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In Kafka’s unfinished story, The Burrow, an unidentified subterranean creature struggles while digging in a burrow, constantly engulfed in anxiety for potential intruders. His obsessive anxiety starts to be materialised in his hearing of a noise everywhere and at constant intensity. Incessantly speculating the cause of this noise, his dreadful imagination first finds it as a swarm of small fries, eventually growing into a single gigantic monster threatening his burrow, as if desiring an irresistible entity that goes beyond the idea of the individual. Inspired by this story of a creature suffocating from his lonesome effort of nesting, this paper discusses how an individual sensation of dread could potentially transcend to an ability to imagine social totality, drawing on the philosophical readings of Kafka’s other character Odradek by Benjamin and Adorno. I further argue that this process is aesthetic, correlating Freud’s idea of the uncanny with Adorno’s theory of aesthetic experience which examine the negotiation between individuation and socialisation in an experience of desubjectification. By sketching out the anxious hearing in The Burrow in reference to the disturbing seeing of object-creature Odradek, I discuss the feeling of dread that marks the transformation of individual entities into a transcendent social/collective being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several papers related developments in economics as realist social theory. According to the author, social theory expressly committed to work out the nature of social being, and, or how people access social reality is going through something of a revival in economics. The papers presented, provide numerous results, arguments, conjectures, and critiques have been produced in recent years, and aim to take some of these specific developments further. Context of the papers and basic ideas and results are presented.

This paper presents a particular understanding of Bourdieu's social theory and the place of language within it, in response to Susen's depiction of these matters in his “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”. Bourdieu's understanding of language is argued to be overly derivative and too dependent upon conventional assumptions of late twentieth-century thought. Conversely, allegations of “determinism” in Bourdieu's social theory are rebutted as being too often glib and unquestioningly rooted in liberal assumptions about human “creativity”. It is argued that Bourdieu's social theory could in fact be construed of as not being determinist enough, an appraisal hardly ever entertained by social theorists today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]