The article develops the hypothesis that Covid-19 is one of the most significant results of the Anthropocene era. Indifferent to nature’s veiled, but not inactive conditions, the human era advances over woods and forests, intensifying the increase of emerging infectious diseases, especially those caused by pathogens that generate zoonoses. In addition to health matters, this circumstance implies the urgent revision of the cultural tradition that conceives the energies of nature as availability. Based on these findings, the text criticizes the cultural (...) determination of anthropocentrism, suggesting that the crisis caused by the coronavirus also represents the possibility of new mediations with nature. The thesis defends that, despite the anguish caused by the proximity to death, the pandemic is an opportunity to open our ears anew to listen to the Earth’s thinking. (shrink)

Natural mimicry is ubiquitous. Plants mimic animals, animals mimic plants, animals mimic each other and animals may even mimic counterfactual states that deceive or distract other animals. Almost all natural mimicry is based on iconicity which hence anchors it in real world resemblances. The vast majority of natural mimicry is done unconsciously but when humans mimic, they know what they are doing. As Merlin Donald suggest, mimicry may in fact have played a crucial role in the emergence of the human (...) condition, allowing new forms of cognition to emerge. Here it is suggested that the role played by mimicry may have involved the evolution of a capacity for metaphorical perception, where an object may not only be seen ‘as is’ but also ‘as if’ it was a functional mimic of something else. This new form of mimicry made possible new forms of communication, co-operation and creative engagement with the environment. Once these developed to the point where they produced symbolic systems and other cultural tools, the nature of human mimicry expanded radically. No longer anchored in resemblance, it became detached and qualitatively distinct from natural forms. The consequences of this detachment are now becoming clear. (shrink)

The always vexed relationships between philosophy, theory, methodology, empirical work and their representations and legitimations have been thrown into chaos with the belated acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, traditional Western thought may have been complicit, given its underlying anthropocentric assumptions and humanist commitments in education philosophy, theory and practice. The postcritical knowledge ecology developed here is applied to both a modest and responsible form of methodological inquiry in an ethnographic study of nature experience. Our contextualised experiment adds to the nascent (...) literature of an environmentally oriented education now demanded in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This article explores the way that senile dementia is represented in contemporary culture, with particular reference to texts which narrate the experience of caring for a parent or spouse with one form of the illness. These narratives raise problematic issues about the materiality of the body and its relation to individual identity, and the unstable relationship between memory and identity in postmodern culture, by drawing on the actual experience of bodily dependency and disorientating memory loss in dementia patients. These speculations (...) about the body, memory and the self are ultimately related in narratives of dementia to the inevitable process of aging and dying and the cultural meanings attached to it. The article places the representation of dementing illnesses within a Foucauldian narrative of surveillance and control in the discourse of aging and death in modern Western societies, redemptive views of illness in western culture and arguments about death in contemporary theory. (shrink)

This essay rearticulates historical and contemporary security discourse as a politics of desire bound to a masculinist and racialized notion of Selfhood. The Persian Gulf War and the Canada/Spain Turbot War are presented as case studies which typify how the securing of desire through warfare proceeds from an idea of the desirous rival a Other. The essay counters Guardian and Lananian narratives of a desire which emanates from a sense of lack, and leads to violence, with Levinas's understanding of desire (...) as central to, rather than disruptive of, an ethical relation with alterity. (shrink)

Created during a certain time period of the world’s art development, fictional history embodies not only a set of individual authorial creative acts, but it is the only "artistic-historical model" conditioned by a number of objective aesthetic and non-aesthetic factors. As such, fictional history represents an integral part of the national worldview. Its exploration requires a combinatorial unity of methods. The article proposes a set of modern methodological principles for studying the processes of artistic modelling of history in the aesthetic (...) consciousness on the synchronous level and their representation in literary works. The methods of academic literary criticism are combined with the advanced methods of modern interdisciplinary humanities that are based on postmodern philosophy. Thus, in the chosen combination of the scientific approaches, the heuristic potential of the structural-semiotic and structural-typological methods, mythopoetics and myth-restoration, imagology, hermeneutics, and receptive aesthetics, correlates with the methods of systematic and descriptive analysis. Such diverse theoretical combinations, the existence of a kind of "methodological sinusoid" within the study, do not contradict but complement each other. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

