Poststructuralism, Misc

This article analyzes how populism is conceptualized and studied in International Relations (IR) and argues that it should be seen as a political logic instead of a political ideology. It does so by demonstrating that ‘populist foreign policy’ looks radically different when analyzing the populist left, refuting the possibility of any distinctly ‘populist’ foreign policy positions. We argue that large parts of IR scholarship practice a form of concept-stretching that undermines the quality of analysis as well as the ability to (...) make meaningful policy recommendations. Using the empirical case studies of Bernie Sanders in the United States and Podemos in Spain, the article demonstrates that populism does not translate into any shared ideological positions but is a way of formulating and performing – in these cases – leftist politics through which political actors can interpellate and mobilize different societal groups and demands behind their political projects. In particular, the analysis debunks common assumptions about populism’s alleged effects on foreign policy and dangers to pluralist democracy and shows that “populism” neither necessarily opposes multilateralism, migration and global public good provision nor formulates an authoritarian claim to power. (shrink)

This paper explores the events surrounding a string of robberies from the homes of young celebrities living in Los Angeles County by a group of teenagers referred to by the media as “The Bling Ring.” It argues that the group demonstrates the intersections of desire and materiality under the conditions of a culture driven by idolization of the celebrity, referring to the works of Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, and French collective Tiqqun. It further examines the events as a moment where (...) subjects were able to escape the life-narratives imposed upon them by the State. Rather than adhering to the norms of regular adolescent life, reproduced and enforced through what Michael Shapiro identifies as “national-time,” members of the Bling Ring endeavored to create their own lives according to what I refer to as “celebrity-time,” revealing processes of becoming in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and plasticity in that of Catherine Malabou. (shrink)

Baseado na perspectiva da geofilosofia de Deleuze e Guattari em um processo que se sobrepõe à relação envolvendo sujeito e objeto enquanto fronteira do pensamento e que implica o pensamento como desdobramento de uma violência e as formações genealógicas do saber, o artigo se detém na análise do paradoxal mundo do Instituto Benjamenta (1995) em uma construção fílmica adaptada do romance Jakob von Gunten, de Robert Walser, que encerra um movimento que traz como conteúdo a matéria que se impõe ao (...) caos imanente e converge para o horizonte que abrange Arte, Filosofia e Ciência. Dessa forma, convergindo para a questão que encerra a imagem ortodoxa, dogmática, pré-filosófica, natural e moral do pensamento, o artigo recorre ao filme Instituto Benjamenta (1995) enquanto construção que assinala a intersecção de séries infinitas de imagens de pensamento que escapam ao horizonte da circunscrição da visualidade através de inter-relações ilimitadas que emergem carregadas de complexidade em um processo que defende a superação das imagens dogmáticas do pensamento e da mera exposição do conteúdo do arcabouço histórico do pensamento enquanto objeto que tende à reprodução de ideias e noções e implica a “repetição” de interpretações na relação de ensino e aprendizagem, impedindo o exercício de criação de conceitos, característica da Filosofia, segundo Deleuze, convergindo para a necessidade da instauração de uma experiência capaz de viabilizar a emergência do “novo” através das possibilidades suscitadas no acontecimento da construção do conhecimento. (shrink)

Legitimacy is a concept that has been largely forgotten by the deconstructive discourse on law and politics. This article seeks, on the one hand, to reassess the role of legitimacy in deconstruction and, on the other hand, to bring deconstructive thinking to bear on the concept of legitimacy. By re-reading Derrida’s “Declarations of Independence” through the lenses of his later texts on sovereignty and (counter)signature, it is argued that, rather than being deconstructible, legitimacy is deconstructing any self-founding of law and (...) power. As such, legitimacy functions not as an evaluative concept of law and order but as a constantly insisting demand that facilitates the principles of responsibility and responsiveness. (shrink)

