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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.