To browse Academia. My paper analyzes the play Homo Empathicus by Rebekka Kricheldorf. The play describes a community of hyperempathic people in which the distinguishing traits of religion, biological sex, and age have disappeared. Another significant inspiration came from the Guide to Non-Discriminatory Language, Behaviour, and Representation published by the Austrian Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in In the shadow of a host of devastating occurrences that range from artificial to natural and in some cases indissociably blend the two including the September 11 terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 'credit crunch', the swine flu pandemic, the Boxing Day tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, and the ongoing threat of climate changethere is a widespread perception that ours is a catastrophic or disastrous age.
These two books overtly position themselves in relation to this atmosphere of shock and anxiety. While each offers much of interest, however, neither succeeds in providing a thorough critical engagement with the perpetual state of emergency that seems to characterize the contemporary moment.
Hoens, Jöttkandt, and Buelens' collection of essays, The Catastrophic Imperative, boasts an impressive roster of contributors, ranging from giants of the contemporary intellectual scene Alain Badiou and J. Hillis Miller to distinguished senior scholars such as Gil Chaitin, Tom Cohen, and Joanna Hodge to emerging researchers including Patience Moll, Aaron Schuster, and Sjoerd van Tuinen.
The jacket copy describes the collection as 'evoking the contemporary zeitgeist of looming ecological, political, and economic disaster'. Similarly, the introduction locates the book against a 'contemporary catastrophic horizon' defined by such phenomena as the 'conflagration. The institutional design outlined in the previous chapters can converge towards Isocracy only if people become again protagonists of their own lives. There are four main differences between the behaviour of homo oeconomicus and that of a passionate human being.
Firstly, passions emerge through non-intentional acts, a loss of control by the subject. Finally, passions are not directly dependent on monetary rewards, because they do not vary within a relevant interval if the latter change.