Das Verhältnis von Einheit und Vielheit als ein Grundproblem der Philosophiegeschichte erfährt in den Werken von zwei der gegenwärtig einflussreichsten französischen Denker, Gilles Deleuze und Jean-Luc Nancy, eine je spezifische Reformulierung mit weitreichenden ontologischen sowie politischen Konsequenzen. Durch einen innovativen, aber dennoch einführenden Vergleich kontrastiert und verschränkt Ralf Gisinger erstmalig Ansätze beider Philosophen, indem er sein originäres Konzept der „Pluralisierung“ entwickelt. In einem Feld zwischen Allgemeinheit und Partikularität lassen sich so insbesondere klassische Kategorien der politischen Philosophie wie Identität, Subjekt oder (...) Gesellschaft radikal neu begreifen. -/- Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, two of the most influential thinkers of our time, both engage with the classic philosophical problem of the one and the many. Ralf Gisinger develops his original concept of ‘pluralization’ by contrasting and intersecting these two philosophers, while shedding a light on the consequences of these pluralizations on an ontological as well as political level regarding notions like identity, subject or society. (shrink)

This article interrogates a certain philosophical scene – one which constitutes itself through the position of what Jacques Derrida calls “the ethical instance of violence.” This scene supposes a certain “style” of writing or doing philosophy, and perhaps even a certain philosophical “genre” or “subgenre”: the philosophical discourse on violence. In the course of the essay, I analyze this quasi-juridical scene through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Werner Hamacher, Rodolphe Gasché, and Martin Hägglund among (...) others. The scene, built on texts on texts on violence, demands a logic of purity; it is wary of contaminations and equivocations. And yet it thrives on them. In analyzing the implications of text, writing, and trace for the philosophical discourse on violence, I follow Derrida “just to see” what could make the scene tremble. (shrink)

This doctoral thesis examines the phenomenon of Filipinization, specifically understood as the ideological construction of a “Filipino identity” or ‘Filipino subject-consciousness” within the highly determinate context provided by the Filipino ilustrado nationalists such as José Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar and their fellow propagandists inasmuch as it leads to the nineteenth (19th) century construction of the modern Philippine nation. Utilizing Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive thinking, this study undertakes a genealogical critique engaged on the concrete historical examination of what is meant by (...) the term “Filipino” across a select historical timeline (1864-1898) and the various notions of Filipino identity implied by the different contexts within which the term “Filipino” has been employed. More specifically, it undertakes a selective philosophical excavation of three seminal texts in the history of Filipinization, viz.: 1) the Manifiesto of Padre Jose Burgos; 2) the writings of the Filipino ilustrados in La Solidaridad; and 3) Jose Rizal’s Annotations on Dr. Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. -/- The philosophical claim of this work is the idea that Filipinization, taken as the differential construction of Filipino identity, is the effective translation of the colonial epistemic violence of Eurocentric racism and its consequent “horror of absolutism” into the homo-hegemony of Filipino nationalisms. By fetishizing the notion of a carefully constructed and essential “Filipino-identity,” Filipinization and the current nationalist discourses that utilize them, unwittingly, stands complicit with the same colonial violence and hegemony that they wish to combat. This happens precisely when the very structures of colonial oppression, on the ideological and practical levels, are transmogrified into nationalist ideals that assume legal and political power unto themselves in a self-referential and self-legitimating fashion. -/- Three processes will demonstrate the above thesis: first, by examining historical texts and setting itself against established nationalist historiographies, a genealogical analysis of the term “Filipino” reveals it as a pliable signifier whose semantics have evolved through time. From its originary referent in the Spanish criollo (creole), it has come to refer to