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This paper develops a new understanding of hospitality on the basis of an anarchist philosophy of cosmopolitanism. It is argued that anarchism – in its radical critique of the principle of sovereignty and sovereign ipseity – is primarily a philosophy and politics of hospitality. The argument proceeds in five key steps. Firstly, the relationship between ontological anarchism (Schürmann and Levinas) and political anarchism (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Godwin) is explored. Secondly, anarchism’s critique of nation state sovereignty is linked to a radical cosmopolitanism based on cross-border solidarity, mutual aid, and human rights activism, including the defence of the rights of migrants and asylum seekers. Thirdly, I show how the anarchic subject cannot be reduced to a fixed or definable identity with closed borders, but, rather, embodies an attitude of hospitality towards the Other and an openness to being transformed by this encounter. On this basis, I aim to develop an anarchist ethics formulated around the idea of care – for the other, both human and non-human, for the world, for the natural environment (Four) – and an alternative cosmopolitan ethical and political horizon (Five).

Four species of grass generate half of all human-consumed calories. However, abundant biological data on species that produce our food remain largely inaccessible, imposing direct barriers to understanding crop yield and fitness traits. Here, we assemble and analyse a continent-wide database of field experiments spanning 10 years and hundreds of thousands of machine-phenotyped populations of ten major crop species. Training an ensemble of machine learning models, using thousands of variables capturing weather, ground sensor, soil, chemical and fertilizer dosage, management and satellite data, produces robust cross-continent yield models exceeding R2 = 0.8 prediction accuracy. In contrast to ‘black box’ analytics, detailed interrogation of these models reveals drivers of crop behaviour and complex interactions predicting yield and agronomic traits. These results demonstrate the capacity of machine learning models to interrogate large datasets, generate new and testable outputs and predict crop behaviour, highlighting the powerful role of data in the future of food. Despite, and perhaps because of, extensive data regarding agricultural variables and plant traits, finding connections to crop yields can be difficult to compile. Machine learning models detailed here can provide accurate predictions to tease out behaviours.

This chapter explores the epistemic and political challenge of post-truth discourse to the idea of the liberal democratic public sphere—a challenge that has been intensified in the time of right-wing populism and COVID-19. However, I also take this as an opportunity to rethink the notion of the public sphere, pointing to the way that emancipatory social movements disrupt the institutions of the liberal democratic state through their claims for social and environmental justice. In this context, I examine the controversy around the relationship between post-truth and ‘postmodernism’, arguing that, so far from being hostile to truth, poststructuralist theory may serve as an antidote to post-truth. Here I focus on Foucault’s idea of parrhesia as an agonistic way of speaking truth to power that at the same reinvigorates the democratic space.

I investigate the contemporary problem of obedience through an exploration of Michel Foucault and Étienne de La Boétie, showing how the former drew on the latter’s concept of voluntary servitude as a way of thinking through the paradoxical relationship between power, freedom and subjectivity. My argument is that Foucault’s theory of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ may be understood as a reflection on the question of voluntary servitude. My aim here is twofold. First, it is to show that obedience is an ethical and political problem just as relevant today as it was in La Boétie’s time. Secondly, it is to suggest that voluntary servitude should be interpreted in an emancipatory way, as a problematic that reveals the ontological primacy of freedom and the fragility and instability of power. ‘Voluntary inservitude’ is something that can be expressed in acts of civil disobedience, and alternate modes of ethical conduct and association.