Precarity and uncertainty recur in numerous critical accounts of the present to stress the sense of social and personal insecurity resulting from global changes and increasing inequalities. This review discusses Precarity and Loss: On Certain and Uncertain Properties of Life and Work by Tadeusz Rachwał as an examination of the major philosophical and social uncertainties of the present and their indebtedness to the certainties of the past. The article situates Rachwał’s book in the context of Judith Butler’s reflections on precariousness, (...) Guy Standing’s study on the precariat, and Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquidity in order to unravel some of the answers it offers to the overpowering sense of vulnerability. (shrink)

This paper offers a brand storytelling, that is a narratological account of Covid-19 pandemic’s emergence phase. By adopting a fictional ontological standpoint, the virus’ deploying media story-world is identified with a process of narrative spacing. Subsequently, the brand’s personality is analyzed as a narrative place brand. The narrative model that is put forward aims at outlining the main episodes that make up the virus’ brand personality as process and structural components (actors, settings, actions, relationships). A series of deep or ontological (...) metaphors are singled out as the core DNA of this place brand, by applying metaphorical modeling to the tropical articulation of Covid-19’s narrative. The virus’ kernel is identified with terror, as a menacing force that wipes out existing regimes of signification due to its uncertain motives, origins and operational mode. In this context, familiar urban spaces, cultural practices and intersubjective communications are redefined, repurposed and reprogrammed. This process is called terrorealization, as the desertification and metaphorical sublation of all prior territorial significations. This study contributes to the narrative sub-stream of place branding by approaching a globally relevant sociocultural phenomenon from a brand storytelling perspective. (shrink)

Baudrillard's fatalism could be interpreted as a unique synthesis of poststructuralism and Eastern philosophy. It may be construed as an effort to integrate the critique of the political economy of the sign with a romantic anthropology of symbolic exchange that is partly influenced by Taoist philosophy. As a whole, it comprises a type of countercultural response to a burgeoning simulacral order. This is a response that draws upon some aspects of Taoist thought because it ideally provides a non-Marxist approach to (...) the critique of the sign, but is insufficiently developed to consider the problem of agency in Taoist non-causal action. This paper surveys the general direction of Baudrillard's writings and suggests possible areas of research emerging from the ambiguities of fatal theory. (shrink)

Often described as an outcome, inequality is better understood as a social process -- a function of how institutions are structured and reproduced, and the ways people act and interact within them across time. Racialized inequality persists because it is enacted moment to moment, context to context -- and it can be ended should those who currently perpetuate it commit themselves to playing a different role instead. This essay makes three core contributions: first, it highlights a disturbing parity between the (...) people who are most rhetorically committed to ending racialized inequality and those who are most responsible for its persistence. Next, it explores the origin of this paradox – how it is that ostensibly antiracist intentions are transmuted into ‘benevolently racist’ actions. Finally, it presents an alternative approach to mitigating racialized inequality, one which more effectively challenges the self-oriented and extractive logics undergirding systemic racism: rather than expropriating blame to others, or else adopting introspective and psychologized approaches to fundamentally social problems, those sincerely committed to antiracism can take concrete steps in the real world – actions which require no legislation or coercion of naysayers, just a willingness to personally make sacrifices for the sake of racial justice. (shrink)