people who would have been otherwise entirely alien to this class, viz., the mestizos (both Spanish and Chinese), the principalia (native elite), and eventually, the lowland Catholicized natives themselves. The historical hermeneutic of this identity-discourse in Padre José Burgos’ Manifiesto yields the fact that what gives the term “Filipino” its semantic consistency as a class concept is its essential constitution as a Hispanic and Catholic identity. -/- Second, from this semantic identification of the term “Filipino” as a Hispano-Catholic identity, we proceed to clarify the meaning of Filipinization in terms of the nationalist propaganda carried out by the Filipino ilustrados in the fortnightly periodical La Solidaridad. Here, the specific ilustrado construction of Filipino identity as a Spanish citizen (ciudadano Español) is revealed precisely as a political and legal construct that served as the basis for their own politics of social inclusion/exclusion. Filipinization can only be applied to those who have been hispanized and Christianized and never to those tribes who have resisted and remained outside Spanish colonial authority. Filipinization is thus revealed as a process of Hispanization and Christianization whereby the recipients of Spanish colonial hegemony are transformed into the religiously docile bodies of the Spanish Empire. -/- From this highly determinate context, the study proceeds to examine Rizal’s ontological grounding of collective Filipino-ness in the mythological construction of the pre-hispanic past as the source of a unique Filipino ancestrality. In his work on de Morga’s Sucesos, what is revealed is a mythologization that grounds a native, essential Filipino identity within a past unscathed by the Spanish colonial experience. Such mythologization, however, can only be possible through an anachronistic nationalist interpretation of historical data. Here, Filipinization is revealed as an exclusive prerogative, a nationalist program by which Rizal and the ilustrado class can combat the evils and excesses of the Spanish colonial enterprise. Ironically, though, this same struggle for emancipation also became an instrument by which the ilustrado class can retain their unjustified position of power over those who belonged to the colonial underside, thus, securing the possibility of perpetuating their own ilustrado bourgeois class interests. -/- Such discursive complicity is the essence of the myth of Filipinization: it presents nationalist identity discourse as an anti-colonial enterprise while being underlined by an economy of motives designed to cater primarily to the exclusive interests of the elite and ilustrado class. Thus, instead of securing the genuine, inclusive emancipation of all colonial subjects and a more humane existence for the poor and suffering majority, ilustrado nationalism has, ironically, merely reinforced those operative structures of colonial discrimination and oppression when the ilustrados: 1) grounded their racial theory upon the very same discourse of Eurocentric superiority that they are precisely supposed to question and 2) claimed a patrimony over Filipinas as their exclusive sovereign inheritance. These two factors illustrate how the manifest transfer of power from the Spanish Empire to the Philippine sovereign nation (and later as a nation-state) illustrate how Filipinization merely has transmogrified the face of Spanish colonialism into its new, subtle, and worse form in Filipino nationalism. -/- In this vein, the existence of the 19th century modern Philippine nation merely masked and deferred the crisis that was supposed to transfer power from the Spanish Empire to the multitude of the poor and suffering native indio majority. This crisis became all the more difficult to address be-cause of the duplicitous character of the discourse of Filipinization itself. It has not only effectively transferred power into the hands of the nationalist elite but also captured authentic emancipatory discourse within the identity-trap against which it can only hope to get out. This study concludes with the claim about the impossibility of ever escaping and overcoming the epistemic and practical violence necessarily contained within the historical discourse of colonialism. Or simply, we have no language or discourse that would enable us to overcome the complicity of Filipinization with the very (epistemic) violence against which it has set itself. (shrink)

