Financial eschatology and the libidinal economy of leverage

Apocalyptic thinking has a long religious and political tradition, but what place does it occupy within the temporal universe of contemporary capitalism? In this essay, we use the figure of the eschaton to draw out the loaded and ambiguous character of the future as it emerges through the condition of indebtedness. This entails a departure from political economy accounts of capitalist futurity, which stress the structural logic of financial speculation, in favour of an existential account that begins instead with the cosmology of money and debt. We argue that finance capital’s fixation on the future has produced a very specific form of apocalyptic imagination, characteristic of financial society and built on a libidinal economy of leverage. Rather than offering an ecstatic end to the global process of financialization, financial eschatologies bind the contemporary subject to debt and indebtedness to the very end: an endless apocalypse, premised on the ends of finance itself

Influence of the pavement conditions on the bridge response

This work investigates the influence of pavement conditions on the bridge response. When monitoring is available for the bridge at study, a correlation between the response, usually in terms of acceleration, and the roughness level can point out the need for a maintenance intervention. This paper focuses on the preliminary numerical work devoted to the study of vehicle-bridge interaction, taking advantage of a combined usage of a commercial and of a research code. The case study is a 4-span 60m long highway viaduct in the Northern Italy. Static and dynamic tests were performed after the installation of the SHM system (MEMS clinometers and accelerometers) and its dynamic behavior was continuously mon-itored in conditions of pre- and post-paving. A FE model was established with SAP2000 and updated to account for the experimental results. As a positive novelty of this work, the analysis of bridge-vehicle interaction is tackled by exploiting the capabilities of the commercial code and of a previously developed research code, named INTER. The struc-tural matrices and the relevant tables of nodes are extracted from SAP2000 and, after some manipulations, adopted as input data to INTER. The interaction analysis accounts for roughness and adopts an ad-hoc developed 13-DOFs vehicle model, representing the one adopted in tests. Preliminary results show the influence of the roughness on the accel-eration of selected points, investigating the variability of results tied to the generation of roughness profiles from the PSD function in Eurocode1

Circular oligomeric particles formed by Ros/MucR family members mediate DNA organization in α-proteobacteria

Macromolecular Biochemistr