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This study focuses on the figure of the techfugee—the technologically precarious twenty-first century refugee in a globalized market space—in anglophone narratives, both fictional and nonfictional, written during the past decade. While current theoretical conversations within the field of refugee studies often focus on identity dysmorphia, spatial and temporal movements of the displaced, and/or the socioeconomic adversities that refugees undergo and sometimes, arguably, cause, I will scrutinize what I call the “technological erasure” of the displaced—a biopolitical and topographical dispositif that includes refugees through their very exclusion. I will rely on Heidegger, Stiegler, and Agamben to showcase the human need for technology and then integrate the works of Foucault and Wendy Brown on the biopolitics of the homo oeconomicus in the neoliberal turn to be able to closely read the representation of the effects of technology on the twenty-first century refugee in the narrative form. To summarize my argument, I contend that technological erasure has three forms. First, it denies the displaced figure access to the technological tools that enable and define citizenship—which thereby renders refugee camps technological “deserts.” Second, it is employed against the refugee figure when they become embedded and captured within technology like cellphones, computer screens, and drones which causes a kind of social or physical death by data. Finally and most importantly, I argue the first two forms of erasure produce a third one, what I call refugees’ self-erasure which is analyzed as the sole form of resistance to state technological erasure that refugees rely on when they shed technology to prevent trackability. Moreover, the anglophone narratives this thesis will re-read, are approached as case studies that critique technological erasure through the representation of the detrimental effects of technological precarity, and at the same time they are analyzed as literary t

This essay reconstructs a now largely obscure fifty year debate within French philosophy of technology from Alfred Espinas to Alexandre Kojève about slavery in the ancient world. To summarize, I argue that early twentieth century French philosophy of technology’s hypothesis that Greek and Roman slavery caused a blocage – a block, delay or stagnation – in the development of technology in antiquity may well seem little more than a historical curiosity today, but that its hypothesis of a constitutive relation between slave labour and technological innovation has recently re-emerged in biopolitical form in such texts as Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies (2015). In the confrontation between what Alexandre Koyré famously calls the ‘philosophers’ and the ‘machine’, I argue that we not only enter a largely forgotten conceptual archive for modern French philosophy of technology (Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gouhran, Bernard Stiegler) but for contemporary biopolitical theory (Giorgio Agamben).

This article is a discussion of Sigmund Freud’s note on ‘The Perversions in General’ from the 1905 edition of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. To summarise its argument, the article proposes that what Freud calls ‘perversion’ is itself to be properly understood as a form of sexual generalisation. It goes on to contend that Freudian perversion thus has larger implications for our understanding of the new sciences of sexual generalisation (sexology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, genealogy) that are beginning to emerge from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. If perverse sexuality is arguably the defining libidinal object of Krafft-Ebing’s sexual taxonomy, for example, the article argues that perversion is already in itself a form of perverse sexual taxonomy. In conclusion, the article argues that Freud’s perversion is consequently a form of structural ‘dis-content’ that cannot be contained within the modern sciences of sex which extend from Krafft-Ebing’s sexology to Foucault’s history of sexuality.

This article explores Thomas Hobbes’s political translations of Euripides’s Medea and, particularly, his representation of the Dionysian ritual of killing and dismembering a sacrificial victim (sparagmos). To answer the question of what forms political theology may take in modernity, I contend that Hobbes seeks to reverse the political theological meaning of ancient Greek sparagmos—which was originally depicted in Euripides as a legitimate religious sacrifice whose objective was to reunify the polis—by turning it into a senseless act of political violence that will dissolve the civil state into competing interest groups or body parts. If Hobbes seeks to expel religious sacrifice from his political state into archaic pre-history, however, the article goes on to argue—via Bramhall, Schmitt, and Cavarero’s revisionary readings of his work—that the philosopher’s critique of Medea ends up bestowing a legitimacy upon the tragic heroine that disarticulates the political theological unity upon which his Commonwealth is founded. In the tragic figure of Medea, Dionysian sparagmos returns to dismember and even potentially consume the body parts of the Leviathan.