Science fiction has served the film industry like a dreamy stepchild. It gets only scant accolades from its master but must do heavy lifting: that is, make money. While science-fiction films often emphasize spectacle and action, they also inspire philosophical contemplation. Why? Science fiction, dating back to Shelley and Verne, came into existence speculating about humanity's social and physical worlds. Many books and articles over the past several years discuss the philosophical issues that films raise. One fairly new school of (...) thought, "posthumanism," explicitly deriving from postmodernism, with touches of critical theory, has seized on science-fiction movies as support for its theorizing. This volume and its 42 authors from film theory, science and technology studies, literary criticism, media studies, and philosophy, offer an array of posthumanist scholarship. (shrink)

Il principale obiettivo teoretico di questo lavoro consiste nel tentativo di verificare, attraverso un’indagine storico-genealogica e concettuale, come nella filosofia di Gilles Deleuze si assista ad un radicale mutamento del paradigma relativo alla nozione di trascendentale. Si tratta, in altre parole, di ripercorrere alcune delle tappe fondamentali che conducono il filosofo parigino a “purificare” il trascendentale da ogni riferimento ad una coscienza soggettiva egologica che si fondi in quanto principio genetico del mondo. Si riterrà utile procedere analizzando, in primo luogo, (...) il rapporto che Deleuze intrattiene con le istanze originarie del soggettivismo trascendentale kantiano, ove il trascendentale stesso, nel pensiero del filosofo tedesco, è strettamente connesso all’Io penso in quanto facoltà appercettiva dell’intelletto che incarnerebbe le condizioni di possibilità dell’esperienza. In secondo luogo, si tratterà di orientarsi nel dibattito critico che Deleuze intrattiene con la fenomenologia di Edmund Husserl, ed in particolar modo con la lettura husserliana della Critica della Ragion Pura di Kant, ove il padre fondatore dell’indirizzo fenomenologico novecentesco è colui che fa leva sullo stretto rapporto che sussiste tra il trascendentale e la coscienza. Nonostante il percorso storico, tracciato dal concetto di trascendentale, abbia inizio con l’opera di Kant, ritengo non sia possibile evitare un pur breve confronto con il ruolo che l’ego ha avuto nella formulazione cartesiana del cogito; si dovrà, per ciò stesso, considerare la particolare lettura deleuziana che riconosce nel cogito cartesiano il “luogo” in cui confluiscono tutte le facoltà del soggetto, permettendo di identificare il cogito stesso con una forma embrionale di piano di immanenza, seppur non adeguatamente radicalizzata nella misura in cui il cogito cartesiano resta saldamente ancorato al soggetto. Ritengo, tuttavia, che il più considerevole obiettivo di questa proposta d’indagine non si risolva in una ricostruzione meramente storico-genealogica. Si tratterà, al contrario, di verificare come l’importanza degli esiti raggiunti da Deleuze mediante l’opera di purificazione della nozione di trascendentale sia da individuare su due fronti: 1. La teorizzazione del concetto di campo trascendentale permette a Deleuze di disegnare una forma di temporalità non psicologica e non cronologica fondata sul paradosso secondo cui il tempo costituirebbe un’interiorità non psicologica, o per meglio dire, una dimensione autenticamente trascendentale nella quale il soggetto vive e diviene. 2. In antitesi ai proponimenti della fenomenologia husserliana, l’esito autentico del progetto di purificazione del trascendentale da ogni istanza egologica consiste nell’interruzione della correlazione a priori tra il soggetto e il mondo, nella destituzione della filosofia da ogni pregiudizio antropocentrico, e nella rideterminazione dell’umano niente più che come un effetto, o un caso, del mondo. (shrink)

Nella sua riflessione filosofica sull’immagine filmica Gilles Deleuze sembra aver tradotto nella maniera più immediata, ancorché insolubilmente problematica, la presenza di uno spazio e di un tempo che giocano il proprio ruolo su di una forma passiva di soggettività: è proprio ne L’image- mouvement, infatti, che Deleuze mostra come uno dei passaggi più proficui delle sue osservazioni sul cinema sia proprio la crisi di ciò che egli definisce immagine-azione, a favore, invece, di un’immagine-tempo, o situazione ottica e sonora pura. Per (...) quanto attiene specificamente lo statuto filosofico dell’immagine, si può dire che sia proprio questo passaggio che consente a Deleuze stesso di modulare la sua riflessione riponendo maggiore attenzione all’elemento temporale rispetto invece al movimento — concetto dal quale, ciononostante, l’indagine sul cinema aveva preso abbrivio. (shrink)

Nella sua riflessione filosofica sull’immagine filmica Gilles Deleuze sembra aver tradotto nella maniera più immediata, ancorché insolubilmente problematica, la presenza di uno spazio e di un tempo che giocano il proprio ruolo su di una forma passiva di soggettività: è proprio ne L’image- mouvement, infatti, che Deleuze mostra come uno dei passaggi più proficui delle sue osservazioni sul cinema sia proprio la crisi di ciò che egli definisce immagine-azione, a favore, invece, di un’immagine-tempo, o situazione ottica e sonora pura. Per (...) quanto attiene specificamente lo statuto filosofico dell’immagine, si può dire che sia proprio questo passaggio che consente a Deleuze stesso di modulare la sua riflessione riponendo maggiore attenzione all’elemento temporale rispetto invece al movimento — concetto dal quale, ciononostante, l’indagine sul cinema aveva preso abbrivio. (shrink)

