1. Recent treatments of trust in relation to language have focused on testimony: on cases in which someone comes to believe something on the basis of what another has told them. A series of highly illuminating papers have brought out that traditional views, of a kind that construe what the other tells me as evidence that things are as they are said to be, fail to capture fundamental, distinctive features of testimony. In particular, they obscure the fact that when another gives me some information I am in relationship with her. There is a crucial contrast between believing what someone tells me and learning from observation of her expressive behaviour. In the former case, my reasons for the belief that I acquire involve trust in the person who informs me: this involving the idea that the other is accountable for the truth of what she says.

My aim in this essay is to suggest that points of this general form have significant analogues in relation to a different, though related, issue: in relation to a ‘trust’ involved quite generally in taking someone to have said something. I will draw on considerations developed by Knud Løgstrup. These considerations are neatly summarised in his observation, ‘In its basic sense trust is essential to every conversation.’ It is clear from the way in which he develops this point that the ‘trust’ of which Løgstrup speaks has a rich ethical dimension. This may encourage the idea that his remarks should be read as a contribution to ‘the ethics of conversation’ – where that phrase is taken to mark a form of enquiry that is distinct from, and secondary to, a philosophical attempt to clarify the nature of language. That would, I believe, be a serious mistake: a mistake that I will try to bring into focus in part through consideration of a certain reading of Wittgenstein along with Grice's well-known treatment of conversation.

2. In a conversation with a friend about yesterday's seminar, I say, as it might seem quite out of the blue, ‘Mary is coming over this evening’. You struggle for a moment to grasp what is going on and even (our having a number of Marys amongst our joint acquaintances) who it is I am speaking of.

Colombia is not the first place that comes to mind when thinking of the Gothic genre. For the most romantic, Colombia is a tropical paradise where it is always sunny; for those less familiar with the country, it is synonymous with little more than drugs and violence. Even for Colombians, Gothic is not a genre through which the country is frequently narrated, in contrast to the omnipresent magical realism, in its variant masterfully used by Gabriel García Márquez. Perhaps the most visible space in which the Gothic is currently articulated in the country is in the Goth subculture, an important “urban tribe” in the cold and rainy city of Bogotá. However, Gothic as a literary genre has been practiced in Colombia since the nineteenth century with pieces written in parallel to those produced by European and U.S. gothic authors. By the 1980s, a distinct Gothic variant—the Tropical Gothic—emerged in Colombia and in the larger region of Latin America.

The idea that the Gothic has flourished and continues to do so in Colombia, and in Latin America more broadly, is still novel in cultural and literary studies on the continent. It is not until the first decade of the twenty-first century that critics and scholars started tracing the presence of the Gothic in Latin America. Argentine scholar and poet María Negroni directly connects Latin American fantastic literature with the Gothic genre in her 2009 book Galería fantástica (Fantastic Gallery). In the prologue of her book, she regards “Latin American fantastic literature as drifting in the wake of gothic literature” (9, my translation), linking the two movements and their productions. For Negroni, the Gothic is an important influence on Latin American fantastic literature, whereas the Gothic itself is not a genre or a mode that has been practiced on the continent. It is not until the second decade of the twenty-first century that studies written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English began to claim a Latin American Gothic as such and trace its cultural products.

Texts in Spanish and Portuguese pioneered these studies: to the already mentioned Galería fantástica we can add the book Gótico Tropical: O sublime e o demoníaco en O Guarani (Tropical Gothic: The Sublime and the Demonic in O Guarani, 2010) by Brazilian scholar Daniel Serravalle de Sá.

