collective performer. By refusing any potential introversion of roles for the unique performer, accredited by convention, but discredited by its trespassing, the unique performer leaves the place already destined for him, homologating by this gesture the ceremony’s failure–or marking the first phase of the fracture to which it will add an excess of virulence. The ritual degenerates in a collective act of heresy. Replacing the ritual order by heretical disorder foreshadows the first substitution of Stalinist social order by the general disorder of transition. For Ceau‫܈‬escu, in the light of Žižek’s reactions, this disorder/disruption seems to have represented the real, immediate and decisive cause of the regime’s dissolution and his own end. The general significance of any of the dictator’s replies/phrases is not aimed towards a reclaiming of order and stability, but towards amplifying the effects of this failure. Hence the imbalance between the temperate drama of the episode and the tragic potential of its consequences. From this point of view the image of the Big Other distances itself from the condition of the third, reclaiming, in its first instance, a whole psychoanalytical recipe-book with nodal points in the father’s beheading and thus confirming its integration into the Big One, who, assaulted by the three, loses its monopoly.

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 2007. Minima Moralia. Trans. Andrei Corbea. Bucharest: Art. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Etica postmodernă [Postmodern Ethics]. Trans. Doina Lica. Timi‫܈‬oara: Amarcord. Bhabha, Homi. 1990. The Third Space: Interview with Homi K. Bhabha. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Jonathan Rutherford (ed), Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Diseminarea [Dissemination]. Trans. Cornel Mihai Ionescu. Bucharest: Univers Enciclopedic. Fize‫܈‬an, Bianca. 2010. (Re)construction of Identity in the Virtual Space of Second Life. Revista de Informatică Socială. Vol. III (13), 43-61. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. SfârЮitul istoriei Юi ultimul om [The End of History and the Last Man]. Trans. Mihaela Eftimiu. Bucharest: Paideia. Giddens, A. 2000. Consecinаele modernităаii [The Consequences of Modernity]. Trans. Sanda Berce. Bucharest: Univers. Gotved, S. 2002. Spatial Dimensions in Online Communities”. Space and Culture 5(4), 405-414. Habermas, Jürgen. 1983. Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. —. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge: MA, MIT Press. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1997. Paradoxul moralei [La paradoxe de la morale]. Trans. Janina Ianoúi. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Echinox. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 2000. Între noi. Încercare de a-l gândi pe celălalt [Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other]. Trans. Ioan Petru Deac. Bucharest: ALL. —. 2006. Altfel decât a fi sau dincolo de esenаă [Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence]. Trans. Miruna Tătaru Cazaban, Bogdan TătaruCazaban and Cristian Ciocan. Bucharest: Humanitas. Manolache, Viorella. 2012. Homo Posthistoricus-Profil filosofico-politic [Homo Posthistoricus–Philosophical and Political Profile]. Sibiu: Astra Museum, edited by Techno Media. —. 2009. Elite în marЮ [Elites in Marsh]. Sibiu: TechnoMedia. Morin, Edgar. 2008. On Complexity. NJ: Hampton Press, Cresskill. Nicolescu, Basarab. 2009. Ce este Realitatea? ReflecĠii în jurul operei lui Stéphane Lupasco [What is Reality? Reflections on the Work of Stéphane Lupasco]. Jassy: Junimea.

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Sartori, Giovanni. 2007. Ce facem cu străinii? Pluralism vs. Multiculturalism [What are we doing with the Strangers? Pluralism vs. Multiculturalism]. Trans. Geo Vasile. Bucharest: Humanitas. Toffler, Alvin. 1983. Al treilea val [The Third Wave]. Trans. Drăgan Stoianovici. Bucharest: Editura Politică. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. Zăbovind în negativ. Kant, Hegel Юi critica ideologiei [Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology]. Trans. Irina-Marta Costea. Bucharest: ALL. —. 2005. Aаi spus cumva totalitarism? [Did you say Totalitarism?]. Trans. Veronica Tomescu. Bucharest: Curtea Veche.

CHAPTER THREE HECATE-ISMS

True to our starting hypothesis, the present chapter focuses upon the relationship between distance–power–security, and underlines the following aspects: the argument of the third citizen depends upon the settlement pre-condition–by being placed upon the grounds of a perpetually/infinitely developing process–of a map superimposed upon another map, with the result of placing a territory upon the subjacent one; in a Foucaultian way, this would show an obvious distance between theoretical space landmarks and effective practice, power strategies (political, cultural, economic) denying their own potential for manipulating these clear distinctions; falling back upon opposed space valued couples, the privileged status of a certain space (private sphere) to the detriment of another (public sphere) expresses the irreversible reaction of forces that are permanently eroding such antinomies. The argument of the third citizen synthesizes the defining properties of citizening, seen as a continuous process of civic (re)involvement (through filling the blank) with an aim towards realizing the public polycentric sphere, moulded upon the profile of the new demoi, and reclaiming a heterarchical space, which transcends, in its smooth formulation, any preexisting borders; and in its striations, from the edge of the coin, (re)presents a multidimensional configuration of (in)visibility. In fact, the present chapter is dedicated to the term which names the whole work–Hecate-isms–in order to justify any intention of extending “Hecate-isms” within their reality as physical–space similes, through assuming a mission of “forcibly” interpreting a standard role and renegotiating any group norms at the level of the hero-individual. The novelty element is also brought to the fore–as postmodernitarism– an opportunity to reload any opinion about modernitarism (assumed as an identifying term for art’s aesthetic regimental forms within the forms of fulfilling any personal task/destiny), as a way of dividing postmodernism will be submitted to the analysis of any temporary evaluation of actual Romanian “isms” (chymerism, delirionism, performatism) which provides a return to much-used Hassan's technicisms.

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3.1. Distance Without forgetting any echoes transmitted from certain inertial zones (either resisting or, on the contrary, hurriedly plunging the local into the global) the state of places seems to be the needed concept for appealing to an alternately-mobile expression, with a clear intention of expressing any chronic(izing) tensions in/within European space, and occurring between place and/or space. Within the operating blueprint of constituting a place, and appreciative of the symbolically-phenomenological experience of space seen as a mediating sign of change and/or conflict, the production and the construction of space (Gieryn, 1999) depend upon a reappraisal of place as an ordering factor for redistributed elements in their coexisting relationships, as a product of harmonizing operations of orienting, placement or temporization. The folding-unfolding proportion–striated space–smooth space states that, by anticipating any poetic import, the white space dispersion theory is converted, on political grounds, into a theory of the blank, as fitting circumscribed architecture. Thus one can reference the blank, perceived as a sliding from the nonspace–pause between/in elitism and mercantilism and from non-speed and de-construction–towards white spaces, as too-full spaces, marked by plusmovement and re-architecturalization, and is thus defined as a product of “a whole spectre resulting from a well-treated registry of visible lights” The translation can be re-placed within the dual infinite circuitry of ending–beginning, mono-polychrome, nocturnal–diurnal, but with a triphased recoil: spaces which are striated by day become smooth by night: nihilo-centrism also includes the nocturnal ensigns of the end, as well as the diurnal designs of the alternative. A definition of the third citizen’s space would have to take into account the mix of histories (participatory democracy, economic justice, emancipation, double working day, “transition costs”, reproductive politics, “state feminism”) and blanks (solidarity, cooperation, queer, resisting exploitation, grass roots democracy, net activism, alternative economics) [Voinea, 2008]. In the same dystopian note, the World Economic Forum Report concerning “Global Risks in 2012. The Seeds of Dystopia” underlines the fact that dystopia is the term which best describes today’s world, with Robert Tally’s (2009) reservation stating that not even the most realistic map can reproduce complete space, but is constrained by a set of imaginary relationships. One cannot ignore the Ecoian cartographic

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projection which states that any 1:1 scale map can only reproduce the territory in an imperfect way; if, at the moment of the map’s tracing, the empire becomes non-representable, then the existence of a self-conscious map would include its own powers (Eco, 2004: 158). With an interest in the present theme, Ecoian postulates re-irrigate an ambiguous, unclear registry–essentially elastic, transparent and permeable, while stating that the argument of the third citizen depends upon a settlement pre-condition, within the flux of an infinite process of maps positioned over other maps: a result which would reproduce the territory and its underlying map at the same time. This tiring and hard to use endeavour includes cumulative preconditions: the territory’s landscape should allow free movement of any subjects with pliable attributes; the storage of the folded map within a vast central desert allowing rotation towards the direction of its unfolding; the territory should either be a circle or a regular polygon; the map should constitute a central point always placed upon that portion of the territory which it represents. Such a cartographic move facilitates the migration of any mass of subjects towards the periphery, avoids any folding of the map while the subjects are inside it and accepts the space filled by one standing subject as its measuring unit. As the map folds, the subjects jump outside it, on the territory, folding it from the outside, and then unfolding and refolding it after different coordinates, thus ensuring a faithful representation through adopting the same position which they initially occupied on/within the respective territory (Eco, 2004: 155-157). This imaginary-ludic perspective underlines the coordinates essential for discussing the space of the third citizen; the central desertification model, seen as a static attribute of storage, allows a multiplication of distances from the centre towards the circumference, with the latter becoming a weak centre and acknowledging the fall within the circle (Soviany, 2008); subject translation represents an algorithm subjected to assimilative strategies, with pre-defined positions/strata and with outside jumps, oscillating between its own elimination and the self-achievement of the same position; investing the random phase (Morin, 2002) with a principal role, acknowledged by circle–consolidating causalities; assuming a spatially-secondary position regarding the empire, and reclaiming, from the direction of nihilo-centric experiences, a return to the same harmonizing position of inoculated principles and meta/extra-spatial recommendations. An absolutely necessary mention: such an endeavour re-confirms the theory of actual “chronopolitical non-places” easy to (re)load (in)

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Sloterdijk's (2005) project of an atmospherically-architectural prototype (centred upon the “escape points” of a commuting construct, airy, cumulating and compressing in a transparent way the direct dimensions of parliamentary space). An unfaithful (in Eco's note) model, this comment considers the provisions of Instant Democracy and of the Pneumatic Parliament to be an ideologically helpful reaction for democracy’s own intentions of reducing disparities between European countries; in fact, an acknowledgement of democracy as an “export product”–an imaginary outpost of Western democracy, easy to install (in 24 hours), transparentlydilating, a “protection shell” for the good development of parliamentary reunions, with all their folding and unfolding attributes of a real agora (Manolache, 2013). The present subchapter (re)assesses theoretical distances between the concepts of public sphere and European public space, by detaching the latter from its geographically–restrictive sense while manifesting a predilection for accenting public spaces and proclaiming them as politicized spaces for producing social ties and re-knotting societal reactions. One cannot ignore, in this sense, the importance of a vast debating place (France–America) with intersecting points within redefining predetermined rights and spaces, which would re-launch debates about the role of a subject within a collective, by a superposition of the political and social factors. In fact, the French model won’t distance itself from the obligation– already noted by Jean-Jacques Gleizal (1999)–of using the state/local concepts, through a doubling appeal to territorialisation and contracts. Including public European space within such a combined treatment would only serve to replace any sectorial function with a coordination one, and would plead for a functioning partnership ensured by public/private actors and banking upon a contracted conciliation of autonomy and its social finality. While willingly eluding any serious theoretical armoury of the subject, the present endeavour confirms the reloaded concept of public sphere from within the hard landmarks of spaces opened by the relationship between debate–recreation–loisir (with finite results in Habermas' syntagm of “communicational associations”) towards the sector/sphere of political/public life. This tendency is guided by public autonomy in its relationship to the state and accepts openings/distensions with (im)mediate repercussions in

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the possibility of launching, in Virilio's way, critical space as a borrowed formula for any reflexes of European public space. In Jürgen Habermas' (2005) acceptation, any structural transformation of the public sphere would imply substantial revisions (which would attest to its permanent theoretical effervescence) and also respect its historical landmarks and its particular elements, while at the same time acknowledging its recognition as a category created by bourgeois society and occurring within the private sphere of European society. A respect for the limits of any “public opinion” topos, with implications for capitalisttype economic relationships and the existence of property, illustrate those characteristics defining the public sphere as being elitist, selective, and almost exclusively male. Synthesizing, the public sphere represents a product resulting from the combination/interference of any condition/quality of owner, definitory for the bourgeoisie (with its status of power and financial independence) and their role/status as social (communicational) human beings. In Foucault's way, one must acknowledge the obvious distance between theoretical space landmarks and effective practice; power strategies (political, economic, cultural) refusing this same availability when manipulating any net distinctions become a retreat to opposed value pairs of space: privileged treatment for a certain space (private sphere) to the detriment of another one (public sphere) as an expression of a nonpliable reaction of forces permanently eroding such antinomies. Such an approach takes into consideration the interrogation, (re)launched by Virilio (2001) and questioning of an open option of “representing the construct or constructing the representation” with all necessary rewritings of starting/suspension points of capacitated spaces with minimal expansion speed, with the avowed purpose of annihilation of (just) the self-penetrating (or crisis) effect. From Benjamin’s perspective, any representation is a reduction, in the sense in which investing public European space with the particularities of critical space depends upon the tri-phased relationship between direction– position–disposition. Correlating critical space with any results of alternative/marginal ideologies (not at all resisting civic oppression) we postulate a result in anticipating abandonment solutions which would consider the minimal state to be the necessary answer to any self-governing demands. A demand for autonomy becomes a symptom of collective and simultaneous inertial searches–a freed space, and a centrifugallydissuading social process (Virilio, 2001: 84-85). Critical space would thus represent instantaneity in terms of mass communication, an interactive

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space where an absence of distance is equal to a lack of delay, in which everything is exposed in a straight line and guided by the force of interactivity. Our proposed exercise reclaims a propping theory which can harmonize political designs/directions of territoriality with the signs/designs of critical space and the effects of a virtual(izing) European network (the network project) which would allow us to conclude that, when in movement, European public space can be considered a synchronic(izing) place for both on flow and network, or a place of achievement for any communication productions fuelled by institutional exigencies. Poetic arguments regarding spaces, overvalued by deprimism, are maintained by the strategy of social change within marginal limits, in discord with completed decentralization reinvesting individuals with their own initial dimensions. Such observations (delineated by senses/geographical ways of space building) define the status of the blank–a political way of questioning the capacity for producing social ties, with an accent upon subjectivity and self-representing dispersion. If the blank becomes productive, a confluence of politics and culture decides in what measure the proportion between politics-culture represents a threshold for creating symbolic productions connected to their own institutional exigencies. One should not forget that any theory of the social field allows a renegotiation of norms by specific physical space dispersion, in the acceptation stating that if movement is extended/becomes commonplace, its reference stereotype diminishes its compulsory nature, legitimizing other spaces which allow similar manifestations (see in this sense a whole file of cultural postmodern alternatives–chymerism, fracturism, delirionism, performatism, authenticism etc.). An extension of “isms” reclaims a similar quality of physical space with the manifesting style of its individual-hero and his interpretation of a standard role. Taking into consideration the obvious distance between the performer and the role, a dispersion of space enforces a renegotiation of norms and a de-structuring of the group itself.

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3.2. Power as Folding and Unfolding Above and beyond any erosion of syntagms such as the good citizen, the authentic citizen (Dahl), the citizen with reflexive powers regarding the organization/functioning of the city (Strauss) or the adaptable citizen (Lapierre), apparently not interested in the topological values of the concept [citizen], Giovanni Sartori (2005) counts the (same) doubles and discovers defining aspects within the significance of terms such as: citizen (an owner of rights in a free city, who also exercises them)–subject (dominated, powerless)–the citizen matters, the subject doesn’t; depending on the type of democracy (direct/indirect), one can mention pairs of antonyms formed by using prefixes; hypo-citizen–hyper-citizen; demoimpotent–demo-potent; under-citizen–over-citizen; while stating that these antinomies recommend/identify the contemporary citizen as that Homo Videns who is aware of fewer and fewer aspects of public life and is less and less interested/concerned by public matters. Corroborating such a statement with the way in which the title of European citizen was awarded, doubling the title of national citizen, in the sense of complicating an abandonment by giving up any (re)affirmation of European identity, the (re)invention of Homo Europaeus (Neumann, 2006) cannot avoid any ideological confusion between/from the ontological and the legal statute of any European citizen: any de facto European is also a de jure European, but not any de jure European is also a de facto European. Assuming a vertically legitimizing tradition, within the limits of a post historical perimeter (an often out-of-minds space) Homo Europaeus is unable to distance himself from the blocking attraction of the doubles, in the direction of decreeing a sociologizing of Homo Politicus Bohemicus– that voluble, often quarrelsome and not-so-active citizen/commentator. The architectural projection (tempered or enlightening) of a whole European file on citizenship cannot avoid oscillations from/towards optimistic/sceptical signals (that is, the coin’s two faces) reconfirming the functioning duality in all its amalgamated knowledge: European citizenship is a state of mind; Europe lost its citizens; the European solution must take into account both multiple citizenship and a citizen– centred society; inventing a new citizenship in order to solve the immigration problem [although the consumer (with all potentiating of the infantile sense–Viatteau, 2007) has replaced the citizen, this latter can be resuscitated, reclaimed and rehabilitated by institutional and pan-European forms/formulas of deliberation and commitment to public life].

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Thus, the European recent-order double advocates instanteism instead of all kinds of endisms (which seemingly control the arteries of public and private life), and in doing so offers Eurotopical solutions for the four political-order fractures (social fractures, fractures between/from democracy and liberty, the ecological fracture and the European fracture) and allows, in an Eu(ro)phorical note, the accomplishments of a filigreed building reflected within ideological corrections. One banks upon the idea of a more accelerating Europe, finished as soon as possible, holder of all necessary levers for a complete European unification, able to accomplish forward jumps without any precautionary measures and responsible for diminishing the apocalyptical zone by reawakening, action/revolution and anti-reformism: an endeavour meant to counteract actual, slow and involute reforms. If the endism landmark already exposed its blocking-articulated provisions, instanteism’s limit offers (under intellectualizing, sociological and political protection) the Appeal for citizens’ Europe, a Europe “of actively-involved citizens” and a counter-model for the “top-down” approach aimed towards ordinary citizens who act independently for the development of national democracies, with the declared aim of rebuilding Europe. We also have to mention that, in the space vacated by the dualistfixed retreat towards the limits, the third citizen represents a now(in)visible type, tempted by folding and unfolding possibilities and infused with attributes guided by a society which avoids theoretical comprehension and pragmatic control. One can thus trace a complex, contingent, non-transparent society with more objective variables than its own possibilities, mobile, volatile, fragmented and fusioning, with multipliable realities and exploding eroded blocks, in which any distribution of power is illusory, cause and responsibility determination are perfected, dialogue partners are unstable, presence is virtual and enigmas are diffused (Innerarity, 2004). On Z. Bauman’s (2000) line, the profile of the third citizen delineates and separates intimacy from anonymity, the unknown from the familiar, social proximity from detachment (egocentrism/individualism). In the state of the one who remains (stays) after folding and unfolding, the third citizen ensures a coagulation of local conditions which thus become rules of the space. In the sense of a flexible accumulation or Tofflerian gathering, the third citizen’s city is (self)-recycling, by exploiting geographical circumstances reconfigured as internally-structured elements of its own logic.

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The obvious reaction is to reconsider space and its significance from a qualitative point of view, by including individual subjects in a multidimensional series of discontinuous realities and by re-dimensioning the expanding space through negotiating partnership connections with the outside (a)flux. Claimed by the same rule of the double–soft power-smart power; dual citizenship-dual status of the individual’s condition–the recent metaphorical profile of the new European citizen rebalances the image of an Aristotelian ship by imbuing it, on an Albert Pike's note, with the structure of a 18th century frigate, which still adjusts its compass depending on the good luck of calmed waters. Positioned between an indication of additional rights (via the Maastricht Treaty) and of those automatically conferred upon European inhabitants in their quality of EU citizens (2013–the international year of the citizen1) the tri-phased occurrence addresses the dialogue connection between public administration, civil society, and enterprises, with a focus upon defining a Homo Œconomicus (a citizen with abstract potentialities, exclusively stimulated by the pragmatic side/way of life and received as a chance of overcoming any crisis involvements) and the Homo Sociologicus (in the idea of underlining any support for the European project). In fact, a reassessment of the blocking mode for the more prominent face (Homo Œconomicus) and the more excavated face (Homo Sociologicus) creates situations alternating between non-accurate dysfunctions, limited rationality, and a displaced system of rewards/punishments; and within which one can flaunt the status of prophecy within reasonable approximations, by the guidance of quasi-inertial forces, insensitive to any circumstances; and through fidelity towards any prescribed behaviour as a passive actor for any inherited standards. This absolutely hybrid(izing) relationship can be noted within the failed wedding of the two alternative symbols conferred upon the Occupy Wall Street citizen, seen here as a representative of that foldable subject endowed, on the one hand, with social thinking and the amplified capacity of formulating social interrogations within public spaces; and on the other with an ability to use sanctioning mechanisms for non-pliable, erroneous, economic logics. In a politically-philosophical note, the underlined profile illustrates the mechanism of breaking/shattering of any significance chain belonging to the status quo, and discloses the way in which Homo Alter Globalist (not 1

Decision no. 1093/2012/UE of the European Parliament and of the Council, 21 November 2012, regarding The European Year of the Citizen (2013), The Official Journal of the European Union, 23.11.2012, L 325/1.

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familiar with the exclusive amendment of “the market’s fundamentalism” or with the unclear reflexes of post-neoliberal prophecies–a form of preservation for a growth model based on export and a combinatorial formulation of social policies more inclined to the left than to the right) functions after the logic of multitudes, and confirms, in a Butlerian way, an overexposure of Homo Laborans biopolitical body. In a Žižekian way, as a clueless Homo Sacer, the citizen from Occupy Wall Street is a heathen venerating false idols. Thus recoil upon the entity offered by Eco's map can be accepted and re-evaluated within its own conscience, as a symbol of the citizen possessed of an adequate language enabling him to articulate his own non-liberty. On New Age lines, already traced in the 60s and 70s, a habituation with alternate qualities of temporarily autonomous zones and with squatting as free space opposed to occupation, invested with unfolding attributes (the subjects will jump outside of the map and inside the territory) would appeal, addressing the model of a trend such as politicized homelessness, to a nuancing of any socio-political limits for any citizen who denounces the political-social statement, and forms a social conscience expressed through avoidance of presently-existing social paradigms. As a sub-cultural term, squatting means accessing your own power (after unfolding and extending, depending upon a different direction, the subjects will adopt the same position they initially had on/in the respective/effective territory) and brings into actuality the dichotomous pairings buying/having, concentrated power vs. lack of power, political action vs. political indifference, poverty vs. comfort, intentional, programmatic isolation (Pruijt, 2013). In the note of exhausted imperial experiments, the argument of the third citizen can be considered as a fitting (adjustable) frame for a dialectics of equality seen in its strictly legal sense and actual(izing)ly willing to accommodate post-national self-defining processes. From within its philosophical-political domain, Habermas' (1995) argument is maintained by a (unifying) non-imperial process expressed through the concept of constitutional patriotism, able to debate the limits of the Community Treaty and the provisos of the Maastricht Treaty, by increased horizontal mobility and a multiplication of contact opportunities. This argument somehow forces majority culture to give up its historical imperative of officially defining the parameters of general political culture, by imposing clear delimitations from the level of subcultures and pre-political identities.

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This option values the integral function of a “system of accommodating differences” within the essence of operationally reinvesting an equalcitizen community whose multiple interactions create a particular norm–a basis for public debate and active citizenship, a product of civic competence; in fact, civic liberty is thus harmonized with collective reactions of the extended public sphere. The argument of the third citizen expresses all defining properties of that citizening which is considered to be a continuous process of civic (re)involvement (filing the blank) with an aim towards creating a polycentric public sphere, applied upon the profile of the new demoi, which–beyond folding and unfolding–reclaim a heterarchic space transcending, in its smooth formulation, all pre-existing boundaries; and in its striations, from the edges of the coin, (re)presents a multidimensional configuration of (in)visibility. In a phase conclusion, under the sign of third-degree encounters, one can assert a certain form/formula of fascination, but also of fear, projected upon those who own power–in extraterrestrial space–and secretive, in their own interest, all information: power holders against whom no possible defence technique or strategy exists. Hence a possible ideologically-spontaneous reaction of recourse to pre-modern traps, considered to be third-degree alternatives; any deciphering of the “great Martian war”; the threat of an extra-terrestrial spider present even in the First World War; or the inherent pessimism of the declaration made by Sergey Berezhnoy, second-in-command of the action centre, when he said that “aero-space defence troops/space troops” are not ready to face an extra-terrestrial invasion. Reflecting upon the statement “there are too many problems on Earth and in its immediate vicinity” Vladimir Putin says that, despite Russia’s incapacity to defend itself against an extra-terrestrial threat, Moscow has the latest technological instruments, allowing it to solve the world’s problems and counter any extra-terrestrial threats. The American side expressed an interest in “third degree encounters” by forming the Committee of Political Action for Extra-terrestrial Phenomena, an organization which, in 1991, demanded that the US Congress accept an “embargo upon truth” to the detriment of “UFO coverups”. On a note of disclosure, these facts borrow all unfolding characteristics (with intercepted reactions from within such different spaces as Russia, Brazil, China, France or the UK). An invitation for the third citizen to flirt carefully with the enigma/incertitude/unknown of faraway, distant things…

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3.3. Security Foucault’s assertions (2009) decoding the [security] term use a threestep structured inventory method: the first emphasizes simple penal law which borrows forbidding physiognomic coordinates; the second adds a number of punishments to the law, forming a body of homogeneously structured decrees with clear role in controlling, observing, surveillance and any practices covered by penitentiary-type coercive techniques; the third establishes the interference relationship between surveillance forms and correctional systems. Even if the Foucaultian theoretical-analytical model has configurationally changed its physiognomy by amplifying or on the contrary diminishing its triple-faceted nature, one can agree that the meaning of security as a term is clarified and exemplified through semantic potentiation of the concept, dependent upon direct sources of information about present-day situations; referring either to existing risks within European space (recent developments in Ukraine) or to the constant dose of terrorist danger (post 9–11 reflections). Starting from a three-part modulation, Foucault offers other three ways for the limitation of socio-economic landmarks which might be acceptable inside a medium optimized for social functions (2009:14). The first formulation–taken from the legal code system and including any accessory mechanism–would comprise the imposition of a law and the institution of a punishment; the second would belong to the disciplinary mechanism, postulating the existence of a third character–the culprit2, existing inside a binary code system maintained by outside technologies (police, medical, psychological, surveillance–all very useful when applied to a transformational diagnosis); the third formulation refers exclusively to the security device–the one which, in a Foucaultian way, is inserted into a series of possible events; in the reactions of power which integrate cost calculations, in the limits of the acceptable/optimal means, and in the distribution of certain things/mechanisms thus architecturized. With an interest in the particular theme of the present subchapter, but at the same time unwilling to give up any Foucaultian postulates (which will be presented in the last chapter) one has to signal any security devices 2

The guilt of the third allows a connection to René Girard’s (2010) opinion stating that the scapegoat mechanism fills the collective unconscious with transfigured violent deities (amongst which monstrous Hecate particularly stands out). The scapegoat–the absolute culprit–calms and purifies consciences. One has to note in this sense that the leaders’ sins belonged to a separate registry and reclaimed a perfect scapegoat!

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which might maintain secure spaces–a way of treating the aleatory, and a certain tendency-or recipe–for normalcy with special implications in the correlation between security techniques and population (seen both as an object and a subject of the security mechanisms). Certainly, Foucault cannot resist the temptation of dealing with space problems from a tri-phased perspective: sovereignty is exercised within territorial limits, discipline acts upon individual bodies, and security can be applied to population as a whole. The limits of such a formulation are attacked by the problem of multiplicity itself–either as sovereignty of bodies or of subjects. One states that the individual represents a particular way of cutting and reshaping multiplicity, and discipline is a way of individualizing multiplicities (2009:20). The meeting place of sovereignty and discipline is expressed in the concept of space, while noting that sovereignty can only be exercised inside of a territory, while discipline and security both include spatial repositioning. If sovereignty capitalizes upon a territory and is predominantly concerned with government buildings, and if discipline architectures a space with an emphasis upon the hierarchical distribution and functional capacity of its building blocks, security becomes the one factor which creates, orders and watches over a certain event-resonating registry which imperiously demands regularity inside a multiplying and implicitly transformation-prone frame; in fact, a temporal aleatory factor is now being separated and demands inclusion within a given space. All of these notes are subordinated to the concept of environment–seen as both base and triggering factor for any action, a necessary detail which explains any action at a distance of a body upon another (Foucault, 2009: 29). Under the sign of emerging innovatory actions, Foucault (2009) settles the disputes offered by concepts such as case (way of individualizing collectively-ill occurrences), risk (distribution landmarks for the individual or group and assessment of contamination degrees), danger (identification of cases based upon their degree of danger-higher or lower, using differentiating risks) and crisis (circular repackaging, which can be stopped only by a natural/superior mechanism or by an artificial braking intervention). One should also consider, when re-launching a new/different model for overtaking the risk/danger/crisis, that new directions in 21st century security reaffirm an intellectual objective (seen as a form of guarantee for quality social jumps) by consolidating security (by founding trust within

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the informational connection structures from/within states and inter-state collaboration). The relationship between security and durable development is in fact analysed here (in order to increase its efficiency one must insist upon concerted actions) with the needed assertion that increase in the quality of life has to be proprietary (through a sustained collaboration of/within the domains of science, economy and ecology). Perceived as a transition point between traditional imperatives and the demands of contemporary society, the idea of security is generally associated with the concept of safety, a beneficial suggestion for materializing any needed insurance for general securization by including it in a durable global development process. One can also project the promotion of world security through the preservation of both biosphere and civilization, and also by noospherization of the socium, an objective defining an actual phase of civilization which has already achieved prominence during humanity’s evolution/survival (a solution indebted to Fukuyama’s prophecies!) and will now promote the transition towards solid, harmless development by eliminating any global dangers and/or catastrophes and ensuring true security for all forms of human activity (‫܉‬îrdea, 2001: 20-23). The above principles cannot distance themselves from a certain biomedical approach of diagnosing and offering the needed treatment, with all due uncertainty filtering from the direction of contagious malady structures which reunite risks, dangers and crises in an actual (izing) and unique formulation–at the same time security, surety and securization. One must acknowledge the impossibility of the general intellectual security imperative to assume any pretensions of describing/putting new faces on contemporary events/theories. Foucault considered Europe (a continent animated by the idea of unity, and seen as a geographically limited clipping with various significances, but also as a unique ethnic multiplicity mix in resonance with the rest of the world) already able to implement the projection of a philosophy of security, by observing that it [Europe] benefits from a diplomatic armour expressed in the domain of security and based upon state reason and European balance (2009: 253). In this sense, Foucault defines three main objectives acting in universal peace definitions (precarious, fragile, temporary–easily transformed into war, detached from any juridical pretensions and maintained by the political, which, although it has the role of ensuring [European] equilibrium, will involve itself in conflict until it reaches the point of excessive non-compromise within the balance) in a new diplomacy oriented towards state physics (by assuming the role of permanent inter-

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state glue, a building-architect of European spaces–with important attributes for its own acceptance as a societas–offering a series of relationships–fixed and encrypted by the law, far from any logic of fragmented pieces, in a politically-ordered and guided corpus) and by the institution of a military structure (an expression of military competence and a guaranteeing factor of European balance). Corroborating the facts/opinions, one can note that in the present the mission of security is almost paradoxically achieved through strictly relating to the paradigm of endurable development, by acknowledging the inefficiency of traditional concepts–of ensuring security in all its forms and for all objects (humanity, biosphere, state, socium, individuals)–and through developing another direction in theoretical methodology investigations. If in theory, these solutions seem to afford an admittedly efficient alternative, recent events (May 2014) confirm an amplification of noncontrollable mixtures represented by the crisis–danger–risk–contagion terms, all belonging to the same lexical spectrum; and the “Washington Post”, analysing recent Ukrainian developments, states that the main target here is the European concept of frontier, which withstood heated debates and sustained major developments lately. From this perspective, Angela Merkel’s visit (in her position as Europe’s leader) to Washington in the fall of 2014 is meant to send positive signals favouring a power repositioning (one has to note, in a Foucaultian way, Germany’s involvement in a conflict in which it surprisingly positioned itself on the Kremlin’s side as the latter’s special ally) by taking into account the fact that Ukraine’s actual position–an escalation of the crisis–provides an opportunity for NATO to prove its basic unity (although marked by deep misunderstandings, it considers the recent Ukrainian crisis as a consolidating factor). Nevertheless, the US imbues Angela Merkel with the status of key player in an effort to diminish sanctions towards Russia, a position with effects in sustaining any durable economic interests which might create a sensitive situation, explained by the German chancellor’s attitude–when subjected to concerted pressures from her own country’s business environment, she demanded the vetoing of economic sanctions against Russia. Such a clipping of immediate reality underlines the insecure contagion (riskily dangerous) of all arteries of the contemporary world: Ukrainian internal conflicts condition both economic tensions and perceivable distances. If in Brussels the European Commission expresses concern for recent developments in Ukraine, the Russian external affairs minister is

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appalled by Western reactions and demands that Kiev cease all military operations in the East. In the same analytical note, Putin sends an ultimatum demanding that Ukraine recall its troops from the south-east and recommends that Kiev uses “ample national dialogue” in order to solve conflicts and diminish internal tensions, deliberately ignoring any imminent threats of balance breaking/shattering into pieces. Also, the Russian president avoids the truth that given the precarious conditions imposed by exceptional conditions, a state’s unity and integrity cannot and should not be defended and preserved except by peaceful means, through a recourse to dialogue and a firm avoidance of tri-phased power games (directed by the US, the EU or even Russia). Within the equation leading from crisis/risk to danger, any punishments directed towards Kiev only reaffirm the inefficiency of the Geneva treaty– and implicitly the EU’s incapacity to defuse the situation; a state of fact which only amplifies Moscow’s decision to lead/provoke a NATO emergency reunion, in order to debate Kiev’s military undertakings inside civilian areas. Apparently equidistant towards the period’s hot events, but anticipating distinct signs/signals of general non-security, Baudrillard (2007) considered that the real world’s unfavourable track is overseen by the Apocalypse of the Good, which maintains and stimulates any counterterror operated by the Axis of the Good (the West) to the detriment of generalized and absolute Evil (terrorism under all its aspects). With the needed observation that the antithetical Good-Bad opposition is permanently re-assessed and reanalysed from within “9–11” and logically directed towards contemporary problems of European space, reloading (regardless of the frame it’s put in) a philosophically-political constant; Good is normative, directional, with finality, and it has an axis; Evil is a parallax, being unidirectional, marked by diversion, detour, curves, deviance, non-controllability, and is unable to demand the attachment of an axis term, thus being impossible to attack by frontal military action. The former statements can be reviewed and confirmed by the same Baudrillardian optics which states that in any advocacy of their Good, terrorism and Evil are one and the same, and terror is actualized even if it’s artificially sustained by simulation and simulacrum techniques, as a fundamental Western strategy (with its control centre in the US) registering a zero degree of symbolic power; in fact, the coordinates of a strange binary structure are traced here–a structure based on the logic of the idea that in an already-created world, Good and Evil have to exist

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together [with all associated Manichaean, Gnostic, Bogomil and Intermedian(t)(!) associated recipes of majority Gnostics or Marcionites (Ifrim, 2011: 36)]. This approach (verifiable even for Ukrainian-European tension points) marks the passage of domination/dominated in/on the grounds of hegemony, with all necessary mentions of its particular characteristics– complicity, devaluing, total and uncontrolled annexation, the impossibility of finding a culprit and, as a consequence, involvement in integral reality. For Baudrillard, terrorism means refusing globalization (what puts the West under threat is the disappearance of identities, while identity, fundamentalist and terrorist communitarisms and “ethnic resurgences” are seen as regressive answers to the crisis); any projections of natural catastrophes (tsunami, 2004, Japanese earthquakes, floods, 2014) cannot avoid the range of terrorism against which the discourse of the Good is articulated and concentrated. Thus, a logic of general suspicion inductive of the concept that postmodernism is unable to react to the strong signals of hyper reality is being perpetuated (Baudrillard, 1995). In the absence of any realistic finality, terrorism (with all the apparent novelty3 offered by detaching it from its classical sense) demands the attraction and reinterpretation of insecurity in a philosophical registry, accenting any Derridian and Habermasian notes (2005) which decide that “9–11” is the date when “the first world historical event” took place, with the “first universal eyewitness” (Habermas); or the experimental event which maintains discord and panic, resisting any precarious conditions framing the actual experiment, with a dose of inappropriateness for the actual events (Derrida). If Derrida offers the politics–violence correlation, Habermas advocates “structural violence” and states that the pathology of communication is the only way by which a spiral of mutually- uncontrollable distrust can be maintained; with the needed observation that international terrorism is not expressed within an “international public space of rationality [public]”–on the contrary, globalization is responsible for intensifying the whirlwind of communicative violence.