Much of the contemporary thought about ecology begins with the questioning of the human exceptionality. By means of this, anthropocentrism is rejected and replaced by a post-humanist framework. In this context, Martin Heidegger‘s oeuvre is credited for its search of alternatives to humanism, particularly because of its rejection of Sartre‘s anthropocentrism. However, while post-humanisms tend to behold the role of technology positively, Heidegger‘s critiques to the technique as a consequence of the same metaphysical and anthropocentric movement are widely known. Instead (...) of considering the common Heideggerian texts about technique, in this paper I explore the relationship between Heidegger and contemporary post-humanisms from the perspective of his existential analytic. In the first place, I will briefly describe the contemporary techno-scientific context, following the insights of Wiener, Haraway and Latour. In the second place, I will consider the relationship between Dasein, cyborgs and animals, discussing the Heideggerian interpretations of Hubert Dreyfus (What Computers Can’t Do) and Steven Crowell (We Have Never Been Animals). (shrink)

Language is often conceived of today as providing a person with a worldview and a set of communicative norms that one accepts unambiguously. However, in his 1992 lecture, “Monolingualism of the Other,” Jacques Derrida insists that his mother tongue is for him “not a natural element, not the transparency of the ether, but an absolute habitat.” In other words, while French is an intimate part of his existence, his relationship to it is nevertheless ambiguous. Derrida claims that his situation is (...) not exceptional though, since for no person is language simply a “natural element.” In this essay, I examine first the phenomenological basis for this controversial claim, drawing from Derrida’s lecture as well as earlier explorations by Martin Heidegger to elucidate the point. Later I turn to address the ethical-political dimensions of Derrida’s claim, explaining how it serves to protest against a problematic process of consolidating power. (shrink)

This work is an intersection of gender studies, philosophy, culture studies, with pertinent aspects of subjectivity. Anyone interested in any of these fields or connected with the humanities should read this book to understand that the ‘non-philosophical discourse implies a constitutive entanglement of the real with the transcendental’ (146).

Marion explores the possibility of a God who would not be, who would not have a being. He sees God in agape, Christian charity, or love and obviates the need for imagining or positing the existence or being of God. Th e second edition and a translation of the original French, this book is a volume in the series Religion and Postmodernism brought out by the University of Chicago Press.

Georges Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the (...) main figure who introduced the work of Goldstein and his ‘phenomenology of embodiment’ into France. In this paper I inquire if we should view Canguilhem and Goldstein as ‘biochauvinists’, that is, as thinkers who consider that there is something inherently unique about biological entities as such, and if so, of what sort. (shrink)

Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the main (...) figure who introduced the work of Goldstein and his ‘phenomenology of embodiment’ into France. In this paper I inquire if we should view Canguilhem and Goldstein as ‘biochauvinists’, that is, as thinkers who consider that there is something inherently unique about biological entities as such, and if so, of what sort. (shrink)

A response to Jean-François Lyotard’s view of postmodernism and the denial of the metanarratives.

In 'Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot' Chris Danta takes Genesis 22 as the starting point for an investigation of the role of literary imagination. His aim is to read the Genesis story from a literary-theoretical perspective in order to show how it can 'illuminate the secular situation of the literary writer.' To do this, Danta stages a fruitful confrontation between Søren Kierkegaard as defender of religion and inwardness and Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot as (...) defenders of literature. In this review, three important points in this confrontation are highlighted. 1. The problem of identification. 2. The moment of substitution. 3. The spectrality of the writer. (shrink)

Cybernetic Revelation explores the dual philosophical histories of deconstruction and artificial intelligence, tracing the development of concepts like "logos" and the notion of modeling the mind technologically from pre-history to contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek and Steven Pinker. The writing is clear and accessible throughout, yet the text probes deeply into major philosophers seen by JD Casten as "conceptual engineers." -/- Philosophers covered include: Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Philo, Augustine, Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, (...) Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Joyce, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Derrida, Chomsky, Zizek, Pinker, Dennett, Hofstadter, Stiegler + more; with special chapters on: AI's history, Complexity, Deconstructing AI, Aesthetics, Consciousness + more... (shrink)