This article proposes a semiotic theory of social imaginaries. Drawing on the work of Umberto Eco, Reinhart Koselleck and Martin Heidegger, it shows the logic that governs the relationship between temporality and semiosis, sign and its constant reinterpretation. In this sense, this work can be read as a sort of epistemological program that also represents the background on which the various contributors to this Special Issue have developed their analyses and narratives.

This article revisits a set of classic political, theological and economic scenes in the (early) modern debate on usury from Luther to Bentham. To summarize, I argue that this theory of usury – which polemically mobilizes counter-Aristotelian tropes of the breeding, reproduction and husbandry of money – might also be read as a theory of what Foucault famously calls pastoral power. If this debate nominally concerns the ‘repeal’ of the ancient prohibition against money-lending at interest, I argue that what is really at stake here is the pastoral production of a new theory of the subject as ‘human interest’: a self whose allegedly intrinsic self-interest expresses itself paradigmatically through financial interest. In conclusion, I situate this genealogy of human interest within the larger history of the self-interested, capitalist and indebted subject from Hirschman, through Foucault, to Lazzarato.

SIGNIFICANCE Consistent with closed-loop models of regulated eye growth, a successful dual-focus (DF) myopia-control contact lens focused a significant proportion of light anterior to the central retina in eyes of treated children viewing near and distant targets. PURPOSE This study examined the optical impact of a DF contact lens during near viewing in a sample of habitual DF lens wearing children. METHODS Seventeen myopic children aged 14 to 18 years who had completed 3 or 6 years of treatment with a DF contact lens (MiSight 1 Day; CooperVision, Inc., San Ramon, CA) were recruited and fit bilaterally with the DF and a single-vision (Proclear 1 Day; CooperVision, Inc.) contact lens. Right eye wavefronts were measured using a pyramidal aberrometer (Osiris; CSO, Florence, Italy) while children accommodated binocularly to high-contrast letter stimuli at five target vergences. Wavefront error data were used to compute pupil maps of refractive state. RESULTS During near viewing, children wearing single-vision lenses accommodated on average to achieve approximate focus in the pupil center but, because of combined accommodative lag and negative spherical aberration, experienced up to 2.00 D of hyperopic defocus in the pupil margins. With DF lenses, children accommodated similarly achieving approximate focus in the pupil center. When viewing three near distances (0.48, 0.31, and 0.23 m), the added +2.00 D within the DF lens treatment optics shifted the mean defocus from +0.75 to -1.00 D. The DF lens reduced the percentage of hyperopic defocus (≥+0.75 D) in the retinal image from 52 to 25% over these target distances, leading to an increase in myopic defocus (≤-0.50 D) from 17 to 42%. CONCLUSIONS The DF contact lens did not alter the accommodative behavior of children. The treatment optics introduced myopic defocus and decreased the amount of hyperopically defocused light in the retinal image.

This article proposes a semiotic theory of social imaginaries. Drawing on the work of Umberto Eco, Reinhart Koselleck and Martin Heidegger, it shows the logic that governs the relationship between temporality and semiosis, sign and its constant reinterpretation. In this sense, this work can be read as a sort of epistemological program that also represents the background on which the various contributors to this Special Issue have developed their analyses and narratives.

In this article, I offer a political architectonic of what Carl Schmitt calls the “antechamber of power [Vorraum der macht]” from Friedrich Schiller, through Franz Kafka, to Walter Benjamin. To summarize my argument, I seek to contend that the “antechamber of power” has always been a marginal or supplementary space within the conceptual imaginary of sovereignty, but Schiller, Kafka, Benjamin, and Schmitt re-imagine it as the privileged space of an originary or constitutive partage, sharing or division of power. If Jean Bodin famously defines sovereign power as “indivisible,” I instead trace a certain inevitable or ineluctable self-division of sovereignty into what Jacques Derrida famously calls “plus d’un” — more than one, no more one — sources or places of power. In a series of readings of philosophical, historical, and literary representations of the antechamber, I show how the allegedly private chamber of power occupied by the sovereign alone constitutively divides or exteriorizes itself into a — potentially infinite — series of new political antechambers occupied by a new class of political bodies: Schiller’s counsellor, Kafka’s bureaucrat, Benjamin’s clerk

