In research on how digital space affects the political sphere, existing scholarship has largely focus on ideology, discourse, power, communicative action, and platform governance, while paying little attention to the perspectives of ″speed″ and ″temporality″. Within Virilio's theory of speed, ″acceleration″ reconfigures human ″proximity″ in the digital age. The physical space required for prudent political deliberation is increasingly compressed by acceleration, while a form of ″chronopolitics″ grounded in ″real time″ increasingly supersedes traditional ″geopolitics″ based on the space of embodied co-presence. Viewed more broadly, the temporality of ″slowness″ is inherent in the traditional liberal-democratic polity. This temporality renders liberal democracy increasingly ill-equipped to meet the intensified demand for ″generalized acceleration″ in the context of contemporary ″post-Fordism″ and ″neoliberal capitalism″, while making rational political deliberation increasingly scarce in cyberspace. This ″disjunction″ between the intrinsic ″slowness″ of liberal democracy and the ″acceleration″ of contemporary capitalism also explains why Western democracy struggles to respond to ongoing technological transformations and widespread political dissatisfaction.

The drastic transformation of Chinese society in the 21st century has generated a diverse and distinctive theme of ″subaltern flight″ narration in Chinese cinema. Centered on three dimensions — spatial predicament, spiritual salvation, and temporal mirror — this theme carries clear expressive forms and artistic characteristics. Related films depict marginalized groups confronting spatial confinement, class barriers, and cultural shocks amid urbanization and modernization, while also presenting their spiritual breakthrough and value reconstruction through virtual imagination, religious faith, and manual creation. ″Subaltern flight″ narration in Chinese cinema expands the expressive boundaries of realism, provides a unique cinematic perspective for examining China's social transformation, and manifests the humanistic spirit of marginalized groups upholding dignity in adversity.

″Analog horror″ short videos derive their name from the poor-image aesthetic of analog TV signals, which present a scattered, patchwork textual form akin to ″ergodic literature″ that allows viewers to piece together the narrative at will. ″Analog horror″ short videos challenge the inertia of reception projected by television as a mainstream media terminal, thereby achieving a self-reflexive narrative of the entire communication mechanism represented by analog TV transmission, and forge their own aesthetic mechanism of horror through the return of ″repressed memory.″ The ″invitation to interpretation″ embedded in ″analog horror″ short videos is in fact a latent mechanism that guides the audience to undermine media authority in the process of ″false nostalgia,″ and thereby enables the audience to attain ″empowerment through resistance″—thus highlighting the cultural-political implications of ″analog horror″ short videos.

In Notes on Kafka, Adorno focuses on historical writing in Kafka's novels. Adorno contends that Kafka opens up a fissure, dialectically revealing the resurgence of primal violence in modern times, namely the collusion between totalitarianism and capital in the late phase of the Enlightenment. This historical condition arises from the subject's continuous separation from the object in the course of the Enlightenment, whereby the subject is ultimately reduced to a hollow authority, a living-dead figure suspended in an in-between condition. Kafka writes history through the hermetic principle, thereby distancing himself from the laws of universal delusion that govern the totalized society, avoiding the taboo against narrating history in a linear, progressivist manner, and instead igniting readers' recollection by awakening their sense of déjà vu, thus attaining a greater universality. In Kafka's hermetic writing of history, Adorno discerns the possibility of a negative redemption through ″nonviolent resistance″, that is, the subject reifies itself and becomes a thoroughly useless waste-product. This heterogeneous existence renders the violence of power visible and brings about the collapse of the Enlightenment's myth of the self. By endowing the Gnostic negation in Kafka's works with a concrete historical-ethical aim, Adorno finds in Kafka's writing of history the possibility of continuously and multilayeredly negating identity through an extreme exposure of the necrotic parts of history, thereby calling forth an ethical reconstruction and perpetually repairing the present world from a redemptive perspective. Through a critical-theoretical reading of Kafka's writing of history, Adorno, within the post-Auschwitz cultural context, offers a literary response to the task of preventing total catastrophe from recurring.

Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism and Philosophy of Art both hold that art brings about the self-revelation of the Absolute and the return of the human spirit to the Absolute, and thus the philosophy of art in the two works exhibits a strong coherence.However, what cannot be overlooked is that Schelling had already altered his understanding of the relationship between the Absolute and the human spirit in artistic creation between these two works, shifting from emphasizing the dominance of the Absolute over the human spirit to affirming the divine creativity inherent in the human spirit itself. The subject of artistic creation thus shifted from the Absolute to the human spirit. The root of this transformation lies in the fundamental change in the mode of production of the Absolute and the structure of dialectical movement in the two works. Different modes of production led to a change in the relationship between the essence and the form of the Absolute, which further influenced the divine-human relationship in art. The evolution in Schelling's view of art also reflects the advancement in his theory of freedom, revealing his profound contemplation of the inherent tension between the infinite dominance of the Absolute and the freedom of the human spirit.