This paper offers an introduction to poststructuralist interpretivist research in information systems, through a poststructuralist theoretical reading of the phenomenon and experience of social networking websites, such as Facebook. This is undertaken through an exploration of how loyally a social networking profile can represent the essence of an individual, and whether Platonic notions of essence, and loyalty of copy, are disturbed by the nature of a social networking profile, in ways described by poststructuralist thinker Deleuze’s notions of the reversal of (...) Platonism. In bringing a poststructuralist critique to such hugely successful and popular social information systems, the paper attempts to further open up the black box of the computer ‘user’, extend interpretive approaches to information systems research to embrace poststructuralism, and explore how notions of the Self might be reflected through engagement with information system (IS), and how an IS appreciation of the phenomenon of global social networking may benefit from embracing such a poststructuralist approach. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MatteringPheng Cheah (bio)Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.Elizabeth Grosz. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.Any cursory survey of contemporary cultural-political theory and criticism will indicate that the related concepts of “nature” and “the given” are not highly valued terms. The reason for this disdain and even moral disapprobation of naturalistic accounts of human existence is supposed (...) to be self-evident: simply put, in a post-Newtonian age, nature refers to the totality of objects governed by immutable causal laws. If human existence was merely natural or given, then we would never be able to alter the conditions that bring about human oppression. Antinaturalism in contemporary theory, however, betrays a deep fear in its repetitive tirades against the natural. For if it is so obviously precritical to treat human existence as given, then why does antinaturalism need to be articulated again and again? This obsessive pushing away of nature may well constitute an acknowledgement-in-disavowal that humans may be natural creatures after all. Furthermore, as a theoretical position, antinaturalism itself is produced by the polemical energy that strives to keep nature at bay, in quarantine from the sphere of human life. Consequently, antinaturalism works with a conventional philosophical definition of nature which it may do well to question. We may therefore be justified in claiming that, far from being tired superstitions that savvy discourse analysts and cultural constructionists can leave behind, the concepts of “nature” and “the given” are, in fact, neuralgic points, the contested sites around which any theory of political transformation is organized.In its conventional usage, nature is opposed to a whole host of other terms: history, culture, law, production, and so forth. The slipperiness of nature, however, is seen in the fact that the relation between nature and its others defies characterization as a simple relation of exteriority between two ontologically distinct terms. For instance, the relation of nature to history can be posed not only in terms of the modification of nature by historical agency but also from within the realm of historical agency insofar as the constraints of structure or construction on transformative rational agency seem to replicate the limitations or weightiness of nature. Feminism is an exemplary site for rehearsing this fundamental questioning of the distinction between nature and its others because it must refute biologistic and naturalistic justifications for the oppression of women even as it must affirm women’s bodily specificity as the minimal consensual stuff which grounds feminist practice. As Zillah Eisenstein astutely observes in spite of her own intellectual allegiances, “if the body is already engendered in this way, how can we claim our bodies without reproducing the inequities of the gender-system?... [S]o we become involved in explicating patriarchal relations without knowing where patriarchy begins and ends in the definition of a woman’s or a mother’s body. What aspect of the body constitutes a woman’s potential capacities, and what part articulates her oppression?” [73, 75]. [End Page 108] Philosophically speaking, the giving of body or matter—what I propose to call “mattering”—may be the process where history and nature become uncannily indistinguishable in a manner that is both enabling and disabling for political transformation, its condition of (im)possibility.Thus far, the productive unease in feminist theory occasioned by the body as the ambivalent ground of both oppression and emancipatory transformation has resulted in debates over the sex/gender distinction and the question of essentialism/antiessentialism. 1 Discussion has, however, primarily centered on the strategic deployment of the body as a political resource. Two recent books—Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter and Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies—stand out because they promise to raise discussion to a level where political issues concerning the body can be reevaluated through a rigorous rethinking of the relation between nature and its others: culture, history, and society. The authors of these books share the distinctive aim of articulating a feminist theory that is centered on a philosophical exploration of the status of the body. Both Grosz and Butler are trained in Continental philosophy, where the secondary status of... (shrink)

Three thoughts of culture: (1) the logogram: high-level software, the ROM BIOS of civilisation, the ‘best that has ever been thought and written’ (Matthew Arnold), secular theology, social phylum, explicitly ideal rampart against philistine disaggregation and the entropy of commodification, desperate and universal cognitive erection in the face of the massive loss of integrity brought about by capital; (2) the decay of the logogram: low-level shoring-up routine, localised resistance mediated through patchy and fragmented attempts at reconstitution, quotidian custom and regional (...) habit nostalgically valorised at the point of their historical evaporation, instantly fit only for museums, tourists and markets; (3) the death of the logogram: evacuation of the hard-wired constraint of organic programming, reinterfacing of cognition and culture with the machine, technological reprogramming of consciousness driven by intensive economic shifts. (shrink)