Expanded carrier screening (ECS) for recessive monogenic diseases requires prior knowledge of genomic variation, including DNA variants that cause disease. The composition of pathogenic variants differs greatly among human populations, but historically, research about monogenic diseases has focused mainly on people with European ancestry. By comparison, less is known about pathogenic DNA variants in people from other parts of the world. Consequently, inclusion of currently underrepresented Indigenous and other minority population groups in genomic research is essential to enable equitable outcomes in ECS and other areas of genomic medicine. Here, we discuss this issue in relation to the implementation of ECS in Australia, which is currently being evaluated as part of the national Government’s Genomics Health Futures Mission. We argue that significant effort is required to build an evidence base and genomic reference data so that ECS can bring significant clinical benefit for many Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Australians. These efforts are essential steps to achieving the Australian Government’s objectives and its commitment “to leveraging the benefits of genomics in the health system for all Australians.” They require culturally safe, community-led research and community involvement embedded within national health and medical genomics programs to ensure that new knowledge is integrated into medicine and health services in ways that address the specific and articulated cultural and health needs of Indigenous people. Until this occurs, people who do not have European ancestry are at risk of being, in relative terms, further disadvantaged.

This paper explores the anarcho-mystical thought of Gustav Landauer as a critical response to Schmitt's sovereign-centric political theology. It is argued that Landauer's thought effects a radical displacement of the concept of state sovereignty through autonomous forms of community, subjectivity and affinity. Central here, I argue, is his notion of mystical withdrawal and spiritual self-transformation. I develop some parallels here with recent interventions in Italian (im)political thought in which the representative capacity of sovereignty is called into question. I conclude by suggesting that anarcho-mysticism, as a critical engagement with political theology, not only broadens out this category, but offers a way of interpreting new forms of activism and dissent.

The 16th-century French humanist writer Etienne de La Boétie has not often been considered in literature on republican political thought, despite his famous essay, Discours de la Servitude Volontaire, displaying a number of clear republican tropes and themes, being largely concerned with the problem of arbitrary power embodied in the figure of the tyrant. Yet, I argue that the real significance of La Boétie’s text is in his radical concept of voluntary servitude and the way it adds a new dimension to the neo-republican theory of liberty as non-domination. The problem of self-domination or wilful obedience to authority is a form of ideological domination that Pettit’s understanding of arbitrary power relationships between agents does not adequately account for. Furthermore, La Boétie shows that freedom is an ontological condition and is realised not – or not entirely – through the rule of law as the guarantee against arbitrariness, as neo-republicans advocate, but rather through acts of self-emancipation and civil disobedience. Here I understand La Boétie’s thinking in terms of a certain anarcho-republicanism in which the promotion of freedom depends not so much on institutions, as Pettit suggests, but rather on autonomous relations of friendship, love and solidarity between individuals.

Political theology is a broad and diverse series of investigations into the structural relationship between theology and politics – particularly the way that theological categories come to underpin modern political concepts, practices and institutions, such as sovereignty, the nation state and democracy. In this chapter I suggest that political theology is fundamentally concerned with the problem of legitimacy and that it refers to the absent place of the sacred in modern secular societies. As a mode of enquiry, it provides us with an alternative framework in which to understand modes of political experience that cannot be adequately grasped by conventional political theory. The chapter explores the origins of the concept, then turns to Carl Schmitt's influential interpretation of political theology as a secular translation of theological concepts into modern ideas of the sovereign state. It is argued that Schmitt's political theology is a justification for an authoritarian notion of sovereignty defined through the unilateral state of exception. The chapter then turns to alternative post-Schmittian approaches, including more radical interpretations of political or public theology that can inform social and racial justice struggles and climate action. Recent interventions in eco-political theology and economic theology are also considered.

Recent debates in liberal political theory have sought to come to terms with the post-secular condition, characterised by deep religious pluralism, the resurgence of right-wing populism, as well as new social movements for economic, ecological and racial justice. These forces represent competing claims on the public space and create challenges for the liberal model of state neutrality. To better grasp this problem, I argue for a more comprehensive engagement between liberalism and political theology, by which I understand a mode of theorising that reveals the theological basis of modern secular political concepts. In considering two contrasting approaches to political or public theology – Carl Schmitt’s and Jürgen Moltmann’s – I argue that liberal political theory can and should open itself to a diversity of social movements and ecological struggles that pluralise the political space in ways that unsettle the boundary between the secular and religious.