3

In the direction of (still questionable) warnings of Romanian “terrorism” (referencing the revolutionary events of 1989) Nicu Gavrilu‫܊‬ă (2003) conceived an infinite theoretical set with multiple fractal dimensions allowing for logical infinite combinations of three, recognized within the revolution- event(s)- terrorists relationship. In fact, an ideal object is being re-interpreted, anchored within social time analysis, designed through an import of the Cantor concept and/or the proceedings of tremic vision (Ifrim, 2011: 38).

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These comments lead to the idea that the two forms of terrorism can actually be placed on divergent positions: outmoded terrorism (transmitter of terror and acknowledging a political, relatively realistic aim) and updated terrorism4 (including a political vision which targets its nihilistanarchist nucleus). Derrida pleads in fact for a deconstruction of the distinction between war and terrorism (a separation impossible to achieve even in the time of the Second World War) by invoking a pattern of relations already established between tolerance and fundamentalism, which maintain an ambiguous rapport (2005: 167). In reply, Habermas thinks that tolerance consists in instituting reciprocal links and cannot exist as a unilateral act, but accepts almost paradoxically any sense which modern societies, governed by a specific epistemic situation revealing repressed cognitive dissonances, might project upon fundamentalism by eliciting a return to pre-modern attitudes– a self-reflexive, religious5 performance with deep political consequences (2005: 62). In Traian Ungureanu’s (2006: 122) post-Katrina acceptation, Islamic theological globalism intersects with pan-European subventionism and with the biodiversity and sustainable Stone Age economy re-imagined by NGO’s and ecological movements, whose common ideas are the following: a fear of development, brain-dead and uniform community,

4

Under the sign of mask games, as a dissimulat(ing) tactics/politics used by Evil, recent events (May 24th, 2014) prove once more, in a tragic note, referencing the assassination of three persons in the Brussels Jewish Museum, that the danger of the jihad is a real and imminent one, inhuman and despicable, and that Europe remains- even in its centre- both vulnerable and on alert. 5 Included in the permanent relationship between Good and Evil, the saeculum’s ensigns cannot discern between recipes for defusing partial Armageddons. As a way of counterattacking Evil, the confessional mix (the protocol meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartolomeus) and inter- politics (high–level diplomatic contacts with the attendance of Palestinian and Israeli leaders) seem to transmit a “private conciliatory peace” which cannot be separated from a profane solution for major problems of today’s society: access to work, funds being transferred from Israel to the Palestinian authority, hydrological reforms, sewage, transport, education, health care. In the same registry, the expected domination of Good is contested by the Taliban attack on the Pakistani capital's airport, a terrorist act which led to the army responding with force and initiating military operations in northern Waziristan (June 10th, 2014), seen as a clear indication of fragile security and an impossibility of affirming the Good–a winning formulation in any stage of dual confrontations.

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triumph against bourgeois individuals and the annihilation of the old European social energy centre; the individual. The conciliating and temperate solution to which security resorts offers a normative message for diminishing violence, implemented by projecting a European model of internationally righteous order6, governed by legitimate instances: the decision is pertinent and beneficial because tolerating any risk/danger to non-axes would assault (within different spaces) the Illuminist inheritance itself.

3.4. Postmodernitarism and (Other) Three Alternative Technicisms The two types of criticism formulated against postmodernism in Henri Meschonnic's (1988) and Yves-Alain Bois's (1988) work would result in spontaneously expressing a double-sided observation: the first notes that the postmodern is tempted to break away from the modern, but it obsessively comes back to it, achieving little more than acting as a jamming interference, both in form and in content; and the second banks upon a rehabilitation of postmodernism as achieved by some currents which, far from considering it finite, manage to save it from the imminent danger of discreditation. In fact, what performatism offers is nothing more than a (re)validation of these reflexes, assumed as postmodernist projects. Hence, the opportunity offered by any initiative which tries to place in the centre of attention, as a novelty element, the term postmodernitarism, thus inviting one to reassess Rancière`s (2012) opinions about modernitarism, 6

Filtered through the eye/analysis of the intelligentsia (Adam Michnik), Obama’s visit to Warsaw (June 3th, 2014) seems to be a diplomatic gesture meant to quieten/dissipate any obscure ghosts which might (still) haunt Eastern Europe, and is imbued with a conciliatory and protective note by the West, fuelled by historical resources of the first free elections in ex-communist Europe. With an accent coming from within West Point, the new structure of military/security strategy values diplomacy and promotes a politics of alliance and not of military interventions. Already mentioned signals trace a favourable European situation illustrated by the dialoged, excessively publicized screenplay between Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroúenko, deployed with the intention of avoiding any re-involvement in conflicting geopolitical demonstrations seen as debris of the Cold War. Any comments upon these events, as they have been reinterpreted by European press, cannot be distanced from certain language reflexes, offered by a bipolar mentality and easy to trace in statements such as “defrosting proof” or “Ukraine-pawn or bridge”.

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seen as a concept of identifying the forms of any aesthetic art status with the forms of fulfilling any task or particular destiny, and as a way of imposing it as a partaking strategy of postmodernism. Coming back to the much–used Hassanian technicisms, the functional term of partaking explicitly means “the operation of dividing riches between two or more persons entitled to own them”. In Rancière's (2012: 32-33) opinion, an overlapping of aesthetic expression between failed revolutionary structures/programs/paradigms sealed modernitarism’s destiny, as it was accepted either in its artistic dimension (counter modernity) or from politically involving perspectives classified as a failure of the ontologically-aesthetic model. Postmodernism–as an inversion process–banks just upon this dual approach, managing a recognition of certain states (demolishing, tensioninducing, confused) belonging to the aesthetic registry as it correlates with the simple teleology of historical evolution/division and the triggering of simple political reactions centred upon the essential conditions of change, and banking upon a meta-politics of political subjectivity or various futurological virtualities. Postmodernitarism borrows and replaces the un-symbolizabled object, representational interdictions and the original distance from the essence of modernitarism; all of these are connected to the “mourning and repentance of modernitarist thinking” in Rancière`s way, in the sense of a morbid impact of desire. In a casual appraisal of actual “isms”, Romanian Eastern brands are manifestly involved in massive dismissals of postmodernist avoidance mechanisms. Himerism is defined as a tendency/aspiration patronized by the illusions of a “Himerus Alter” with recoils within transfiguration, the sickly, journeys or science, in a “parallel life” undertaken with a view towards exploring different places on the planet and turmoil-ridden periods of our past, which would remain otherwise inaccessible. These implications are obvious in any “live” process pleading for a projection of stateless characters or universal citizen profiles, as well as for liberated provincialism expressing itself in cosmopolitanism, “looking forward to a new century where globalization of all life on Earth will become a reality” through “mimicry of complete and total freedom”. This exposition cannot be distanced from himerism’s appetence for inventing “parallel realities” on the anti-provincial coordinates of an arrogantly-meditative discourse, with a chance towards eluding Eastern complexes through unforced expansion within the-space-in-which-we-live.

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Himerus Alter embodies the characteristics of an identity already marked by the chimeric vision, in its acceptation as teleporting inside a reality which can be acknowledged at any moment, seen as a cosmopolitan chance of egressing into the Universal; a situation in which reality has overtaken the chimeric vision and the two are no longer out-of-phase. Performatism cultivates another type of subjectivity, in answer to a subject’s difficult position in/from postmodernism, extracted and built in a dense manner and in direct relationship with an environment banking on solving forced isolation through spontaneous involvement as a sequence interpreted in a reconciliatory, amateur or erotic key (Eshelman, 2008). Emphasizing coercion rather than continuity and transgressed postmodernism, performatism is recharged from theist principles which suggest a reversal of the centre–threshold/victim–perpetrator positions, and traces postmodernism’s blueprint as a process in which alterity is obtained through victimization, while at the same time choosing a mild, less critical tone when discussing any excesses the central powers might commit. In essence, performatism allows for a centring which establishes proximities and delineates individual spaces, while targeting modernistic nostalgias explained through “the subject’s temporary involvement in [holistic processes]”. When reanalysing any indictment directed towards postmodernism and insisting upon its role in restraining individuals, performatism reassesses the modernist/postmodernist distance between it and performance (dissolving any boundaries between life and art/human body/subject integration within an artistic context). This parallelism is achieved by referencing the model of the “concentrated, holistic subject” (Mitchell, 1982), the “reduced” unitary subject reflected in the ontology and sacralisation of any Derridian difference (Gans, 1997), but also of the “new historism”; while maintaining that the performatist era favours the creation of chronotropes allowing for unlimited possibilities of preserving integrity and liberty, while banking upon self-therapy. When performing an inventory of performatism’s ideas, one notes that it dispenses with conglomerated quotations, authenticity, intertextualism– and repositions ritual, dogma and a reclaimed history of “empirically classified subjects” inside the same circuitry, while availing itself of cynical/ironic non-constants, and affirming itself in a solid or opaque, naive, confused, simplistic, firm or heroically manner–and certainly in an ostensible manner.

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Performatism ensures a dampening, even a conciliation of dichotomies, while clearly targeting any therapeutically refuelling of metaphysical optimism, seen as a “fictionally categorized transcendence state”. As a consequence, one can also note the idea that a rehabilitation of the phallus is needed, in its quality as active, unifying agent of performativity, and, why not, as a means of accessing performatism’s lyrical program–an autochthonous trademark, in the spirit of any positioning which might apparently be less favourable to postmodernism, as they are being transmitted through 90s and 2000s manifestos (Komartin, 2005). Political performatism is organized against postmodernism’s indifferent irony and in favour of assuming individual-order political responsibility inside post-ideological concepts, clearly placed under the influence of imperatives such as “a return of the phallus seen as a major motor force of present-day culture”. Performatism banks upon a (re)instatement of phallocracy with its sacrificial effect of annihilating language’s symbolic order and negating its significance chains. Performatist linguistic randomness revalues the frame within which both the transmitter and the receiver have already been placed. Deprimism includes all complete transfers of terms and visionary structures and offers a dispersion of blank spaces comprising minimal elements, and compatible with any human experience, but still conditioned through valour(izing) environments by the experience–component that is poetically controlled by the author (Vla‫܈‬in, 2007) . Uncoincidentally, the main exponent of deprimism, Don Quixote the Wanderer7 (Vla‫܈‬in, 2009) [adventurer, wanderer, egocentric, both accepted and contested, adored and vilified, favoured and banned]–traces through his own profile a political-social space of risk society, in a Baumanian sense of belonging to the neotribe, either showing an explosion of sociability or suggesting unplanned excursions within the world of inaccessible morality. On modernist grounds, a classification of inhabitants depending on their status as settled/sedentary or foreigners/immigrants was solidified through an asymmetry of power (such as was needed for the 7

Liviu Petrescu (2003) reviews, in this sense, Foucault’s assertions which, while presenting in an architectural manner the perspectives of anti-mimetic directions and their impact upon representation, establish that Don Quixote’s adventures close the outmoded game of signs and open new and entirely modern hierarchies by promoting a poetics already centred upon language per se.

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creation/administration of social space), or through the effort of dividing and organizing social space after the rules of documented cognitive maps promoted by administrators. Within the universal space of transfigured shows, directed by deprimism, Don Quixote's windmills are powered by the circuitry of cultural goods, by the relationship between literature and the virtual media, by literary prizes and author rights, by inter-cultural factors and multilingualism, by the ensigns of geographic, ethnic and cultural alterity. All of which extrapolate the hermetic space of the real/reality, defying the usual and the predictable, projecting a vocation of the unusual and exacerbating the euphoria of escaping the everyday, while targeting any uncensored cultural feasts through corresponding cultural spaces with effects in something with beyond-the-limits propulsion role. Hence the naming of benchmarks within a space already considered to be the centre of the Earth, with a doubly-fortified base (both through a dose of the imaginary and through receiving maximal sincerity)–Ayla–a world, and another barely-perceived world beyond it (Vla‫܈‬in, 2011). Politically and socially, by an appeal to Virilio`s concepts, deprimism remains just an(other) faded version, when seen in relation to counterattacks launched by survivalism, as a way of overvaluing free spaces which belong to the fringe people and the emancipated, while at the same time adding up the attributes of centrifugal, socially-dissuading processes. In fact, the culture-poetical/political universal glue involved in space construction represents nothing more than an experimental, lab alternative to endisms, a nihilocentric ideology valuing postindustrial selfsubsistence. In a possible phase conclusion, referencing a certain technicizing inventory only confirms the involvement of three technicians: the multicultural activist–the manager-the therapist, who dominate and control a techno centric universe marked by flatness, finitude and self-referencing (Hurduzeu, 2003). Thus, functioning technicisms create an impression of complexity and of new, spontaneously occurring states created through a systemic-quality transformation from the simple to the complex (Munteanu, 1999). In the same tri-phased note, Pascal Bruckner (2009) considered that, starting with the Enlightenment, European intellectuals assume and comprehend three functions: prejudice critic–projector of collective actions–creator of a party/camp, by completing them with the tri-phased qualities of secular prophet, insurgent rebel and visionary (Bruckner, 2009: 88).

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If we accept the option of the three as an inclination to complicate the one’s relationship with the three, then we necessarily have to conclude that the three takes over the one, organizes the two and refracts both of them. Following in Corni‫܈‬-Pop's (2000) footsteps, the reader is forced to operate three series of phenomenological-rhetorical transformations: travelling the circuit from the surface to the core, transcending the abyss through ideologically-derivative sets, and conquering the totality of ideologically-aesthetic senses. One cannot omit the fact that any theory of social fields allows a renegotiation of norms through a dispersion of specific physical spaces, while stating that if the movement is extended/becomes commonplace, then the reference stereotype’s compulsory nature is diminished by empowering other spaces which allow for similar occurrences (see in this sense a whole series of cultural alternatives to postmodernity–Himerism, fracturism, delirionims, performatism, authenticism etc.). This expansion of “isms” allows the existence of a simile quality within physical spaces, the deliberate involvement of an individual protagonist and the actante’s interpretation of a standard role8. In a poststructuralist sense, this development would aim towards identifying an aim within the context of tri-phased reality, as it is socially, ideologically and linguistically projected. Taking into account the obvious distance between the agent and the role, any dispersion of space would reclaim a retracing of norms and would lead to deconstruction of the group.

8

Re-reading Toffler’s”Third Wave”, Liviu Petrescu (2003) thinks that inside the techno sphere, sociosphere or infosphere, fragmentarism is the prevailing term, to the detriment of de-massification.

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3.5. Three Ecological Registries Concentrating upon a politically ethical presentation of the medium, social relationships and human subjectivity, ecosophy adopts a strategy of non-constraint, even if its previous research focus was restricted to an inventory of industrial prejudices seen from a technocratic perspective. In the analytical manner of Félix Guattari (1989), the way of solving ecological crises would be by triggering a political–social-cultural revolution through a change of tri-phased registries with nodal points within sensitivity-intelligence-desire. In fact, any alternatively-mediating solution demands rescue from the grip of a double pair of pliers, signalling any pressures coming from acting instances of world market structures (by a narrowing of particular value systems and the equalizing of material goods with natural and cultural ones) and of military industrial complexes. Within the frame of the systematic transformations of the modern world, multipolar stakes for the three ecologies are considered to be, in a Guattarian way, mere replacement suggestions for traditional dual oppositions and geopolitical cartographies that are perceived as useful ways of orienting/directing social thinking. The above-mentioned objectives are realized by launching a tiers-mondisation which would mark the total disappearance of differences between the Third World and the developed world, with predictable impacts signalled by the development of the New Industrial Powers. In a schematic presentation of the three Guattarian ecological models inside a table showing the three interrelated planes, we offer an image of their essential fundamental qualities, as found in: SOCIAL ECOSOPHY SPECIFIC PRACTICES Reconfiguring the totality being-in-the-group modes PARTICULARITIES

- A tendency towards modifying/reinventing the couple, the family, the urban context, work

- Doubling communicational interventions by including mutations observed within the essence of subjectivity

- Avoiding any general recommendations by applying experimental micro social interactions on a larger institutional scale.

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MENTAL ECOSOPHY SPECIFIC ANTIDOTES - Reinventing a relationship with the body-phantasm-desire - Reconsidering human relationships at all levels of the socium PARTICULARITIES - Freedom from mass-media guided uniformity and model conformism - Re-empowering artistic expression rather than professional intervention modes - Re-emphasizing delocalization, deterritorialization, extension and intension - Accenting the dissents and singular production, filtered through the grid of equipment and specialized reference frames - Alternating between “fight” and intimate re-singularizing moments ENVIRONMENTAL ECOLOGY SPECIFIC OVERVIEWS - Prefiguring and constituting a general ecology of un-centred social fights and dissected psychic manifestations. PARTICULARITIES - Freeing the ecology from any connotations of the imaginary, the archaic and the folklore - Replacing the accent upon a complex of subjectivity and a totality of capitalist power formations - Articulate rethinking of neoliberal themes with recoil in the flexibility of labour and the domain of deregulation The glue uniting the three interrelating tectonic structures (with all their specific reflexes) is the principle of praxis opening, which Guattari (1989) considered as the essence of the “eco” prefix–a formula for cumulative modes of taming/particularizing existential Territories, with a clearly-established trajectory in researching deep problems of intimacy: body–surrounding environment–ethnicity–nation–general rights. Any particular properties of tri-phased proportions analysed here demand an avoidance of “principled antinomies exist between ecosophical levels” of the three ecological visions, representing in fact just three discriminatory lenses.

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Technic(izingly), the three ecologies are conceived in brute form, “in one piece”, and subjected to a process of heterogenesis–a continuous way of re-singularizing–but still accept subjectivity as both a transversal model (of sedimenting, inside the universe of surrounding environments, the great Social and Institutional Assemblies) and at the same time and/or a symmetrical one (probing inside the intimate sphere). If definite aspects of mental ecology are connected to a pre-object, prepersonal type of logic, which expresses in a Freudian way the notion of “primary process” or logic of the “included third”, the present study would be interested in discovering the method by which such an approach can reconcile ugliness and beauty, interiority and exteriority, the “good” object with the “bad “object. One must note that mental ecology counterattacks ambivalence, and social ecology promotes a “group Eros” able to redefine any subjectivity already converted by the influences of mental ecology. On the same Freudian note, the three ecologies are exponents of the three new revolutions dedicated to existential questions touching a large theoretical area: from the hypothesis stating that the Earth is a part (and not the centre) of the Universe, passing through that of man as a Darwinian product, to the psychoanalytical pulsional capacity of conscience and superego pressures, which states that equality can never exist between contemplation and experiment, or between the incapable/reduced man and the enlightened/developed man using the instruments of regressive vanguard. This repositioning (regarding the triad denotation–connotation– significance) beyond any existential divides9, shows how the ecology of ideas is oriented: by perceiving the parts of the ecological subsystem as a “context” and stating, in the same Guattarian interpretation, that “being taken into context” expresses a systematic “pretext” resulting from separation. The political and social field, refractory to any alternative-techniciz(ing) environments, seems to avoid this very circumscribing of discursive practices while allowing theoretically-practical self-constructability. Ecological sustainability is concerned with rebuilding the neighbourhood, the community and contesting, eliminating and forbidding any negative actions directed towards the environment, while at the same time observing, as Basarab Nicolescu (2007) stated, that trans-nature is the one

9

The fracture-bifurcation is used by Guattari (1989) as means of identifying protosubjectivity.

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which unites both the transdiciplinary Subject and Object in a philosophy of Nature representing the trademark of trans-disciplinary ecology. In the opinion of Robert D. Kaplan (2009), geography and climate reinstate themselves with a vengeance while reanimating a concept which seemed long gone: the death of distance. From a political and geographical perspective, for Kaplan, the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolizes the overstepping of an arbitrary limit of realism and pragmatism-labelled as deprecatory notions. We are thus involved in tracing the wide limits of an ecosophy considered now to be a way of re-establishing the totality of ecologies (political scientific, environmental, social, mental). Ecosophy thus becomes that concept ready to replace any old ideology which sectorialized the social, the private and the civilian, but seemed incapable of establishing a clear distinction between politics, ethics and aesthetics. If ecological thought captured and exploited the importance of “externalities”–negative or positive–as well as mineral or human resources in the frame of a “limited economy”, then subjective externalities could reclaim their importance by reactivating mentalities (Manolache, 2012). Thus, ecological politics banks upon a potentiation of values, of affections, and of the mental/‘way of life’, respecting the axiom that a wide economy needs an extended politics and ecology in its turn (Guattari, 1989). Separating themselves from the apocalyptic signs announcing the end of incomplete worlds, Lucian Boia (2005) does not try to block the term inside its inclinational sense, but imbues it with additional senses of climate-belt, while noting its associative and interferential potential (reconciling Hume and Montesquieu) between a good (bad) government and a good (bad) climate. If climatic volunteer work and anthropogeography become obsolete terms (and not an authentic marker of what Nicolescu calls trans-nature!), for Boia the new climatic challenge settles within a relationship synonymous to the technological flood, the heat death or the new climatic order. From this point of view, the proof that ecology is placed (after the erosion of hard ideologies) on a privileged position by a reinvention of climate religions, is easy to observe. One cannot avoid in this sense Pascal Bruckner’s assertions (2012) which confirmed that ecology, although it never controlled any centres of power, triumphed in the battle of ideas, and that the environment

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represents the new secular religion with pan-European exposure, especially by potentiating catastrophism10 and all manner of endisms. Reloading a scapegoat parade–Marxism against capitalism, tiermondism versus the West, or altermondialism against both above directions–ecology notes, respecting the Russian-doll principle, three victims: “refuses that type of capitalism invented by a West which robs countries and destroys the Earth” (Bruckner, 2012: 27). Still faithful to the 70s anti scepticism with all the forceful comeback of vegan theories and biosphere egalitarianism, the French greens did not hesitate to claim, back in 2009, the necessity of strikes sanctioning the trend, demanding that couples intending to have a third child be fined11. Such an approach can be equated with amending Hecate-isms, an option establishing the lines of turning energy-hungry monsters into nomad every day-use objects. Generally, a third-order current such as the survivalist one projects three visions–nature as escape, fable or fortress, availing itself of three formatting formulations (preservation, conservation and reconstitution)– by deepening the impossibility of choosing one possibility, in a context where the imminent collapse of the rural world12 cannot be avoided and is foretold while insisting upon archetypal deconstructions of its peaceful/ecological attitudes.

10

Thus the idea of catastrophe subsumes three essential parameters; fulfilment– plausibility–fullness (Bruckner, 2012: 81). In the same sense, the precautionary principle, impossible to translate/transpose into practice, is nothing more than political necessity. 11 If the registry of the three seems obstructed, this appearance is contradicted by wider anthropocentrism, recommending (for the moment only in South Korea) the fundamentation of an “Ethical Chart for Robots”. 12 According to the agricultural census, and deepening catastrophism's ideas– landscapes better suited to Chernobyl! -the Romanian rural space is acutely depopulated and about to disappear, assaulted by massive migration and the rhythm of demographic senescence.

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References Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Etica postmodernă [Postmodern Ethics]. Trans. Doina Lica. Timi‫܈‬oara: Amarcord. Boia, Lucian. 2005. Omul úi clima [Man and Climate]. Bucharest: Humanitas. Bois, Yve-Alain. 1988. Modernisme et postmodernisme. In Enciclopédia Universalis. Symposium. Paris: Les enjeux. Borradori, Giovanna. 2005. Filosofie într-un timp al terorii. Dialoguri cu Jürgen Habermas Юi Jacques Derrida [Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida]. Trad. MarieLuise Semen, Ciprian Mihali. Bucharest: Paralela 45. Bruckner, Pascal. 2012. Fanaticii Apocalipsei [La fanatisme de l'apocalypse]. Trad. Daniel Nicolescu. Bucharest: Trei. Corni‫܈‬-Pop, Marcel. 2000. Tentaаia hermeneutică Юi rescrierea critică [Hermeneutic Temptation and the Critical Rewriting]. Bucharest: Editura Funda‫܊‬iei Culturale Române Publishing House. De Graeve, Cyril, Kyrou, Ariel. 2007. Jean Baudrillard: paradoxul bine temperat [Entretien avec Jean Baudrillard]. Trans. Luiza Palanciuc. Observator Cultural 106 (363). Eco, Umberto. 2004. Minunea Sfântului Baudolino [Miracle of Saint Baudolino]. Trans. Sorin Mărculescu. Bucharest: Humanitas. Eshelman, Raoul. 2008. Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism. Colorado: Davies Group, Aurora. Foucault, Michel. 2009. Securitate, teritoriu, populaаie [Sécurité, territoire, population]. Trans. Nicolae Ionel. Cluj: Idea Design & Print. Gans, Eric. 1997. Signs of Paradox. Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Standford: University Standford Press. Gavrilu‫܊‬ă, Nicu. 2003. Fractalii Юi timpul social [Fractals and Social Time]. Cluj: Dacia. Gieryn, Thomas F. 1999. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Girard, René. 2010. ğapul ispăúitor [Le bouc emissaire]. Trans. Theodor Rogin. Bucharest: Nemira. Gleizal, Jean-Jacques. 1999. Arta Юi politicul. Eseu despre mediaаie [Art and politics. Essay on Mediation]. Trans. Sanda Oprescu. Bucharest: Meridiane. Guattari, Félix. 1989. Les Trois Écologies. Paris: Galilée.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. Citizenship and National Identity. Some Reflections on the Future of Europe. In Theorizing Citizenship, Ronald Beiner (ed.). Albany: State University of New York Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2005. Sfera publică Юi transformarea ei structurală. Studiu asupra unei categorii a societăаii burgheze [The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society] second edition. Trans. Janina Iano‫܈‬i, Bucharest: Comunicare.ro. Hurduzeu, Ovidiu. 2003. Sindromul vulnerabilită‫܊‬ii [Vulnerability Syndrome]. Convorbiri literare 1 (96). Ifrim, Nicoleta. 2011. Fractalitatea Юi discursul literar. Ipostaze ale unei noi teorii a receptării [Fractality and the Literary Discourse. Hypostases of a New Theory of Receiving]. Gala‫܊‬i: Europlus. Innerarity, Daniel. 2004. La sociedad invisibile. Madrid: Espasa. Kaplan, Robert D. 2009. The Revenge of Geography. Foreign Policy, May/June (96-105). Komartin, Claudiu. 2005. Manifestul performatismului [Performatism Manifesto]. In GeneraĠia 2000–o introducere [Generation 2000–an Introduction]. www.clubliterar.com. Accesed 1 May 2014. Manolache, Viorella. 2010. Curente alternative ale prefixului postevaluări filosofico-politice [Alternative Currents of the Prefix Post-. Political and Philosophical Evaluations]. Sibiu: TechnoMedia. —. 2013. Peter Sloterdijk ‫܈‬i arhitectura psiho-politicii [Peter Sloterdijk and the Psiho-Political Arhitecture]. Revista de Эtiinаe Politice Юi Relaаii Internaаionale X (1),(49-58). Meschonnic, Henri. 1988. Modernité, modernité. Paris: Verdier. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1982. Against Theory. Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morin, Edgar. 2008. Gândind Europa [Thinking Europe]. Trans. Irina Scurtu. Jassy: Institutul European. Munteanu, Florin.1999. Seminаe pentru altă lume [Seeds for Another Word]. Bucharest: Nemira. Neumann, Victor. 2006. Tentaаia lui Homo Europaeus. Geneza ideilor moderne în Europa Centrală Юi de Sud-Est [The Temptation of Homo Europaeus. The Genesis of the Modern Spirit in Central and Southeastern Europe], third edition. Jassy: Polirom. Nicolescu, Basarab. 2007. Transdisciplinaritatea. Manifest [Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity]. Jassy: Junimea. Petrescu, Liviu, 2003. Poetica Postmodernismului [The Poetics of Postmodernism]. Second edition. Pite‫܈‬ti: Paralela 45.

