The military ossuaries (sacrari militari) that were built to house the remains of fallen soldiers of the First World War offer a striking example of how Italy has dealt with the legacy of Fascism. Located along former frontlines in north-eastern Italy, the ossuaries occupy an ambiguous position in Italian heritage as both national monuments and the remnants of a difficult past. Whereas originally they functioned as instruments of Fascist propaganda, they have been reinvented as monuments of Republican Italy. Thus, while challenging the notion of Fascist remains as ‘difficult heritage’, this article suggests that the ossuaries might be seen as palimpsests that have been overlaid with different and ever-changing memories. To this end, the article traces the afterlives of ossuaries from 1945 to the present in search of evidence of evolving attitudes towards the Fascist period. It also examines a recent resurgence of public interest in the ossuaries in conjunction with the centenary of the First World War.

Le présent article défend la thèse selon laquelle (i) le participe passé est une forme purement aspectuelle représentant le temps interne du procès sur la borne terminale de sa phase processuelle ; (ii) cette représentation détensive du temps interne, qu’il ne partage avec aucune autre forme verbale, permet de rendre compte des trois principales constructions dans lesquelles entre le participe passé : l’emploi nu, la construction du passif périphrastique, la construction analytique. C’est à l’analyse du rôle du participe passé dans la construction analytique, du fait de son aspect détensif, qu’est consacré le présent article.

This article asks how we might map the complex relations between music and socialism. If an abiding concern of socialism is the collective appropriation of the means of production, what are the points at which music might participate in this project? Three moments from the history of music's entanglements with socialism shed light on this question. The first considers music's role in workers’ struggles in Europe c. 1900. Here what is at stake is how music and musical associations (most notably workers’ choruses) were mobilized as a tool in the struggle to socialize the means of production. A second vignette turns to France after May 1968, when music itself became a site of political intervention. Here what is at stake is the struggle to socialize the means of musical production, part of the struggle to institute a truly democratic culture. The third vignette turns its attentions to the proximate future, considering music's place in emerging forms of digital capitalism. Crucial in this regard is the way music is being transformed into a means of production in its own right – a means, that is, of producing the kinds of subjects required by contemporary capitalism – as well as the political constraints and possibilities these shifts present for a socialism of the future.

This article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.

Our fraught political moment is a propitious one for renewing the Marxist approach to music. Because that approach has consistently been folded into a more general Marxist discourse on art and aesthetics, any attempt must begin by revisiting what is essential to that discourse. I take its keystone to be the realist conception of art. This conception holds that artworks are a means by which at least some of their appreciators come to know truths about the world outside consciousness. Insofar as they are representational, painting, fiction, music, and drama potentially constitute vehicles for coming to understand the real world. Artistic representation on this view is understood to be analogous to mental representation.

Previous studies of Marxist aesthetics have followed Maurice Merleau-Ponty in making a sharp distinction between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ branches of the tradition. The Eastern, beleaguered by the exigencies of Communist Party rule is often presented as the corrupt twin of the Western. The latter, developed in relative freedom and informed by a Hegelian legacy suppressed by Stalinism, alone commands theoretical, rather than merely historical, interest. This article departs from this Cold War framework in arguing that the Hegelian strand in Marxist aesthetics grows out of its Bolshevik predecessor and, crucially, shares with it a realist conception of art. After reconstructing the emergence and development of this conception (paying special attention to how music is directly addressed in the literature), I evaluate the compatibility of the realist conception of art with the materialist conception of history as it is found in Marx and Engels. I ultimately argue that moving past the realist conception of art is key to renewing the Marxist approach to music for our time.

In 1992, after the dissolution of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Slovenian government unlawfully erased 25,671 individuals—ethnically mainly Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Roma—from the Register of Permanent Residents of Slovenia. The aim of this article is to analyze the logic of the governmental rationalities that served as a basis for the politics of the erasure. The article begins by refuting claims that the erasure was a tactic for achieving ethnocultural homogeneity and continues by explaining the mindset involved in this particular practice of government, resting upon Foucault’s notions of raison d’état, governmentality, and sovereign power. Highlighting the prominence of the individual’s political opinion and loyalty to the newly established state, the article discusses the principles of nationalism, which reinforce the very common-sense exclusionary politics related to political loyalty implied in citizenship and ethnic identity. Finally, the article deliberates on the effects of the contemporary diagram of power of the nation-state, which legitimizes the exclusion of individuals from the national polity and thus immobilizes universal respect of human rights.

After Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day 1941, the ongoing war threatened life in isolated, neutral Macao. While many scholars have attributed the local people's starvation and suffering to the war, others have highlighted Macao's economic prosperity. To explain the gap between these two narratives, this article explores how the locals dealt with rice scarcity and fared relatively well during the four years of Japanese occupation of the Pearl River Delta. Instead of blaming the shortage solely on the machinations of the Japanese and the rice merchants, we uncover the local people's actions in exacerbating the problem.

The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) raises questions about what comparative advantage, if any, human beings will have over machines in the future. This essay explores what it means to be human and how those unique characteristics relate to the digital age. Humor and ethics both rely upon higher-level cognition that accounts for unstructured and unrelated data. That capability is also vital to decision-making processes—such as jurisprudence and voting systems. Since machine learning algorithms lack the ability to understand context or nuance, reliance on them could lead to undesired results for society. By way of example, two case studies are used to illustrate the legal and moral considerations regarding the software algorithms used by driverless cars and lethal autonomous weapons systems. Social values must be encoded or introduced into training data sets if AI applications are to be expected to produce results similar to a “human in the loop.” There is a choice to be made, then, about whether we impose limitations on these new technologies in favor of maintaining human control, or whether we seek to replicate ethical reasoning and lateral thinking in the systems we create. The answer will have profound effects not only on how we interact with AI but also on how we interact with one another and perceive ourselves.

In an article titled “Reforming the Security Council through a Code of Conduct: A Sisyphean Task?” (Ethics & International Affairs 32, no. 4, pp. 463–82), Bolarinwa Adediran argues that efforts to establish a code of conduct at the UN Security Council amount to energy misspent—for reasons both of practicability and effectiveness. While it is true that the proposed codes of conduct do not offer any shortcuts or magic answers to the dilemmas surrounding efforts to prevent atrocity crimes and protect populations, I disagree with the assessment that these initiatives will ultimately prove to be “unhelpful.” I examine the initiatives on three levels of analysis: (1) their effect on political and normative movement toward giving increased attention to human security considerations, (2) their effect on Security Council decision-making, and (3) their effect on atrocity prevention and protection on the ground. The proposed codes have both downside risks and upside potential on all three levels, but it is on the first level that my assessment most sharply diverges from that of Adediran.