Through the critical examination of Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality, this article seeks to make a wider contribution to contempor ary debates about postmodernism. It draws on a post-Cartesian, Heideg gerian philosophy to demonstrate the weakness of the concept of hyperreality and reveal its foundation in a Cartesian epistemology. The article goes on to claim that this same Heideggerian tradition suggests a way in which the concept of hyperreality and nihilistic postmodern sociologies more generally might be dialectically superseded. Instead of these (...) theories being seen as saying anything insightful about recent social transformations, the epistemological void in which they position themselves should be inter preted as the intellectual expression of the wider cultural and postmodern trend of transgression. Key Words: Baudrillard • Cartesianism • Heidegger • hyperreality • postmodernism. (shrink)

This article offers a philosophical account of a range of urban phenomena that are integral to the visual fabric of the modern city and, at the same time, external to the visual order administered by the city’s rulers. Explaining why the common terms of “graffiti” and “street art” are too narrow for discussing the plurality of the illicit visual forms that populate the city’s space, I coin the alternative term “streetography” and aim at a new understanding of its visual efficacy. (...) This is done by showing that the key for deciphering the streetograph’s unique visuality is its form of embeddedness in the street and, in a corollary manner, the form of visual experience—the kinds of viewing—that the street opens for the urban viewer.Streetographs always operate within the city’s given visual order and as such the question of their efficacy is addressed here in terms of the streetograph’s relationship to that hegemonic visual rule whose basic traits are also clarified. Developing an understanding of this relationship, the article thus addresses the following questions: What kind of resistance can streetographs provide to the kind of optics that governs the modern urban space? Can streetographs evoke an alternative kind of spectatorship that disrupts the sovereign’s imagination? And, more specifically, in an epoch in which streetographs are regularly absorbed into capitalist aesthetics—advertising, cinema, social media—how can they allow us to rethink the possibility of resisting the measure of a global capitalist visual system? (shrink)

Many contemporary writers are claiming that society is becoming rapidly deanimated. However, this idea is not entirely new. During the past century, the same observation has been made by critics as disparate as Durkheim and Marx. In general, they pointed out that as an outgrowth of industrialization, social relationships were beginning to deteriorate. In point of fact, complaints about social fragmentation and the emergence of bureaucracies were commonplace. Simply put, citizens were beginning to feel powerless and overwhelmed by their institutions. (...) Recently, Baudrillard referred to this sentiment as indicative of the “Golden Age of Alienation.”. (shrink)

We live today within a system in which state and corporate power aim to render space flat, transparent, and uniform, for only then can it be truly controlled. The gaze of power and the commodity form are capable of infiltrating even the darkest of corners, and often, we invite them into our most private spaces. We do so as a matter of convenience, but also to placate ourselves and cope with the alienation inherent in our everyday lives. The resulting dominant (...) space can best be termed totalitarian. It is space stripped of uniqueness, deprived of the “spatial aura” necessary for authentic experience. In Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura, Saladdin Ahmed sets out to help us grasp what has been lost before no trace remains. He draws attention to that which we might prefer not to see, but despite the bleakness of this indictment of reality, the book also offers a message of hope. Namely, it is only once we comprehend the magnitude of the threat to our spatial experience and our own complicity in sustaining this system that we can begin to resist the totalizing forces at work. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

The machine-organism analogy has played a pivotal role in the history of Western philosophy and science. Notwithstanding its apparent simplicity, it hides complex epistemological issues about the status of both organism and machine and the nature of their interaction. What is the real object of this analogy: organisms as a whole, their parts or, rather, bodily functions? How can the machine serve as a model for interpreting biological phenomena, cognitive processes, or more broadly the social and cultural transformations of the (...) relations between individuals, and between individuals and the environments in which they live? Wired Bodies. New Perspectives on the Machine-Organism Analogy provides the reader with some of the latest perspectives on this vast debate, addressing three major topics:1) the development of a ‘mechanistic’ framework in medicine and biology; 2) the methodological issues underlying the use of ‘simulation’ in cognitive science; 3) the interaction between humans and machines according to 20th-century epistemology. (shrink)

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, (...) transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality. (shrink)