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Pruijt, Hans. 2013. Squatting in Europe. In Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles, Squatting Europe Kollective (ed.). Brooklyn: Minor Compositions. Rancière, Jacques. 2012. ÎmpărtăЮirea sensibilului. Estetică Юi politică [The Distribution o f the Sensible. The Politics of Aesthetics]. Trans. Ciprian Mihali. Cluj: Idea Design & Print. Sartori, Giovanni. 2005. Homo videns. Trans. Mihai Elin. Bucharest: Humanitas. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2005. Instant Democracy: The Pneumatic Parliament. In Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel (eds.). Karlsruhe and Cambridge: MA: ZKM. Soviany, Octavian. 2008. Apocaliptica textului (Încercare asupra textualismului românesc) [Apocalypse of the Text. (A Try on the Romanian Textualism)]. Bucharest: Palimpsest. Tally, Robert. 2009. Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer. London: Continuum. ğîrdea, Teodor N. 2001. Securitatea ca noĠiune fundamentală a noosferologiei. Progresul tehnico–útiinĠific, Bioetica úi Medicina: probleme de existenĠă umană [Security as a Fundamental Notion for Noosferology. Technical-scientific Progress, Bioethics and Medicine: Problems of Human Existence]. Proceeding of the 6th international conference. Chiúinău (20–23). Ungureanu, Traian. 2006. Războiul timpurilor–declin occidental úi asediu islamic [The War of Times–the Western Decline and Islamic Siege]. Bucharest: Humanitas. Viatteau, Alexandra. 2007. La société infantile. Paris: Hora Decima. Virilio, Paulo. 2001. Spaаiul critic [Critical Space]. Trans. Isabella Badiu. Cluj: Idea Design & Print. Vla‫܈‬in, Gelu. 2009. Don Quijote Rătăcitorul [Don Quixote the Wanderer]. Cluj-Napoca: Eikon. —. 2011. Ayla. Bucharest: Cartea Românească. —. 2007. Manifestul deprimist [Deprimist Manifesto]. http://geluvlasin.blogspot.ro/2007/05/manifestul-deprimist.html. Accesed 1 July 2013. Voinea, Raluca. 2008. Interviu cu grupul H.arta, Arta ca metodologie [Interview with H.arta Group. Art as Methodology]. IDEA Artă+ Societate (30–31).

CHAPTER FOUR VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF THE THREE

The present chapter is focused on visual representations of the three, with an accent upon current cinematographic registries that are advocated both outside and through film: while also being interested in proving that any relationship between distance–power–security can be traced back to narratives conspiring to form a le petite imaginer–a concept which would only serve to amplify the perspective of intermediation and of film itself, seen here as a complex accompanying continuum. Both in pretext and subtext, the three movies commented upon were chosen taking into consideration their degree of involvement with our research theme, while deliberately ignoring their status/valuation, either non-or partially-valorical, in/for their accepted domain. Our endeavour for the whole chapter was guided by intermediation, an approach allowing both a retreat and an application of concepts already in use in other artistic domains (representation, body, space, power) in order to allow their placement on/inside the movies we discuss–while still taking into consideration any aspects pertaining to the vertical look, the horizontal perspective and intermediate optics.

4.1 Between Two and Three: Intermediation Mediation defines, in Jean-Jacques Gleizal's (1999) opinion, what is found between two terms, while excluding any additive effect such as organizing areas of widening art, or any adequate arrays of theorizing actor sociology, as a substitute for their social roles; in fact, mediation is accepted as an autonomously-institutional(izing) fact. While acknowledging the problem of mediation as accepting a political dimension too, Jean-Jacques Gleizal states that it nevertheless represents the political way of manifesting itself inside the [political] art sphere, while at the same time expressing a quotient of independence and/or socializing–or, in an Althusserian sense, of manipulation/over determination of art by political forces, because society equals mediation (Gleizal, 1999: 42).

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Noting that duplicity concentrates upon movement maintaining both edges of a fold (as a reference to Mobius structures) even if one fold seems to cover the other and accept both converting powers and operational direction changes–refusing to refuse–or/if duality constitutes a hybridizing solution of melting within the object and/or subject, any Gleizalian conclusions would establish that mediation cannot be taken for the One; it belongs to the domain of artistic ecology; it excludes revolution; places itself on the side of renewal; triggers the occurrence of above and is much more than postmodern. Along the lines of the same demonstration, we note that intermediation becomes a mixture composed of any perception/finality imposed upon art by mediators and intermediary forces. If the mediator transports, redefines and produces change, the intermediary instead sediments and preserves, by positioning himself on the outside; hence, the intermediator represents a third-order category of one who operates with any imprimatur-bearing technology defining one and the same substance, but resulting in a modifying-impact final product. Attributing such a modifying-transporting state to the visual registry, one can afford to correlate the more-than-postmodern Gleizalian theory with an argument stating that any investing of the “ism” suffix with multiple superposed significations would only target (even more) clearly the aesthetic areas and the artistic domain (Mihali, Polgár, Sîrbu, 2005). In an almost Hutcheonian combination of image–text and representations, assuming an intermediating involvement of both art and the visual, the film production launched by Carol Reed in 1949, while respecting the conventions of the film noir genre, anticipates the con/pretext of suspense already seen in The Third Man, belonging to a society with an international nucleus, protected by an international patrol force comprising members of all the powers and subservient to the control of a third–“all strangers to the place and speaking not its tongue”. Thus, the play of suspense is placed under the sign of a (possible) three (negated by final revelations): three men; there was a third one; who was the third person? The appeal (even if only episodically fragmented, in the sense of insertion or fragmentation) to film noir registry is not speculative if one accepts Žižek’s opinion (2001) that, starting with the 80s, we are all contemporaries with an attempt to resuscitate the [noir] universe of policier dramas upon which the new cinema direction of the 40s was focused. We can unhesitatingly attach this observation to any postmodern argument of sovereign film, in a Lyotardian note, accepting the inherent

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truth of our observations and the force of decision unhindered by any controlling force, with no recourse to authority, but still occurring and acting without invoking/demanding the right “to be what they are”. Thus, any discussion of cinematographic art only serves to bring to the fore the form of movement and to emphasize displacement [third order multiplication, we note] as a told story, under the authority of a general formulation, as an argument of acinema, which would imply excessive immobility and mobilization, lyrical abstraction, marginality and locution changes (Lyotard, 2000). With a particular interest in our present study, film noir self-referenced two particularities, typical for a self-contained genre (an inclination towards the universe of noir crime and the idea that policier movie constitutes just one of the possible application fields of noir logic–Žižek, 2001: 9-10), and any discussion of The Third Man film would re-launch, as a third-order attribute, a concentration upon memory and an undermining/reclaiming of both the self’s and the other's identity; in fact, one notes an intention towards triggering an investigation of intersubjective areas, continued by a rebuilding of attributes for any symbolic communitas. In a phase conclusion and in a Lyotardian note (2001), the present chapter will use the optical displacement method–(here) as a placing/inclusion of two code inscription zones within another surface– which, in a Möbiusian way, represents nothing more than a technique whose main function is representation.

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4.2. The Three Faces of Eve (1957) Any image instructions operate(ing) in the Three Faces of Eve movie re-launch a pre-Oedipal pattern reinterpreting pathologizing melancholia as an argumentative lead strengthening a semiotics in opposition to symbolism, insisting upon white-and-black touches for organic re-tracings already considered to be a definitory characteristic of feminine writing in visual form. The post-Lacanian trauma (the mother forces him to give a last kiss to his dead grandmother, referencing the Proustian anti-madeleine–a triggering element for any third-order objects–identities being their breakage/fragmentation–and the broken porcelain cup) only strengthen the concept of aphanisis by using the dialectical relationship between presence and absence, alienation–a voyeuristic subject and a spectral-gaze author, repressed or, on the contrary, exacerbated sexual desire–by picturing the paradoxical intersection of the present with an illusion of absence (Maule, Beaulieu, 2009). The scene pleads for accepting trauma as a deteriorating occurrence of the cognitive/emotional response (with an expected result within dislocations) or for third-order voices whose only purpose is to impose a certain order upon apparently chaotic events and episodes (referencing the nature of the trauma which expresses an effort to break the silence, to bear witness, with finality within the performative act of speaking). In fact, the image is illustrative (even from a psychoanalytical point of view) for the off screen– on screen relationship already illustrated by the dialogue between three personalities/individualities/characters, reloaded at short intervals and made to confront each other. The warning this screenplay directly transmits, without any undue delicacies, is referring to the illusion of fiction, counterattacked from the beginning “this is a true story (...) about a young, rather pretty and nice wife, small and sad, who in 1951 scared her husband in her Georgia hometown by acting as if she was someone else”. Thus, the image refuses to remain fixed inside fiction and overtakes the real experiment/case which it presents as if it were entirely true: “the case study was sent to the American Psychiatric Society in 1953. This film does not need any help from screenplay writers”. In an anticipatory manner, the initial statement–within any obese man lies a thin man struggling to get out–launches the strategically Baudrillardian couple of underdeveloped/overdeveloped, distancing itself from its philosophical sense while approaching the psychoanalytical

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registry of weak and strong identities, circumscribed inside a competition aiming to win the dominant identity position. Image strategy traces the three stages of the heroine’s transformation, shown by passing from a prime status of medical file taken over by Dr. Luther in order to diagnose the patient, to the effervescence of the two (with an emancipatory and political undertone) and finally to the thirdorder identity, trying to correctly award faces/facets to the social roles: a mother, a wife and a repository of femininity. Appraising Pavel Florenski’s (1997) arguments as arguments of intermediation–the analysed film might be considered a final product of en face techniques, a creation in which frontal plans meet, intersect and even relate with far-off plans coming from the background: if the initial treatment Dr. Luther offers is limited to two, to the harmonization of the two identities by simplification, the patient’s file shows that none of these can constitute an acceptable solution. Thus the image offers a sensation of policentring, of appraising different individualities from different angles, and as a result confirms Florenski’s opinion (1997:30) in stating that separation is traced by a different brush, forming a system of potential lines which does not have any visible or physical corresponding object. Accepted in Freudian interpretational manner, the movie The Three Faces of Eve examines the already-predicted traumatic event by using a tri-storied structure formed by internalization, re-living and resurrection. In Laplanche`s acceptation (2000) the first event determines the second and subsequently produces a hermeneutics of retroactive projection. In fact, atemporality is offered as a means of analysing one’s own life, and of validating the idea that alterity maintains, by the process of conscience, any trauma allowing us to define the other. According to the yin and yang principles, Eve White and Eve Black meet, speak, and thus enter a communicational situation proving that representation, far from operating a doubling effect, indicates a third-order element as being the only authentic one, deviating from external perspective towards introspection (concentrating upon interior perspectives) and demanding a symbolic construction of identities. One must not forget that the discourse conceives its object in a dialogical way and admits that dialogic acts can reload living replicas in/from the inside of foreign words/objects (Bakhtin, 1981). If Eve White’s first interference sign comes from a registry of feminist emancipation (exuberant clothes from the Beehive shop) subverting the pret-a-porter until it negates maternity and challenges familial situations (returning home), Eve Black has a surface identity (an allergy to nylon,

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being tempted by uncensored sexual life, dance addict, detesting and challenging pre-established social rules: marriage is just fun); together, the two characters form a one-color duality characterized by the statement “when one is weakened, the other is strengthened”. Third-order identity, as a viable positive formula, offers through the typical profile of a nameless heroine (maybe Jane, why not Jane?) the best solution to transforming group associations (Earl, Bonnie and Jane are headed home) while offering a Baumanian testimony for any sociological significance of the third element and defining on psychoanalytical grounds identity as a person’s capacity to remember while offering him/her the chance of taking over/assuming a role/status/position.

4.3. Three Survival Island (2005) Pavel Florenski (1997) maintains in his analysis that representation imbues space with meaning, but does not explain its organization, thirdorder characteristics of the image being the ones which particularly establish that space can be limited in surface, only with the condition that the form of the represented object (1997: 74) be modified, even destroyed. The existence of a certain image instruction can be inferred from these statements, deciding–through representation–that the intermediation rapport between/from image details and the signs/symbols of its own representation, forcing a maintained continuity for both aspects. Perceived as a relevant expression of the interdependent relationship between the imaginary-imaginative/imaging=imagination, representation must perforce respect any fission, side-slip and compromise demanded by pre-established connections, in order to present a coherent image of the original, thus creating a hiatus between the original (one)–copy (secondorder transcription)–imagined (third-order representation). The registry and props of the Three Survival Island movie can be used as propitious signs for verifying illusion instructions–a concept giving the impression it resonates to the application of Gleizalian mediation by registering echoes within artistic ecology and acknowledging its direct implication in the occurrence of the beyond. Thus, embroidering on the concept of illusion, Florenski (1997:126127) distances the concept from the significance of the statement “it seems different than in reality” taking into account the fact that, within an interaction, the whole is not/does not seem anymore what it would have been as a multitude of elements taken one at a time. Three Survival Island illustrates the potentiation of an illusion with a mission to represent the particular and consider the general as a

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background for developing representations of particular impressions: if the general is commonplace, predominates, then the particular is the exception, the impression and the expression, but also the experiment. Initially, the behaviourally-flavoured ship voyage shows four persons forming a group–the rest does not matter–constituting a circle which is going to be assaulted by a fifth individual. At a distance, the abandoned woman casts her (sexualizing) spell upon the one who will crack the group’s unity and enlarge its circle–the fifth element–thus causing a contraction of multiplicity. If the image’s instructions are deliberately oriented towards an anticipatory/prophetic soft program of/for events about to happen, without avoiding signals coming from a segment already influenced by the effects of mass cinematography, the immediate reaction is the affirmation of the surviving couple already integrated within the island’s deserted space. The double–close to the demands of perfect bodily proportions–takes over the space (he fishes, consents to and passes any survival tests, adapts to the new environment, builds a shelter, interacts, maintains latent sexual energies flowing). If the readily-built is dependent upon cliché, then its strategies assume the unification of two models–the masculine, socially inferior but with a strong personality and imposing physique [Manuel studied civil engineering for two years] and the feminine–superficially fragile, easy to manipulate but socially superior [Senora Jenny]–united in a couple whose two halves teasingly accept each other, balance each other and are harmonized by permanently reverting to a code based on the supremacy of instincts and biological necessity. The apparently complete design is shortcircuited by the appearance of Jack, assaulting the newly-formed double’s rules with the old couple’s exigencies. A group formed on the principles of solidarity–“we have to accept each other, it’s the only way to survive”–is affected/conditioned and even threatened by an unequal representation of space (deserted) and the uneven distribution of the three; one male+one female+another. Thus, homo triplex’s survival efforts, close to classical workmanship– Jack becomes the prototype of a failed homo tribalis, possessed of incorrectly-oriented and non-censored instincts, perverted by the society which produced him; Manuel, with his precisely-traced native qualities, has the necessary abilities to explore, know and master the habitable space; Jenny represents the perturbing feminine force, maintaining a fine balance between sexualizing tensions and an instinct allowing her to turn any received attraction into survival rations. Within the film’s cliché structure, the image reverses any representation of classical temptation, by

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transmuting space and humanizing sin itself (Manuel or Jack) depending on the viewing angle. Coupling: impossible to separate from the image’s preserved and premeditated energy with a role in anticipating the immanence of sexual experiences–as pretext and reflection of the demands of space, (on a Freudian-Jungian note) reproduction and nourishment-thus becomes the decisive signal for fixing and delineating habitation places within deserted spaces (two buildings made using different architectural concepts and situated in close proximity to each other). Jack, who never shared anything with anyone, finds a way of leaving the space (Boat) by convincing one of the newly-formed couple’s partners to help him leave “in the care of the sea”, abandoning the territory to the double who has already claimed it. Under the sign of division (of space or the feminine), of sharing, the slogan accompanying the image’s construction seems to underline Jenny’s statement “we did everything in order to survive”. By alternating permutations of the place of three (a position the three characters will permanently find themselves in, regardless of the dual relations they enter into) the movie underlines Clifford A Pickover’s (2013) opinion stating that the first can be turned into the second by establishing correspondences between neighbouring points, or translating one of the spheres in the fourth dimension–which would result into its projection in the third state. Thus, the fourth dimension–Manuel’s lover magic–is the one orchestrating the development of events and decides the way they end: Jack is abandoned on the island, confirming the impossibility of survival, because, in the same technicizing1 note, the one stays alert only if two or three of its neighbours are activated.

1

The present book constantly uses the technicizing concept, denominating a way of relating to the registry of the experimental/temporary, by placing two reduced units in dialogue, through the prism of synonymous terms such as technique = techné.

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4.4. Thr3e (2006) Taking into consideration the proximity of living-without-life, as in a wardrobe, image instructions from Thr3e (2006) trace the landmarks of a controlled proximity (explosions on small surfaces) by the loner/antisocial/invisible man who adores his machines and does not hesitate to implement their functioning, applying in fact the pretextual instructions of the image, without fear of recharging, even using clichés, hard themes–such as evil–in the line of Plato, St Augustine or Freud, inside the time duration allotted by the characters to philosophical deliberations (the century in which Kant would have written his work). From the beginning, it is obvious that man’s fight with evil continues unabated because of the ‘Fall’, a perspective/image obstinately reloaded and anchored in proximity, but clearly illustrated by the image of sliding along the wall until you can open a door. Despite flattening appearances, Thr3e values the artistic status of both divided proximities (between two or two-by-two; friends–enemies, brother–sister, colleagues–strangers, murderer–victim, stalker–prey, teacher–student) and proximities tirelessly filtered theologically (three numbers which save–Romans 6.6.23). The character of Kevin Parson juggles with specific traits of his own identity, exclusively marked by his relationships with others–orphan, experimented student, traitor, liar, false and hypocrite, gossiping; in fact, the relationship can be found also within the consecrated structures of triphased operating formulations which harmonize engineering (image)– literature (imagination)–theology (imaginary). The tri-phased is permanently reordered and extrapolated with inserts– be they mythological–the Sphinx’s riddles/nonsensical questions (what sets but does not fall? or it brings you there but it does not take you anywhere?) which need a plenary use of the figure three in order to be deciphered (the 33 bus–only three of them are in circulation)–or responsible for an identification of the triggering element (appealing to the three senses–I don’t like the way you look–the way you talk–the way you smell) or establishing a pattern for the book, an almost-initiated text (here, counter-initiate) which is being written (the third writing about the sources of evil). In a (dis)orienting way (the third is always affected, even baffled by the possibility of having his suffering known and understood) proximity delimitates, analyses and rewrites any interaction in small doses: two are under surveillance and are being explored by a third, thus creating a relationship which is projected upon the adopted family too (the princess,

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the infantile and the angle) and which betrays a strange, closed world denying any proximity connected to political events/occurrences and the mass media (Eisenhower for president!). It also functions on the principle of eliminating what you don’t like and keeping the rest, and underlines the idea that outside proximity there is only blood and chaos. Under the sign of classified riddles–what thing wants to be filled but is always empty?–the symbol of the three still becomes the determining factor of any action-the warehouse on 33rd street, no. 369-33; or the factor which remarks upon the coexistence of three natural forces within every being-the good, the bad and the oscillating soul torn between these two extremes. Initially throwing away the key which could help solve the enigma, and then coming back to it in order to correct it–one finishes by labelling it as an unequivocal finality; thus, Thr3e presents Kevin’s tri- divided identity; the captive child–Samantha–Slater, by showing the profile of the traumatized being who imitates killing strategies but without becoming a murderer; or, on the contrary, reinstates the dominance of the three from the perspective of healing proximity–a double good (Samantha–Jennifer) and the cured soul placed right next to the two proximities. Referencing the three cinematographic productions, the present chapter tries to prove that any relationship between imagination–imagined– imaginary serves to re-launch the particularizing mixture already identified inside established connections between representation–identity and proximity. Tracing a vertical axis through these framed images (as an allusion to changes of plane: from water/island to abandoning space/final escape), we discover in Three Survival Island a concept of space as representation, suggesting that the image of counter-pure cinematic space which is impervious to any transformation, used and temporarily involved in the characters’ place/role, by registering nodal points in a process of transparency, fluency, continuous action/dispute and suspense effects. Former statements will only serve to prove that there exists space enough for image exploitation, imprinting a sensation of depth upon the initial framed scene, by efficiently supplanting poorly-represented interior imagery. Thus, the registry of Three Survival Island can be seen as a cinematic endeavour representative of changes, with unclear connections to presentational or representational landmarks, which accepts the fact that representational situations don’t need the presence of any code: the only functioning protocol is that of the image as mounted representation of borrowed spaces.

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The screenplay confirms, in a Baumanian way, the idea that society begins/functions or ends/extracts its dysfunctional from the rule of the three. The Three Faces of Eve–as an intermediating achievement–expresses the idea of identity unity, which guarantees the subject’s placing in the very core of socially functioning action, reuniting the imaginary with the symbolic in a Lacanian manner. The imaginary invests the subject with visual representations of unity (the childhood phase) while the symbolic becomes a strategy of differentiation allowing the adult to return to childhood, as both means of validation and opportunity for self-discovery; with the absolutely necessary mention that the erupting unconscious, positioned between the imaginary and the symbolic, constitutes a threat to their unification. Hence, an idea of perpetuated illusions about the subject’s freedom can be extracted from the aforementioned works, while still taking into account its own option for a certain role, faith, social position or chance of reasserting itself as a divided, torn-in-three entity still possessing three vestiges of personality. This imported Lacanian mixture certifies any consequences arising from effective assessments of the subject’s position. While still attached to intermediating effects seen in The Three Faces of Eve, Thr3e sees proximity as an instantaneous, involuntary mode, arising from context and applicable thanks to pre-existing experiences. Of course, one can accept a frame built from superposition and valuation of solutions–seen as guarantees for the inclusion/exclusion of the three; the one is that which multiplies and thus has a central status; two and three represent solutions, symbolic figures creating sequences and directing/solving ad-hoc proximities, in which the one covers the two and symmetrically implies the three. The formula of the three oscillates between visible/non-visible proximity and obstacle elimination from within the logical structure of relationships between the one, the three and the two–with reference to the artifice of doctoral papers seen as anti-parables, as pretexts for creating an artificial fabric both inclusive and exclusive of proximities. Sequences oscillate between the cliché–simulacrum–non-discovery of essences, and/or zone focus–zoom–secondary/lateral focus, as well as between the interdependence image (representation)–imagination (fictitious representation or multiplication of personality)–imaginary (non-existent, unrealistic proximities)–all of these, under the surveillance and coordination of the third-order intermediator. In actual temporal proximity to the present chapter’s completion (July 2014), Romanian cinematographic space presented the film The Third

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Person (Paul Haggis, 2014)–seen as an obvious way of avoiding any references to the 1949 movie The Third Man which might be due to its anti-thriller nature–with the enlightening subtitle Love in the Third Person (a reference to Michael, the main character, who writes his journal in the third person). A change of registry–from Man to Person–cannot avoid the Ingmarian opinion (‫܇‬erban, 2007) referencing persona through excluding (or on the contrary, underlining) the presence, an ambiguities of the plus-mask relationship seen as a cinematic convention of intersecting puzzles. If the term Man expressed in a clear and simple way the 1949 movie story, 2014’s Person becomes a complicated notion, close to the Freudian concept of the spontaneous as manifested in human relationships (Aristarco, 1979), or superposing flux flows where multiplicity serves to emphasize the plot and dynamize/diversify actions (Goddman, 1991). The film unfailingly respects and applies the imperative idea of a Haggisian crash seen (here) with the clear intention of procrastinating on three simultaneous levels: three stories, three persons and three spaces (arch-erotic-romantic stereotypes seen as tourist attractions: Paris–Rome– New York, spaces demanding three types of owners of both the story and/or the place; the writer, the businessman, the father) in conclusion, three starting points which might allow for infinite/triple intersections. More proof of the fact that the registry of the three offers concerns unlimited resources… inside image plans.

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4.5. Media Culture: a Televisual Technicism Any endeavour targeting the area of television series pleading for a postmodern status is seen as “more than a sonorous word” (Kellner, 2001) and this is demonstrated beyond any economy of the text or image hiding strategies, architecturizations or quantifiable significances. Kellner warns against enlaced images, successive sequences and scenes, unrolling narratives and texts–all belonging to the media culture, with a well-defined role in promoting a cavalcade of subject/protagonist reactions considered to be weak models: the significant is released and the image is permuted before the narrative, captivating by its central(izing) position which produces fascination, fragmentation and an ephemeral feeling. These impositions offer an uncontested media continuity (as proven by American TV series, which often do not justify an innovator status but rather just integrate tendencies or submit to socio-cultural imperatives) of opting for specific contexts and ensuring a confluence of aspects, objectives or themes reloaded by the media culture: a hard effect (after a stimulus-answer model, hegemonic-dependent formulation); a limiting ingredient (after the precepts of a “two-step flux” accomplishing all the points of daily agendas) or a soft effect (a “uses and gratifications” schedule with a predilection for the receiving phases). These observations underline the mission of (re)dosed movies with particular characteristics, represented (this time) by a capacity to create [what Lyotard (2001) defined as a possibility of interaction and cooperation between social and psychic segments] and to offer, in a Jamesonian note, two micro-narratives: the first, with direct impact, stating that any significance that institutional structures have, which start with individually multiplied cases, cannot avoid a recourse to the artificial/laboratory/simulacrum; the second, centred upon introducing a force inside a regulated-tension circuit–with meeting points in the apex of the triangle–as a new inscribable surface, with a double inside and outside, with a digital epidermis graft and the ability of traversing psychological tensors. From the perspective of decaying into the everyday, or of degrading placements within commercial spaces, postmodernism reinvigorates the significance of the media culture concept with advanced, complex programs and vast projects. Mass culture is abilitated to indicate a retracing of the contours from heterogeneous, surrogate canons or easily sold constructs towards variable mode(l)s (such as literature recipe-books) in the manner of a viral

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symptom which abandons culturally autonomous zones in order to delve into techno-cultural combined areas. The consequences of a media regimen comprising a repositioning of orientation directions and selective groupings inside a multimedia pattern thus ensue (Manolescu, 2003). In the same analytical approach, Linda Hutcheon (1989) denounces the exclusively binary effect of plurality associated with existential multiculturalism, stating that, accepted or contested, any differential trope heralds political, social or cultural progress, and is unable to distance itself from reinventing and reinterpreting the particular–which tends to replace it within the circuitry by a limiting label(ing) formulation. Hence the conviction that cultural hybris is dependent upon metaphorical humanist models when it comes to its authenticity. Harmonizing the two concepts (postmodernism and representation) creates a favourable context for placing image, narrative and finality inside an interconnecting relationship (as producers of ideology). Postmodern practice maintains and promotes the cultural, investing it with a mission of mediation through representation and implementing the ambivalent politics of postmodernism by expressing, on one hand, a lack of depth and expressiveness; and on the other, a polysemantic flux and ideological overcharge, replication and multiplication. Rosemarie Haine‫( ܈‬2002) avoids placement under postmodernism’s influence while at the same time deciphering an unperturbed mediation of social innovation inside the very structure of abstract (that is, postindustrial) society and advocating the paradigm of (tele)visual communication. Audio-visual communication, frequently accessed by the registry of Romanian inventories, is perceived as a monopolizing phenomenon, associated with prevailing American productions but also with weakened levels of ideation or aesthetic and artistic standards, which emphasize soft productions, entertainment, pseudo-messages and discretionary remakes. The present chapter, trying to avoid such danger signs, endeavours to confirm that, in a particularizing manner, any visual effect transmits the message that individual products are generally levelled, impregnated with apparently harmless shocks and sensations, with no discernible consequences, but also subsumed under a carefully and permanently monitored consumer reaction, with the avowed purpose of calculating their momentary reflexes. We also maintain that the message is not capable–and should not be forced–to assume other priorities; or, in an Adornian sense (1981), limiting oneself to the abstract present cannot be considered to be an

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alarming aspect, because in this case the formula does not function according to the principles of hard aesthetic(izing) principles. From this point of view, film–as a loop propagation work and product designed specifically for general(izing) consumers–is definitely separated from any cultural and intertextual slogans, and thus becomes “just cinema”, in a tolerating –Deleuzian acceptation. In a McLuhanian vision, film is a new medium, suitable for offering/transmitting “something different” by triggering a change of emphasis and meaning, even if it remains subservient to fashionable cinematographic subjects. David Harvey (1989) identifies non-problematization as a distinctive characteristic of postmodernism that is implemented by an inherent complicity with consumer goods, but liberated from any critical opinions which could be impossible to ignore when trying to define the postmodern paradox. This statement is strengthened by Linda Hutcheon (1989) who admits that truth and reference have not vanished; just ceased to be unproblematic dimensions of accepted reality, by allowing interrogation and examination of the whole segment presently involved in knowing the real itself. From a position of (more) mobile identities, multipliable, personalizing, self-reflexive, fragile(izing), but also subject to change and renewal, postmodern theory offers a concept of identity [multiple/multipliable identity–multiple/multipliable identities] under the pressure of euphoriaimbued moments, fragmented and decentred, and concludes that identity itself is nothing more than myth or illusion. The result is easy to spot within the construct of American TV series, which give up hard themes and focus predictably upon the everyday, individualism and questionings, without avoiding the connection defined by Linda Hutcheon (1989) as a relationship between ideology and subjectivity. If modernism investigates the fundamental experiences of the self and concentrates upon the ego trying to reclaim its integrality (even) in the midst of fragmentation, postmodernism underlines the idea of a coherent, autonomous subject, a source of significance or action. Photography and fiction represent nothing more than two instruments of artistic manifestation, with special relevance in the case of film–as a participating force in natural research and subjectivity exploration. The immediate conclusion drawn from such a symbolic, Žižek–Freud– type new ideate combination, would be that identification has an anticipatory, precipitate and energetic character, showing a potential for propagation and recognition, anticipation and outsmarting others, who might decide to exclude us from “an already organized community”.

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Precipitated identification constitutes a progress factor (a jump forward) of anticipative valuation and preventive representation of one’s own image (“what I become for the Other”) in a Lacanian (1977) sense of intersubjectivity, or as defining status of the doubly-undefined subject. One can distinguish two stages in subjectivity’s evolutionary process: affixing the moment in time by speculating upon a neutral subject (with the help of the impersonal) and appraising transformations which would define and help us assume symbolic identity (Žižek, 2001:77). From a cinematic perspective, these proceedings would generate a kind of condensation of both field and counter-field within the same sequence, a kind of communication with the one-before-us, accepted now as an equal partner, also called a superposed subject. In a Kantian vision, this would engender the occurrence of a position defined by the existence of two positive, complementary forces which negate each other (considering that any opposition of positive and negative poles is consumed inside a magnetic field) and also by the logical contradiction based upon the notion that any considered object will contradict itself. The functional triad is that of need–demand–desire, or, more to the point, need explores symbolic space by working as a demand addressed to the double who will fulfil that need. If the modern type of emancipation consecrates the ideal of the socialized persona ruled by rational principles, postmodernity promotes “the loneliness of the moral subject”, opposing the moral ego to an ego lacking any moral-aesthetic foundation, and placing the subjects inside an asymmetrical relationship. Life actually finds itself inside the post-division stage, offering solutions for a return to that unhappy ambivalence, incongruent, unreasonable, as a foundation for the moral ego; while post-ambivalence offers a defeated compromise, “the lesser evil”, the unavoidable and regrettable self-sacrifice; in conclusion, we can say that a lack of selfsatisfaction and righteous indignation constitute morality’s safest protections. Two strategies for substituting one ambivalence with another are thus activated; fixation (defined as the effort to free the ego from indecisive feelings while expressing the desire to find itself in a state where it will receive without giving either more or less than was initially agreed upon) and floating (defined as minimizing losses after a failed or compromised association, cultivating a hope of recaptured self-assurance and rebuilding inner balance with minimal costs and reduced efforts) (Bauman, 1993).

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In the style of fragmentations, the subject’s role is established by the number he impersonates through impregnation and assumption, and by any fusions reflected from collective and personal element insertions. Still under the sign of the double, postmodern imagery values the double codification (in a Hutcheonian way, both ironic and nostalgic) and places identity within the climate of dynamic tensions occurring between the identical and the different, the original and the copy–in fact, promoting a prime plural (the third, we note) beyond the singular (Jankélévitch, 2001).

4.5.1. Banshee and the Reminisces of a Second-Order Community It is F. Jameson’s (1991) opinion that an attenuation of the image affect in postmodern culture is reloaded through postmodern egos. The latter (lacking those expressive energies and character individualities which define modernism and the modern ego) deliver a flat, superficial effect of intensity and loss of vacuity, by being deprived of substance, signification and renouncing any ties with the past. The present subchapter will interrogate such a statement by a double reading of the Banshee series (2013)–the first, a reading of a visual order; the second, of a graphic image translation. Such a registry change is not accidental in the same measure in which we accept the idea illustrated in the next comment: “if cartoons represent a written (and drawn) creation with aesthetic–and not (just) utilitarian properties-then they are literature; if cartoons are part of popular and/or consumer literature, then it has the right to canonical representation in the same way as cultivated, lyric, epic or dramatic literature” (Manolescu, 2011). Connecting the image to a transcription posted in cartoons should take into consideration a supplemental recourse from a (re)territoriality of everyday mythologies and figurative narration in the sense of a light discourse articulating a different culture’s treatment of image/reality, perceived as a balm/treatment for images/realities. Or, in the ism key, any discourse is imposed through a prescriptive mode not lacking a “relativization of literary history’s great truths, eradication of critical infallibility monopoly, post-modernization of critical discourses and historical investigative methods, adopting a pluralistic theoretical position free from pre-judgments and inhibitions, exploding canonical festivism, canonical democratization, a liberalization of historical competition” (Manolescu, 2011).