It can seem as if, from the novella early in the century to the flowering of tragedy later on, an advance has been made. Over the course of the sixteenth century, human suffering was little by little wrested from the complacent confines of the morality tale, or the jingoism of romantic fantasy, and worked into open-ended dramas of inescapable struggle, to which the proper response was pity, puzzlement, terror or horror and grief, mixed perhaps with indignation, and a wish for a better world, where the struggle will have been overcome. “The weight of this sad time we must obey,” says a character at the end of King Lear, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3.298–99). We have arrived at what may seem to be a typically modern point of view. And perhaps, at least in some respects, we have. But the impression of progress may be an effect of a bias that has governed my choice of texts and themes, beginning with an inclination toward finding discoveries in literary history, points where new dimensions of human experience and sensibility seem to have been approached, observed and expressed. From Seneca or Bandello to Shakespeare, or from Gower to Erasmus, surely something has been achieved in human understanding, if achievements of the sort are what we are looking for. (And why should we not be looking for them?) But if we don't limit ourselves to the audacious masterpieces of the period, what then? We may be faced with a culture of indifferent disturbance. The impression of progress may be an effect of omission—of all the texts I have not had the opportunity to discuss, including a world of what are usually considered to be minor works, or nonliterary texts, some of which treated violence unthinkingly or gratuitously, or according to the moral standards which can no longer be to our taste. I think of a play I mentioned in the beginning of this study, Chantelouve's La Tragedie de feu Gaspar de Colligni, which delights in assassination, or again of Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, which delights in some sort of assassination and recoils indignantly at others, depending on whether the victim is Protestant or Catholic.

1. Wittgenstein took this – ‘Not empiricism and yet realism’ – to be something to aim at in philosophy. My concern in this essay is to suggest what he might have meant by this. The task is made tricky by the fact that the term ‘realism’ is used in a variety of ways in philosophy. Wittgenstein himself is, presumably, understanding the term differently when he speaks of refusing both ‘the scepticism of the idealist’ and ‘the assurances of the realist’.

To give a rough indication of how I will use the term in this essay: ‘realism’ is the view that things and their properties exist independently of human concepts and practices. The formulation leaves room for the suggestion that we should be realists about some but not other of the things people speak of (perhaps trees but not unicorns), and about some but not other general areas of our thought and speech: perhaps science but not ethics. I will suggest that there is nothing in Wittgenstein to cast a completely general doubt on realism so understood. What, then, does he have in mind when he rejects ‘the assurances of the realist’? One possibility is this: he is insisting that it is not the business of philosophy to offer assurances that, for example, trees and mountains exist independently of us. Another, more relevant to my concerns in this essay, is that he is rejecting the assurances of views that hold that we have the ‘right’ concepts: that our experience of the world dictates that these are the concepts in terms of which it is to be described. Such views are, I believe, well characterised as ‘empiricism’. They are, I will suggest in the next section, particularly clearly exemplified in Locke's thinking and may, I believe, be at least part of what Wittgenstein has in mind when he calls for ‘Not empiricism and yet realism’.

2. John Locke remarks that:

Violence as Labor

E cominciarno il dispietato gioco: “And they began their pitiless game.” Thus in Orlando Innamorato Matteo Maria Boiardo's narrator describes the opening of a fight between the titular Orlando and one of his enemies, the Spanish Saracen Feragu. The combat between them is a “game,” but the game is “pitiless.” The next sentence takes up the “cruelty” (crudeltate) of what they are doing to one another, and the damage they are doing to one another's shield and armor. But then, out of the blue we are told “Their flesh—enchanted—can't be cut.” Can't be cut? In other words, neither of them can win this ruthless game? Actually, “Neither one was sure he’d win.” The equivalence of the combatants is key. For in a narrative of this type, a heroic narrative and an epic romance, violence aspires at once toward symmetry and precedence as well as gamesmanship. If the world of the novella, as we saw, is about asymmetry, the imbalances of power between perpetrators and victims, and the inevitable inequities of outcomes, the world of the heroic narrative (leaving apart stories about supernatural beings) is all about equivalence, about sustaining and proving equivalence even unto death, even in spite of the fact, or because of the fact, that society (Christian, pagan and Muslim alike) is strictly hierarchical, and the highest reward for entering into a symmetrical combat and emerging victorious is precedence. The best fights are those where outcomes are uncertain because the combatants are equal in status and prowess and they can do battle as if following the rules of a game. (The uncertainty of outcomes is also, of course, a key to the narrative drive of the poem, enabling suspense and delay.) In this case, however, as in so many others, the fight is interrupted. A damsel in distress needs their help. And so, for now the “ruthless game” is over.