This article deals with the representation of identical twins in the films Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway and Dead Ringers by David Cronenberg. It situates the films in a cultural and political context of the 20th-century controversies surrounding the issues of evolution, reproduction and cloning. The article claims that twinship represents the corporeal economy of the Same, whose ideological meanings have been shaped by the history of eugenics and social Darwinism. Identical twinship inscribes a utopia of the perfect, (...) unchanging and self-identical body, opposed to the unpredictability, confusion and contingency of sexual reproduction and evolutionary history. The films under discussion critique the utopian ideology of twinship and its imaginary cancellation of difference as narcissistic and deadly. (shrink)

The central question concerning the future of masculinity is whether the current matrix of distributions of roles and status, praxes and practices, will remain intact or whether a shift to a new configuration will occur. This essay briefly examines thinking on masculinity in two French attempts to theorize the future of relations between men and women: that of Auguste Comte, at the beginning of sociology, and Jean Baudrillard at the end of sociology. Both have, in their time, predicted radical gender (...) futures. The essay considers these theories against changes in social structures and the effectivity social movements. (shrink)

Although the body has become of increasing importance throughout the social sciences, it has been neglected by the discipline of social policy. The aim of this article is to rectify that neglect. It argues that the connections which some have begun to make between social welfare and the body can be strengthened by reference to the figure of the cyborg. The article develops a model that can be used to explain the cyborgization of social identity. This process of cyborgization is (...) then related to contemporary trends in social welfare: the individualization of rights and the collectivization of duties which is occurring via the prevalence of surveillance technologies and the ideology of productivism. These trends signify a drift towards what can be called post-social security. (shrink)

Transparency’s importance as an administrative norm seems self-evident. Prevailing ideals of political theory stipulate that the more visible government is, the more democratic, accountable, and legitimate it appears. The disclosure of state information consistently disappoints, however: there is never enough of it, while it often seems not to produce a truer democracy, a more accountable state, better policies, and a more contented populace. This gap between theory and practice suggests that the theoretical assumptions that provide the basis for transparency are (...) wrong. This article argues that transparency is best understood as a theory of communication that excessively simplifies and thus is blind to the complexities of the contemporary state, government information, and the public. Taking them fully into account, the article argues, should lead us to question the state’s ability to control information, which in turn should make us question not only the improbability of the state making itself visible, but also the improbability of the state keeping itself secret. (shrink)

This article introduces and explores the concept of emotional consumption through an analysis of an exotic dance club in the New England area. Through understanding how regular customers consume the services offered in an exotic dance club, I show how consuming service labor differs dramatically from consuming objects of exchange. Emotional consumption involves psychosocial dynamics, which emerge from the intersubjective relationships between the consumer and the dancer who is providing a service. In this exchange, the consumer engages in an interaction (...) where the boundary between pure economic exchange begins to merge with a sense of relationality. (shrink)

In utopian/science fiction literature, comprehensive knowledge is a familiar motif that also inspires recent policies to screen society through surveillance. In the late 20th century, a digital archive promised to facilitate quick access to abundant information and effective strategies to confront myriad challenges. Yet, today, the scale and scope of information accumulation in national and corporate repositories is reaching proportions whose intelligent processing excedes human capabilities, and triggering a shift in focus from dumb repository to artificial intelligence. Processing such accumulation (...) of knowledge necessiates skills commonly attributed to divinity. Without a theory that recognizes this condition and informs the operations of artificial intelligence, the latter is likely to fail in human ways, e.g., by perceiving false patterns resulting from flawed theories assigning meaning to knowledge. For successful pattern recognition to occur, theories must rest on science fiction and a digital ontotheology of the machine as the form this archive assumes. (shrink)