The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. In the UK, Italy, Japan, and France remarkable longevity is instead predicted by regional poverty, old-age poverty, material deprivation, low incomes, high crime rates, a remote region of birth, worse health, and fewer 90+ year old people. In addition, supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five: patterns indicative of widespread fraud and error. As such, relative poverty and missing vital documents constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.

I understand post-truth as a new paradigm in politics - one that goes beyond mere political lying and spin and points to the decline of the symbolic authority of truth itself. In so far as, as Arendt claimed, politics depends on a shared acknowledgement of certain factual truths, post-truth thus represents a crisis of political life. The post-truth condition is a post-political condition. To grasp this thoroughly, we need to understand the paradoxical relationship between truth and politics, locating a problematic that goes back to the very origins of the demos in ancient Greece: the original conflict between the singular truth of the philosopher and the affairs and concerns of the polis. Here I will draw on two different approaches to this problem: Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the conflicting, and yet inextricable, relationship between the stability of truth and the contingency and plurality of political life; and Michel Foucault’s exploration of parrësia or ‘frank speech’ – a form of truth-speaking which, while often in conflict with the polis, is also necessary for any notion of ethical conduct in political life. Both approaches suggest that politics bears some essential relation to truth, even if truth often finds itself impotent in the face of mere opinion. Yet, while there is some question about the efficacy today of asserting facts against lies or ‘speaking truth to power’, I argue that there is something valuable in Foucault’s idea of truth speaking as a form of ethical (and also political) subjectivation. Entiendo la posverdad como un nuevo paradigma en política, uno que va más allá de la mera mentira política y señala el declive de la autoridad simbólica de la verdad misma. En la medida en que, como afirmó Arendt, la política depende de un reconocimiento compartido de ciertas verdades fácticas, la posverdad representa una crisis de la vida política. La condición de la posverdad es una condición pospolítica. Para comprender esto a fondo, necesitamos comprender la relación paradójica entre verdad y política, afrontando una problemática que se remonta a los orígenes de las demos en la antigua Grecia: el conflicto original entre la verdad singular del filósofo y los asuntos e intereses de la polis. Aquí me basaré en dos enfoques diferentes para este problema: la discusión de Hannah Arendt sobre la relación conflictiva, pero inextricable, entre la estabilidad de la verdad y la contingencia y pluralidad de la vida política; y la exploración de Michel Foucault de la parrësia o ‘discurso franco’, una forma de decir la verdad que, aunque a menudo está en conflicto con la polis, también es necesaria para cualquier noción de conducta ética en la vida política. Ambos enfoques sugieren que la política tiene alguna relación esencial con la verdad, incluso si la verdad a menudo se encuentra impotente frente a la mera opinión. Sin embargo, aunque haya algunas dudas sobre la eficacia actual de afirmar los hechos contra las mentiras o ‘decir la verdad ante el poder’, sostengo que hay algo valioso en la idea de Foucault de decir la verdad como una forma de subjetivación ética (y también política).

The aim of this article is to develop a theoretical understanding of the insurrection as a central concept in radical politics in order to account for contemporary movements and forms of mobilisation that seek to withdraw from governing institutions and affirm autonomous practices and forms of life. I will develop a theory of insurrection by investigating the parallel thinking of Giorgio Agamben and Max Stirner. Starting with Stirner’s central distinction between revolution and insurrection, and linking this with Agamben’s theory of destituent power, I show how both thinkers develop an ontologically anarchic approach to ethics, subjectivity and life that is designed to destitute and profane governing institutions and established categories of politics. However, I will argue that Stirner’s ‘egoistic’ and voluntarist approach to insurrection provides a more tangible and positive way of thinking about political action and agency than Agamben’s at times vague, albeit suggestive, notion of inoperativity.