Orlando Innamorato would never be finished. After 35,000 lines it breaks off, in the middle of the action, the author announcing that he can't go on for now: “while I sing, o my redeemer, / I see all Italy on fire, / because these French—so valiant!—/ come to lay waste who knows what land” (3.9.26).

This content analysis is based on the May and August issues of each title from 1920, 1922, 1926 and 1928. In order to gain the fullest understanding of the commercial content in relation to the magazine as a whole, both the number of advertisements and the page space occupied were recorded. In the case of the latter, the basic unit of measurement is the page. The page space is therefore represented as a proportion of the individual page, rather than a measurement of actual size, allowing for an accurate comparison of the larger Ladies’ Home Journal and smaller Canadian Home Journal which is unaffected by the alterations in page size that occurred in both titles. Each advert was counted and assigned one of 23 subcategories, which were then arranged under 3 main categories: ‘Home’, ‘Appearance’ and ‘Lifestyle’. Each advertisement was coded according to the category which fitted it best, involving in some cases a qualitative judgement. For example, some advertisements for toothpaste positioned themselves primarily as aiding appearance and were therefore assigned to the ‘Beauty products’ category. Other toothpaste advertisements, however, presented the product as a hygiene product – emphasising health benefits – and were therefore assigned to the Health and Hygiene category. One category was assigned to each product, according to the attribute which was primarily being marketed to the consumer. The only exception in this regard is in the category of ‘Beauty products’. Given that make-up was often marketed within advertisements for other beauty products, and that discussion of make-up forms a significant part of Chapter 4, an additional subcategory of ‘Of which makeup’ was added to the ‘Beauty products’ subcategory.

In this chapter, we will explore the timeline of events in the build-up to the 2013 Sentencia that retroactively stripped the plaintiff Juliana Deguis Pierre of her Dominican nationality (Figure 3). The ruling led to the implementation of a nationwide audit to identify tens of thousands of other foreign-descended populations born since 1929 whose legal identity was now in dispute. We will examine the tug of war that took place between the Dominican state and migrant rights organisations who had mobilised in an effort to combat statelessness. As these campaigns gained traction, Dominican and international NGOs joined forces to demand the restitution of rights to affected populations, turning to the Inter-American system for support. In response, the authorities introduced stricter administrative barriers, ordering that civil registry officials challenge and investigate individuals they believed to be of Haitian descent. From the mid-2000s, the authorities introduced new legal, institutional, procedural, constitutional and administrative reforms which aimed to block persons of Haitian ancestry from acquiring evidentiary proof of their national status. Through a radical overhaul of the Dominican civil registry (Central Electoral Board, JCE), the government developed a new legal definition of the Dominican nationality that ultimately removed birthright citizenship from Haitian-descended populations with a view to blocking them from the body politic altogether. This chapter concludes by examining some of the reactions of NGOs and affected populations who once thought they were citizens yet were later informed they should never have been recognised as Dominicans in the first place.

The Inter-American System, NGOs and the Fight against Statelessness

During a heated election campaign in 1996, the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) aligned with the xenophobic and ferociously anti-Haitian National Progressive Force (FNP). Together they opposed the election of José Francisco Peña Gómez, a Black man born to Haitian parents. This political gamble may have secured Leonel Fernández the presidency (1996–2000, 2004–8, 2008–12), but he was heavily criticised in international circles for his close ties to the FNP. Bilingual Fernández, who grew up in New York, positioned himself as a modern leader eager to distance the country from its dictatorial past by embracing neoliberal reforms, economic expansion and technological advances.