Shuowen Jiezi constructs an exegetical system that takes the character as its foundation, the classics as its telos, and the word as its bridge, with the three interpenetrating to yield a multidimensional yi (meaning). Distinguishing zaoyi (constructed meaning), shiyi (actual meaning), yuanyi (etymological meaning), and ciyi (lexical meaning) in light of character formation and word formation, and correlating ziyi (character meaning), ciyi (word meaning), wenyi (textual meaning), and jingyi (canonical meaning) through patterns of usage and the principles of classical studies, help us grasp the full complexity of exegesis in Shuowen Jiezi. As exegetical scholarship narrowed in scope over time, its engagement with the classics and its capacity for intellectual elucidation withered, skewing our understanding of yi in the exegetical practice of Shuowen Jiezi. In the contemporary academic context, exegetical scholarship should expand its horizons through dialogue with hermeneutics and recover its power of elucidation. The multidimensionality and determinacy of exegetical yi remain a central and inescapable issue for the construction of Chinese hermeneutics.

The structure of King Wu's Xianfu ceremony as recorded in the Shi Fu chapter of the Yi Zhou Shu reveals the significance of sacrifice in the formation of early state order: the ritual symbolized the presence of the divine, sacralizing acts of violence; by killing captives as offerings, it expelled sin entirely from the community to rebuild order; at the same time, the sacredness of the rite demarcated a normative sphere that brooked no violation, serving as a crucial mechanism for constructing and sustaining early state order. The evolution of the Xianfu rite spanned nearly the entire Western Zhou period. In King Wu's time, the ceremony still followed primarily the ″honoring sound″ (shang sheng) tradition: there were yue players performing music to honor the ancestors, alongside the ritual prescription of human sacrifice, showing deep influence from Shang sacrificial patterns. During King Kang's reign, the Xianfu ceremony seen in the Xiao Yu ding shifted to a ″honoring scent″ (shang xiu) model, employing chang (aromatic wine) as the medium, and implemented rewards and punishments toward different subjects through the procedures of xun (interrogation) and shang (bestowal). From King Mu onward, the Xianfu rite was combined with investiture (ceming) and banquet (xiang) ceremonies, putting into practice the principle of ″rewarding the diligent and meritorious″ through feasting and bestowal, and gradually interfacing with the bureaucratic system to take on hierarchical and procedural characteristics. Ritual and music thus penetrated the judicial and administrative domains, becoming a vital mechanism for sustaining judicial and administrative order.

Current discussions of the shift from ″Afro-Asia and Latin America″ to the ″Global South″ have largely remained at the level of political naming or the expansion of subject matter. The crux of the matter, however, lies in how cross-regional musical experience is constituted as an object of knowledge. Since the early years of the People's Republic, cross-regional musical experience did not enter scholarly attention on its own; rather, it was institutionalized as an object of knowledge that is audible, visible, and learnable through the linked processes of composition, performance, media circulation, and teaching-and-research. Reducing the ″Global South″ to a mere change in terminology risks misreading inherited experiential structures and reveals the explanatory inadequacy of existing research at the institutional-medial level. The ″Global South″ discourse, drawing on Southern Theory, exposes inequalities in knowledge production and prompts a reorientation toward explaining the mediality of music, its institutionalization, and the mechanisms of perception. Taking the Maritime Silk Road as a vantage point, this article proposes a locally grounded research framework centered on a ″mechanism chain.″

In modern China, the meaning of ″non-war″ evolved continuously with shifts in the global order, the nation's fortunes, and the political climate, its conceptual boundaries gradually narrowing. It has always drifted between two discourses — opposition to foreign aggression and resistance to internal strife — yet its core of anti-oppression, anti-aggression, and the hope for peace has never changed. Grounded in humanism, China's non-war ideology saw two major waves, manifesting in literature as a dialectical balance between opposition to unjust wars and narratives of nation and family. Modern Chinese non-war literature produced a vast and heterogeneous body of work, rich in theory and marked by successive ideological surges, yet it has failed to receive the attention it deserves. The study of modern Chinese non-war literature must be tied to contemporary intellectual currents and viewed through a dynamic lens: it reshaped the Chinese people's ethical outlook on war; it deepened the engagement between modern Chinese literature and world war literature, and the shifting balance between non-war and leftist forces in turn propelled resistance literature to new depths, making non-war literature a distinctive and vital force in the modern transformation of Chinese literature.