This article offers the first comparative study of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s readings of the Biblical figure of Jephthah the Gileadite and, in particular, the latter’s notorious appeal to God that leads to the killing of his own daughter. To outline its argument, I focus on a critical moment in Hobbes and Locke’s corpuses where they both appeal to Jephthah’s vow to support their theories of sovereign right: Hobbes’ account of the right to punish in Leviathan and Locke’s account of the right to go to war in the “Second Treatise of Government.” If Hobbes and Locke’s readings of Jephthah differ considerably – the one focusing on Jephthah’s daughter, the other on Jephthah himself; the one exploring domestic political theory, the other international relations theory; the one seeking to legitimize the right to punish, the other the right to go to war – I contend that both see Jephthah’s story as an allegory for the origins of sovereign violence in self-sacrifice or even martyrdom. For Hobbes and Locke, Jephthah’s fate becomes a kind of arcane theological paradigm for sovereign killing: what begins as the religious power to die ends up as the political power to kill. In the obscure story of Jephthah the Gileadite, then, I conclude that Hobbes and Locke set in motion what we might call a martyrological machine at the core of the modern liberal state. What if liberalism is constituted less by its professed love of “life” – private interest, private property, self-preservation, self-determination – than a willingness to sacrifice everything and die?

This article offers the first comparative study of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s readings of the Biblical figure of Jephthah the Gileadite and, in particular, the latter’s notorious appeal to God that leads to the killing of his own daughter. To outline its argument, I focus on a critical moment in Hobbes and Locke’s corpuses where they both appeal to Jephthah’s vow to support their theories of sovereign right: Hobbes’ account of the right to punish in Leviathan and Locke’s account of the right to go to war in the “Second Treatise of Government.” If Hobbes and Locke’s readings of Jephthah differ considerably – the one focusing on Jephthah’s daughter, the other on Jephthah himself; the one exploring domestic political theory, the other international relations theory; the one seeking to legitimize the right to punish, the other the right to go to war – I contend that both see Jephthah’s story as an allegory for the origins of sovereign violence in self-sacrifice or even martyrdom. For Hobbes and Locke, Jephthah’s fate becomes a kind of arcane theological paradigm for sovereign killing: what begins as the religious power to die ends up as the political power to kill. In the obscure story of Jephthah the Gileadite, then, I conclude that Hobbes and Locke set in motion what we might call a martyrological machine at the core of the modern liberal state. What if liberalism is constituted less by its professed love of “life” – private interest, private property, self-preservation, self-determination – than a willingness to sacrifice everything and die?