This chapter provides a rare insight into the strategic use of local media labor in extending neoimperialism, an example of Pashtun journalists whose work transforms in the wake of a war/military confrontation in Pakistan's bordering region with Afghanistan. In 1979, at the peak of the Cold War politics, hundreds of Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in harsh winter to occupy Kabul's snowy roads. No strangers to Afghanistan, the Soviet troops had apparently intervened in support of the pro-Soviet Afghan president, Nur Mohammad Taraki. They faced no official resistance, therefore. About seven hundred miles west of Kabul, however, generals in Pakistan were sulking. In the country's scenic capital, Islamabad, dictator Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan was already in trouble. He had toppled Z. A. Bhutto's elected government before hanging him in jail, a political murder that followed him like a ghost, earning him worldwide condemnation. The Soviets not just provided the Pakistani general with a chance to divert domestic tension focusing on events outside the border, but the local ethnic reporters also got subsidiary role of reporting the events across the border in Afghanistan. The war, in other words, became training as well as a launching pad for the emergence of the first generation of local reporters, a role reassigned to “fixers” in the post-9/11 Pakistan.

Provoking nationalism on domestic front, Pakistan military presented the “godless” Soviets as a threat to Islam and, hence, Pakistan. If the Soviets “were allowed to occupy Afghanistan, it would then be but a short step to Pakistan,” Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, a military strategist in Zia-ul-Haq's dictatorial regime, wrote later in his widely famous book (Yousaf & Adkin, 2001, p. 23). The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy chief General Akhtar Abdur Rahman in his presentation to Zia recommended that Pakistan back the Afghan resistance, not just for “defending Islam but also Pakistan” (pp. 22–23). Zia did not find trouble in mending his US fences and winning over the capitalist world. In his book-turned-movie, Charlie Wilson's War (2007), George Crile writes about this operation:

It is in the very DNA of capital to turn life itself into a means for generating more capital (professional, academic, cultural, financial, industrial, etc.). The global journalist visits the conflict zone like a gold prospector—this is his cultural capital, where he has discovered, like Columbus, the native, whom he calls his “fixer.” Using “fixers” as his “eyes” and “ears,” the journalist's entrepreneurial spirit goes on to acquire more cultural capital, that is, titles, bylines and awards. This objectification process, that turns the local knowledge worker into an embodied instrument of global media capital, reduces the “fixer” to a status not different from the nineteenth-century native colonial soldier. While the latter was compelled to fight in British imperial wars, the former is enlisted as a faceless gatherer of war stories. As history continues to bleed into the present, the local reporter, like a colonial soldier, literally carries in his body (as women are precluded from this role under patriarchy) the very conflict that births him. The reporter's precarity, a result of—and reason for—the low exchange value of his labor in the global marketplace reveals the commodification of life itself.

Marx had identified this script in the early days of expansion of the capitalist mode of production. He cautioned us that capital works like an objective force, extracting labor from a worker's body, turning “life itself “ into drudgery. His work is still relevant today, if not more so, due to the expanding reach of global capitalism into every corner of the world and the living labor's transformation, like other elements of life, into just a commodity to be bought and sold to maximize profits. Marx ([1867] 1976) not only describes how capital profits by turning living labor—the innate capacity to work—into commodities on the market, but he also explains that capitalism creates unequal conditions for the individual worker to appear in the market ready to sell their labor in order to subsist. These conditions are twofold. First, the individuals must be free to sell their labor. Second, they must sell their labor for a short while (because a permanent alienation of labor is slavery): they must temporarily alienate their labor and also retain ownership over it.

In March 1922, the Ladies’ Home Journal published a letter from Mrs. Irene Darnell-Hartwick, of Low Moor, Virginia. Introducing the letter, Editor Barton W. Currie stated, ‘We doubt that any of us could, so ably, in such brief space, state our aims and objectives’ (26). Throughout the letter, Mrs. Darnell-Hartwick flatters the characteristic range of content within the magazine; its ‘editorials and special articles by men and women especially qualified to write on upon these subjects’, its ‘clean and wholesome’ fiction and its fashions which are ‘conservative and of good taste’. Taken together with the editorial endorsement, the letter represents a rare example of an explicit statement of intent on the part of the Ladies’ Home Journal (1883– 2014), confirming its attitudes towards modernity and femininity, its priorities in terms of content and – perhaps most crucially – the centrality of the home. The home is of equal importance in a full-page statement in the June 1926 issue of the Canadian Home Journal (1905– 58). Untitled and unsigned, it too describes the magazine's range of content; its ‘entertaining, wholesome and clean-cut’ fiction, the ‘very latest creations and styles’ in fashions which offer also ‘practical information’ and features ‘relative to the home and home life’ (66). Where it differs from the piece in the Ladies Home Journal however, is its consistent emphasis on national identity: ‘There is no doubt that the Canadian who is truly Canadian at heart, should know the preference for Canadian achievements and Canadian enterprise’ (66). These magazines were, in their respective countries, among the most successful and enduring women's titles of the twentieth century.