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In the few introductory notes for the Banshee Origins comics [because “ of course there had to be a comics version”] Alan Ball (creator of True Blood and executive producer of the Cinemax original series, Banshee, October 2012) traces the overlapping levels of image building–a vivid atmosphere, archetypally complicated characters inside multiplicative stories, a mythic urban background, Kinaho Indian tribes, Amish religious imprinting, violent ingredients coming from Neo-Nazi skinhead or Ukrainian gangsters–in fact, all of the defining landmarks of an almost (a)typical American small town, with deliberately darkened, sexual(izing) accents and unfulfilled love stories. All these identity-descriptive coordinates are almost inseparable from a reserve of different political contaminations that are often attributed to political correctness syntagms, in the sense of postmodernism’s predisposition towards compromise, ambivalence or ideological contradictions. Recaptured from Scottish-Gaelic mythology, the American feminine in the Banshee name preserves its ectoplasm status and recharges it with a directorial duality easy to trace in the series–that of form preservation regardless of the moment/stage in which it occurs, a maternal messenger of an imminent, violent death. And in order for the double2 to function inside all of the series’ arteries, the Clay Burton character (the silently malevolent double of Kai Proctor) doubles as the mythological character, through the male-violent alternative of the one who causes/waits for death in order to either make its signs visible or to hide them. The Banshee story does not suffer from anticipatory blockages or discontinuities–each title sequence introduces a different story; an insert placed after the finals reassesses a possibly unspecified reaction inside the episode; and the story/restitution fragments are just (first order) puzzles correctly and sequentially dosed. Not random at all, the opening scenes of the series bank on the importance of photographic discourse (more sign manipulation than effective object production, by imagining the onlooker as an active code breaker and not as passive consumer), a moving mode–ribbon-type interface; almost-framed photographs allow for unrequited movements (the placing of a strap on a shoulder, a languorous eye blink, shadows taken from one frame and added to another, an alternation of mono and 2

In the sense of narratives offered by Filip Florian (2011: 131), “the figure 2 signifies sometimes the genesis, the beginning, the origin; even if, in the formal order of numbers, 1 is well- placed in its own position. In situations such as these, 1 appears as a consequence, being comprehensible only if 2 also exists”.

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polychromies, the insertion of different elements in a frame either by photo-on-photo montages or prop filming, an alternation of static and nonstatic–the moving carousel image, anticipatory associations between characters and certain subtle symbols/masks/analogies or obvious instruments/tools, the vertigo photograph–a meat-grinder and a musical spinning device, used and torn photographs, rotating knives or un-cuffed hands, recomposing weaponry, chess moves–see in this sense, the Banshee Extended Opening). All of these, photographically, warn us about D. Kellner’s (2001:280) diagnostic intentions of (pre)viewing inside American series, which he calls a schizoid dichotomy, useful in the process of rebuilding an identity for their main characters. Hence, contrary to any Jamesonian direction, a hyper-charged, expressive, non-static energetic was beginning… What the Banshee series offers is in fact a reloading of the subject’s intensity, a fluctuating reaffirmation of its identity and a permanent dive inside its own characters–none of them existing as one, but only as dual superposition. As a conclusion, a reaffirming double layout–reversible identity and reactive identity–accepting the possibility of a unifying intermediary nuance–imposture. Michel Morel (2001) establishes that the spectral double is thus spontaneously converted into a reference-simulacrum, a rival of the original, through immediate-effect doubling placed within the subjects’ subordinate resemblance/superposition proportion; in fact, a permissive confluence allowing one–first, to reach for the double and second, to aim for a superposition of places and similes, of newness and otherness. In a Morelian key, the reversible always implies mimetic, double referentiality, automatic completion, a reference to the other, autonomy, similar but rival forces, and homologues. The reacting double can thus be defined by antimimesis, double referentiality, self-configuration, dependency, bipolarity. Close to the Lacanian analytic lines (Lacan, 1981), Banshee represents the community of the Nebenmensch (the one under) and the semblant (the mirror-image of the self) categories already defined by the actions which guide them, by that which stays static and has no possibility of ennoblement. Balancing situated in both categories, the series characters undergo easy-to-place designs in a reversible container: Carrie Hopewell/Anastasia, Rabbit´s daughter, lover of an unnamed partner who later becomes Lucas Hood, mother, wife and bank-robber, ideal housewife and inmate; Sugar

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Bates-boxer and ex-con, owner of the Banshee bar and Lucas Hood´s ally; Kai Proctor–model member of the Amish community and permanently above the law (Rebecca Bowman will be attracted inside the same double identification game through affiliation); Alex Longshadow, unworthy leader of the Kinaho tribe, false homologue, permanently pitted against his father´s politics. In a reactive key, the Job character reassesses the male-female duality by decreeing a making and remaking of reality after his own standards, in his position as spokesman for the mechanics of the double. Lucas Hood and Rabbit denounce two typological categories that are impossible to imprison inside firm lines-Rabbit will forever be the threatening character, a more-or-less invisible danger in the series´ highly charged dynamic moments–the one who guides and maintains the double´s existence through absence. Under the sign of similar though rival forces, Lucas Hood permanently and boundlessly disputes his double, pushing him towards total selfidentification. The character borrows both reactive and reversible effects, the impossibility of definite anchoring within one of these categories placing him in the imposture schema [here in the sense of identity problem, a psychoanalytical equivalent of illegitimacy]. Following Belinda Cannone´s blueprint (2009), the imposter not only has a problem when comparing himself to the others, but is permanently implicated in a dispute with his self/other while at the same time disassociating himself from it, because he always takes into consideration his unworthy, guilty or never-ready part, unable to take possession of the place he already claimed (involuntarily unready and always forced by circumstances to reposition himself). In Cannone´s opinion, the imposter does not feel legitimized, keeping a sensation of accidental presence and anchoring it either into the continuous fear of “being found out by the world” or into trying to solve/deflect the problem of his recognition (see episode 1 season 2 and agent Racine´s investigation, or episodes 6, 7–which bring back the real sheriff, Lucas Hood´s, naturally legitimate son Jason). Imposture must be kept secret, in the sense of hiding what the character truly is or isn´t. Hence an implication towards perpetuating the illusion that both the occupied place and the means used are legitimate (see the scenes where Proctor´s arrest is prepared using police templates and not the instincts of a vengeful criminal). If the segmentation mode of Lucas Hood´s character seems already familiar, Deva (his daughter) and Rabbit seem to assault pre-established

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limits and to permanently re-launch the characters´ links to the past–in its sequential presentation in insert forms/formulas that the onlooker notices. Where most series-related comments see the love theme as a central(izing) pillar, the imposter´s profile is opposed to any such evidence: the imposter manages and is able to declare his sentiments, sees himself as permanently enveloped either in sexual energies with a selfdefining potential, or in situations which demand a forceful approach (the imposter never lacks courage!). In a philosophical-political key, the recourse to a second-order identity implosion re-calibrates the distance between autonomy and consciousness [taking into consideration the phrase found in every series synopsis– “Banshee, a small American city inhabited by Amish people, is disturbed by the arrival of a martial-arts expert (sic!) who replaces the recentlymurdered sheriff. He intends to make people respect the law, but has a personal way of doing this. What´s more, his plans have just his own interests at heart, not caring about the rest of the population”–as compact and excessively-superficial and commercial presentation] seen as a confirmation of permanent doubling within the decision mechanisms of an alter ego, in the sense of inventing new rules, unifying imaginary, symbolic and real aspects: both recognition, reciprocity and competition, a triphasic social substance already guiding sets of impersonal rules (Žižek, 2005). All the mentioned levels are reloaded by the Banshee Origins comics, which under the sign of a postmodern appetite for commercials, deliver an invitation in the manner of holiday banners: “Come to Banshee for Tradition, for Tranquillity, for Business, for Love, for Adventure, for Life”.

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4.6. From Language to 3D Vocables The present subchapter attaches itself to the technicisms of 3D (politics) as a way of approaching new ideas and using any support that Godard’s work (Les trois désastres, 3x3D, Adieu au language) may offer, with the avowed intention of reviewing image signifiers which (here) either show one/two entities/objects, or a third-order alternance of the same couple (the Other is in the One, the One is in the Other and both find themselves in the Third). Beyond any distinctly-superimposed image experiments, entrapping sequences which make image focusing impossible, will assault the viewer’s senses and reaffirm, in a Monetian sense, the canvas on which the whole projection focuses–to paint what cannot be seen. This observation establishes through inversion any endeavour that 3D considers its own, to film more than can be seen. Of interest to our present theme is the statement that 3D image registry abandons a certain language, while still maintaining the status of editing, about which Bazin (2002) said it only uses language as an allusive formulation. In fact, Bazin closely follows cinematic language trends, taking into account the fact that contradictory comments made by exegetes who still believe in reality but also by image fans, serve to implement an assertion which, in a Malrauxian acceptation, projects film over the limit of its own indistinct differences from graphic images, and thus liberates them from the tyranny of language: because by avoiding language, reality is able to express itself without an intermediary. When referencing Godard, Susan Sontag (1993) underlines the nation’s need to relate to the present time, thus frustrating its prevailing option of telling a story, devoid of both depth and relationships, by applying an intensity measuring scale to it. Hence, the opportunity to enumerate (just a few) properties of 3D which are easy to note within its ambient, tridimensional space status, or in the type of continued action based upon the idea of power conferred by fabricated appearances and an absence of identification/false recognition, which would decree that any identity is deliberately illusory, and generates an absorption of stimuli. In an anticipatory note and in the wake of those critics Bazin brought together at the Cahiers du cinéma laboratories, Godard signals the advantages of using editing, while also keeping alive the Brechtian style of obtruding any channels the spectator might use to get inside the narrative,

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which he marks as: reply; natural, unmediated reaction/intervention (Gorzo, 2012: 98). Thus Susan Sontag analyses Godard’s completely non-rigorous model, filled with asides, with indirect correlations, un-admitted deviations and echoing in philosophizing monologues or debates–which, from Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle onwards continue to insist upon a tendency to distance oneself from language by promoting a (new) vocable (objectives which are also easy to find in the frame-project of 3D images). In the same Brechtian fashion, we can consider the 3D vocable to be an articulation of as-if-they-were-true answers, a denial of organic ties to the whole exercising a major role upon disturbing elements, by blocking identification and presenting personal opinions through the use of images.

4.6.1. Europe’s Third Language Close to the monstrous category, the Tower of Babel symbol–seen as an unfinished triangle which encompasses the Earth, the sea and the skies– demands attention and imposes the spontaneously natural gesture of turning one’s head, a reflex assumed from Nimrodian perspectives as both excessive presence and invisibility due to the too-disproportionate. If, from a Zumthorian (1998) perspective, the perfect language ensures its own perpetuation by approximate translations in an attempt to reinvigorate itself and oppose any degradation or disintegration processes, in Vico’s acceptation (1972), the first language, that of the gods (hieroglyphic), heroes (symbolic) and humans (epistolary), acknowledges a tri–phased origin. Under pressure from international languages and utopian bipolar endeavours to transform an already existing language into an international one, or to revert to a neutral one, the present encourages the creation of a unified European language. In this sense, an artificial construct is offered, analogous to natural languages and perceived as neutral, which would follow natural language patterns but which would have a lexicon comprising all the terms already existing in natural languages (Eco, 2002). Mixed–system laboratories cannot avoid hard political divisions: Volapük–with English as a reference language, with linguistic approaches and lexical notion analyses made using a philosophical method; Tutonish– an international language only understood by German (and partially English) speakers; or Esperanto–a prefacing variation and a complete manual (for the Russians).

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Conceived and organized as a unitary system for samideans (people who share the same ideals) the auxiliary languages project maintains its independence from any particularizing ideological orientations, banking upon flexible means of expression and simple structures; in fact, the possibility arises of disengaging oneself from any economic principles of a priori languages, and offering a chance for optimization imperatives. According to Eco (2002: 262), if a priori languages were too philosophical, a posteriori languages (considering them as a totally Westernized content system) are not philosophical enough. From the grounds of critical valuations of such artificializing constructs, the convention which makes us use the same language would alter, through use and abuse, the very climate of a unified European space, building and/or deconstructing different structures, distinct idioms, progressive distancing, and reconfirming a Babel which re-builds itself. Under the sign of political power offered by auxiliary international languages, Eco notes the non-existence of historical precedents which would allow supranational organisms to decide the imposition of a unification program/project for frequently-used European languages: far from denouncing a minority-linguistic fragmentation, this would only reload the parable of “the cut tongues”. Offering a possible answer to any interrogation about the preponderantly circulating language of the EU, recent European declarations confirm that “Europeans overwhelmingly opt for the use of English”, in the terms of a construct placed by Joachim Gluck under the sign of primacy for a Europe communicating in English, thus talking and harmonizing its concepts through a recourse to this one linguistic instrument. Thus one can distinguish the emergent structure of a Euro–Globish language, a sort of English-sounding dialect combined with continental cadences and syntax, which would become the language/tongue of EU institutions (which still preserves a few French linguistic reminiscences: to assist=to be present; to control=to verify; Spitzenkandidaten= [German neologism] democratic deficit, public opinion enthusiasm against nonvoters (“The Economist”, May 24th, 2014). In the same registry, for Jean-Paul Nerrière (2006), beyond any linguistic hiatuses an “authentic, correct form of Anglorican” exists, its lexical baggage limited to “1500 already-known words” with elementary syntax complete with practical rules of form which has all the properties of a natural, general and unified language and represents a dominant form of “English light” or “Globish” language, an expression of the planetary lifestyle philosophy.

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If one harmonizes these precepts with the model Umberto Eco considered as an exercise rigorously glued onto virtual writing techniques, which only functions when one uses a series of instructions about how to write a god text, we can accept virtual writing’s status as a way of synchronizing/sympathizing between the communicator and the receptor, and “promoting” access to easier communication, such as zapping; with a final result in finding sequential sense and freeing oneself from any directaccess transmission (Manolache, 2013). Warning us about the hegemony of English (see in this sense Czech interventions about the uses of dubbing in TV programs) Ovidiu Pecican launches in “România Liberă” (August 15th, 2013) a manifesto advocating concerted reactions and firm attitudes/actions against the supremacy of English, seen as a too-soliciting solution (post-doctoral, as a form without fundament, undiscerningly attached to any intellectualizing valuations) for the problem of a unified European language. Repercussions had already been anticipated and demolished by Eco (2002: 272), following in Walter Benjamin’s footsteps, when he concluded that the only perfect language is translation. Not randomly, 2011 was decreed to be the year of translation and of translators, reconfirming the Chomskian assertion that Earthlings speak the same language despite endeavours promoting various nondecipherable lexicons, multipliable and prefiguring in reality a possible linguistic reconstruction of the Tower of Babel. The idea of a parameter-language (and implicitly the idea that Europe has a common language) is formulated in respect of the structure of a tertium comparationis (which facilitates the transition between language A and language B–both with equivalents in the meta-linguistic expression of C). The tertium recomposes the perfect language, both natural and flexible, allowing the whole of Europe to communicate and to culturally understand itself3. After appraising the Babel concept, Eco (2002) confirms the socially positive reality of multiplication and not the mixing of tongues, maintaining that intelligible language guides the common body and strengthens unity–by inhabiting the same corner of the world, stimulating sedentary by maintaining communities “in place”, as opposed to 3

One cannot ignore in this spiral–even if episodic- the concerted action of (re)affirming multiculturalism and multilingualism seen as geopolitical realities. The symbolic elements which the “Maalouf Commission” placed inside the circuit are thus actualized: one of the Commission's artisans/inspiring factors/counsellors is the political man/politologist as well as the cultural man/ writer or artist, generally.

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situational changes demanded by deciphering the Babel myth (Eco, 2002: 269). In Derrida’s opinion (2009) people congregate in the centre in order to separate or to merge, only to retreat later towards the edges, in the sense of linguistic division, and the Tower of Babel offers an idea expressing the impossibility of total saturation/codification. Derrida (2009) states that one cannot talk about “the end of the book” or “the beginning of the writing/writs” and notes that any notion subservient to “closure” can go on forever, the ending and the beginning being pure metaphysical illusions belonging to the universe of “becoming”. If we accept the equality logocentrism=phonocentrism, then we also have to admit that text represents a repressed form of book, force is countered by form, play is dominated by structure, and writing by voice. The tri-phased Vicoian structure (1972) of the language of gods (hieroglyphic), heroes (symbolic) and men (epistolary) is reinterpreted by Derrida (2009) by drawing attention to and reinserting in the circuitry the hieroglyph, the pictogram and/or the mythogram, which result in a specific Western pattern, by an endeavour of re-fertilizing myths and transcending the “metaphor of writing, which haunts any European discourse”. Europe is open to the problems of language and translation, as a supplement, and confers upon translation its due importance without avoiding or treating its virtual constructs lightly. Practically, Google can be accepted as an innovative achievement in the domain of applied and technical translations, offering a chance of emancipation to the philosophical conception of artificial languages, and flaunting perfect translation recipes; thus, it becomes a mode of reloading Babel itself in a conciliatory way, able to include any pre-Babel signs/signals. In the process of searching or reinventing the perfect language, and under the sign of compatibilities and cultural pacts with “the third discourse” which would appease any double exclusions symbolically found in “the West’s geocultural Bovarysm” an/or “the isolation of autochthonism” (Marino, 2001), such a Hecate-ism would only reveal the excluded third of the East–West dialogical registry, an idiomatic compromise between reality and fiction, between history and Utopia, an intellectualized double-bind implying a double impact of local socialization and universal integration. The dialogue model represents an enduring dual situation by which pan-European dialogue is mediated, and legitimizing the balance between

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centre and margin, as an affirming formulation of “pre–European redirection” through the use of differentiating identification markings (Ifrim, 2013). Without ignoring the landmarks of third–order discourse, Marcin Król comments in Dziennik Gazeta Prawna (July 26th, 2013) on the Multikulti tendency, given its recent transformation (reloaded from the 70s) in a fashion bank(ing) on obsession. Multiculturalism constitutes a convincing answer to monoculturalism, affirming a soft Eurocentrism that both values and accepts closet/imported languages, by making use of the functional dynamics of the immigration problem. If multiculturalism cannot avoid the label of a reasonable essay, post– multiculturalism offers a solution for eliminating any discomfort maintained by a Europe which seems incapable of identifying ways of achieving European solidarity and unity, in the form of slogans for peaceful living on the continent, expressed in the invitation to feel good between us and the others. In harmony with Raphael Minder’s opinion (New York Times, July 26th, 2013) we consider that Europe is building a crisis Babel–by reloading the proviso formula of more intense criticism of eroding constructs (using stone instead of fire-burned bricks and lime instead of tar)–as a defining brand of the new generation of Noah’s sons [Spain–ni- nis (neitherneither), Portugal–geração à rasca (the adrift generation), Greece– neoptohi (the new poor); with all due extensions of the registry towards the indignados (the indignant), yayoflautas (the old flutes) or marea blanca (the white tide). In the same analytical style, Denis Muzet (2013) notes the emergence of a new unifying language of the crisis, observing that any new terms already in use are but a reflection of economic problems and of informational flows. Third-order perspectives of perte du triple-a type cannot be subtracted from the list of particulars of our muddied languages, with an operation(al) result used on the scale of valuable rating agencies, with the clear intention of stopping the loss of jobs and diminishing the shock of market competition. Thus, a new projection in the structure of the final language can be foreseen; non–hieroglyphic, non–symbolic and not at all epistolary.

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 1981. Gesammelte Schriften. vol. III, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Aristarco, Guido. 1979. Solitudinea ontologică la Dreyer úi Bergman [Ontological Solitude at Dreyer and Bergman]. Secolul 20 7-8. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The dialogic imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press Slavic. Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. Strategii fatale [Fatal Strategies]. Trans. Felicia Sicoie. Jassy: Polirom. Bauman, Zygmunt.1993. Postmodern Ethics. Cambridge: MA Basil Blackwell. Bazin, André. 2002. Qu'est-ce que la cinéma? Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. Cannone, Belinda. 2009. Sentimentul de impostură [The Imposture Feeling]. Trans. Adina DiniĠoiu. Bucharest: Art Publishing House. Derrida, Jacques. 2009. Despre gramatologie [De la Grammatologie]. Trans. Bogdan Ghiu. Cluj: Tact. Eco, Umberto. 2002. În căutarea limbii perfecte [La ricerca della lingua perfetta]. Trans. Drago‫ ܈‬Cojocaru. Jassy: Polirom. Eco, Umberto. 2011. Pliculeаul Minervei [La bustina di Minerva]. Trans. ‫܇‬tefania Mincu. Bucharest: Humanitas. Florenski, Pavel. 1997. Perspectiva inversă Юi alte scrieri [Reverse Perspective].Trans. Tatiana Nicolescu, Alexandra Nicolescu, AnaMaria Brezuleanu. Bucharest: Humanitas. Florian, Filip. 2011. Degete mici [Small Fingers]. 4th edition. Jassy: Polirom. Gleizal, Jean-Jacques. 1999. Arta Юi politicul. Eseu despre mediaаie [Art and Politics. Essay on Mediation]. Trans. Sanda Oprescu. Bucharest: Meridiane. Goddman, Erving. 1991. Les cadres de l'expérience. Paris: Editions Minuit. Gorzo. Andrei. 2012. Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel [Things that cannot be said different]. Bucharest: Humanitas. Haine‫܈‬, Rosemarie. 2002. Televiziunea Юi reconfigurarea politicului [The Television and Reconfiguration of the Politics]. Jassy: Polirom. Harvey, David.1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change Oxford: Blackwell. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London & New York: Routledge.

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Ifrim, Nicoleta. 2013. Identitate culturală Юi integrare europeană. Perspective critice asupra discursului identitar românesc în perioada postdecembristă [Cultural Identity and European Integration. Critical Approaches on the Romanian Identity-Focused discourse of PostDecember Period]. Bucharest: Editura Muzeului Na‫܊‬ional al Literaturii Române. Innerarity, Daniel. 2004. La sociedad invisibile. Madrid: Espasa. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2001. Pur úi impur [The Pure and the Impure]. Trans. Elena Steiciuc. Bucharest: Nemira. Kellner, Douglas. 2001. Cultura media [Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle]. Trans. Teodora Ghiviriga, Liliana Scărlătescu. Jassy: Institutul European. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Ecrits. A Selection. New York: Norton. Laplanche, Jean. 2000. The other within: Rethinking psychoanalysis. Radical Philosophy 102. Lyotard, Jean Fr. 2000. Misère de la philosophie. Paris: Galilée. Manolache, Viorella. 2013. Signs and Designs of the Virtual(izing) E@ST. Trans. Ian Browne. Saarbrücken: LAP, Lambert Academic Publishing. Manolescu, Ion. 2003. Videologia: 0 teorie tehno-culturală a imaginii globale [Videology: A Techno-Cultural Theory of the Global Image]. Jassy: Polirom. 2003. Manolescu, Ion. 2011. Benzile desenate úi canonul postmodern [Comic Books and the Postmodern Canon]. Bucharest: Cartea Românească. Marino, Adrian, Antohi, Sorin. 2001. Al treilea discurs. Cultură, ideologie Юi politică în România [The Third Discourse. Culture, Ideology and Politics in Romania], Jassy: Polirom. Maule, Rosanna, Beaulieu, Julie. (2009). In the Dark Room. Marguerite Duras and Cinema. Series: New Studies in European Cinema, volume 7. Bern: Peter Lang. Mihali, Ciprian, Polgár, Al., Sîrbu, Adrian T. 2005. O conversa‫܊‬ie cu Boris Groys despre condi‫܊‬ia postcomunistă [A conversation with Boris Groys on Postcommunist Condition]. Idea Artă+Societate 21. Morel, Michel. 2001. Figures du double dans les littératures européennes. Gérard Conio (coord.). Laussane: L'age d'homme. Muzet, Denis. 2013. Les Mots de la crise. Paris: Editions Eyrolles. Nerrière, Jean-Paul. 2006. Don't speak English, parlez globish. Paris: Groupe Eyrolles. Nicolescu, Basarab. 2009. Ce este Realitatea? ReflecĠii în jurul operei lui Stéphane Lupasco [What is Reality? Reflections on the Work of Stéphane Lupasco]. Jassy: Junimea.

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Pickover, Clifford A. 2013. Banda lui Möbius [The Möbius Strip]. Trans. Diana Constantinescu Altamer. Bucharest: Humanitas. Sontag, Susan. 1993. A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Vintage BooksRandom House. ùerban, Alex. Leo. 2007. Un eseu despre Ingmar Bergman. Persona [An Essay on Ingmar Bergman. Persona]. LiterNet.ro. 20.08.2007. Vico, Giambattista. 1972. ùtiinĠa nouă [The New Science]. Trans. Nina Façon. Bucharest: Univers, 1972. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. Zăbovind în negativ. Kant, Hegel Юi critica ideologiei [Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology]. Trans. Irina-Marta Costea. Bucharest: ALL. Zumthor, Paul. 1998. Babel sau nedesăvârúirea [Babel ou l'inachèvement]. Trans. Maria Carpov. Jassy: Polirom.

CHAPTER FIVE PARALLAXES PERSPECTIVES: FROM THE THREE TO THE MULTIPLE

We consciously share Slavoj Žižek’s opinion (2006) about the possibility of maintaining the same type of illusion when we use the same type of language for mutually untranslatable phenomena, which can only be understood by resorting to a parallaxes vision (seen as a possible/constant perspective shift between two points which do not allow any possibility of synthesis/mediation). We therefore start our analysis by making use of the above theory, and the present chapter banks upon the parallaxes method, actualized in aspects such as: different positioning– through approaching or distancing–a certain technicizing assembly (conceived using a model already suggested by parallaxes-theoretical displacements as well as cohabiting along opposite sides of a Möbius strip); operated and reclaimed changes within the theoretical space of political philosophy (democracy as object); the convergence of double vision from the top of the triangle–the parallax of biopolitics. When talking about parallaxes deviation, Žižek (2006) means the confrontation between two opposed visions, between which it is impossible to find a common space with neutral value. This opinion is built upon a Kantian acceptance of parallax, a term considered the semantic equivalent of a name defining and denominating an antithetical, fundamentally contradictory, irredeemable relationship– maintained through contemporary philosophical theoretic oscillations between mechanical materialism and idealistic obscurantism. The aforementioned observations will only serve to intensify the recessively-secondary relationship between the One and the status of philosophy as the parallaxes domain, and decrypt the latter’s option towards explaining and preserving (with pre-Socratic inflections) any infiltration into the crevices of this socially-substantial community, thus securing a relational position which obstructs, in its turn, any identification with socially positive identities.

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Any attempts to clarify the term [parallax] cannot avoid (here) the wide range of domains in which it is being used (in philosophy it marks the ontological difference between subject and object; in science, it establishes the distinctive signs of the mathematical Real and the autologous Real, and in the sphere of politics it signals social antagonisms between the individual and the group). Simultaneously, a parallax network is projected while proving that any subject is characterized by/through essential passivity, and that movement is (almost paradoxically) attained by the object becoming active. Such a reversal of roles is seen by F. Jameson (2006) as a symptomatic displacement, and is perceived as a form of deepening postmodern relativism, facilitating its interference with narratively- Lyotardian landmarks already seen as a method of repositioning the alreadyweakened “postmodern” concepts of causality (the historical agent, the event, philosophies of history). Such discourses are indebted to narrative mechanisms which state that X narrates the quantum theory story or the story of modern dictatorships, while Y tells a different story. This narrative (pre)text reclaims, in Jameson’s view (2006), the fundamentally quantifiable difference between correlating the parallax concept with the Heisenbergian principle stating that any object will preserve its coded status, impossible to decipher, because of interfering with its own observational system, as well as inserting its own point of view (an objective which can only be achieved by systematically coexisting with the incriminated reality). By approximating the limits of investigation, Heisenberg can be considered to be “postmodern”, by the very action of adhering to the ideas of the absolute indeterminacy of the real/object, expressing a tendency to be re-attracted inside the Kantian noumenon. The folds of parallaxes thinking include the possibility for any object to be determined–exclusively indirectly–by basic triangulations included in incommensurable observations. It is obvious that the object will acknowledge its non-presentability, thus distancing itself from the Lacanian psyche while emphasizing a problematic personal identity characterized by radical dis-aptability/inadaptability. The major binary oppositions–subject vs. object, materialism vs. idealism, economy vs. politics–generate opportunities for deepening the parallaxes dephasing of a language already permeated by tensions and incommensurate concepts essential to productive thought (itself marked by disparity), while respecting the essential non-complacent condition which positions it inside the sphere of Aristotelian agnostic moderation, where “the truth is always in the middle”; thus, the immediately noticeable effect

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is that of perpetuating tensions in order to appease or reconcile differences. One cannot forget, in a clarifying acceptation, the definition of the term parallax–which explains the apparent displacement of an object (its change of position) caused by variations in the viewing angle and the opening of a new interpretation; any difference perceived is not just “subjective” but is also guaranteed by the presence of an object in/from the “outside”, analysed from different points of view. Hegel remarks upon the role of a movement able to trigger epistemological changes while certifying that a subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” change within the object itself. Any mod(ality) of short-circuiting those energies which fertilize–from two different observation points–the domain of democracy, seen as both an object and a bio-political parallax, re-launches (as a triangulation scheme) the active object (seen here as a concept insisting upon transmuting the Thing in a suitable form, and stating that the object-more-than-object represents a reflexively-subjective spiral). If the Thing–on a Kantian line–can still accept the solution of its own substantiation, the Object feeds upon leftovers already emptied of any perceived content; or, in a Lacanian acceptation, orients itself towards a space of desire, in order to comply with structuring processes through the intervention of a signifier–while the Object replaces the Thing and compensates for its dissolution by becoming a synthetically and spontaneously autonomous exponent of the subject. Thus, the reactivation of the void transforms the Thing into an Object, taking full advantage of the support of spontaneous action (2011). In line with the West’s enthusiastic fascination for the East’s reinvention of democracy, in the sense of rediscovering the lost origin of dual insights which (self)impress (in a reciprocal situation), the psychoanalytical Thing is converted into an Object in the same way in which democracy finds itself assaulted and invaded by signs and signals, both quantifiable and problem-producing. The Zižekian statement approximates any parallaxes or superpositions of minimal ontologies for curved spaces, folded upon themselves and easily noticeable inside a Möbius band; hence, the needed underlining of phase studies included not within a simple frame, but inside spaces with specific, non-symmetrical twists and private autonomy. In Žižek's (2006: 57) vision, the parallax is–within the object’s selfreproduction–identical to an aspect of democracy placing economic relationships and the inherent logic of the political in a secondary plane: an association depending upon the logic of a micro-physics described by

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Foucaultian power concepts or the theory of Lacanian disclosures inside the mechanisms of power (re)production. From within crossings which the practice of democracy allows–as an object–one cannot avoid those half-twists identifiable within defining concepts such as unachieved–unachievable–democracy of multiplicity, constituting the founding matter of homogeneous compositions: the One/Identity/Unity (the people)–empirical multiplicity (mechanisms of population representation)–measuring conditions (well-delineated). Freeing ourselves from the much-used contemporary syntagm of “deficient democracy” (referencing the exclusion of democracy from the sphere of popular representational mechanisms, because they are conditioned by its connection to the status of the Thing and not that of the Object), any reform of democracy (via Robert Keohane, Joseph Stiglitz, David Held, Richard Falk or Ulrich Beck) would necessarily demand a greater transparency, increased responsibility and an efficiently stable economic administration. One plausible way of solving contemporary blunders would involve removing the actual debates’ centre of interest towards the multitude, an act of contractual import operating within the grounds of transcendental philosophy, by actualizing the idea that the multitude defies any representation, defining itself as multiplicity. Included within the sphere of power, the multitude re-examines ontological revolutions, bio-political revolutions and production revolutions, noting (via Spinoza or Marx) that any democracy of the multitude is based on three elements of counter-power (resistance, insurrection and constitutional power). It is also a well–known fact that a multitude authorizes a continuous invention of new life forms, new languages, new intellectual and ethical forces–in fact, it promotes a biopolitics of marginalized bodies (Hardt, Negri, 2004). Critically re-examining its own liberal vision and reticently interpreting any effervescent manifestations towards trusted democratic mechanisms, the Ljubljana philosopher expresses his distancing from any notion of democracy, while still involved in evicting any reminiscences or traces of a “remnant bourgeois ideology”. His prompt interventions regarding actual aspects of contemporary world existence plead for an EU– type model, which he imbues with the power of regulating the development of global contemporary capitalism. Sometimes, the EU plays with European traditions, protecting them in a conservative way and banking upon inducing, maintaining and stimulating amnesia, but also upon intensely perpetuated marginalization

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which does not take into account a resurrected radical universal inheritance achievable through peaceful and tolerant coexistence. This is the way in which the Zižekian comment about forced, premature and precipitated democratization which creates political despotism: a democratization marked by differences, the sentiment of emulation (registering as a result of catching-up) and intensified (reflecting from the direction of the year 2008) pessimistic attitudes (not trusting oneself=not trusting democracy). This unequivocal warning considers capitalism to be responsible for the unprecedented permissive attitude Zižek adopts (2006: 295). Thus, the essence of a permissive era is amended by conservative cultural critics who compare it to an excess that is about to transform into another one and demand a firm limit, traced by a symbolic authority able to guarantee not only stability but also detachment from what, in a Freudian key, can only be described as plus– value and plus–power; the explicit absence of limitations confronts here the Limit itself, as an inherent obstacle to achieving satisfaction. In the search (less for satisfaction and more for) human perfection, as a way of transcending limits, Axel Honneth (2003) offers a set of three principles of justice, able to operate within interpretations or evaluate actual social claims. Concisely stated as relational identities and alterities (the self and the necessity of achieving peer recognition), the aforementioned principles thus show the existence of a practical reality, where peer recognition is particularized through love (Liebe), by affirming and exercising rights (Recht) and through solidarity (Solidarität). According to Honneth (1986) intersubjectivity is inextricably linked to recognition and manifests itself through the extended form of social conflicts. Beyond simple vested interest clauses, these collisions are governed by the rigorous provisions of a moral code/moral grammar, and are politically impregnated by norms and statements regarding both legitimacy and recognition. Any comment upon the Fraser–Honneth polemic allows us to review the equidistant relationship between Fraser’s “accusation” (regarding Honneth’s failure to offer functional valuation criteria for social conflicts/demands) and Honneth’s “excuse” about the inconsistency of his advocated principles (which represent nothing more but than the first phase of a norm theory still being built). This dispute, trying to clarify concepts such as recognition and redistribution, is exclusively based upon the rule of versus: “perspectival dualism”, the principle of participative parity, versus “normative

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monism”, a normative essence already expressed as the principle of affection, equality before the law and the principle of social esteem. Axel Honneth’s socially-political theory (1986) doubles the norm content of self-confidence (Selbstvertrauen) and self-respect (Selbstschatzung) with the effective practice of relating to one’s self, seen here as a space of patterns and/or particularities of individual and collective identities. Defying the multiplicity concept, Honneth (2003) underlines the attributes of an intact and non-distort(ed) social identity (seen from the perspective of equalizing priorities for any demands included within the process of moral valuation based upon principles of social validity) which are already institutionalized inside the frame of democratic capitalist societies as their infrastructure/moral foundation. Invested with a “validity/normatively significant surfeit” any exigencies these principles might formulate can be perceived as an indication of legitimacy, in the idea that social conflicts are (con-) (in)ducive of progress by satisfying the triple phase with a role in improving relations of mutual recognition inside societies–a clear indication of increased chances of self-affirmation for an intact identity, and a way of ensuring the multiplication of their citizens.