The paper will explore Max Stirner’s idiosyncratic notion of ownness. My claim is that ownness should be understood as an alternative to more familiar concepts of negative and positive freedom, as well as offering a more effective answer to the problem of domination that is the concern of republican theory. The paper will start with the experience of freedom within contemporary neoliberal societies, where it becomes the mode by which we are governed and an ideal to which the individual is sacrificed – a problem Stirner essentially foresaw in the emergent liberal societies of the nineteenth century. I will then explore Stirner’s alternative proposal of ownness as a response to this problem: ownness is a form of freedom that is not dependent on external factors but is, rather, the ontological condition of the subject. The next section will be devoted to an elaboration of this theory of ownness, showing how it goes beyond more familiar analytical paradigms of negative freedom and republican non-domination. Moreover, while his refusal of the state and its laws as a guarantor of freedom bears some affinity with anarchism, in rejecting all social collectives as alienating and oppressive abstractions, and in affirming property as central to autonomy, Stirner also exceeds the ideological terrain of anarchism, putting forward instead a radical form of individualism and self-possession. At the same time, I seek to distinguish this from the more familiar notion of positive freedom as ‘self-mastery’, which, as Stirner shows, requires that the individual be sacrificed to some higher moral and rational ideal. In promoting instead self-defining, self-constituting and ‘egoistic’ forms of subjectivity outside of any prescribed standard or norm, Stirner’s concept of ownness, I argue, provides a more effective antidote to the bind that freedom currently finds itself within.

Factors genètics; Desordre d'ús de substàncies Factores genéticos; Desorden de uso de sustancias Genetic factors; Substance use disorder; ADGRL3 (LPHN3) Genetic factors are strongly implicated in the susceptibility to develop externalizing syndromes such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and substance use disorder (SUD). Variants in the ADGRL3 (LPHN3) gene predispose to ADHD and predict ADHD severity, disruptive behaviors comorbidity, long-term outcome, and response to treatment. In this study, we investigated whether variants within ADGRL3 are associated with SUD, a disorder that is frequently co-morbid with ADHD. Using family-based, case-control, and longitudinal samples from disparate regions of the world (n = 2698), recruited either for clinical, genetic epidemiological or pharmacogenomic studies of ADHD, we assembled recursive-partitioning frameworks (classification tree analyses) with clinical, demographic, and ADGRL3 genetic information to predict SUD susceptibility. Our results indicate that SUD can be efficiently and robustly predicted in ADHD participants. The genetic models used remained highly efficient in predicting SUD in a large sample of individuals with severe SUD from a psychiatric institution that were not ascertained on the basis of ADHD diagnosis, thus identifying ADGRL3 as a risk gene for SUD. Recursive-partitioning analyses revealed that rs4860437 was the predominant predictive variant. This new methodological approach offers novel insights into higher order predictive interactions and offers a unique opportunity for translational application in the clinical assessment of patients at high risk for SUD R01 DA039881/DA/NIDA NIH HHS/United States. DA039881/U.S. Department of Health & Human Services NIH, National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)/

This study highlights how the mortality plateau in Barbi and colleagues can be generated by low-frequency, randomly distributed age-misreporting errors. Furthermore, sensitivity of the late-life mortality plateau in Barbi and colleagues to the particular age range selected for regression is illustrated. Collectively, the simulation of age-misreporting errors in late-life human mortality data and a less-specific model choice than that of Barbi and colleagues highlight a clear alternative hypothesis to explanations based on evolution, the cessation of ageing, and population heterogeneity.