From our first steps through the African savannah 2 million years ago, right up until we started to make our way into the stratosphere, we humans never truly envisaged that our destiny could lie elsewhere than on Earth. The idea that we could one day be meant to leave the planet where we were born was just not conceivable by most people in the past. Their imagination was peopled by angels, demons or spirits, not by aliens and space battles. For them, the celestial heavens remained a magnificent backdrop thought up by God or competing divinities, and absolutely nothing in any antique cosmogony suggests that a possible departure from Earth could one day be humanity's greatest adventure. Medieval man would have had a spiritual breakdown if he had been invited to step aboard a spaceship and take a voyage to colonize another star system.

Yet things have changed with space conquest. As we gradually discover the existence of exoplanets suited to our wildest dreams, the possibility of a departure from Earth sounds increasingly familiar and exciting. Indeed, as inaccessible as this may seem, at least for the decades to come, the likelihood of interstellar travel should no longer be viewed, given the amazing technological progress we are witnessing every single day, as an unrealistic dream. After years of relative indifference following the exploits of the Apollo missions, space exploration has obviously caught the public's imagination once again, and we’re shyly beginning to admit that traveling to the most lavish and furthest-flung reaches of the universe could one day come true.

However, this enthusiasm may well hide a disturbing existential question, with potentially dramatic consequences: what if humankind is in fact bored with life on Earth?

If someone had presented me with that question during a conversation, I would have been slightly troubled, but this only on an intellectual level. But if this awareness of a boring world had come to me through the experience of everyday trials and tribulations, then I would have devoted my full attention to it. This, of course, is exactly what happened. A few years ago, I was depressed at work, but I could not distinguish between a simple “bore-out” or disillusionment concerning my professional life, which can affect anyone, and a more tenacious ennui, revealed in a disappointing everyday life but reaching to the very essence of my entire human existence.

In one way or another, I feel that we have reached the end of the world, which is not only a moment but also a state of being, and this is why we find it so hard to grasp its essence. We have more or less accomplished all that we can in a world that has exhausted most of the material and immaterial forms it could give us. Of course, history goes on, but it is starting to repeat itself. It does so because, for the moment, it has no grand quest to offer us that would go beyond an imagination that appears to have reached its limits, despite all the efforts of Hollywood. How will we react when we have fully digested the fact that our fishbowl has nothing left to reveal? Can we humans still endure if our perspectives do not go beyond the management of a planet that has given up all of its secrets? How will we cope with this finiteness?

The film Interstellar, quoted in this book's epigraph, probably was the very first movie to depict a departure from Earth in such a realistic and dramatic fashion, unlike the traditional space operas or survival movies that went before. What struck me most in this story was the melancholy, sadness and all-pervading apathy filling the hearts of a future society that looks so similar to ours. In the movie, the impending environmental disaster threatens humankind at the very moment when it is in fact ready to leave, weary of life on Earth. As their automated remote-controlled tractors harvest the fields, the farmers at world's end have nothing else to do but sit back and watch. This oppressive atmosphere exudes an apocalyptic air, the virtualization of the body and collapse of human desire that I seek to describe and which, without any possibility of adventure, can only lead to the depression of all humankind.

Depression. There, I’ve said it. I have already used the word, in fact, to prepare the reader for that which I believe is the hidden reality of our current pathology: humankind is depressed. If God were a doctor, His diagnosis would probably also include the phrase “bears suicidal tendencies.”