Articles
What Can Dialectics Change in the System?: Yuk Hui, Marx, Vygotsky, Mamardashvili
Keti Chukhrov
This article maps the differences in the application of systems method in Marxist dialectics, cybernetics, and poststructuralism. It studies the impact of algorithmic rationality on the speculative lexicons of philosophy—especially when philosophical dialectics is defined as nothing more than quasi-cybernetic recursivity. According to Yuk Hui, the decline of philosophy and dialectics can be contested only by second-order cybernetics as the proper successor of philosophical speculation. To dispute this bold assumption, the article embarks on a comparative inquiry into the systemic method in Marx’s political economy, cybernetics, and poststructuralism, respectively. Reference to the comparative analysis of systems method and Marxist dialectics by Igor Blauberg and Eric Yudin allows one to challenge the thesis according to which the preconditions of dialectics can be developed in the frame of cybernetic recursivity. It enables one to go farther in demonstrating the differences between the Marxist application of systems, which includes dialectical procedures and genesis, and cybernetic systematics, in which these procedures are redundant. Lev Vygotsky, Evald Ilyenkov, and Merab Mamardashvili are brought in as the exemplary methodists who elaborate Marxist methodology to encompass genesis and dialectical difference within systemic abstraction.
Read now at Duke University Press
Heretical Hebrew: On Pseudoscript and Christian Humanist “Truth” in Andrea Mantegna’s Anti-Jewish Ecce Homo
Gregor Christopher Meinecke
This article discusses a Christian devotional painting by the Early Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna. It traces its iconographic traits to illustrate its anti-Jewish implications by focusing on the depiction of an inscribed, pseudo-Hebrew paper crown. This attribute situates Mantegna’s painting within the humanist studies of Hebrew, the Veritas Hebraica, which was a means to access antique sources and to delegitimize Jewish belief. The article further draws a parallel to the burning of heretics, who wore similar crowns when they were condemned. Since Mantegna depicts the Jews with such crowns while they hold Jesus in their hands, Mantegna invents a cunning way to invert the accusers and the accused and embeds a hitherto unexplored, anti-Jewish statement. The article traces the development of the visual tradition of the ostracization of Jews in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Read now at Duke University Press
To FM2030
Salar Mameni
A letter to the futurologist FM 2030 written by a young martyr.
Read now at Duke University Press
Review Essays
From Automation to AI: The Informatization of Labor
Won Jeon
A review of Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (London, UK: Verso Books, 2023).
Read now at Duke University Press
My Two Dans: Conglomeration, Criticism, and the Contemporary
Ryan Lackey
A review of Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publication Industry and American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).
Read now at Duke University Press
Cover: Andrea Mantegna, The Triumph of the Virtues (ca. 1502). Tempera on canvas, 160 × 192 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Volume 33.2 is available at Duke University Press. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.