Sara Suleri has written recently, in Meatless Days, of being treated as an "otherness machine"-and of being heartily sick of it.20 Perhaps the predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intellectuals-a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism-we are, indeed, always at the risk of becoming otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role. Our only distinction in the world of texts to which we are latecomers is that we can mediate it to our fellows. (...) This is especially true when postcolonial meets postmodern; for what the postmodern reader seems to demand of Africa is all too close to what modernism-in the form of the postimpressionists-demanded of it. The role that Africa, like the rest of the Third World, plays for Euro-American postmodernism-like its better-documented significance for modernist art-must be distinguished from the role postmodernism might play in the Third World; what that might be it is, I think, too early to tell. What happens will happen not because we pronounce on the matter in theory, but will happen out of the changing everyday practices of African cultural life.For all the while, in Africa's cultures, there are those who will not see themselves as Other. Despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease, and political instability, African cultural productivity grows apace: popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music, and visual art all thrive. The contemporary cultural production of many African societies, and the many traditions whose evidences so vigorously remain, is an antidote to the dark vision of the postcolonial novelist. 20. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days , p. 105. Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and literature at Duke University, is the author of a number of books, including For Truth in Semantics , Necessary Questions , and In My Father's House , a collection of essays on African cultural politics. His first novel, Avenging Angel, was published in 1990. (shrink)

Sloterdijk proposes to go beyond ressentiment (to transform current capitalism to gift-giving motivational type of system in order to achieve self-esteem and provide it to others and to everything) as the solution to the constant world history of paranoia and revenge. That, or repeating the old, the same, and the criminal! Nietzsches's hopes about it (overmen) is a cession to modernity (another great narrative, yet another ultimate kind of the will to power, or freedom) and is contrary to his main (...) idea of eternal recurrence of the same, so I'm less optimistic. (shrink)

-/- ABSTRACT: The concept of beauty has been central to the understanding of Aesthetics, but most modern scholars examine and celebrate Aesthetics presupposing that beauty exists in this Universe, and that by merely being patrons and proponents of art, they can exercise their metaphysical-value judgment however they feel is fulfilling. Contemporary artists fail to realize the etiology and phenomenological value of beauty. The perfect exemplification of this can be seen in the veritable themes and allegories of Postmodernism. The fetishistic penchant (...) of Post-structuralists and Post-modernists has made the treatment of art and literature destructively convoluted and obfuscated, and offers infinite leeway for analysis of any kind. The trite adage ''Kill the writer’’ has been grossly misused and misidentified. Having said that, this essay also does not aim to blindly ridicule Postmodernism, and It will be apparent from the tone of the essay that I myself subscribe to the incontrovertible absolutism that Postmodernism offers, but only in the sense of axiom and logic. I, however, do not value and extol the senseless plurality and verbosity of non-analytical assessment that is ubiquitously pronounced in Postmodern content. (shrink)

In this thesis I try to evaluate the risks and potentials of modern and archaic myths for human existence in a holistical approach. After Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique that enlightment would still be mythical the positive aspects of myth and ancient religion were - with a few exceptions (i.g. Blumenberg, Eliade) - mostly neglected: In the analysis of Critical Theory myth only serves power, its misuse in fashist and capitalistic societies is inevitable; therefore any hint of mythological structures needs to (...) be destroyed. Even so, myth as one of the first tools of sensemaking had made sure that humanity clings to life through entire history. In the words of Baudrillard and Blumenberg, mythical (and, further on, religious and rationalistic) icons preserves their followers to get in touch with an overwhelming reality. The mythical tills the world as an factual entity and, in the cultural aspect, as an entity shapeable by "our" collective power. With the evidence given of increasing difficulties for finding "Bedeutsamkeit" (Blumenberg) in individual life, the bivalency of myth illustrates a promising oppurtunity for individual and existential sensemaking. (shrink)