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5.1. Oedipus; Ante-Oedipus; Post-Oedipus As one who is exclusively concerned with the components of today’s world, Žižek (2006) maintains that subjectivity operates by a change of emphasis from desire towards demand, seen as opposing and opposed formulations which plead for a model of cultural criticism recommending a return to desire or a reinventing of desire in the context of yet another prohibition. The above-mentioned opinion is easily adjustable to the justice-tainted proviso–Oedipus returns and all is forgiven–which expresses the idea that demand, when it becomes discretionary by being deprived of compulsion, succeeds in transmitting the very profile of desire. If demand is not addressed to the Other anymore, in the assumed situation proving his nonexistence (the Other is dead!) the re–Oedipization idea can be invoked as a tri-phased way of reacting to any ideologizing changes: if the fundamental structure of the subconscious remains intact (in a Freudian manner) then the signs of a new/another paradigm can only be superficial temptations; the passage to a post-Oedipal society involves losing ethical-symbolical coordinates and affirming a new type of paternal law sliding between global chaos and violence; the new legitimacy resorts to the neurosciences, redefining any therapy custom-designed to treat “new anxieties”/”pathological narcissism”. If none of the above possibilities offers a reasonable solution (which can be accepted as a “correct way” of solving problems) then mediated observation establishes a politically ideological constellation involved in control mechanisms and the applying of bio-political regulations; thus a profile of narcissistic persons/personalities can be traced, with an accent upon the ego’s self-fulfilment and exponential growth of self-control (from jogging to safe sex and healthy foods): an endeavour which recommends the individual as being nothing more than an object for biopolitics. Hence the assaulting projection of Janus’s face can be safely inferred–a double maintaining the universal discourse as a hegemonic way of receiving any signals of modernity. Seen as social confluences, the contradictions/tensions inherent in such a discourse are externalized in the dominant biopolitical logic [bureaucratic totalitarianism, bio-politics as an instrument of the administered world] and inside the capitalist matrix of production and excess (plus-value) by promoting self-reproduction through an analogy with the concept of selfrevolution. The parallaxes approach accents the two faces of the same coin, inoculating detachment from a capitalism already reduced to its apparent

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attitude towards technological dominance, and transmitting signals from the direction of programs synchronizing with economic excess (seen as the force of the capitalist machine) and political signals (effective exercise of power). If the political aspect represents the logic of dominance upon any regulatory control mechanism, the economic one constitutes the logic of de-territoriality seen as a result of superposition: (sur)plus–value– (sur)plus power. It is not surprising that the production of production technically correlates the act with the results (Deleuze, Guattari, 2008) and offers the triad distance–power–security while imbuing it with Oedipal valences; different spaces become simultaneous (with tides, stops, nondetermination), power leaves visible traces, and security anti-productively transforms into schizoid-type relationships. The symbology of the three allows for a relation to be generated between the terms: disassociation (specific symptoms, primary deficiency), autism (delirium, space–time detachment and a predominance of inner life), and space–time (a profile of delirious individuals imprisoned within specific worlds). If everything can be reduced to capital and if disjunctions are emblematic for wishful genealogy, then any Guattarian–Deleuzian interpretations can only clarify the way in which genealogy incorporates oedipal elements, or the concept stating that perhaps Oedipus is just the consequence of social reproduction which domesticates matter but eludes any genealogical forms. Oedipus becomes, in a tri-phased approach, a symbol of the nuclear complex which is general (sex, pulsing, affections, and relationships), serial (negative complexes) and group-related (referring multiple interactions, and registering any psychosis-affected generation). Thus, two useful observations can be formulated: the first postulates the existence of a structural Oedipus (3+1), non-super-imposable on any triangle but still a part of any possible triangulation which classifies desires, objects and laws in a particularizing way; the second involves the body without organs–a result of anti-production, rejecting any attempted triangulation. Deleuze and Guattari (2008) technically infer three machines/systems/ social structures belonging to the savages, the barbarians and civilized people: the basic territorial machine, the transcendent imperial machine and the modern machine decoding the flow of capital-money and with repercussions in a secondary movement of de-territorialisation and reterritorialisation. This type of analysis notes that any oedipal triangle

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places intimately-private territoriality within the sphere of capitalist social re-territorialisation. Any resistance towards the political (de)nominations consists of a supernumerary element which can’t be included in a list of political terms anymore, but can only be accepted as a resistance form/formula against the logic of excess economic reproduction. Thus, on philosophical-political grounds, the Left’s dream1 extracts its power and reinvigorates itself through a strategy of maintaining the economy in a delayed relation of subservience towards the political (although, for instance, Hardt and Negri plead for ideas which would promote the economic fight against the fortress-state, seen here as a resistance pillar). In the light of these observations, the dual motivates any liberal option advocating the instalment of peaceful coexistence and mutual respect (via Habermas or Rorty, with nodal points within dialogue, communication and acknowledging the Other) or the imminent emergency of radical changes–this time classified as reaction-less situations (Deleuze), nonmeeting (Levinas), reconciliation (Lyotard) or promises which cannot be kept anymore (Derrida). All these serve to certify, in a Zižekian note (2006: 321) the general collapse of Utopias. The resistance concept re-launches the super-evaluating parallax of power through the medium of subversive ideologies, tracing the pattern of politico-ideological parallaxes–with an accent upon public law and any manifestation of the superegos seen here as common depositories fuelling the orgasmic mechanisms. All the aforementioned ideas serve to confirm the Lyotardian approach (2001) stating that Europe can be compared to a two-bodied monster: one, pragmatic, of general exchanges and registered intensities; the other, made of gold, barbaric, mercantile, assuming the status of a negotiating body or victim –body (210). From the perspectives of libidinal economy–that theatricality which accepts a double limit–the present analysis proves we are not dealing here with two types of coin or two functions, but nevertheless acknowledges the existence of two coins (for payment and for balance) and three functions: homeostasis, dynamic equilibrium and imbalance. Žižek (2006) argues about the parallax of power and resistance by deleting the limit, seen as a failure which only approves biopolitic's mechanisms of control, within the concept that politics become much 1

In this sense we need to mention the fact that, after exhausting the ideals of emancipatory politics, the Left divided its discourse, suddenly concerned by reformist precautions and dissipation of post-revolutionary unknown quantifiers.

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more direct and efficient without excluding the existence of excesses and justifying any emancipation type politics. Previous statements illustrate the re-launching of dialectical materialism, against its historical counterpart, through a silent acceptation of passivity (2006: 24). Thus the ontological difference will constitute an essential parallax which conditions our access to reality itself, against any Kantian directions (Žižek, 2006:119-120). From a functional point of view such an endeavour eliminates binary, banking upon re-duplications as minimal differences between the signifier and its inscriptional places. Excessive life offers the presence of a bodiless organ, a partial element invading and mortifying the biological body. More to the point, the biomedical score informs us that, in the category of vestigial organs (organs which have lost their original functions but still exist in the body) the semilunar fold–placed in the eye's internal corner– sustains the rest of the nictitating membrane (“the third eyelid”) a membrane which could previously cover the eyeball, with a protection role. Signalling the existence of three opportunities–opening, rushing or crossing–Lyotard (2010) notes, by analogy with the digital epidermis, that the third, while spoken to, does not see anything. Another proof of the fact that third-order vision, far from enlarging perspectives, assumes the role of a curtain…is marking the end of the ... second act. .

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5.2. A Particular Case: Fighting the Three-Headed Dragon Within the Ecoian limitations of the integrated term (defined as an attempt to identify and eliminate societas from the Other's territory) and the apocalyptic concept (a reaction against the rejection and/or dismantling of traditional values/norms) identity can be considered a mobile notion with sense-transporting valences, defining in a Deleuzian way the place as an intersection of lines creating the possibility of individualizing a point. Transferred from within the perimeter of a delimited place into the open space of global intersections, identity consolidates those atypical construction levels recognized within symbolic identification, with an anticipatory-precipitating character subsuming it both to momentum analysis seen as a precautionary method, and to investing any place with the status of political squatting, a contested way of reaffirming a social conscience already flaunted through denunciation and protests against a certain arbitrarily constituted reality. Both of these manifestations can be proven and illustrated by the protest organized at ECHR (June 2014)–a protest which becomes an actual form of including the place within a space-contesting relationship, in the direction of a toponimy translated by letters used as symbols while explaining a series of identities, chronologies and precise localities. Žižek (2001) saw the option of assuming a symbolic mandate that impacts upon the identification of X, as a way of precipitating. We therefore offer such a message as analytic material, transcribing it within the evidence and actuality it represents and attributing to it a sense of “borrowed” referential signals with “abnormal discourse profiles”. The message is considered to be, in a Foucaultian acceptation, an occurrence/product offered as a rule of non-corporeal contact, tattooing the political message in an incommensurable form. In Žižek's (2001) opinion, X represents the paternal metaphor of a spatial opening towards potential ulterior signifiers, in harmony with the Lacanian idea of a signifier without a signified. Graphically portrayed–from X to Z–symbolic signs prove the precipitated systematization of a place inside the solution-offering possibility of space, thus indicating the protester's route: Ipotesti-Suceava Prefecture–the placing of a tent in the Central Park of the Catholic Church in Bucharest–or the posting of the message outside the Strasbourg ECHR headquarters.

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The connotations of X (becoming a chromosomal sign of the place) can thus be explained by the protester's decision to respect his mother's wish of substituting her name for the name of his father in the land ownership papers (the object of this protest is the overturning of a legal judgement through which the deceased father became the owner of land inherited by, and belonging to, the protester's mother–both parents having died in 1962). Any reference to this protest–and not another–is justified through signalling the proceedings through which the place is transformed in a pattern of political squatting, accepting and selecting, from within possible senses, that sense which denominates the self-help movement, the action of the last refuge, that disengaging and redistribution of the protester's resources in such a way as to allow the protest’s termination to coincide with the obtain(ment) of personal justice. In fact, this proceeding exemplifies the possibility of attaining one's own powers, through search/identification and the building of a place within a space of intentionally-programmatic isolation. H. Pruijt (2013) deliberately appraises this occurrence as a direct reaction to politics, an eloquent expression of the social falsification of the collective self-fulfilment project, through returning to transformations already imposed by conscious desires, as an unavoidable part of a revolutionary and localizing program. Timidly impregnated (notched) by the fingerprints of little fingers, the protest's text respects a narrative technique based upon remembrance, the expounding of remembered impressions and events (“that which the memory brought him”); the protester being thus able to create a bizarre, almost-evangelical text–which seems to be written in a large cave with enough storage space. In fact, the whole text seems to be a transcription of divine will and project, allowing a risky mission to be carried through to its logical conclusion in a responsible and difficult way, by an operation of “remembrance, creation, and preparation of written support and of writing itself”. The whole endeavour was deployed inside an enormous period of time–“filled a huge duration of time”–time in which the protest author was overwhelmed by the moment's importance and marked by confusional states, exaltation and/or restlessness: “careful not to leave signs of survival in those places, fascinated by lifting his eyes up and perceiving something above”, instants consumed in a “calm, sometimes precipitated state of expectation” (Florian, 2011). By applying the tri-phased formulation to the discontinuous event, we discover, in a Foucaultian note (1998) that “discourses and not the

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representations existing behind them (...) are a regulated and distinct series of events”. Such a marginal discourse is placed inside space, concerned with delimitating its own territory (that is, place) and interested in operating within a reacting field/network of (re)active scales resonating with outside forces (Manolache, ‫܇‬erban, 2010). Marginal historicisms can be perceived as matrices of a trace discourse, in which the traces are imprinted texts, in accordance with Vattimo's statement (1994) noting the formal resemblance between almost-identical lexical structures of the words energhia (actuality) and enargheia (evidence). This formulation is a reactive one: any actual, message-bearing human presences are invested with the role of involved partners inside a dialogue of experiences, reclamation, and discontent. If, in this quality, marginal discourse is extra-determined, the marginal uses graphic forms/formulas as its instruments of communication. The symbols of “ground floor post-graffiti” expose the protest as a form of decline, perceiving its intention and finality as a marginal discourse able not to assert itself but on the contrary, to dissipate within the environment. Affixing the marginal discourse to a space inside the conceptual “nonorder” in which speculative horizons of free “occultism” prevail, only serves to confirm the Derridian imperative: a sign must allow its own interpreter to imbue it with a part of its own signifier, favouring a displacement of discourse towards an anti-disciplinarian environment. “Disciplinary dismemberment” is capable of animating the essence of the message, by forcing the marginal to conceive of a message in a theoretical plan, in order to be able to oppose the very disciplinarily which created it. Thus the “degrading landmarks” of political society are disproved– corruption, theft, lies, disinterest–by underlining the incapacity of Romanian reality to synchronize itself with European space–with the needed mention that, superimposing itself on a pattern, today's political world “borrows” the negative signs of totalitarian eras. In the key of Foucaultian lectures (1999) vision focused on the centre of a public space becomes an ‘attention distracting’ device. The monster/the abnormal contaminates the impossible with the forbidden thing, and the infraction he commits automatically places him outside of the law. He opts for the alternative brutal form/spontaneous form, which will become the hypothetical growth pattern for all possible irregularities, a great model for all kinds of small infringements. Marginal discourse is inscribed within the dynamics of a normal discourse–abnormal discourse relationship, with the necessary statement

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that this type of marginal discourse is organized inside residual emissions of an apparent “series of verisimilitudes”. Clarifying the particularities of these discourse types, R. Rorty institutes two typological types of discourse: on one hand, the commensurate (normal) discourse–consensual; on the other hand, the incommensurate (abnormal) discourse–controversial. If incommensurate dialogue is not entered into with the avowed purpose of reverting to normality, but tends towards creating an interesting and fruitful disagreement, sufficient unto itself, it can obtain the quality of being “edifying” (Habermas, 2000). Any intention of identifying the author of the above-mentioned protest with Onufrie, the Romanian folklore hero who meets a kind of ‘Saint George’ fighting “the dragon terrorizing cities and villages” and helps him by using a signalling system, so that each of them would know when the other was writing to him–would re-launch the integrated apocalyptic Ecoian vision already discovered inside any registry guided by the rule of the versus: if the integrated opt for globalizing variations and neo-liberal cynicism, with tentacles in the triad progress–prosperity–trust, the apocalyptic cultivates the firm denial, scepticism, revolt, umbrage and its accents: both categories bank upon the unavoidable attributes of economic-political processes, with all needed sliding between activepassive, tolerant-critical, pessimist-optimist, beneficial-malevolent, positive-negative, creator-demolisher. The integrated revalues the profile of the named One, in a pre-modern, folklorizing manner: while the apocalyptic considers the Other to be the deciding factor in any attempt to annihilate traditional norms and values. With an interest in the present subchapter's theme, such a discourse would (re)launch the category of the monstrous and reinterpret any reaction it engenders, confirming the perspective image of a folklore culture of the terrifying, under the sign of the “three-headed dragon, with horrid faces, with one jaw in the sky and the other on the ground” (Slavici, 2012). This vision belonging to the phantasmagorical domain is not static, but dynamically and shockingly exponential: the dragon sighs and then disappears without a trace, only to return with even more terrifying new heads, becoming bigger and stronger, with scarier, widely-opened jaws. The multiplication already illustrated by the standard portrait of the fabulously-monstrous creature establishes the fact that the dragon has not three, but seven heads–spitting fire to the right, the left, afore and behind– only to mutate, later, into “twelve horrid heads, all filled with fire!”

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From within such portraits one can infer the hypothesis that every dragon has its own brave (marginal, we note)–fearless, strong, courageous, ready for action, spitting in his hands, eager to fight and to win... but the folklore tradition warns us that “dragons are not to be taken lightly” because… “once a Dragon, always a Dragon!” (Slavici, 2012).

References Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix. 2008. Capitalism Юi schizofrenie (I). AntiOedip [Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Anti-Oedipus]. Trans. Bogdan Ghiu. Pite‫܈‬ti: Paralela 45. Florian, Filip. 2011. Degete mici [Small Fingers]. 4th edition. Jassy: Polirom. Foucault, Michel. 1998. Ordinea discursului [The Order of Discourse]. Trans. Ciprian Tudor. Bucharest: Eurosong & Book. —. 1999. Anormalii [Abnormals]. Trans. Dan Radu Stănescu. Bucharest: Univers. Fraser, Nancy, Honneth, Axel. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London-New York: Verso. Habermas, Jürgen. 2000. ConútiinĠă morală úi acĠiune comunicativă [Moral Conciousness and Communicative Action]. Trans. Gilbert Lepădatu. Bucharest: SubstanĠial. Hardt, Michael, Negri, Antonio. 2004. Globalizare ‫܈‬i democra‫܊‬ie [Globalization and Democracy]. Idea Artă+Societate 19. Honneth, Axel. 1986. Kritik der Macht. Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag. Jameson, F. 2006. First Impressions. London Review of Books, 28: 17. Manolache, Viorella, ùerban, Henrieta Aniúoara. 2010. Cartografierea marginalităĠii [Mapping Marginality]. Bucharest: Institutul de ùtiinĠe Politice úi RelaĠii InternaĠionale. Pruijt, H. 2013. The Logic of Urban Squatting. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (1), 19-45. Slavici, Ioan. 2012. Zâna zorilor [Fairy of Dawn]. Bucharest: Vellant. Vattimo, Gianni. 1994. Dincolo de subiect [Beyond the Subject]. Trans. ‫܇‬tefania Mincu. Constan‫܊‬a: Pontica. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. Zăbovind în negativ. Kant, Hegel Юi critica ideologiei [Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology]. Trans. Irina-Marta Costea. Bucharest: ALL. —. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CHAPTER SIX ANNOTATIONS AND BRIEF CONCLUSIONS

From a series of comments regarding the problem of the monstrous, an important statement can be inferred, able to sustain the constitutional maintenance of a certain type of comfort aimed towards the horror status/registry, and able to trigger, under the influence of a growth impulse, an attenuating, temperate process of orientation and surveillance, of crisis valuing/testing and solving. In a representative manner for the registry of the three, folklorizing themes already present when expressing the confrontation between good and evil in the realm of fairy tales, as well as in overtaking, finishing and solving any trials, difficulties or tests inherent in an initiation journey destined to affirm and complete the ego’s structure, obsessively reloading the fatalistic figure of three when they establish the number of three emperor’s daughters, three emperor’s sons, three fairies, three ogres, three fantastic objects, three trials/tests and just one moral; if two are preoccupied/guided by the pleasure, adventure or non-loyal emulation principles and effortless achievements, minimizing or refusing any contact with the Other, then the third develops strategies, studies reality, relates to the Other–in sum, he is open to multiplication, alternate solutions and technicisms. Starting from such a premise, one can agree, in proximity to the ideas launched by Pascal Bruckner (2009), that attributing an anaesthetic surplus to contemporary society would constitute not only discerning proof, but also an opportunistic reaction to the obvious tendency of turning towards the supernatural or believing in occult forces–the embodied accessories–in the context of eroding religious beliefs. Hence, a tendency of promoting Hecate-isms already easy to identify/integrate in three alternating categories: the cyborg (a hybrid subsuming three species characteristics: the instinct of the beast, the cruelty of humans and the machine’s automatism)–the recycler (a monstrosity on the limit between the Pavlovian being and the discontented Sisyphus: an egotistical, corrupt individual perceived, via TocquevilleConstant, as a being dominated, incorporated by its own material interests

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and forgetting any communitarian aspirations)–the alogosophic (tolerant, pacifist, accepting endurance in all its forms/formulations/instances).

6.1. The Deceiving/Enigmatic Faces of Hecate 6.1.1. The Cyborg From the same (inter)related position established between the concepts of power–distance–security, one can interpret the Biblical sequence dedicated to Job1–the victim-protagonist of sacrifice, tested under destructive conditions, but blessed with a precious offspring–the one who had seven sons and three daughters2, unequalled in beauty, inheritors of a substantial part of the father’s fortune (“there were no daughters as beautiful as Job’s daughters in all the country. Their father gave them part of the inheritance, along with their brothers”). If four assumes a genealogical continuity or a generational activation and transmits the idea of multiplication (“Job lived 140 years more and saw his sons and his son’s sons on to the fourth generation”), the triphased self-preserves its metaphorical significance through the correspondence already suggested by the hybridizing proportion of terms included in visual, olfactory or auditory images: the light of day/the dove (Jemima)– aromatic herbs (Kezia)–algosophic–antimony horn (Keren-Happuch). Using the same biblical score as a pretext, a TV series such as Dominion (2014)–in the context of political reinterpretations of that special independence flaunted when relating to the metropolis–re-launches the triad distance– power– security, completing it with profiled Hecateisms (cyborg, recycler, algosophic). 1

André Scrima (2008) saw in Job’s travails an apocalyptic mode/model (i.e., a judgement formula) using as a (pre)text of the monstrous God’s answer to “Job’s mindless words” and equating the monstrous-monstrosity with the subcelestial powers of cosmocrator angels. With clear intent, God offers to tie (that is, to appease) the Leviathan in order to turn it into a toy (in the sense of domestication) and offer it to his daughters. In Scrima’s analytical note, Job’s rehabilitation in the plan of accepted integrality would reveal a third apocalyptic element of his destiny, following the suffering and the crisis, that of judgement (a threshold of eschatological order) confirming the triple dimension of a spiritually–moralizing portrait of the biblical character: Job-before-suffering–Job- after- suffering-Transcendental Job (2008: 91-92). 2 McLuhan (2006) reviews the profile of the mechanical woman–as an allusion to the character, expert in sexual mechanics, who operates the icy, complicatedlycosmeticized products of the factory line in Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County.

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The TV series screenplay mentions the existence of archangels– invested with a superior rank–presented as angels who look like human beings but have considerably superior force, being followed on a hierarchical scale by the category of lower angels, suggestively called the dogs of heaven (see one of Hecate’s canine physiognomies), the ones who are forced, because they do not possess a clear material outline/physical form, to temporarily occupy borrowed human bodies. This winged perspective projects, based on undoubted similarities, the image of an astronaut benefiting from a homeostatic system’s properties which keep its initial variables unchanged; thus, it has an augmented concentration and attention point, a strong metabolism and increased immunity, a rigorous control of all available functions and energies, in the sense of technical fine-tuning and activating the conditions/components of an (otherwise) impossible experience. Such a hybridizing relationship indicates the cyborg’s well-established role as a mechanical way of realizing the junction between the machine and the living organism. In a sequent(ial) way, the cyborg can be accepted as a primitive tool, which can be extended or replaced in order to contribute to medical operations, such as prosthetic procedures, from which we cite: extirpating parts of the nervous system (central or peripheral); replacing muscles with motors to provide intact neuromuscular control; completing/maintaining a functional central nervous system with peripherally autonomous elements able to record bionic reflexes; creating a personal nervous system by using mediator structures in/between organic impulses and mechanical reason, with guaranteed results in creating a new conscience placed above the dual linearity-nonlinearity proportions. The (im)mediate observations convey the idea that cyborgs are possible/probable categories, with the capacity of forming a communitas, in Donna Haraway’s acceptation (1995), or creating a “dynamic”, “selfregulating”, “homeostatic” system with material and non-material implants3, both “natural” and/or artificially constructed–constituting, finally, an “interspersion of organic, technical, textual, mythical, economic and political elements”.

3

The new prosthetic forms operate for example in the registry of cyborgic feminisms, sliding from medical problems (polymastia or supernumerary breasts) and their cinematic transpositions, to surgical interventions offered as models (for instance, Mary the mutant in Total Recall or the freak circus in the American Horror Story series), to seeing implants as an opportunity for uniformizing estheticism (see the world’s first three-breasted female).

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As for the Harawayian 1985 blueprint of “world-destroying”4 and/or “world-building”5–in the postmodern acceptation of mathematical time and imaginary deployments–the cyborg would re-empower both the formula of a living existence and the culturally-technological constructs and discourse projects already presented. From the statistics of inventories related to angelic possession6 the Dominion series selects and uses operational signs, bizarre and shocking facts and practices, some of them of a paranormal nature, such as the puppeteer organism, the hyphema effect, climbing walls by the use of hands, long-distance jumps, object levitation, vanishing tooth enamel– physical dysfunctions which can be monetized because they accept an analogy to the Biblical antimony horn as a way of nebulously secretizing the prosthetic effect. The already-stated observations and appreciations maintain Haraway’s opinion leading to the conclusion that the cyborg is a mechanical and organic hybrid, equidistantly created and disputed by social and fictional realities. Thus, its specific hybrid condition pleads for the confluence and concentration of material reality and the postmodern imagination’s mythical qualities, considered to be production and construction devices of a particular (cyborg) spatialization. In an informed way, Ray Kurzweil (1999) launches his own theory about Earth’s transformation into a cyber-osmotic organism, peopled by nanorobotic interconnected “swarms” (adding attributes of selfregeneration, multiplication, mobility and intelligence). More to the point, the nanorobotic swarms have freedom, exercising their legitimate/autonomous

4

Such a vision is illustrated in Dominion by the Archangel Gabriel who descends from Heaven to bring death and destruction, with the programmed mission of exterminating human life; but who sins by underestimating the men/humans in perpetual regrouping (see the battle on the West Coast of America and the Hoover Dam victory). 5 Becoming an inhabitant of Vega city, the Archangel Michael seconded by the Archangel Corps as first defence contingent, keeps watch from the top of the Stratosphere hotel (in full postmodernism!), attentive and alone, ensuring humanity’s safety. 6 In a psychoanalytical note, taking contact with this type of metamorphosis implies the same tri-phased stages: refusal–a dangerous stage with repercussions in conscious transformation from man to creature/criminal angel taking possession of the human body; anger–a way of activating the suprarenal glands by an increased impulse of power and speed; acceptance–calling the Archangel Corps and demanding they discover a protection weapon and conquer the transformed/transformable one.

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right of assuming any form7: these organisms are able to project any sound or image, and can imprint and shape any object or being, functioning as unitary-distributive intelligence. Adept at projecting spectacular constructs, Dominion reunites the entire theoretical corpus of identity cyborgization and fluid identities, including the aspects of specific release and post-humanist perspectives, valences of performativity and symbolic interactionism, thus offering a possible disconnection from a certain re-established/known reality in order to prepare for interpreting another role and assuming another identity, different from those already held within the social sphere and traditional private sphere. Included in this score, the religious becomes an annotated category, (still) serving the same traditional rites and being doubled by the prescriptions of Saviourism, approved as an official religion (every citizen should partake of the religious services at least twice a year)8. The Church of the Saviour was created during the First Principality in order to bring hope and peace in the souls of men, and remind the citizens that the Chosen One can appear at any moment (and also advising the people to stay awake and be spiritually prepared for the apocalyptic and apotheotic moment of the encounter): it strongly favoured the preservation of the people’s free will, liberated from the domination of the angels. The saviour is embodied by the child-youth with weird markings on his body resembling a tattoo network in a strange unknown language filled with anonymity and safety symbols, and who is protected by the archangel Michael. The redeemer can be associated with the Japanese germinoid, with his quality of being able to potentiate interactions with people near him (thus obtaining the valuation of unconditional love clichés)9: he can move his body, nod his head, blink, smile, and has over sixty facial expressions and body movements. 7 The registry of the monstrous cannot exclude from a subject analysis the ones called the Dark Acolytes of the Archangel Gabriel, whose profession of faith is based upon desire, stating that power is born from suffering. The distinctive sign of the Dark Acolytes is an imprint of open eyes coloured on the inside, explaining the symbolism of the gaze which became Gabriel’s sign: the one who can see–as through a screen–through the eyes of all who serve him. 8 Influenced by Augustinian ideas, André Scrima (2008) reaffirms the biblical model of a heavenly polis, peopled by citizens, dynamical and lacking a stable political organism (27). 9 The Germinoid has a Kinnect system, a specialized program able to recognize persons stocked in memory, by scanning their faces with video cameras implanted in the eyes.

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In an analogy with Haraway’s network-mechanisms (1991) a “global ideological system” of cyberspaces could be built (Gabilondo, 1995: 427431), while borrowing Marxist-Leninist reflexes of state-controlled means of production (via Althusser) or notes of a schizoid-analytical theory of subjective productivity (as formulated by Guattari and Deleuze). The created system is contaminated, even rounded-in a BaudrillardianVirilioian direction–by communication theories of the speed-space or the social-economic theory of information merchandise (launched by Harvey and Negroponte). Harmonizing these perspectives, Vega becomes the rebuilt/solidified refuge, near Las Vegas, with an intact infrastructure, separated by a wall signifying both an instrument of defence and identity. Any political landmarks of organization over-empower the Senate by giving it a supplementary role in its mission for continuously building surveillance and defensive actions within the city walls; of course, any objectives included in the urgent survival plan are ranked and classified, such as the water purification system (a fully operational project of the nuclear power plant) and the functional structure of the agro-tower (with 65 levels and a priority role in providing food.) In reality, an architectural System V-type formulation is anticipated, with already-known finality depending on social occupation and vitally organized activities10. 10

The same André Scrima (2008) operates with tri-phased categories–barbarian, bourgeois, pneumatic (see Sloterdijk's pneumatic parliament!). If the first ignores the ensigns of a spiritual world, the second–the bourgeois–appeals to external signals as a way of solving crises, and the third–the pneumatic–is both active and contemplative (2008: 110). Referencing the pneumatic occurrence, we have to also reference the Instant Democracy project, and in this context, the mission of the pneumatic parliament, as an ideological reaction of sustaining democratic intentions to reduce (socioeconomic) differences between European states, “to leave no country behind”; in fact, an attempt to transcribe democracy as an “export product” -an imaginary forerunner of Western democracy, easy to install (with/in 24 hour schedules), transparently- inflatable, “a protection skin” for parliamentary reunions which have all the attributes of an agora (Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel eds., 2005). The project ambitiously aims to reclaim and affirm the pneumatic origins of modernity, an endeavour indicative of the Sloterdijkian model as landmark for leaving behind open contaminations, offering recharging and reinvigorating energies directly available at the source, inside a closed environment; and recommending instant democracy as formulaic for direct–contact–democracy. In reality, the identification of a direct and transparent way of experimenting with parliamentary activities is desired, by the use of an aerated dome which could be

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From here one can infer a first concluding note of the present book: triangulated/in a V form, Hecate-isms technic(izingly) corroborate the triad distance–power–security, which they include in the structure of a hybridizing, imaginary formula while considering it a cross-reference instance accepting different particular(izing) emphases. Marshall McLuhan (2006) states that the image of fragmented man is the supporting idea which creates and maintains the homogenous Western world, and says that hybrid energy is just the confluence of existing models, as applied to both social order and the lawful definition of the hybrid=area of impact for two means, which provide a moment of truth/revelation, from which another/new (third-order) form can germinate. Utility, seen as a pretext for commenting upon any aspects which might define the offered theme of the Dominion series gives us the possibility of launching a bio-iconic–triphased combination–“autonomous”– “neutralized”–“desubstantianted”–allowing us to retrace the causalhierarchy patterns. Such an option confirms in a McLuhan way any trans-media crossings/hybridizations able to release energies and bank upon their mixed signals as opportunities for observing their structural components/properties. This deductive line of thought led us to the conclusion that correlating the category to which the series belongs with pertinent arguments taken from the domain of political philosophy, as a way of facilitating the release of another, known force in achieving an extension of means, with certain repercussions within instituting new relationships and other types of interactions. In an absolutely politicizing structure, the Vega Senate comprises eleven hereditary leaders representing the city’s most powerful families: two of them occupy the position of Consul and just one is named Lord of the City (the mechanisms of power follow the rule of simple majority vote, with the exception of the death of a Senator, Consul or Lord–when a majority of eight senators is needed; the Lord of the City represents the supreme armed authority).

parachuted into post-conflict zones and connected to the “airing system” by using photovoltaic cells, with permanent regulatory mechanisms and which would favour the colouring/infusing of space with shades allowing psycho-political imprinting of a democratic colour.