Several organisms, including humans, display a deceleration in mortality rates at advanced ages. This mortality deceleration is sufficiently rapid to allow late-life mortality to plateau in old age in several species, causing the apparent cessation of biological ageing. Here, it is shown that late-life mortality deceleration (LLMD) and late-life plateaus are caused by common demographic errors. Age estimation and cohort blending errors introduced at rates below 1 in 10,000 are sufficient to cause LLMD and plateaus. In humans, observed error rates of birth and death registration predict the magnitude of LLMD. Correction for these sources of demographic error using a mixed linear model eliminates LLMD and late-life mortality plateaus (LLMPs) without recourse to biological or evolutionary models. These results suggest models developed to explain LLMD have been fitted to an error distribution, that ageing does not slow or stop during old age in humans, and that there is a finite limit to human longevity., Author summary In diverse species, mortality rates increase with age at a relatively fixed rate within populations. However, recent discoveries have suggested this relationship breaks down in advanced old age, with mortality rate increases slowing and even reaching a plateau. This late-life mortality deceleration has initiated sustained debate on the cause of late-life deceleration and plateaus. Proposed explanations include evolutionary patterns, the exhaustion of selective pressure, population heterogeneity, and even the cessation of the ageing process. Here, I demonstrate that apparent late-life mortality decelerations and plateaus can be generated by low-frequency errors. I then reveal how indicators of demographic data quality predict the magnitude of late-life mortality deceleration and the existence of late-life plateaus in human populations. These findings suggest that human late-life mortality plateaus are largely, if not entirely, artefacts of error processes. As a result, late-life mortality plateaus and decelerations may be explained by error patterns in humans and many other species without invoking complex biological, heterogeneity, or evolutionary models. This finding has immediate consequences for demographic modelling, evolutionary biology, and the projected upper limits of human and nonhuman life.

There is therefore something both impossible and inevitable about the relationship between psychoanalysis and anarchism. Without an understanding of the psyche, its irrational desires and its passionate attachments to authority figures, there can be no coherent theory of political action, let alone a successful revolution. At the same time, psychoanalytic theory poses fundamental questions to the very concept of revolution, highlighting the utopian fantasies and “wish fulfillment” embodied in such notions, and revealing the deeper problem of the inextricable link between revolutionary desire and the position of the Master. Yet, as suggested by the more radical exponents of the psychoanalytic tradition, there is indeed something potentially transformative and liberating—both individually and socio-politically—about psychoanalysis. And, if we can speak of a psychoanalytic anarchism, we can perhaps also speak of an anarchistic psychoanalysis. Yet, as I will show, this would involve a different way of thinking about anarchism, in which the desire for greater autonomy is coupled with an awareness of the pitfalls and dangers awaiting revolutionary projects. In exploring this unavoidable encounter between anarchism and psychoanalysis, this chapter will mainly confine itself to a discussion of the (post)Freudian tradition, including Reich, Marcuse, and Lacan, as different as they are. While there are no doubt many non-Freudian forms of psychotherapy which might, superficially at least, have more in common with anarchist practices, my contention is that it is the Freudian tradition, with its seemingly hierarchical architecture and discourse, that confronts anarchism with fundamental questions about our own relationship with power and authority. So, rather than this being a comprehensive survey of psychotherapeutic practices and their similarities with anarchism, this chapter will focus on specific areas of theoretical controversy in order to test anarchism at its limits.

This study analyzes two case studies: the Unionist–Republican conflict and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. These disputes are comparable in that peace accords depend on majorities ceding rights to subordinate nationalist groups. However, dominant nationalist groups in the two cases have behaved differently. Unionists have proven more willing to make the necessary political concessions for peace. Testing hypotheses derived from theories of negotiation, trust, opportunity, positive and negative contact and covenants, the findings suggest these variations may be partially explained by the level of trust in subordinate nationalists, perceived threats to dominant labor, and the level of religiosity among dominant nationalists. Trust is a function of both the cessation of violence and a commitment to not engage in future violence. The impact of compromise on dominant labor played a greater role in Northern Ireland than in Israel. Religiosity also serves as a major obstacle toward concessions. Secularization plays a crucial role in opening dominant nationalists to compromise.

by Nathan Jun, New York, NY, Continuum, 2012, 250 pp., ISBN 978-1441140159 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4411-6640-1 (paperback) Within anarchist scholarship – and there has been a lot of this appearing i...

In his Politische Theologie (1922), Carl Schmitt declared that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”; “not only,” he goes on to add, “because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.”1 The key example Schmitt gives is that of the exception in jurisprudence, which he says bears the same structure as the miracle in theology.