SIGNIFICANCE Treatment of myopic children with a dual-focus soft contact lens (DFCL; MiSight 1 day) produced sustained slowing of myopia progression over a 6-year period. Significant slowing was also observed in children switched from a single vision control to treatment lenses (3 years in each lens). PURPOSE This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of DFCLs in sustaining slowed progression of juvenile-onset myopia over a 6-year treatment period and assess myopia progression in children who were switched to a DFCL at the end of year 3. METHODS Part 1 was a 3-year clinical trial comparing DFCLs with a control contact lens (Proclear 1 day) at four investigational sites. In part 2, subjects completing part 1 were invited to continue for 3 additional years during which all children were treated with MiSight 1 day DFCLs (52 and 56 from the initially treated [T6] and control [T3] groups, respectively). Eighty-five subjects (45 [T3] and 40 [T6]) completed part 2. Cyclopleged spherical equivalent refractive errors (SEREs) and axial lengths (ALs) were monitored, and a linear mixed model was used to compare their adjusted change annually. RESULTS Average ages at part 2 baseline were 13.2 ± 1.3 and 13.0 ± 1.5 years for the T6 and T3 groups, respectively. Slowed myopia progression in the T6 group observed during part 1 was sustained throughout part 2 (mean ± standard error of the mean: change from baseline SERE [in diopters], -0.52 ± 0.076 vs. -0.51 ± 0.076; change in AL [in millimeters], 0.28 ± 0.033 vs. 0.23 ± 0.033; both P >.05). Comparing progression rates in part 2 for the T6 and T3 groups, respectively, indicates that prior treatment does not influence efficacy (SERE, -0.51 ± 0.076 vs. -0.34 ± 0.077; AL, 0.23 ± 0.03 vs. 0.18 ± 0.03; both P >.05). Within-eye comparisons of AL growth revealed a 71% slowing for the T3 group (3 years older than part 1) and further revealed a small subset of eyes (10%) that did not respond to treatment. CONCLUSIONS Dual-focus soft contac

Monocular polyplopia (ghost or multiple images) is a serious visual impediment for some people who report seeing two (diplopia), three (triplopia) or even more images. Polyplopia is expected to appear if the point spread function (PSF) has multiple intensity cores (a dense concentration of a large portion of the radiant flux contained in the PSF) relatively separated from each other, each of which contributes to a distinct image. We present a theory that assigns these multiple PSF cores to specific features of aberrated wavefronts, thereby accounting optically for the perceptual phenomenon of monocular polyplopia. The theory provides two major conclusions. First, the most likely event giving rise to multiple PSF cores is the presence of hyperbolic, or less probably elliptical, umbilic caustics (using the terminology of catastrophe optics). Second, those umbilic caustics formed on the retinal surface are associated with certain points of the wave aberration function, called cusps of Gauss, where the gradient of a curvature function vanishes. However, not all cusps of Gauss generate those umbilic caustics. We also provide necessary conditions for those cusps of Gauss to be fertile. To show the potential of this theoretical framework for understanding the nature and origin of polyplopia, we provide specific examples of ocular wave aberration functions that induce diplopia and triplopia. The polyplopia effects in these examples are illustrated by depicting the multi-core PSFs and the convolved retinal images for clinical letter charts, both through computer simulations and through experimental recording using an adaptive optics set-up. The number and location of cores in the PSF is thus a potentially useful metric for the existence and severity of polyplopia in spatial vision. These examples also help explain why physiological pupil constriction might reduce the incidence of ghosting and multiple images of daily objects that affect vision with dilated pupils. This mecha

In this article, I seek to offer a set of notes towards what Walter Benjamin calls a political theological “rideaulogie” --- quite literally a “curtainology,” a study or science of the curtain. To be precise, I unpick four different readings or writings upon the political theological curtain: Hobbes’s façade; Benjamin’s curtainology; Deleuze’s fold, and Derrida’s tallith or prayer shawl. It is well documented by scholars as diverse as Blumenberg, Derrida and Hadot that the history of truth from Ancient Greece to modernity is itself a history of the veil. At the same time, the history of political theological truth-telling --- from Jewish, Christian and Islamic occultation and revelation to liberal iconoclasm and disenchantment --- is equally, if not more so, a dialectic of (un-)veiling. If Hobbes, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida are thoroughly enveloped in this political theological history of the curtain --- which is also an entire metaphysical history of the relation between interiority and exteriority, appearance and essence, surface and depth and so on --- I argue that they each seek to fold, pleat or re-double this history differently: what is unveiled in their work is a certain inexplicability (from the Latin inexplicabilis, literally "what cannot be unfolded or disentangled” --- AB). In Hobbes’s curtain, for instance, we do not encounter an absolute divide or threshold between the outside and the inside --- between the state of nature, say, and society --- so much as the “becoming-inside” of this outside: the Hobbesian Commonwealth does not lie behind the curtain but, inexplicably, may be the curtain itself.