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The connection to the registry of Hecate-isms imbues the three part dismemberment11 with a unification tendency12, establishing the fact that distance becomes proxemics13, power–a reflex, and security–a warning assemblage. In the context of the proxemics, Vega’s neighbours bear a triple significance expressed in the concepts: cyborg feminism [the city of Helena (an allusion to the Trojan war!), built on the ruins of La Jolla, is ruled and controlled by a matriarchal society whose members/inhabitants expose themselves in traditional clothing, respect and apply power principles identical to the Amazon society, and keep/nurture their children far from public spaces–a space harbouring, from the perspective of security, the last Air Force]; recalculated mysticism (New Delphi, the nongoverned city, disorganized and without an administration, a city ruled by chaos: a city without law, customs or government); adjacent spaces (The Camp is an annex-space occupied by a–damned and reprobate, contested and contesting–nomad population of refugees, vagrants–the Killing Zone or the Wall). Such an insert14 will note, in a philosophical-political way, that being is the equivalent of propagation, banking upon the relays of a new

11 As Edgar Allan Poe said (The Man that was Used Up–A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo), Brigadier General John A.B.C. Smith, who fought in the wars against the Bugaboo and Kickapoo tribes, represents a “pile of something extremely bizarre”, demanding its piece-by-piece reassembly. In the same note, Marshall McLuhan (2006) identifies the author of the assembly process in the children's book hero–Humpty-Dumpty, who falls from the wall, breaks into pieces and cannot be put together again (p. 41). It is important to note–appealing to the same registry of TV series (the original Bron/Broen and its sequels)–the story of the strange body on/at the border/bridge, composed of two half- bodies belonging to two different murdered women (socioprofessionally, ethically, ethnically etc.), fragments which become an object– pretext of study for diagnosing halves (marginality, minorities, alternative deviations), be they social, cultural, economic, attitude- linked, psychological or political, in two distinct spaces. 12 As an illustration of Hecate's image, dismemberment would target the custom of making fertility talismans from parts of an animal body concentrating its generational potential (Detienne, 1977). 13 See Edward T. Hall (1966) and proxemics, considered a discipline of the way in which civilization uses body- centric spaces. 14 Under the sign of three mysteries, three programs, M. MaliĠa (2014) states that the one corresponds to the physical universe, the second signifies the essence of life and the third is included in the domain of knowledge.

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“telepistemology” (Goldberg, 2000), with the intention of resonating with the new hybridizing demands of the image/imaginary.

6.1.2. The Recycler If there is a convincing and rigorous postmodernist argument indicating that consumer/consumerism is a brand of the current world, the present subchapter’s analysis will prove that, from the perspective of a technical approach, consumer communities are stigmatized by the barbaric propensities of the monstrous, as seen in the Baudrillardian motto (1970): “we need to consume in order to live, and we live in order to consume” (a statement also emitted by Molière, but with a synonymously-conceptual variation: to consume=to eat), a statement which certifies the impossibility of separating life from the (need to) consume. Such an observation is inspired from that proximal reality which emphasizes the preconsumer stage as a replacement for need/demand, with abundance seen as the supreme deity of consumer society (generating and encouraging excess, with unpredictable consequences both for the individual–reflected in their behaviour/personality–and in general-collective plan, disturbing the very balance of the ecosystem), in the sense of erron(eous) positioning in relation to the sense of measure, moderation and ethics, in the context of a pact between common sense and morality. Thus a new category of the monstrous is articulated, one in which alienation becomes a constantly defining trait of the structure of society, announcing the unavoidable end of transcendence and adoring, even treasuring, the supreme objective of an essentially mercantile society. In its de facto expression, consumer society’s greatest achievement is an interest in guaranteed profit and the business quotas of the productive private sector, where pleasure is the only measure of rationing consumerism–and defines, as a consequence, the profile of a plural monster–the amorphous masses. Bauman (2005) reviews and revalues this dehumanized profile of a citizen transformed into a hardened consumer and enslaved by the vice of consumerism, when he notes that “the advent of the consumer signifies the decay of the citizen”, and that the amorphous mass becomes synonymous with those global nomads marked by isolation and dominated by the pragmatic aspects of consumerism, reactions generated by the transition period of a fluctuating, liquid, uncertain world devoid of rules or nodal points, with no aspirations or ideals. For a sociologist and researcher interested in the effects and implications of postmodernism in society, such as David Lyon (1998), any

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mutations in today’s world can be found in a globalization chart, which is a sum of imperatives and objectives imposed by the alarming extension and unsuspected amplitude of consumerism, and the creation of a new consumer prototype. Consumerism is thus perceived as a final result of a process determined by the new cultural, ethnic, religious, political conditions–but can also be seen as an eloquent expression of experiences gathered by social conditions at a given point in time.15 That which can be presented and exposed, evidently, in a world of video impressions, theme parks and great commercial emporiums (constituting a new vision of perception and appreciation of sui generis values; a clear and blinding, often striking, expression of the specific languages of commercial advertising images, the imposition of a pragmatic, real, profit-generating aspect to the detriment of any moral/ethical dimensions or intrinsically social-cultural human structures, the temptation of the pseudo-aesthetic and the easy trappings of kitsch, the vocation of pleasure, abundance and diversity maintaining generous offers etc.) can also permeate and contaminate domains which were once considered outside of the market-these being, in Lyon’s opinion: religion, science, sex, ethnicity, politics etc. These postmodern aspects and manifestations already seen in urban life and which are succinctly presented above, become the distinctive properties of a new type of city, re-conceptualized from the consumer’s point of view, conforming to the new directions, norms and orders of fully expanding consumerism. David Lyon (1998) interprets the new urban option from the perspective of a space built mainly for machines. The elimination of public places and walking spaces will lead in turn to the disappearance of infractions or vandalism acts. 15

Preserving in a deliberately non-anticipatory way a certain nonperturbed, balanced even from/in the title, the “Goat with three kids” story, by Ion Creangă accepts re-readings in accordance with the registry of the three (big- middlesmall): the small kid seems to possess just positive character traits, such as industriousness, meekness and reasonableness, in contrast to its older brothers' disobedience, intractability and agitation. Avoiding the negative- cruel–vengeful message with anti-educational valences which the story transmits, the actual event can be interpreted in a Jungian way as a fierce competition for obtaining/finding daily food (satisfying the Baudrillardian need to consume) and implicitly for survival reflected in the unquestionable attributes of the three: three defining character traits of the small kid, (agility, wit/intelligence, survival instinct [hiding in the chimney] and also three stages of the potentiation element (a witness to crime, an accomplice, and also a paragon of justice).

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In the same Baumanian note (2000) the central character of the new social-political reality is not the worker of the modern age, but the protagonist of another screenplay, the consumer. Close to the puzzle model, the new tribes preserve and introduce new elements into the prehistoric rule structure, easy to recognize in: central authority’s limited power to impose rules and sanctions, investing citizens with the role of collective actors placed upon opposing positions to the institutionalized power; a civic life based upon emotional elements; taking part in the “re-witching of the world”; the ephemeral–a property of this type of world; conceptual border experiments; shared feelings and specific ensigns; the impossibility of belonging to a single tribe (Cova, 2002). Without a doubt, these neotribes represent a dominant model of antistructural and sociability patterns, deploying a type of uniformity and homogenizing elements, erasing differences and affirming a militant collective identity. Instead of demanding collective compensations, the neotribes explicitly prefer daily repetitiveness, opting for the present time and the intense experience of each second, but also of the moment resulting from the succession of present instants. According to Z. Bauman (2000), the neotribes would in fact be sociability eruptions, “unplanned expeditions into the morally inaccessible world“. They are structured and controlled neither by hereditary communities, nor by the state’s legislative organs, but are just “short reconnoitring invasions assuming the hope (but with no realistic perspectives!) of lengthy, even durable colonization” (Manolache, ‫܇‬erban, 2010). In the same line of social-political analysis and (re)loading a term already used by Prigogine and defining spontaneous structures, we consider as plausible the intention of advancing a suggestive comparison between the neotribes and the process of salt crystal growth in saturated solutions. These crystals are characterized, on the one hand, by the uniformity of their constitutive elements and a lack of differences between their components, by homogeneity and the appearance and affirmation of a collective identity; and on the other hand, they seem to lack any perpetuating and/or self-reproducing mechanism. Marshall McLuhan (2006) maintains that there are two extreme organizing structures/equations, one being civilized and the other, tribal; the first accepting the eye as its equivalent, and the second using the ear as its symbol. The significance of this statement allows one to assess the road leading from the undertaker with individual isolated virtues to the group based on interdependent relationships, but also accepting the affective

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involvement of its members–and finally, to the tribal gangs, representing the idea of harmonious communion. Revisiting the industrial fable (the meeting between Atala and Citroen) articulated by Jean Fourastié, Mircea MaliĠa (2014) approves of the concept which divides activities into primary (with medium rhythm), secondary (marked by accelerated dynamism) and tertiary (with diminished mobility). If agriculture is a primary activity, and industry can be considered secondary, transports can be integrated into the tertiary domain. Fourastié launches a certain prophetic concept–“tertiary hunger”, as an occurrence defining the evolution of sectorial hierarchy, establishing that the tertiary represents an equalizing factor, that the efficiency of work in the tertiary is relative and that richness can cause its growth (MaliĠa, 2014: 250-251). With a satisfying note, the civilization of the tertiary cannot be separated from the conditions of abundance, an aporia which, according to Fourastié, will be certified by the statement that, in the future, society will be 80% tertiary. In an analytical approach, Alex Mucchielli (2002) considers the transition from mass marketing to tribal marketing as a manipulation of the consumer status, made possible by creating and fine-tuning affective ties between the involved parties and having as a final result the creation and consolidation of consumer “clubs”. Starting from the idea of coupling consumers and collector images, the last being perceived as a political receptor with an interest in design (thus noting the role of a wider range of arts touching and influencing the sphere of the political with its extended tentacles–Gleizal, 1999) and in maintaining a functional memory of the object, we shall consider the recycler as that non-formal creative category in the sense of Hecate-isms already presented, both as a recycling form and as an effect of the recycling action itself.16 The recycler, seen from this perspective, is placed at a distance from the objectives offered by the pilot-project of the Great Disposal17, an initiative marking the importance of collecting disposable waste in order to free ourselves from stress and apply selective therapies18, but also for

16

See in this sense Creative Recycling, http://reciclarecreativa.ro/, accessed on August 14th, 2014. 17 Alluding to the National Campaign for waste collection-electrical and electronic equipment, organized by the Ministry of Environment in Romania in 2007; the third great cleaning was started in October 2008. 18 See also http://www.colecteazaselectiv.ro/reciclare-pentru-destresare/, accessed on August 15th, 2014.

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the optimal functioning of typeset “institutionalized” formulations (a recycling bank=ecobank–a recycling patrol bike=a recyclette). The recycler model inverts the theoretical data launched by Marshall McLuhan (2006) and completes the Butlerian Erewhon by accepting that the endeavour (which proves the similitude between machines and living organisms) can be proven by the following arguments: in order to function, a machine consumes and digests fuel, just like an organisms consumes food: the function of perpetuating/reproducing living organisms is mimicked by the machine’s capacity to create new/other machines: the undifferentiated behaviour of organism and machines is conditioned by external stimuli, contaminating the recycler with the machine’s rigidity and behaviourism. Thus, the recycler would represent the category of organism becoming a machine again, through the concerted action of hoarding and collecting residue/fuel, through its post-digestive capacity and through its ability not to produce, but to transform a machine into another (less noxious) machine by creating (almost artistic) anti-environments which propagate the idea that any society, as long as it is active, has a tendency to invest in itself (McLuhan, 2006: 60). In essence, the recycler establishes a technical–pragmatic relationship with the industrial environment, with the avowed mission of operating the creation of a new background, by its connection to an interface which is superimposed upon the figure/image of new domineering industrialism. This analysis, with its McLuhanian implications, refers to a process already deployed in both directions, one being de-tribalization (an absolute priority for obtaining a civilizing advance in backward regions, a progress in the unconditional plane of civilization, not related to any geographical coordinates or the prevalence of an ideology); and the other, banking upon a re-tribalization of the levels of civilization and achieving the jump (with enthusiasm and force!) over the civilized period in order to plunge into their own tribalism. If the background implies reclaiming and reconstituting, the figure signifies extension, assuredness and purification, and the superposition of the two defines the character of the recycler. From the perspective of favouring and reawakening social relations, and of affirming a new art or concept of urban living (Gran, 2011), the recycler’s politics cannot be distanced from what Bruckner (2012) calls, using an urban waste metaphor, an odyssey of remains, a commercial selfrecycling of residue, conceived and endowed with the emblem of a carborexical tribalism.

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In this sense, an imaginary double has to be accepted: the first, a decomposing, inversely-treasured image, adjusted by being re-used; and the second, an imaginarium of release, simplification and aeration, reducing the carbon imprint until any ecological trace disappears. In the shadow of the ecological imperative: do not leave traces, do not hurt the atmosphere, access carbon neutrality, conquer gravity (Bruckner, 2012: 209), the recycler makes his presence known, as the actante corresponding to a pre-warned consumer, the volunteer agent with critical powers and self-recycling potentialities.

6.1.3. The Algosophic Ferenc Fehér’s assertions (2005) allow us to state that the biopolitics of sex and health is missing from the post-communist story–as subchapters of biopolitics not included (at the moment when Fehér’s article was published, in 2005) in the political agenda of the post-communist world, for either correct and/or erroneous reasons, neither as biopolitical themes, nor as nodal points in a politics of freedom, or as permanent inquiries into social problems. Invoking as an alternate transaction in a Sloterdijkian (2004) sense, the remedies oriented against unavoidable/insufferable causes of dissatisfaction, referencing actual reality depends upon the significance of a Geburtlichkeit, that native presentism establishing the radical difference between poesis and technique: if technique banks upon conceptualization and functionality, as a methodical process, proposing to make a product and launching it onto the market, poesis reaffirms [here] the natality of the present. Reclaiming the poesis term (which defines the capacity of attributing the name of an object to another object) on Aristotelian lines, Susan Sontag (1995) semantically potentiates it and re-launches it, invested with all the significance of an inverted landmark accepting as a starting point the political metaphor discourse appraising the body, in a Wirchowian sense of multi-celled organisms [a body made from many citizens forms a republic, that is, an unitary community]. Algosophia is valued according to the ideas already stated by Peter Sloterdijk (2004) referring to the measurement registry of admitted/possible endurance amplitude and intensity.

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In Thomas Pogge's19 opinion, beyond any assault of poesis, medicalization demands an imperative grounding in politics and references three colleges: governments–pharmaceutical companies–the public. A realistic attitude would target the moral, but also a cautious import, able to extract applicability and pragmatism from within the area of purely philosophical projections. On the impure ground of political philosophy, re-discussing the particularities of algosophia actualizes a generous debating subject about that legitimacy which includes applying the principle of individual responsibility towards disease, as well as the distribution of medical services, thus directing in a hard way the biopolitical ensigns from the poesis towards the political. When the present chapter was written (August 2014) the Ebola virus was presented by appealing to the registry of elements of artistic expression, (just) by a poetic image/syntagm: “a forest fire, spreading through sparks from a single tree”–an expression similar to that attributed by Stephan Monroe to the sense of the reaction-answer “more a marathon than a sprint”. Hecate’s registry can be verified by a double reference, both to the triphased algosophical profile: Guinea–Liberia-Sierra Leone, or especially by using the ritualistic authentic attraction of witch doctors able to treat the virus, insisting upon the triple importance of instruction, appropriate information and permanent connection of these three states with the Red Cross. In the same enduraing note and through the prism of a warning of the type “geopolitics is back!” Jonathan Holslag (2014) is preoccupied, in the “turbulent 21st century” (a direct allusion to the tragedy of the MH17 flight–seen as a European 9-11, a pivotal element for “strategic thinking”) by the algosophic’s need (we note) which is very useful when recalculating the distance/placing (“the distance between Kiev and Katwijk is not enormous”) and rethinking security (“the security of all European countries between these two cities is interdependent”). The problem already mentioned fuels a welter of comment about the European crisis, accusing Europe of creating a “power void along its external frontiers” and not being able “to build strong partnerships with the regional superpowers”, but also offering a way of appeasing and defusing the present situation, by assuming the leading role in the initiative of “fighting against uncontrolled proliferation of rockets”. 19 Pogge's answer to questions about death, sex and ethics on the Ask Philosophers site, 2009.

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The intelligentsia’s reaction towards the Russian-Ukrainian conflict (see in this sense the continued proposals signed by Adam Michnik in the pages of the Polish newspaper “Gazeta Wyborcza”), with the intent of exposing the limit-threshold of endurance, by denouncing the open letter addressed to Europe’s leaders, and condemning Europe20 because “it stays silent when faced with Putin’s political aggressiveness”, concluded that solidarity against such an intolerable attitude/position (of aggression, dominance, violence) represents “the real answer given to the Ukrainian crisis”. The summer of 2014 (July-August) reconfirms the algosophic’s statute as a clearly determined category, and corroborates it with pronounced traits accented and thickened by an intensification of violence on a world scale (tensions in the Korean peninsula, the Syrian crisis, terrorist attacks, the explosive situation in the Middle East, hostile relationships between the West and Russia, accused of breaking international laws during the Ukrainian conflict), seen as apocalyptic previsions which alert public opinion; (mostly) by the “tragic exodus of Christians from the Arab world” (Le Monde) or by the prophecy of the Jesuit Cultural Centre of Alexandria which noted that “everything that made the West the beacon of the world and produced the Renaissance, humanism and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is about to die before our eyes” (La Libre Belgique). According to Hecate’s astrogram (which will be presented in another sub-chapter) its movement along its own trajectory seems to be retrograde, posing the problem of reconsidering the Cold War [“from the start of the 20 We can use Revel's opinion (1995) to answer such hypothetical suggestions for stating crossroads arguments in order to accommodate the politically–binary logic of the Cold War (re-activated–East vs. West, capitalism vs. communism, market economy vs. centralized economy etc.) and relate it to Hecatism. Revel said that the new map of conceptual circulation–liberal democracy and communism– indicates a perpetual permutation game (multiplication and not opposition) reflected in a gradually–favourable transformation of political situations under the influence of democracy. According to Revel, communist countries have failed on the economic level by favouring a politics of isolation and separation, and thus creating a distance between them and the economic developed democratic countries; socialism failed in the third world too; for the developed countries, socialism (where collective ownership of the means of production and exchange was guaranteed) becomes synonymous with regression; there is no third way, human-face socialism or mixed economy; liberal society is the only economic functional society, with true revolutionary spirit and socio-cultural creative qualities; information represents the corollary of civilizational transformations; communism is doomed to fail (Revel, 1995: 99-100).

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Arab revolutions, a cold war between states realigns diplomatic alliances in the Middle East and the Maghreb”–El Mundo, seen as an event with an always surprising occurrence/reloading, and subsumed to the statement “are we talking about 1983? No, this is the new Cold War of 2014”21], and announcing a time of magic/witchcraft (see the African continent) or of askew crossing nodes (“Hamas demands a third Intifada, after the violent uprisings in Jerusalem and the West Bank–on the road from Gaza to nowhere”–The Telegraph).

6.2. Concluding Notes–or the Way in which Hecate-isms become Philosophical–Political Arguments Announced initially as an argumentative endeavour, and tempted by the accent placed upon the tri-phased interpretation of pro- jects, grams, spectives22, the present book tries to launch a new conceptual category which can be applied easily to post–postmodernist concepts, with the avowed intention of stating another/new threshold concept: Hecatisms, as possessed of sense-transporting arguments, which in a philosophicalpolitical score can ensure a certain direction for those crossroads already present in the sign of the three, and which daringly tries to recompose itself in the manner of an offering. If the style of our text, structured and laid out in the book’s chapters, gives the impression of an undefined juggling of images or metaphorical/technicizing expressions of Hecate-isms, far from clarifying 21

See for more details Laura Bretea, “Doborârea MH17 e confirmarea că suntem într-un nou Război Rece”, Europlus.ro, July 18th, 2014. 22 The present chapter focuses upon tri-phased interpretations: pro- jects, grams, spectives and endeavors to establish as its epistemic context the area of science philosophy, political philosophy and system theory. Starting from such an intersection, the relationship between political philosophy- postmodernism, beyond Lyotard, is controlled and placed under the sign of prefix replacement and slides from the soft, neutral prefix–post–to the hard, displaced one–hyper–and culminating with–ultra–in the sense of transcending pre-established limits. The actualization and interpretation of ultrametaphysics and nihilism marks liberation from the tyranny of oppositions and solvent dualities. Only from this perspective can the Heideggerian Ge-stell be understood, seen as an “essence of modern technology”, a definitional slogan of modern humanity (subject of action and knowledge)–the world (as nature) and knowledge (as systematic representation of natural laws). The Ge-stell postulates an interpretation triggered by the basic sense which asserts, instantiates, postulates, in order to reach an extension of research areas beyond and above the scientific threshold, by attracting market calculations in the equation, as a central principle.

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such a slide of thematically oriented sections, a review of our opinions seen as landmarks in an argumentative competition can only confirm the rigorousness of the objectives we have followed from the very start of our research. These state the fact that the tri-phased should not be perceived (as a) metaphor only, but can be transferred and included in the registry of the experimental and relative technicisms. From the perspective which maintains the “duality” as a monstrously general category, a possible clarification could come from the unclear third-order investigation/perspective; if one face is convex and the other– concave, to which of the sides does the third correspond? In the equation describing the faces of the medal–a binary geometry in it, the third way has more than a subtly slithering role. It strengthens both the face and the back, and corresponds to the edge, thus consolidating the margin. If our first thought would be that, in a disorienting polisemantics, everything matches everything else, things are not exactly this way–in three. Placed on the edge, the three (seen here as a crossroads) attracts, identifies and decomposes the once intersected parts in order to release them again towards the three directions. The trinocular perspective, preferred in our analysis, was suggested and constantly maintained by the theoretical platform offered by the interdisciplinary fabric of information, ideas and theories specific to every domain. The specialized information flow was often interspersed with purposely-guided and correctly executed jumps towards the artisticallyillustrative segment of cinematography (as an example, we offer bibliographic sources: journalism-media studies-event series–sociologyanthropology or political sciences). The book banks upon obtaining a vector–the Hecate-ism vector–(seen as both a crossroads of the senses, a disjunction and an amphibology) from a mythological element, by starting from its mythological relevance and from what the goddess represents–not only in a mythological system, but also in its symbolic texture. The latter constitutes an argumentatively illustrative, generous source, able to facilitate any endeavour of constituting and launching a new concept. If defining the concept does not impose total disassociation from the mythological sequence already dedicated to the goddess, it has to be considered, from the start, as the product of a decanting form for all mythological, teratological or contextual impurities. One has to mention here that we accepted Hecate-ism as a modern product–as an artificial ism obtained by simply referencing the relevant reworking of the technical concept.

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Pragmatically, Hecate-ism includes: tri-phasedness, like the threeheaded goddess from classical representations [certifying that the monstrous (seen as the absence of certain segments) was not completely absorbed or neutered]; a form of suture/glue for three concepts prosperity– security–freedom and distance–power–security; an underlining (and) of the beneficent, apotropaic dimension of the goddess symbol, with the avowed purpose of absorbing its positive parts into the concept; a psychoaffective mechanism of oniric relevance akin to delirium, nightmare, apparition; an anthropological structure presiding over the occurrence of homo triplex, integrating a series of characteristics compulsory for the existence of modern society; the mechanism status creating trinocular perspectives. The three-part model we offer is a limited-conjunctive one. It implies giving up dichotomies or using opposites, contrasts and “the rule of the versus” with the purpose of extracting a third sense from any preestablished relationship. The significance of the third shows an alternative (see our proposals from within the sphere of European politics), a “third way”, a necessary asymmetry (of dismantling any binary-order conflicting judgments), an interference and negotiation zone, a component of the tri-phased model “equal” in importance to the other two. The relevance of theoretical models when set against a third way, in economics, politics and political philosophy, restates its [the third way’s] intention of organizing itself as a third centre, which offers the blueprint of lowering taxes, partial withdrawal of the state from economic mechanisms/social life, and a new vision of wealth redistribution. The perspective is Hecatean in the sense in which the new way states that the left–right division is overtaken and new post-ideological parties, placed “neither to the left nor to the right” come to the fore now, included in an area of “best inventory/handling”. The text offers a managerial recourse to three formulations: passing from one analogy towards another (but referencing the same goddess profile, whose heads simultaneously see three different perspectives); deferring synonymous terms (with the purpose of provoking the reader into choosing the harder or weaker sense of the concept); tentative doubling of lexemes, through brackets which lead to the creation of a final third-order sense/product. In fact, we are in the presence of a “laboratory combination” of halfcoils operated within the registry of the three (see in this sense an appeal to Clifford A. Pickover’s theories, confirming the appetence analysis carried out for experiments), the text addressing (neither overspecialized

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specialists, as it might seem at a first reading, nor competent readers able to understand what we suggest here) a reader whose mind is open to experiments, new combinations and extensions of sense (see the chapter dedicated to the corner and the threshold–different topoi, with unequal configurations, where we offered the needed space for crossroad spaces to become Hecatic attributes, by considering equal terms as ways of combining integrated experiments). All these are explained not from an excess of theoretical erudition, but in an endeavour to extend the text’s margins/perspectives. The book operates with a widened isotropy, in the epistemic context of tri-operational interference: social sciences (emancipated from their own neutrality)–economic geography (as a reaction to precarious)–research (in the sociological/technological domains) and in domains such as political philosophy or cultural anthropology. These observations maintain, by their particular character, the Lyotardian proposition that is aiming to creatively apply the game strategy to language games, an approach which one might call operative placing of the political fact outside any report(ing) structures. The needed observation takes into consideration the fact that the three has to be adapted to a desingularizing lecture/interpretation, in a Sloterdijkian sense (2012) of multi-focusing as a starting point for distancing oneself from any second-order research. The above idea would take into account just this type of direct description of the world, a situation in which the third interpretation could be objectified, by using minimally-invasive gestures through which the metaphysical text could be compared to the inner onirical drifting, the delirium of a limitless proximity, prophesying the inevitable failure of its endeavour (2012: 69). The second objective of the present book is that of experimenting with a tri-phased glide from within the concept towards the category and argument(s), a transformation proving the repeated nature of permutations, an iterative way of revaluating the linguistic signifier and establishing its modal-unitary particularities (in detail: down to the predicates associated with objects). Continuing this idea, one must mention that argument represents a series of third-order premises launched with the intention of using, motivating and proving the interference potential of the three terms. From the three concept series23 allowing the transfer between concept– category–argument, the presence of the first term is compulsory, because 23

Three ships cross the ocean: after thirty-three days of travel, America is discovered by Columbus' team–a pretext for (re)using the three as an instrument of discovery and a sense transporter.

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it has the property of accepting multiple interpretation compatibilities (Peacocke, 1992). Starting from a minimal significance, with predictable targets of contextual transmutations and placing them inside a specific discourse, its denomination shows composite, descriptive and replaceable signals (Millikan, 2000). The category, as an intermediating-reclaimed formula on an Aristotelian technical channel (which, taking into consideration a list of expressed senses, according to his multiple classifications, denominates all the ways of being) illustratively establishes the way in which the object becomes the suggestive expression of “being”. Not by chance, Marian Popa (1968) signals by comparatism, taxinomism and neostructuralism the relationships which–syntactically, semantically or pragmatically-reinstate themselves between fictions, between the elements of a fiction, between fictions and interpretations, and between fictions and the reality which contains them. From the perspective of a more-morphological comparatism, M Popa denominates and classifies, by its structure, the heuristically-fictional character of modifiable, temporary, hypothetical –status response. From within the analytical tradition Gregory Currie (1990) adopts, words/concepts benefit from a capacity of preserving their senses both inside a fictional discourse and inside a non-fictional one. Such a way of preserving form imprints any sentence with a certain degree of truth. If the statements/constructs belonging to the fictional registry maintain a tendency to disbelieve in the fiction-making effect, seen as an explicit mode of fabricating fictions, it nevertheless imposes the creation of an institutional theory of fiction. The relationship between sliding concepts is strengthened by the relationship between distance–power–security, emphasizing the tri-phased aspects acknowledged in the argument of the third citizen-depending both on the settlement’s precondition, on power strategies (political, economic, cultural etc.) and on the consequences of the mixture between crisis– danger–risk–contagion. Integrated into this type of discourse/arguing method, distance is perceived as dimensional category, possessing the attribute of retreat into the opposing-value space couplings, by affording a privileged treatment to certain spaces (private sphere) to the detriment of others (public sphere) with the purpose of reclaiming a heterarchic, third-order space: power has the mission to facilitate “forced” interpretations of standard roles by the individual-protagonist, and to create the favourable context for negotiating rules useful to the group, and security projects acceptable alternatives

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addressing insecurity, resonating with the dominant message transmitted by the tri-phased registry–and security and safety and securization. A possible representation of Hecate-isms can be (re)found in the image below, which reunites the triad of distance–power–security24 by offering as a perceptual variation (via Gamble, 2001) the following equation: power=decision space regarding the acceptance of the one within or regarding the option of placing outside; identity = space of choosing between values and principles, with an accent upon loyalty, obligations and duties; order=space determining the general lines of social activity, by creating and consolidating (social) ties.

(Author) photo. Hecate’s three heads: Distance. Power. Security.

If distance is superimposed upon the image of a stable identity, power ties and unties, unites and divides, solidarizes and creates chaos, according to a pattern of obvious asymmetries, and flaunting a certain exteriority 24

Not by chance, in the context of spirit apparitions and bad omens (misfortunes, cataclysms, armed conflicts), Aniela Jaffé (1999) notes that time and space both suffer transformations and changes after the archetypal conscience becomes actualized (this leading to the non–intervention rule and forbidding any experimental modification of variations called spatial-temporal extensions). This shows that the only operant connection is underdetermined by evidence stating that time can only be measured by/in relationship to moving bodies inside space, as a reflection of the space-time continuum. Of course, the idea stating that, unconsciously, space does not play any role cannot be avoided!

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(compared to identity); with the fact that it can occupy space through deployment; security, as a non-symbolic instrument, built from a strong alloy, is reloaded through advanced, courageous extremities occupying avant-garde positions, or is imagined as open, inquisitive and attentive heads suggesting an action of danger-detection and annihilation by dismounting or extirpation, or the mission of being permanently on watch–a real mode of reacting to imminent risks and perils. The photograph represents an addressing the main symbols, concepts and themes that have already been discussed in the book, the intention of proving that identity, space and security can in equal measure be considered mobile arguments, with qualities signifying the idea of a place as an intersection of lines, creating the possibility of individuating a single point. Resorting to the technique of blur(red) photographs, we obtain an image emphasizing the deliberately illusory character of the three symbols, generating an absorption of stimuli. The image thus created betrays a Hecate whose aspect comprises three heads (built from three different alloys) representing in fact the three European principles: prosperity–security–liberty. On a philosophical-historical note, Paul Ricœur (2001) offered in his analysis a tri-phased grouping which could explain concisely and precisely any subject referencing responsible factors–seen as a support for the act of memory creation, with the capacity of processing memories and able to manipulate: the ego, the collectivity and our next of kin. The endeavour is considered absolutely necessary, when accepting the idea that neither the sociology of collective memory nor individual phenomenology can prove (in an asymmetrical acceptation, the relaunching of a meeting zone–a crossroads, our underlining) the legitimacy of coherent states of conscience for the ego; or collective memory’s capacity to bring to the fore common memories. On a semantically–grammatical level, the common language chiselled with instruments belonging to a certain oratorical praxis offers notes and explanations pertaining to any conditions/opportunities of using pronouns and pronominal possessive adjectives (me, mine, and all forms of singular and plural) with the needed mention that, in order to finish this remembrance process psychical operations are needed. The participatory involvement of the psyche is a confirmation of the fact that asserting one’s own memories, as they are reflected through language, is my own model of being, which can be applied to all psychic phenomena (2001: 153).

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An inclination towards egoism and closure inside a personal microuniverse, an exacerbated possessive sentiment of the ego25, or the inexplicable, uncensored and intense need for luxury (manifested in the often useless pleasure of stocking products) reveals, in a Baumanian note, the definite side of the personality of modern consumers becoming pragmatic citizens, individualistic, more and more alienated and detached from ethical and moral problems. Not blocked inside the one, any thesis about the relationship between practical predicates/real actions and psychic acts seems open to the dual registry, taking into consideration the fact that, when attributed to the self, predicate-actions can also be assigned to someone else; hence, the statement confirming that the registry of the three acknowledges a sum of compulsory preconditions expressed through suspended or operated attributes and preservations of the sense which predicates accept in two different situations, by maintaining dissymmetry as a rule of multiplication; dissymmetry of attributing to oneself–to another–multiple attributions. In a Husserlian acceptation, the coupling (the two/the pair) represents the silent operation, made in an ante-predicative plan: that operation which makes possible (even agrees with) the inclusion of another within the relationship. The third-order Ricoeurian perspective (re)unites representative occurrences and social practices, emphasizing the existence of an intermediate reference pole, belonging to those who have a distinctly generic type of memory, something quite special. Thus, one can certify the fact that any particularity of distance and proximity (minimal in the case of the next of kin, or the ones in immediate proximity, and maximal for the totally unknown others) becomes a beacon for any citizen contributing politically to the politeia or who is involved in social life or the actions of the polis. In fact, the registry of the three decides upon its own connections and is actualized by intersections between/in the next of kin (placed midway between the self and no one else–the impersonal) and through deviant relationships (useful neighbouring/privileges) 25

In the same sociological note, via Talcott Parsons, Mircea MaliĠa (2014) identifies three different units of the social system with reference to the one–a social actor, with ramifications in the multiple: the social actor is performed by a true actor and oriented towards one or more actors as–objects; the role- status, which one perceives in sets of reciprocal orientations; the actor himself as both object and author of a system of activities- roles. These Parsonsian mechanisms follow the rule of the three–here, learning, defence and adjustment, seen as mechanisms of personality profiling.

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The above-rendered observation corresponds to Ricoeur’s recommendation: “we must enter the field of history not just by the hypothesis of polarized individual-collective memory, but also by the triple attributions: the self, the next of kin, the others” (2001: 162). The formulated opinion transmits the necessity of establishing, as an instrument of work, either the individual/personalized valuation: one by one, or the collective approximation, favouring certain gathered looks, multiple appraisals or registry revelations. One can therefore accept the endeavour of degrading the one, immobilizing the two and activating, mutating and consolidating the three–an ultimate zone that Ricoeur considers to be the perimeter of really-functional discursive coherence: memory stops being attributed to the singular of the three grammatical persons, sensitive to being designated/addressed as one or another, and narrating a third in the singular, thus opening the prospective for third-order alternatives. After an objectively-critical analysis of this opinion, Aniela Jaffé (1999) elaborates her own assertions regarding the given theme, and warns us that the trappings of traditional thought have to be avoided at all costs– the one which sees formulations of phenomenal causality in the traditional time/space categories: choosing instead to associate these circumstances with the perspectives themselves. If, under the sign of the double, we emitted the hypothesis that there exists a “conscience A” outside the body, with a momentous character and a perception from the outside towards the inside, and a “conscience B’ independent and linked to a body, one might sustain the possibility of a “conscience C” as a consequence of intersecting the inside with the outside, a dependently-independent formula of temporary/perennial occurrences. The A–B–C interrelationship notes the real presence of parallel events, superimposed upon a certain order (by giving up any contaminating modality) by applying the method of tri-phased distancing: one–the other–the third. In an analytical, Jungian-Freudian interpretation, the transcending base of empirical phenomena and the unconscious at the base of consciousness would represent one and the same dimension, an interdependence obviously activating a neutral nature–the third–a tangent formula/expression, a transcendence of essence. Starting from Albertus Magnus’ and Gerardus Dorneus’ first intuitions about the transcendent one, Jung conceives a third seen from an alchemical perspective, defining it by terms such as the simple, the one or the unus mundus, and imbuing it with the right to participate in the same

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way both in the physical and the psychical world (Aniela Jaffé, 1999: 211212). One should not ignore in this conclusive context Robert Esposito’s invitation (2002) to clarify, in accord with Emile Benveniste’s theories (1978) the linguistic status of the two and the three, starting from the premise that the second and third person can only be correlated by a symmetrical superficial relationship, their association revealing in fact an oppositional proportion, marked and tensioned by the option of the three which adds/communicates “something” irreducible to the indissoluble dyad of the two. If the first and second person operate through validating selfreferences, and implicitly integrate the spatial-temporal concept, with an accent upon mutual reversibility, complementarity, role change and selffulfilment on different planes, the third rethinks its “something” statute by semantically perceiving it as a possibility of asserting a non-personal person. The third is not considered a person26 but a verbal form whose 26

We have to note here the ideas considering the fictional being as a pre-subject of knowledge, possessing an impersonal conscience, an endeavour offered by I.D. Gherea (1984), with a nodal point in the articulated “social being” and clarifying the relationship “between the ego and the world”. Between these two markings we can diagnose both the effect of distancing fictional character (produced by “interpretation”, an operation which transforms sensations into signals outside the field of impersonal conscience as initial markings of fictional beings), and also its transformation into a social being, advocating its ultimate quality of subjectivity within the act of knowing. Hence, the opportunity of creating a system of knowledge, subsuming conscious durations and decreeing that the fictional ego is an experimenter of “necessary interrelated fictions”: material object (“a unique possibility of sensations appearing either in one duration or in another”)–space (not just a useful fiction but also a metaphysical hypothesis and duration coordinator)–time (duration–successive series of conscious moments, seen as a whole in an idealistically vision). Symmetrical notions such as the primitive object (primitive matter)–primitive space and primitive time belong to the impersonal conscience. If the primitive object (presented as a system of possible sensations and unactualized potentialities, an assimilation mode of the possibility concept) selfpreserves its identity and corresponds to relatively identical sensations in order to become, during perception, a Mobius strip cut inside an impersonal duration of time, and deployed without continuity solutions (Gherea, 1984: 96), then objectivity is no more an inherent attribute of perceptions (being added as ulterior interpretations) and the investigated object has a personal duration, a property denied to the imagined object. It is impossible to describe from the perspective of an independent existence, primitive space is made up from various materials, alloys of complicated- fixed

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function is to represent the non-person (Esposito, 2002: 106). Conceptually, the third discloses the impersonal person, marking a space outside clearly delineated formulations by the projection of the second person’s own self, referencing only an externally referential object. In conclusion, such logic consequently confirms that the rule of the three is the only rule which can be used in order to assess a thing as predicate. Esposito considers the third person to be the strangest category, expressing a singular symbol with intensely plural potentialities, and proving it has the availability, determination and force to sustain and transmit the concept of plural, even when it is in the singular form. This explains the reason by which the third was invested with a nonperson status; this (the status) needs a non-defined set of impersonal beings admitting a third-order plural. In a comment upon the theory of the three, launched by Alexandre Kojève, Esposito signals the essence of third person intervention inside a binary dialectics, considering (in a Kojevian way, of course) that in the domain of the Droit, the involvement of an impartial, disinterested three into the plan of action will nullify any reaction coming from the two and the one, dismantling any binary dialectics.

laws to which the fictional being adds fictional content–multiplications of the real's faces and of the one reality. Space constitutes the composite form of indifferent motor distances, logically possible but diversified by their heterogeneous content, in the Poincaréian sense of the point, consisting of a class of kinesthetic reactions represented by a motor distance. The fictional being's body (an assertion predating Lyotardian aporias) neither rotates nor moves. Primitive space is continuously moving, heterogeneous, heterotypical (anticipating the Foucaultian perspective) and possesses a centre (occupied by the body of the fictional being) immobile and contingent. If sensations do not indicate anything, the appearance–essence opposition being inconceivable for the non-personal conscience, in this case primitive space has radial directions: when the fictional being wishes to displace an object, it rotates around its centre until an axial radius is reached; then, in successive stages, it attracts it towards the central body–a place of interesting things, a luminous band of primitive space; on both sides less interesting, imperfectly symmetrical sectors can be seen, with their meeting point at a secondary placement–the avoidable object space (Gherea, 1984: 137-140). With impossible-to-actualize data outside impersonal durations considered authentic primitive time, the trinome conscious duration–unconscious duration– fictional duration is reduced to the blueprint of the unique duration. As long as real and imagined contents are seen as simultaneous, the fictional being is able to conceive a duration interval made form ephemeral elements, by noting that duration is “a container destroyed by its contained” because, once identified, duration and conscience do not allow empty spaces [Cernica, 2008].

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The Kojevian hypothesis (2000) maintains that the three’s intervention is necessary and sufficient because it displaces such an analysis towards the domain of political science and suggests, as a functioning formulation (of Carl Schmittean origin), the active presence of a disinterested, objective and neutral third party. In an X-ray of the three types of justice (marked by the Master–Slave– Citizen categories) Kojève notices that the three maintains an active role in all instances (as legislator, judge and police) in order to impose its identity in the final stage, by proving its value as an independently disinterested category, showing it has not been contaminated by possibilities, with the possible exception of a role/group attributed to it at a historically given moment. Regarding the Cluj Circle debates (Centre for Imaginary Research27) exposed by phantasmal research as a method of pertinent diagnosis of postmodern symptoms which break airtight constructs considered to be inter-domain milestones, it launches the metaphor of the three-headed bridge28 which seems to be the appropriate sign/symbol for stamping any inclusion in postmodernity’s tide. Or, in Cornel Vâlcu’s vision, the metaphor clearly transmits the signal of being on the bridge, far from any 27

See for more details: http://phantasma.lett.ubbcluj.ro/?p=3380. The metaphor of the bridge is interpreted as a formula for transferring/welding temporal, spatial and/or contextual movements, the bridge becoming the transporting vehicle symbol (both connector and divider), open towards the interrelationship of opposed parts and separate directions. In its own way such a construct is more than a simple desire to unify places, taking into account the fact that, being already projected, its structure transforms the nature of space itself. On a sociological note, such a perspective is more interested in fragment(ations), thus from the middle one can see spaces which interconnect, with well- established roles in reclaiming an ontological feeling of security-artefact, culture conductor and exponent of synthesizing qualities at the same time. According to Simmel (1994), an important attribute of constructs would be just this escalation of visibility, an objective achieved by reuniting time and space, remounting the two halves: a process revealing interdependent functions and ambiguous forms, deployed in a virtual power laboratory as a way of exclusion/inclusion. The incarnate space, or the place as it is experimented, the bridge is defined in a Heideggerian manner (1993) as a socio- cultural matrix or as inter- related formulation of distant networks and rationally–calculated estimates of maximal costs: as a transversal stage of horizontally–vertical displacements or rhisomatic landmarks, in Deleuze and Guattari's acceptation (1980), without fixed signs: a dynamic bridge, heterogeneous and non-dychotomical, with open beginning and ending, stimulating nomadic flows, a middling, neutral landmark (Kuepers, Deeg, 2013). 28

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hard base, equally absorbed by the three pillars: objectity, subjectity and establishments acting as languages. In fact, the applied rationing and the explicitly expressed comment cannot be separated from the Humboldtian formulation of the ontological actantes triad and the Text’s alterity, stimulating a certain time-history internal tension which states that, even if it’s impossible for both to be concomitantly true, there exists a third between P and non-P, creating a space for the inside/outside, seen as the dream of a third subsuming the two. In an explanation of the propensity for three-headed bridge metaphors, Cornel Vâlcu confesses that (a similar confession could be made regarding the present book’s subject too) the idea appeared two-three years ago, using as a motivating support the desire to offer an answer in the form of “here, here, here” to any problems arising from relationships between (always the same!) generic terms a, b, c. This theoretical tension targets and proves the dissipation of postmodernity from/within different margins (three heads, three edges!) with the purpose of potentiating and valuating a definite(ive) reassessment in which the postmodern condition (neatly delineated from Harvey or Lyon’s conceptions) would represent an absorption/downward attraction, towards the three pillars of the bridge, and also a mimicry of frustrated gestures, the actante trying not to be bewitched by a Narcissus reflection. A possible solution for defusing the situation would be moving from one leg to the other, with the absolutely essential mention referencing the compulsory three-time leg change, a ritualistic movement of equilibrium transmitting the message “when you are safe you are not on the bridge”; in this context, the bridge loses its value as a metaphor for a divided relationship and becomes synonymous/substitute for de-relationing/deterritorialisation. Based upon this type of comment, the significance (retraced from the sphere of the absurd) of third-order construct/construction can be reloaded, targeting the novel revolutionary attitude of a bridge builder who would act in a bizarre/illogical and unexplainable way: “a person who gathers material for a bridge, but instead of building it he wastes the material by throwing it at passers-by”. In the line of a Humboldtian endeavour we can advance the idea that, if alterity exercises a double pressure upon the subject–deterministic and finalistic–in the sense of communication as an attribute/distribution of the one, objectivity interferes with the third semiotic moment/report: if the first two demand to be commented, the third reclaims interpretation.

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Appealing to the synonymic rule of the “either”–either a trinity or a still life–these concepts (such as the light interpretation of the eidos, trying to pin the word’s semantic potentialities with direct reference to its sense/content) maintain the conjugated relationship including the subject’s sense/content, the manner in which it perceives the product-object and the message transmitted by the word, considered to be a sense-sound linguistic unit. Equally divided in the registry of the three, the developing relationship illustrates the interdependence object–subject–language. This metaphor has a privileged, pre-eminent position (to the disadvantage of the technical): the image of the three-headed bridge reaffirms the (pre)established movement between/in the three constituting agents whose status is not yet clear, but only modified by making contact with the second-order others. Sanctioned from the perspective of the three, Cornel Vâlcu’s metaphor proves that the ego represents the strongest category in the triple equation of ontological agents, the one which suffers doubling, designed both as author of the synthesis and as owner of the occurrence’s headquarters, divided between/in alter and ego: always-displaced, the ‘I’ remains/is one; the two anticipates the third-order plan of language (signifier– designated–sense) and the third emphasizes in an Aristotelian way, the initial relationship’s dynamis/energheia. From the perspective of a postmodern–ontological–gnoseological triad, Europe’s philosophical history can be placed, in a symbiotic concept offered by Donatella di Cesare–Wilhelm von Humboldt, within the perimeter of a third epoch focused excessively upon language, on what, in an Ecoian acceptation, is accepted as third-order language, an operational procedure of dismantling the subject-object dyad by dividing it by three. Such an exhaustive presentation of the three’s discourse reflexes cannot omit the objectives of a “theoretically correct” analysis, in which the passage from being to individual is a concept subordinated to the ideology of citizenship, with all the perturbations within the registries deciding, paradoxically, that the person can replace the citizen, and that any failure in applying a functional version of the rights of man as well as an emphasis upon their failure to establish a connection between life and rights, does not target a personal ideology but happens just because of it (Esposito, 2002: 5). In the same discourse equation, Blanchot (1993) notes that the thirdorder relationship is a vertigo initiating a communication situation between two partners, able to interrupt and ignore any prohibitions which might exist between them.

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If the neuter/neutral is not simply a three added to the two, but subsumes all the qualities of the non-general, the non-generic and the nonparticular, aspects which would ensure a corresponding basis for the transition between one–two–three, then, in a Blanchotian manner, any analysis has to start with the three (under the sign of an always-derived subject–one sees, one speaks, one dies); or, in a Simmelian note (1950), the three has a decisively qualitative role in creating and defining social situations.

6.3. Hecate and New Categories of the Monstrous A blog dedicated to astrological predictions opens with the following clear-cut statement, “Initially I wanted to tell you about Hecate. But I realized it would be difficult to do so if I left out or omitted certain explanations. So, if you want to find out about Hecate’s influence upon your astrological themes, you have to meet the Dragaica first! And in order to know the Dragaica, you have to understand the Sanziene and see their real face! It’s probably not the only way, but I found it very simple…29” … truly an invitation able to overthrow already-built eidetic plans and to deflect pre-created (and overly travelled) paths when interpreting important problems, and it can change already-formulated conclusions, especially the ones in a book–such as the present one–which seemed to be heading, without any premonitory signs (at least not badomened ones!) towards the completion of an endeavour already projected inside a systemic situation. And because any serious astrogram cannot dispense with the archived signals of its time, the goddess Hecate’s astrogram gives the impression of trying to integrate an unsettling area from which Romanian folklorizing coincidences, futurology and souvenirs from the Cold War cannot be separated; on the 11th of July, 1968, Hecate was in a retrograde movement in 15.34 degrees of Aquarius, in conjunction with the Black Moon and in opposition with Pluto; on the night between the 23rd and the 24th of June, Hecate opens the gates of the nether world so that the dead can return and visit their relatives; the way Hecate (the 100 asteroid) is placed within one’s birth chart can be indicative of a “crossroads zone”, a natural

29 See for more (threshold, sic!) details Otilia Mazilu, “Nemuritoarele Spirite: Sânzienele, Drăgaica ‫܈‬i Marea Zei‫܊‬ă, Hekate”, AstroText, http://www.astrotext.ro/2013/05/nemuritoarele-spirite-sanzienele-dragaica-simarea-zeita-hekate/, accessed (a little too late to change anything of the present book's essence, sic!) on July 1st, 2014.

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affinity for practising magic, witchcraft or choosing alternative healing methods and experiencing spiritually intense moments. From the gallery of defining syntagms (particularly symbolic and multiple valences of the goddess’s personality) attributed to Hecate, we must mention: possessing magical powers, interested in the occult, natural therapy healer, preoccupied by the study of plant therapy, passionate about studying nature on a spiritual level, possessing mediumistic powers, prophetic dreams and a fine intuition. Under the impression of this pre-telling, it is compulsory to signal the fact that the phantasm represents more of a concept than a pulsionally fabricated object, misappropriated from its usual role but possessed of invented, multiplicative fragments, outside the self, obtained by modification and by the intercession of that third-order habeas corpus, allowing it to logically prove the necessity of its own existence: somewhere, there has to exist at least one body able to transcend in/by a segmental use which constitutes the action of passing beyond, through cutting a part from the surface of the other's body and appropriating it to the body of the subject who fantasizes (Lyotard, 2001: 83). In the analytical note offered by Andi Mihalache and Silvia MarinBarutcieff (2010), to imagine is the product and effect of to iterate, and shows a technique allowing us to avoid the truth–imagination dichotomy, or gives the second category more importance, by emphasizing its constituting episodes/segments, or to imagine means the real to which fiction is subsumed. Amongst the philosophical strategies of fiction, in the Genetian sense of thematic literarity (manifested in/through fiction) we note the special relationship between the dimension and the concept, defined as recessive, of complacency and compromise. A mixture illustrating, from equidistant positions, a fictional perspective on reality; with realism, the fictional becomes an intrinsic part of any fiction, because the form of any concept is inserted in the substance of the other. It is not by chance that Jean-Jacques Wunenburger’s opinions (2009) about the role and implication of the fictional in relationship with fiction confirm the functioning blueprint of the imaginary, already decreed and easy to review inside the substance of a few node levels, establishing that the fictional includes the infrastructure (corporeal experience) and the superstructure (science), as landmarks of transcendental imagination independent of any accidental contents of empirical perception. Both an image and a perception/representation, but also identity/verbalization, the fictional values the holistic (the whole) to the disadvantage of the atomistic (the basic compositional element) declaring

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that, beyond a certain theatricality (themes, motives, stories, props) there exists a segment/space/sector, maintained by the secondary, indirect sense of the concept (object, temporality, space). By accepting the object, time, space, and the couple character–author as structural elements of the fictional, an immediate observation would note that these categories have a double mission, posing as both operators of the fictional being and of identity. In fact, both these value functions are opposed to the fixed Bergsonian traditions and the relationship static–closed system–dynamic open system (Durand, 1992) revealing through their fictional being a perceptive, passive rudiment; and through their fictional identity, dynamism with renewed significances. We are not surprised to observe that Hecate’s profile has completely feminine characteristics30. Re-read in Aniela Jaffé’s interpretation (1999) the feminine is the expression equivalent to destiny in waiting, betraying a premonition and constituting a hyperbolization of the archetype and the mother. From the multitude of already-discussed cases, seen as serious responses to an inquiry made by the Swiss magazine Schweizer Beobachter and discussed by Aniela Jaffé, we will note the idea that the feminine monstrous allows a description of three entities: a first narrative tells the story of the man who was married three times, and who, just before his death, dreamed about three women–the first wife, from behind who peeked the second, and the third who was farther off (1999: 55); the second presents a legend that is actualized in the story of a virgin who was cursed, and her redeeming remedy implied three kisses she would have to get from three metamorphosed persons/entities: the first was an exceptionally beautiful being, the second was the ugliest man, and the

30

Aniela Jaffé (1999: 226) signals the fact that in the symbology of the number three, three is a dynamic, masculine figure, indicating in dreams a fourth element which will be actualized in the future. We consider that in Hecate's case the feminine three, accepting masculine animal analogies, corresponds to a release from the everyday, the usual, and the chance of plunging into the monstrous–showing events synchronically linked to feminine aspects which in a Jungian and Jafférian acceptation, we can associate with a form symbolized by the triplicity of the event. We do not wish to avoid in this context any statement considering the seer widow who becomes a prototype of Amazon-specific femininity. Widows, akin to social, psycho-revolutionary bombs, reiterate a hysterical–historical road of feminine– masculine phenomenology, along the lines of ontological continuity (Bréda, 2010: 40-41).

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third, who metamorphosed into an entity who had to kiss her, was the Devil himself (1999: 116). Appreciated both for the impression it creates as well as for the flaunted expression, feminism has to be disassociated from any invitation extended by the hermetic [which Julius Evola subsumed to death and life, and named a conductor of temptation] which maintains that the primary force is feminine and which is moulded upon triphased nature31: the happy nature of the Highly placed man: the mortal nature of the lower realms: the tribe of the Kingless Ones, in ascension, Miriam’s place, the winged virgin, the power of One, the King’s Wife or the Matron (1999: 29). Such narratives adequately exemplify the correlation between the availability of conscience and subconscious containers or subconscious information, and offer the chance to discover, in Hecate’s triple-headed image, a surplus of personality/individuation; a model of monstrous perfection32. We must note in this sense the absence of details about Hecate’s body and also the nonexistence of data and facts about the ramifications of her body or, on the contrary, its unitary or tri-corporeal construct. A lack of both integral and complete descriptions including any data necessary for a faithful portrait, confirms the goddess’s transcendental vocation, expressed by disengaging from terrestrial reality and opting for another space/context–immaterial and ancestral. Ignoring the happy-intuition redirection33 of the monstrous in order to achieve an interference with the literary (metaphorical) registry, the poetical endeavour Hecate will come (with atmospheric opening in the spirit of William Blake’s paintings, dedicated to Hecate, 1795) illustrates the image of death with three faces and traces of sand on the soles of her feet (accumulating rest and movement or suggesting dreaming and euphoria) correlated with an image of Hecate riding her Dog: a constant, everyday presence, from morning to night, the three-headed goddess is the 31

In the sense of homogenized-morphemic (self)identification, Nature can be equated with the Pesiunt deity, the Mother of the Gods, the Cecropian Athena, the Paphos Venus, Diana Dictyna, Proserpina Stigyana, Ceres, Junona, Bellona, Nemesis Rhamnusia or Hecate. 32 On a theological note, the report allows a subsumation to the concomitances: one nature–one instance, one nature–one hypostasis. 33 Hecate could not be appeased: the site of Craiova magazine Sisif (no. 28-29, February 2011), in which the poem Hecate will come appeared, turned out to be defective. Postings on the site/blog: https://lifewritingjournal. wordpress.com/ 2011/06/ belong to Raluca Cristina, in the “Ars Moriendi” section, and author rights belong to Raluca Bădoi, 2011.

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permanent companion of any mortal, a devoted protector and supervisor in all life’s moments, assuming the mission of presiding over one’s destiny, proving she is patient, wishful, maternal. “Hecate will come and knock on your door, will open your locks, and will take your treasures”. Such a metaphorical image has to be included in the re-interpretative endeavour of theatrical perception, and the significance of creation/existential acts, in the sense in which Fr. Bréda (2010) considers as an existential happening, involved in the artist-politician relationship, warning us against the conviction that, unhesitatingly, the meta-cosmic conscience will choose ‘the first’. Offering another name for the Malmesbury Beast, Th. Hobbes (1994) states that art has the means and special properties needed to create an artificial animal, speculating a concordance from the imitative sphere which discovers in the Leviathan (with all the Carl Schmittian emendation of selective imprecision equating the State with Leviathan and not with Behemoth) an artificial man, of a different size and increased force, whose artificial soul is sovereignty and whose health –disease–death triad is observed and guided by events such as concord–uprising –civil war. This kind of mechanical approach suggests the model of the organism as a starting point, taking into account one of the statements that nature functions like an animal body or God is a body, and launching the image of the crowned giant whose body includes every individual on a smaller scale. In the same interpretative vision practised by Fr. Bréda (2010), any technical/techniciz(ing) tricks would be efficient in creating zoomorphic impersonations, filtered by the theatrical theology of masked gods, with the avowed intention of returning to psycho-optical metaphors of the polymorphous truth, with successive roles imbued with the aim of opening the gates of both fabulous and confabulate bestiarium. Hence we arrive at the conclusion that we must accept the three as a meta-mathematical metamorphosing matrix/multiverse (2010: 18). Subsumed into the operation of decoding the symbolism of the triphased monstrous–dragon, giant serpent or crocodile–the Leviathan (which should not be awoken from its sleep) flaunts its intense properties, seen in the unequivocal significance of terms denominating disorder, pitiless force, the chaos, evil, the invincible, the monstrous mouth– entrance to Inferno, the Hebrew equivalent of the one who gathers himself or the one who is sent out. Representing the faithful image of the supreme beast, seen as the colossal soldier enrolled on the side of evil, and availing itself of an imagological transcription in/on a rounded-belly elephant walking on two

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legs or, in a biblical sense, defined as a giant hippopotamus, with a tail as hard as a cedar but charged with the role of being the infernal singer/cupbearer, Behemoth seems to personify, in a literary registry34, the companion and feline comforter, a burlesque allusion to the status of a disciplined, solvable animal. Interpreted in a Hobbesian35 note from the perspective of political philosophy, the monstrous is equated with the arbitrariness of the state, and the Commonwealth’s direction is attributed to a monarch whose welldefined portrait represents a giant, artificially-conceived man, with limbs that monitor and rule the whole of state machinery and occupy all social functions: from men, courts, judges, private property, laws, to schools and/or virtues. Such a forced, fictional screenplay imposes sovereignty as an artificial soul, able to animate and coordinate the whole body-system of society, while adversity (rebellious forces, including war) is just one of the possibilities proclaiming its imminent, unavoidable, (un)real end. Apparently placed upon a tautological pedestal, the film Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959) with the original title The Giant Behemoth, creates favourable conditions for an event marking, inside a global post-atomic era background (in which men–masters of the Earth–have as only profession, preoccupation and obsessive aim in life, the cultivation/veneration and imitation of the monstrous), the birth of the monstrous is guaranteed by the exponential growth of radioactivity, a bomb with unforeseen effects, germinating in oceans which have become deadly-infernal conglomerates. The signs of the Hiroshima nuclear catastrophe, the real, striking testimonies, the palpable consequences of the unpleasant aftermath of a nuclear explosion, are diagnosed and empowered by the profile of a new Behemoth (coming from the waters, burning like fire, projecting giant 34 This comment references the scene placed in the introductory part of the Master and Margarita novel, where Behemoth first appears “a strange feline landing on the stairs of tram A” which had just stopped; it “insolently pushed a woman who, once outside, started to cry blue murder, tried to get hold of the metal bar and even tried to give the ticket vendor a ten-kopek coin for the ticket. The tomcat proved to be a solvent and disciplined animal. Waiting until all three wagons (we note!) passed in front of him, it jumped on the rear stairs, closed its claws upon a rubber piece and rode all the way to its destination, thus saving a few kopeks too”. 35 In an interpretation of the Hobbesian Leviathan, Mircea MaliĠa (2014) sees in the zoological metaphor a way of producing effects in contrast with the rationality of social organization, a way of transposing sense-transporting symbols from the theological kingdom inside the new, rational and secular realm.

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lights)–a denomination (right name) given it by its first victim, the old fisherman, confirmed by the priest at the funeral, and therefore accepted by the whole international community. The monstrous accepts a description based upon contrasts, being shown as a shadow creeping in the night behind the fire, and likened to a shark or a tiger, compared with a palaeontological specimen or a tornado. The monstrous is also characterized by two images: in the first, it is particularly invested with the identity of a marine brood that adapted to dry land conditions; in the second, it is imagined as a creature possessing an electrical, radioactive body. The theme of this subchapter is made relevant by relationing the monstrous and space, in the sense in which Behemoth represents the aspace (the blank)–impossible to see on a radar screen–which destructively imprints a place made unsuitable for the form and dimension of the monstrous. Thus, with a body resembling the submarine hunting it, Behemoth is related to the whole array of transport means: the footprint next to the parked police car, boat, ship, submarine, helicopter and, indirectly, charged with yet other spatializing coordinates–3.1.9–which reference the same registry of the three and its multiplications in relationship to the one, becoming a problem of military-political handling/solving, against any scientific and especially theological arguments. Thus, the biblical support becomes remarkable only through the landmarks of an evacuated/deserted/unformed space–borrowing the real coordinates (of the London Bridge, the Thames etc.), a space which, awaiting the Apocalypse, launches premonitory post apocalyptical signs, and whose witnesses/victims of the monstrous are submitted to contamination, burning, disfigurement, transfiguration. In the financial documents of the film direction department there is mention of the budget problems forcing the film’s producers to use the crushed car sequence three times. This coincidence is not too far-fetched: neither for the registry of the three, nor for the image used, because the car accepts interpretation and can be seen as a conventionally artificial instrument of displacement, of travelling through space and avoiding distances, while being nevertheless labelled as an industrial product, fabricated, in contrast to natural states. Deliberately, the final news of contaminated America is transmitted in the car, on its radio (sic!) By accepting and valuing the registry similes, the Monster dog (1984) movie, using the alternate name Leviatán, (re)plans inside the score of the coincidental protagonist-soloist (Alice Cooper) the recording of an

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experiment (“we are going to create something truly unique”) with the ultimate intention of filming a rock video. The protagonist’s return, after the same twenty-year interval, anticipates the monstrous screenplay, in conjunction with ancestral signs: the old caretaker who stayed behind in the deserted house, the fog, the blocked road, the police investigation of five murders (2+3, “the dogs have already added three victims to their CV”) and the rabid dogs, the wind dissipating the fog and the clouds covering the moon. Multiplied, the Leviathan is subsumed to the accursed, pitiless dogs who are everywhere, intelligent and unpredictable, banking upon the nonexistence of a survival formula, beyond the limits of the normal and the rational: “We are almost in the year 2000. I am an expert in rock videos; you are one of the world’s greatest rock stars.” Beyond a certain propensity for the unexplainable, along the lines of “Werewolves–myths, legends and scientific explanations”, the abovementioned film assumes the role of offering explanations which can eventually identify risk factors, able to trigger heart disease, transforming the patient into a kind of madman, a beast who howls at the moon, not unlike a wolf, without omitting the genetic inheritance and deliberately referencing the paternal prototype (the father–the cause of any monstrously-evil occurrence, becoming a ritual sacrifice). On this paternal line, the son–who assumed the father’s place/role–is now the designated leader who commands/controls the dogs, becoming the new king of the monstrous, who could also be named the Werewolf, the Murderous Animal, or the Monster Dog. In the fight between man and monster the first will (apparently) win: the monstrous is discredited and destroyed as a whole (in order to avoid the scattering of the rest), by a direct hit, akin to a land mine’s explosion on impact, maintaining radioactivity inside (see Behemoth the Sea Monster). Continuing the series of postmodern commentaries (we should read, post apocalyptic) of the biblical fragment dedicated to Job or of the Hobbesian approach, the (not by chance) Russian production Leviathan (2014) investigates the social-political post-communist conjecture in order to extract the landmarks of an operant Great Demon, lacking substance, a perfect/perfected organism, guided by entropy, with superior powers, imagined as an expanding macro-structure. The cinematographic interpretation delivered by Zvyagintsev denies any moralizing potential: Nikolai’s segmented destiny is that of an innocent, even if the Leviathan of the Old Testament is now reloaded by the Church, which sustains its monstrous structure by its perverted, twisted role.

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With all these unavoidable biblical inserts, close to the access key which would offer us Revelation, we can attribute the role of Genesis to the natural state, demanding a reorganized society as way of attaining happiness, but not giving up the three main causes of sin–competition, shyness and glory-which are structurally integrated into the invader’s profile–conquering, domineering; of the opposing defender–just domineering; and of the vain high-minded character, a lover of glory and supremacy. This approach targets in fact historically accumulated tensions, from the first conflict, ending with the supreme sacrifice (the first skirmish is mentioned from the start, with Cain and Abel as its protagonists) towards a displacement of accent, from morality towards preserving human nature: the natural right implies the freedom to choose, thus allowing the individual to express his own options. Traced with clear lines, proportionate to the dimensions of the world's face, the man’s portrait seems to be an aggregation of mechanisms for functioning in accord with local causality principles and physical interaction, portraying the body as a machine controlled by the mind and independent from the soul, but imprinted with sentiments–humours, as a result of chemical processes, offering answers governed by cold calculations. The Hobbesian analysis (2005) can be extended to the subject-object relationship, guided by sensation and coordinated by cognitive-sensitive factors, by the visible species and the intelligible entity (the visible image, the seen–heard entity) essential for understanding, but also by corporeal positioning whose language can express conflicting sentiments: desire is transmitted by the closeness between subject and object; and the actante’s aversion, rejection and antipathy, by distancing. In the same analytical note, Hecate’s profile is convincingly created with the help of the representational method, by presenting the action of things through conventionally rewriting (via Democritus) and accepting them as sensations. If every man can prove that the image of every object seen through a reflection in glass/water does not correspond to the image from or inside these conductive filters (Hobbes, 2005:46) then applying certain technicisms (discourses) certifies the fact that a succession of representations imprints either a passage from anything towards anything, or the rebound effect (a spring’s return to the initial position after the force acting upon it vanishes). Noting that, even in the absence of sensation, the image/representation persists, Hobbes (2005) identifies in fact the properties of fantasy,

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perceived in a triphased pattern as obscure–expansive–challenging, properties converging upon a representation of the monstrous as a concept created from parts, based on sensations perceived in different moments. Such a statement allows us to identify Hecate-isms with experiments (memories of successive things, one after another, and of simultaneity) with conjecture (reviewing histories) and the sign/signal (harmonizing previous events and their subsequent prescriptions). Logically, we can discuss the problem of goddess Hecate’s given name, in this representational sense which, according to Hobbes (2005) men possess to the detriment of wild beasts (who forget the place where they hid the bones) considering naming as a visible/sensible means of bringing representation into memory36. If we almost unanimously accept the existence of two directions of examination for the monstrous–explicit and implicit–this last chapter takes into account the European doubly-beneficial way of inter-comprehension, by accepting a discourse based on the existence of similarities, but avoiding the politics of a speaker who abstains from using a third language when in the presence of two persons who use related languages. One must note that the monstrous can be theorized only if we clearly state its tri-phased registry coincidences, which demand that monsters be placed at the top of the hierarchy, because they have the dominant qualities of the grotesque and are the result of the fusion of elements of different origins (Kaiser, 1968): when its compatibility/equivalence with the grotesque is tested, the monstrous borrows a diverse range of signifiers; the estranged world and the absurd game, invoking and subduing demonic aspects; these are but a few of the semantic correspondents of the term monstrous=mask, automatism, mechanical construct, abysmal/unregulated aesthetics of the ambiguous, mark of the crisis (Hocke, 1973). From this perspective, we have to focus again on the Jungian method (1999) of synchronicity, seen as a term opposed to synchronism, the first expressing more than a simple simultaneity between two events, according to the relationship already present between two or more events which are not in a causal correlation, but have identical significance and accept a temporal coincidence. We would thus be in the presence of a sense correspondence, whose interpretation demands an intermediary with 36

In the same dychotomical optics, the beast does not benefit from denomination systems, because it does not feel the loss of one of its many cubs, who have only ordering names–one, two, three etc. In Aniela Jaffé's interpretation (1999: 131), knowledge of the name chases away the helping spirit: a name is the equivalent of essence, and knowing it gives power to the one who finds it out.

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amplifying reflexes actualized in the extension of identical images from the same source. According to Jaffe’s opinion (1999:22), Hecate’s astrogram is correctly interpreted and has an impact only if we take into consideration the idea that “not everyone notices the same things, but only those born under a certain sign (…) the 24th of June, on the Sanziene day”. The instantly noticeable idea is the reactivation of an impersonal underlying layer reinvigorating a series of events, as background arguments37. The announced ideas and observations approximate the willingly– assumed distancing of both the present chapter and the whole book from the trap of endisms, catastrophism and apocalypses, and also considers that the moment when the monstrous will be reinstated in its own right is approaching, under the form of technicisms–Hecate-isms–with involving roles in the configuration of changed/changing profiles. According to Sloterdijk (2000) the monstrous has to be considered an extreme phenomenon, with everyday dimensions, which can be modified by giving up certain existences/apparitions and/or attributes of localizing/particular(izing) passengers and defining an aggregation state, by germinating an anthropic-monstrous form. In the same acceptation (2000) the world is conditioned and maintained by the monstrous positioning of the human and by its capacity to sustain, assert, contest or deny any truth considered to be at the same time unsettling, enigmatic, unpredictable and dangerous. The ontological monstrous is born near and in the intimacy of a common being, without any divine descendancy and through adopting a pertinent attitude towards the truth. Ciprian Vâlcan’s comments (2004) about the Sloterdijkian endeavour which concentrated on the theme of the monstrous in order to target the philosopher’s argument for considering modernity as “the era of the monstrous” and offering as example the classical image of the actor–god, a manipulator of monsters. After all, the above opinion could open and describe three phenomenological fields with specific resonance in the triad that are already identified by the present work (distance–power–security) maintaining the existence of a monster for space, another one–for time, and a third, within the essence/structure of man-made things. 37 We need to mention from this point of view the gesture to which the researcher and astronomer Camille Flammarion resorted, in accordance to his philosophicpolitical arguments, when he deliberately published his researches about the reactions and behaviour of people on their death bed, in Annales politiques et littéraires.

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If the flat monster is a creation of uniform cosmic places, with its cartographic-pragmatic inserts, and if the deep monster acknowledges the strange, the absurd and the angst impossible to express or explain, the third-order monster–Hecate38–would be (re)converted in a combinatorial, hybridizing formulation, with deconstructive virtues, instantaneous and domesticated, becoming a code for nothingness. Vâlcan (2004) states that “Sloterdijk’s monstrous is an abstract force, a solution diluted by the sublime and the ridiculous, the impossible story of the Prague rabbi’s Golem, translated in the post-metaphysical idiom of the moment”. The significance of this statement creates an opportunity to remark upon/identify another hypothesis in our book, that the monstrous represents just another simple function of the context. We can offer a vision similar to Jean Céard’s (1980), another conclusive appraisal which references the status of Hecate-isms: enigmatic and obscure(izing), Hecate-isms are a median category allowing, even encouraging the multiplication of contraries, interrelating them and projecting a proportionate platform of expanding possible solutions. The idea transmitted by Cătălin Avramescu (2003) signifies a mature, serious proposal for returning to the original source (the prime matter) of a science which has as its object of study the natural law theatre, a kind of speculative geography concerned with describing/explaining the bizarre, that which is beyond the limits of common human understanding/knowledge, in a space/place of endless expanses, where civilized individualities are doomed to die and the limit between the normal and the abnormal is relaxed (18). In a Foucaultian acceptation (1999), three classifications of the abnormal exist: the first class is represented by the primordial political monster, tyrant and prime model for ulterior deviations; the second category includes the popular monster, multishaped and violent; and the last defines the modern criminal, germinated from the social contract theories, as a product of regressed natural states, with the absolutely essential mention that the popular monster and the princely monster are abnormal types opening up routes towards many sciences, most particularly anthropology and/or criminal psychiatry).

38

Operating a mixture between monstrosity and witchcraft, the Penny Dreadful TV series delivers as an operating evil scene, the scene of the three malefic females, focusing upon the privileged role of Hecate- the only one able to fulfil the Luciferian tasks. In fact, the whole registry of the series implies, without any clear delimitations, the whole range of the monstrosity–from Frankenstein to Kali (sic!), a portrait from which Hecate cannot be ignored.

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In the language of the moral code, moral monstrosity is the only untranslatable form/concept, being considered as an abnormal episode lacking adverse/specific judicial consequences (Avramescu, 2003: 50). On an incisive note, the antique conception establishes that the one who lives alone, isolated from the others, is either an animal or a god, but in any case is not human, and imposes a new analysis of the societas– communitas option, seen through the prism of sentimental sociability, which records expected reactions of shyness or terror, as manifestations of natural man; thus, any scientific rational deduction about man should reclaim the nature of the political body, and cannot be exclusively built upon sentiments of natural sociability. The existence of monsters trigger animated debates, being considered possible/real in some cases, or totally out of the question, in others. The monstrosity effect is subsumed under the nature of a contingent relationship, starting from the observation that a monster poses the problem of clarifying definitions and legal concepts, as the exclusive prerogative of sovereign authority, namely the state being forced to decide the problems of the monster's existence, and even to denominate them. Modernity’s monsters separate themselves from their predecessors’ radical alterity and become household appendices; or represent deviations from the figure of normality, towards the category of the aesthetic, accepted in Rousseau`s sense, and signifying more strangeness than a fearsome countenance, more the effect of deformity upon conceptualisation than of a horrifying image. And this is the moment for reproducing, in concise yet allencompassing style, in the context of novel approaches and surprising, often shocking occurrences, Christa Wolf’s prescient statement (2002: 13) reflected in the avowed truth “even… the dead gods rule”. The essence of the message confirms the idea that, between the geographical coordinates of antique Colchis (with dark secrets, expressively called the wild edge of the world) and Corinth (a space covered in/with gold) lies a territory and lives a world where “desires and appetites give value to matter” by founding a third beacon, with a mobile, elastic, living axis and invested with metamorphic capacities. A third serpent (not that of Eden39 or of the desert) elicits a new temptation, borrowing external qualities (the Colchidean twisted monster,

39

In the spirit of literary dialogue, Nichita Danilov (Locomotiva Noiman, 2008) takes the religious fantasy a bit further, in a Bulgakovain manner, stating that the fate of the world would have been different if two men, instead of one, were created alongside Eve. The assertion notes that the marital triangle is marked by

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enormously long, with three heads, thick as a tree trunk and spitting fire, symbolizing danger, violence or aggression and generating fear and terror) or displaying domestic features (snakes are household gods, peaceful, harmless, protected–kept near the hearth and fed). In fact, the monstrous offers itself as a category which exists by creating/fabricating heroes and/or converting heroes to counter-heroes40. And who else, besides Medea–Hecate’s priestess–can domesticate the monstrous, sitting beside the phallic trunk of the strong oak tree, through murmured incantations (whispered–sung) and dripping in its eyes a few drops of freshly-extracted juniper sap? Asleep, the feminine monster–the snake–becomes one with its tamer…

boredom, and the erotic game can only be actualized in three: “you cannot do in two what you can do in three”. In the idea of replaying the temptation scene, and establishing that all evils–incest, crime, schizophrenia, suspicion–come from the duality, the offered solution maintains that the multiple act in which two play their roles and the third supervises them from the Heavens (not by chance, the registry of the three will accent the biblical cycle of the New Testament–three mages, three kings, the threephased transfiguration, three crosses/three crucified men, the three cock crows, resurrection after three days, the trinity etc.): “if the third would have acted, Adam would have lost his frustrations”. Not by chance, in validating the present book's hypotheses, the selected literary insert traces certain directions which the present endeavour follows too: within the registry of the three (two men and a woman) any sliding from the light towards the darkness or from the light towards the shade project a twisted ribbon, a Möbius strip in which fullness- twisted- into- emptiness decrees that only the void can create pleasure; the three bodies forge an unexpected statuary group, with a totemic head (after the Hecatean model) on top; in the middle and below- down, a larger head; also in the middle, a smaller head; and above, just part of a head; the third–degree game involves both cards and zodiac signs. Geometriz(ingly) attempting to reduce the triangle to the line, Noiman witnesses its counter- transformation, creating multiple ramifications (multiplications, we note) both logical and unclear at the same time (Danilov, 2008, 206). 40 Suggested by the Romanian Researcher, Valentin Trifescu, Athanassia Zografou`s book, Chemins d'Hécate: portes, routes, carrefours et autres figures de l'entre-deux (Centre international d'étude de la religion grecque antique, Liège, 2010), examines just the space–time relations as one of the possible ways by which Hecate’s connections can be inventoried.

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SOME AFTERWORD NOTES: ON THE STAIRS OF THE TRIAD’S THEATRICAL TEMPLE FRANÇOIS BREDA

Hecate triformis, quosque iurauit mihi deos Iason, quosque Medeae magis fas est precari: noctis aeternae chaos, auersa superis regna manesque impios dominumque regni tristis et dominam fide meliore raptam, uoce non fausta precor. Seneca, Medea, Actus Primus, Scene I, 7-13.

The human spirit will find the goddess Hecate (ਬțȐIJȘ), the Tricephalous, Obscure and Occulted goddess, the Monstrous and Demonstrable Trivia, everywhere within the being’s texture; the spatial – temporal field is interspersed by this mysterious form which is the simulacrized Triad. The being’s revelation or self-revelation communication, articulated inside the epiphany of the Third, thus occurs on the stage of ontological theatricality under the morphological traits of iconic masks, at once composite and polysemantic. Being an ample monograph dedicated to the functionalities of the Triad, the absolutely magisterial book written by Viorella Manolache deals with the proposed theme in a remarkably scholarly manner and with complex theoretical depths. The present work is built, according to its subject, as a genuine epistemological trilogy, and presents the various philosophical, semantic and politological aspects of the problem under a new and interesting light. Punctual and innovatory analyses of hermeneutic interpretations are complemented by a whole range of empirical associations. For daringly trying to associate form and methodological encasements, Viorella Manolache’s book opens new practical possibilities for

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humanity’s liberation, in its instance as homo viator, from the traps of schizoid dichotomic dualities. The heuristic value of this theoretical endeavour is amplified by the fact that the author, a first–rate researcher in Central Europe, achieves a neutralizing rebalancing of ideological and geopolitical antagonisms. The solution offered by Viorella Manolache–The Theory of the Three– is a truly magical instrument allowing us to overtake, to sort, to selectively filter, and to pass The Three through the Past, and in this quality Hecateism, with its plausible operational applications, will also become a way of programming and formatting the future.

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Mihalache, Andi, Silvia Marin-Barutcieff (coord.). 2010. De la fictiv la real (imaginea, imaginarul, imagologia) [From Fictive to Real (Image, Imaginar, Imagology)], Jassy: Editura Universitatii Al. I. Cuza; Mihali, Ciprian, Polgár, Al., Sîrbu, Adrian T. 2005. O conversa‫܊‬ie cu Boris Groys despre condi‫܊‬ia postcomunistă [A conversation with Boris Groys on Postcommunist Condition]. Idea Artă+Societate 21; Miller, D. ed. 1995. Acknowledging Consumption. A Review of New Studies. London and New York: Routledge; Millikan, Ruth. 2000. On Clear and Confused Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Mitchell, W. J. T. 1982. Against Theory. Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Miyoshi, Masao. 2010. Trespasses. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Morel, Michel. 2001. Figures du double dans les littératures européennes. Gérard Conio (coord.). Laussane: L'age d'homme; Morin, Edgar. 2008. Gândind Europa [Thinking Europe]. Trans. Irina Scurtu. Jassy: Institutul European; —. 2008. On Complexity. NJ: Hampton Press, Cresskill; Moscovici, Serge. 1999. Prefaаă [Preface]. In Psihologie socială. Aspecte contemporane [Social Psychology. Contemporary Aspects], Adrian Neculau (coord.). Jassy: Polirom; Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. Sfîr‫܈‬itul lumii bipolare. Ce va fi de acum încolo? [The End of Bipolar World. What Comes Next?]. Idea Artă+Societate 21; Mucchielli, Alex. 2002. Arta de a influenĠa. Analiza tehnicilor de manipulare [L'art d'influencer: Analyse des techniques de manipulation]. Trans. Mihaela Calcan. Jassy: Polirom; Munteanu, Florin.1999. Seminаe pentru altă lume [Seeds for Another Word]. Bucharest: Nemira; Muzet, Denis. 2013. Les Mots de la crise. Paris: Editions Eyrolles.

N Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. L'Évidence du film: Abbas Kiarostami. Brussels: Yves Gevaert Editeur; Nerrière, Jean-Paul. 2006. Don't speak English, parlez globish. Paris: Groupe Eyrolles; Neumann, Victor. 2006. Tentaаia lui Homo Europaeus. Geneza ideilor moderne în Europa Centrală Юi de Sud-Est [The Temptation of Homo Europaeus. The Genesis of the Modern Spirit in Central and Southeastern Europe], third edition. Jassy: Polirom;

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Nicolau, Felix. 2013. Estetica inumană. De la postmodernism la Facebook [Inhuman Esthetics. From Postmodernism to Facebook]. Bucharest: Tractus Art; Nicolescu, Basarab. 2007. Transdisciplinaritatea. Manifest [Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity]. Jassy: Junimea; —. 2009. Ce este Realitatea? ReflecĠii în jurul operei lui Stéphane Lupasco [What is Reality? Reflections on the Work of Stéphane Lupasco]. Jassy: Junimea; Norris, P. ed. 1997. Women, Media and Politics. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Nozick, R. 1997. Anarhie, stat Юi utopie [Anarchy, State, and Utopia]. Trans. Mircea Dumitru. Bucharest: Humanitas.

P Peacocke, Christopher. 1992. A Study of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Petrescu, Liviu, 2003. Poetica Postmodernismului [The Poetics of Postmodernism]. Second edition. Pite‫܈‬ti: Paralela 45; Pickover, Clifford A. 2013. Banda lui Möbius [The Möbius Strip]. Trans. Diana Constantinescu Altamer. Bucharest: Humanitas. Polgár, Al. 2003. Din col‫ ܊‬în col‫[ ܊‬From Corner to Corner]. Idea Artă+Societate 14; Pollock, G. ed. 2013. Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures. London: I.B. Tauris; Popa, Marian. 1968. Homo fictus: Structuri úi ipostaze [Homo Fictus: Structures and Hypostasis]. Bucharest: Editura pentru Literatură; Pruijt, H. 2013. The Logic of Urban Squatting. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (1), 19-45; —. 2013. Squatting in Europe. In Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles, Squatting Europe Kollective (ed.). Brooklyn: Minor Compositions.

R Rancière, Jacques. 2012. ÎmpărtăЮirea sensibilului. Estetică Юi politică [The Distribution o f the Sensible. The Politics of Aesthetics]. Trans. Ciprian Mihali. Cluj: Idea Design & Print; —. 2014. The Intervals of Cinema, Verso; Real, M. 1996. Exploring Media Culture. A Guide. London, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications; Revel, Jean-François. 1995. Revirimentul democraаiei [Le regain démocratique]. Trans. Dan C. Mihăilescu. Bucharest: Humanitas;

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S Said, Edward. 2004. Problemele neoliberalismului [Problems of Neoliberalism]. Idea Artă+Societate 18; ‫܇‬andru, Daniel. 2001. Depă‫܈‬irea metanara‫܊‬iunilor politice [Overlapping the Political Metanarratives]. Contrast 1; Sartori, Giovanni. 2005. Homo videns. Trans. Mihai Elin. Bucharest: Humanitas; —. 2007. Ce facem cu străinii? Pluralism vs. Multiculturalism [What are we doing with the Strangers? Pluralism vs. Multiculturalism]. Trans. Geo Vasile. Bucharest: Humanitas; Scrima, André. 2008. Ortodoxia Юi încercarea comunismului [Orthodoxy and the Attempt of Communism]. Trans. Vlad Alexandrescu, Lucian Petrescu, Miruna Tătaru-Cazaban. Bucharest: Humanitas; ùerban, Alex. Leo. 2007. Un eseu despre Ingmar Bergman. Persona [An Essay on Ingmar Bergman. Persona]. LiterNet.ro. 20.08.2007; Simmel, Georg. 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Free Press: Glencoe, IL; —. 1994. Bridge and door. Trans. by Mark Ritter. Theory, Culture & Society 11: 5–10; Sloterdijk, Peter. 2000. L'heure du crime et le temps de l'oeuvre d'art. Paris: Calmann-Lévy; —. 2000. La domestication de l'Etre. Paris: Mille et une nuit; —. 2004. Eurotaoism. Contribuаii la o critică a cineticii politice [Eurotaoism, Contributions to a Critique of Political Kinetics]. Trans. Alexandru Suter. Cluj: Design & Print; —. 2005. Instant Democracy: The Pneumatic Parliament. In Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel (eds.). Karlsruhe and Cambridge: MA: ZKM; —. 2012. Derrida, un egiptean [Derrida, ein Agypter. Uber das Problem der jüdischen Pyramide]. Trans. Corina Bernic. Bucharest: Humanitas; Sontag, Susan. 1993. A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Vintage BooksRandom House; —. 1995. Boala ca metaforă [Illness as Metaphor]. Trans. Aurel Sasu. Cluj: Dacia;

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Visual Support The Third Man (1949) Director: Carol Reed, Production Co: Carol Reed's Production, London Film Productions. The Three Faces of Eve (1957) Director: Nunnally Johnson, Production Co: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959) Directors: Douglas Hickox, Eugène Lourié, Production Co: Artistes Alliance Ltd., Diamond Pictures Corp. Monster Dog (1984) Director: Claudio Fragasso, Production Co: Continental Motion Pictures, M&C Films, Royal Films. Total Recall (1990) Director: Paul Verhoeven, Production Co: Carolco Pictures, Carolco International N.V.

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Three Survival Island (2005) Director: Stewart Raffill, Production Co: Thema Production, T Films, Future Films. Thr3e (2006) Director: Robby Henson, Production Co: MovieRoom Productions, Namesake Entertainment. The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006) Director: Sophie Fiennes, Production Co: Amoeba Film, Kasander Film Company, Lone Star Productions. American Horror Story (2011–) Creators: Brad Falchuk, Ryan Murphy, Production Co: Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision, Ryan Murphy Productions, 20th Century Fox Television. Bron/Broen (2011–) Producer: H. Rosenfeldt, Production Co: Filmlance International AB, Nimbus Film Productions, Sveriges Television (SVT). The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012) Director: Sophie Fiennes, Production Co: BFI, Blinder Films, Film 4. Third Person (2013) Director: Paul Haggis, Production Co: Corsan, Hwy61, Lailaps Pictures. The Tunnel (2013–) Directors: T. Vincent & H. MacDonald & U. Prasad & P. Martin & D. Moll, D., Production Co: Canal+, Kudos Film and Television, Shine. Banshee (2013–) Creators: David Schickler, Jonathan Tropper, Production Co: Your Face Goes Here Entertainment, Cinemax. The Bridge (2013–2014) Creators: Elwood Reid, Björn Stein, Meredith Stiehm, Production Co: FX Productions, Shine America. Leviathan (2014) Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev, Production Co: Non-Stop Productions. Adieu au langage (2014) Director: Jean-Luc Godard, Production Co: Wild Bunch, Canal+, Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC). Dominion (2014–) Creator: Vaun Wilmott, Production Co: Bold Films, Sony Pictures Television, Universal Cable Productions. Penny Dreadful (2014-), Creator: John Logan, Production Co: Desert Wolf Productions, Neal Street Productions

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Special Discussions/Suggestions on the Theme -

-

ANGELO MITCHIEVICI on the arguments, conclusions and further elaboration of the concept; IAN BROWNE with useful thoughts regarding Bakhtin's ideas on the social meaning of carnival, in the sense that carnivals seem to encompass all the following aspects of Hekate, plus an aspect of biopolitics; VALENTIN TRIFESCU (TRIFESCO) with particular suggestions on bibliography; ANA MARIA TUPAN and MIHAI D. VASILE with punctual and effective indications and support in the publishing aspects.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Viorella Manolache has a Ph.D. in History from the Bucharest University, her thesis being “Post-communist Romania’s new political elite”; Scientific Researcher III, Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Political Philosophy Department. ƔƔƔ

Authored Books and Coordinator of Collective Volumes ¾ Postmodernitatea românească între experienĠă ontologică úi necesitate politică [Romanian Postmodernity Between Ontology Experience and Political Necessity], Editura UniversităĠii “Lucian Blaga” Publishing House, Sibiu, 2004; ¾ Cecitatea politică între sindrom ereditar úi faza lungă a maúinistului [Political Cecity Between the Heredity Syndrome and the Long Phase of the Machinist], Editura UniversităĠii “Lucian Blaga” Publishing House, Sibiu, 2005;

Philosophical—Political Hecate-isms: The Rule of Three

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¾ Elite. Legitimări juridice úi moderne [Elites. Juridical and Modern Legitimating], Editura UniversităĠii “Lucian Blaga” Publishing House, Sibiu, 2006; ¾ Ipostaze ale fetiúului în presa culturală românească [Hypostasis of the Fetish in the Romanian Cultural Press], Editura UniversităĠii “Lucian Blaga” Publishing House, Sibiu, 2006; ¾ Antielite. Forme tipice úi atipice al elitismului politic contemporan [Antielites. Typical and Atypical Forms of the Contemporary Political Elitism], Editura UniversităĠii “Lucian Blaga” Publishing House, Sibiu, 2007; ¾ Elitele politice româneúti-între deconstrucĠia comunismului úi reconstrucĠia democraĠiei [Romanian Political Elites–between Communist Deconstruction and the Democracy Reconstruction], TechnoMedia Publishing House, Sibiu, 2008; ¾ PhD Thesis: Elite în marú [Elites in March], Editura TechnoMedia, Sibiu, 2009; ¾ Coordinator of the international collective volume: Centru úi margine la Marea Mediterană. Filosofie Politică úi Realitate InternaĠională [Center and Margin at the Mediterranean Sea. Political Philosophy and International Reality], Editura Institutului de ‫܇‬tiin‫܊‬e Politice ‫܈‬i Rela‫܊‬ii Interna‫܊‬ionale Publishing House, Bucharest, 2009; ¾ Viorella Manolache, Henrieta Aniúoara ùerban, Cartografierea marginalităĠii [Mapping Marginality], in Collection Filosofie politică contemporană, Editura Institutului de ùtiinĠe Politice úi RelaĠii InternaĠionale Publishing House, Bucharest, 2010; ¾ Curente alternative ale prefixului post-evaluări filosofico-politice [Alternative Currents of the Prefix-Post: Philosophical and Political Evaluations], TechnoMedia Publishing House, Sibiu, 2010; ¾ POSDRU: Dinamica modelului european asupra localismului creator în epoca “modernismului ofensiv” (prima jumătate a secolului XX) [The European Model Dynamics on the Creator Localism in the ”offensive modernism” (first half of the 20th century)], TechnoMedia Publishing House, Sibiu, 2011; ¾ Coordinator of the international collective volume: Dincolo de propagandă: un instrumentar istorico-politic al filmului românesc [Beyond Propaganda: a Historical and Political Instrument of the Romanian Film], TechnoMedia Publishing House, Sibiu, 2011; ¾ Homo Posthistoricus-Profil filosofico-politic [Homo Posthistoricus– Philosophical and Political Profile], Astra Museum Publishing House, edited Techno Media, Sibiu, 2012; ¾ Repere teoretice în biopolitică [Theoretical Approaches in Biopolitics],

198

About the Author

Editura Institutului de ‫܇‬tiin‫܊‬e Politice ‫܈‬i Rela‫܊‬ii Interna‫܊‬ionale Publishing House, Bucharest, 2013; ¾ Signs and Designs of the Virtual(izing) E@St, LAP, Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany, 2013. ¾ Coordinator of the international collective volume: Romanian– Moroccan Forms of Manifestation in the European Space, Editura Institutului de ‫܇‬tiin‫܊‬e Politice ‫܈‬i Rela‫܊‬ii Interna‫܊‬ionale Publishing House, Bucharest, 2014. ƔƔƔ AUTHOR of numerous articles, specialist papers and scientific studies published in magazines and collective volumes or in interdisciplinary publications (comprising political essays, philosophical interventions and political sciences) (selected): Romanian Review of Political Science and International Relations, Transilvania, Revista de ùtiinĠe Politice úi RelaĠii InternaĠionale, Revista de Filosofie, Revista Institutului Diplomatic Român, Studium, Revista de Humanidades, Convorbiri literare, Sfera Politicii, Annals of the Academy of Romanian Scientists, Revista Română de Studii Eurasiatice, Nord Literar, Revista Moldovenească de Drept InternaĠional úi RelaĠii InternaĠionale, Revista de Sociologie, Revue Cycnos, Le Refus: esthétique, littérature, société, musiqu, Wagadu, Journal of Tourism Challenges and Trends, Argumente Юi Fapte, Estica, Lekythos, Annals of the ”Ovidius” University of Constanаa–Political Science Serie, Research and Science Today, Sociology Study, Cogito, Revue Roumaine de Philosophie, Brukenthalia, Romanian Cultural History Review Supplement of Brukenthal. Acta Musei, SÆCULUM, Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, Postmodern Openings, PARIPEX, Indian Journal of Research, International Journal of Scientific Research, Networking, Observing, Rethinking & Disrupting, SEA–Practical Application of Science, JCDS: Journal of Communication and Development Studies, Caiete Critice, Meridian Critic etc.

Philosophical—Political Hecate-isms: The Rule of Three

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ƔƔƔ PROFESSIONAL ENHANCEMENT COURSES: -1996–English for the Cambridge Examinations, Studio School of English, Cambridge; -1999–Y’S Men International Club, Danemarca; -2010 –Postdoctoral Research Program POSDRU/89/1.5/S/64162 EUROPAEUS-Postdoctoral Program of Advanced Studies for Lisbon Agenda Objectives in European Studies/International Relations, University of Bucharest. ƔƔƔ MEMBER of: (selected) o Member of the editorial team and responsible of the issues of Romanian Review of Political Science and International Relations; o Peer reviewer of Romanian Review of Political Science and International Relations–January 2012–present; o Secretary of the department of Political Sciences, Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations (October 2013-present); o Member of the evaluation commission for the Scientific Researcher and Scientific Researcher III positions Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations (2013, 2014); o Member of the Disciplinary Commission Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations (2014); o Member of the Romanian Philosophy Association, Bucharest; o Member and coordinator of the Socio-Political Department, Mediterana Cultural Association, Cluj-Napoca (“Babeú-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca and “Lucian Blaga” University, Sibiu) 2005present (see http://mediterana.50webs.com); o Member of the scientific committee of Forum méditerranéen de la Narration, Les débuts et le mythe d'origine, L’Université Printanière Ouverte de Fahs-Anjra, 25-27 November 2010, Tangier, Morocco; o Member of Advisory Board of Maghreb Journal of Cultural Studies and Translation, Morocco; o Peer reviewer of Revistei Române de Studii Eurasiatice, "Ovidius" University ConstanĠa, Faculty of History and Political SciencesNovember 2011; o Member of the Scientific Committee of the review Research and Science Today, Student League, “Constantin Brancusi” University,

200

o o o o o o o

o

About the Author

Editura Academica Brâncuúi Publishing House, Târgu-Jiu (December 2011-present); Member of the mailing network Balkans -Balkan Academic News, Centre for Southeast European Studies University of Graz, Austria; Member of the Academic Anthropological Association, Bucharest; Member of the Editorial Board of the review The Journal of Educational Research and Reviews (JERR), http://sciencewebpublishing.net/ jerr/board.htm; Peer-reviewer of the scientific journal US-China Law Review, USA; Peer-reviewer of the scientific journal Cultural and Religious Studies, David Publishing Company, EL Monte, CA, USA; Peer-reviewer of the scientific journal Journal of Advances in Political Science, Council for Innovative Research; Member in the Editorial Board of Science Publishing Group, New York, USA, of the journals: - International Journal of Philosophy; - History Research; - Social Sciences; Member of the scientific debate platform–SEA open-research–Expert, Political Science, Political Philosophy. ƔƔƔ

Participant in national/international conferences and presenting scientific studies/papers: Sibiu, Jassy, Timiúoara, Târgoviúte, Cluj-Napoca, Bucharest, Piteúti, Târgu-Jiu, Neptun, Deva, Valea Verde, Tetouan (Morocco), Madrid (Spain), Wellington (New Zeeland), Nice (France), Nicosia (Cyprus), Belgrade (Serbia), Bratislava (Slovakia), Brussels (Belgium), Gdansk (Poland), Wroclaw (Poland), Rome (Italy), Prague (Czech Republic), Chi‫܈‬inău (Republic of Moldova), Salzburg (Austria), Strasbourg (France), Braga (Portugal) etc.