At a time when ideas of crisis and critique are at the forefront of public discourse, this article seeks to understand moments of crisis vis-à-vis critique as a key feature of critical social theory. It addresses Jürgen Habermas’s strong claim that this relationship accounts for a ‘model of analysis’ concerned with grasping the ‘diremptions’ of social life. To elaborate this reading, the article pays attention to the main problems Habermas identifies in conventional ways of understanding the concepts of ‘crisis’ and (...) ‘critique’ in social theory. The aim is to examine the mode in which he reconsiders each of these terms and then reasserts the dialectical link between them. I reconstruct this relationship by taking as cases two of his most substantive works of social theorizing: The Theory of Communicative Action, and Between Facts and Norms. Based on this interpretation, I suggest that though Habermas contributes to resituating the practice of critique as a communicative translation of objective crisis, he does not adequately account for another key movement: when critique actually initiates, enacts and furthers the moment of crisis. (shrink)

The Deleuze/Guattari text Anti-Oedipus burst onto the intellectual scene in 1972 as a radical new means to reconceptualise capitalism and its effects. At the heart of Anti-Oedipus and its analysis of capitalism is the concept of deterritorialization, and how it evacuates identities, culture, values, and, indeed, coherent thought itself, and it makes them susceptible to the equations and dynamics of capital flows. Anti-Oedipus presents the mechanisms with respect to how deterritorialization interacts with and to an extent liberates desire as ‘desiring-machines’. (...) This philosophy of education paper applies the workings of deterritorialization and desire from Anti-Oedipus to the dynamics of contemporary climate change education and the Anthropocene. As such, it posits this dynamic as being critical to present day approaches to the philosophy of education that wish to engage with capitalism and its effects, and at the same time positively enter the climate change debate. This paper suggests that understanding the matrix of deterritorialization, desire, climate change and learning, is perhaps the most important work that can be performed in the philosophy of education today and with respect to the future. (shrink)

Lissa McCullough, The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction, New York: Tauris, 2014, 264 pp, $25.00, ISBN: 978-1780767963.There are any number of introductions to the thought o...

Kathleen Stock, Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017, 222 pp. Julie Cheminaud, Les évadés de la médecine. Physiologie de l’art dans la France de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, Vrin, Paris 2018, 294 pp. Carla Carmona, Jerrold Levinson, Aesthetics, Literature, and Life: Essays in Honor of Jean-Pierre Cometti, Mimesis International, Milan 2019, 220 pp. Report on “Jean Baudrillard, l’intelligence du temps qui vient”, Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, Cerisy, France, 9-16 August 2019.

In Occasional Deconstructions, Julian Wolfreys challenges the notion that deconstruction is a critical methodology, offering instead a number of reintroductions or reorientations to the texts of Jacques Derrida and the idea or possibility of deconstructions. Proceeding from specific readings of various texts (both film and literary), as well as mobilizing a number of issues from Derrida's recent work surrounding questions of ethics, politics, and identity, Wolfreys considers the role of deconstruction in broader academic and institutional contexts, and questions whether, in (...) fact, deconstruction can be called upon to function as theory at all. In this book, Wolfreys suggests that the patient, necessary work of reading, in which response and responsibility to the other has a chance to manifest itself, is necessary to the always political and ethical tracing of the material and the historical. He also contends that reading should be an encounter that gives place to an acknowledgment of the other, and that this singular act by which one is introduced to the other can never be programmed. (shrink)

This essay reads Deleuze and Guattari's Anti‐Oedipus, somewhat perversely, as a radical Lacanian means of conceptualizing hypermodern capitalism. If, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is psychoanalysis that rediscovers and retraces the death instinct in classical, nineteenth‐century capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis better exemplifies the ways in which the deterritorializing flows of twenty‐frrst‐century global capitalism have overcoded and overwritten that classical, nineteenth‐century order of things. Taking Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho as its symptomatic text, this essay discusses the implications, (...) raised hysterically in the novel, of an unrestricted economy in which the ‘subject’ is no longer held in place by a governing (master or paternal) signifier in relation to a traditional symbolic order. The essay shows how Lacan's notion of ‘the Other’ has been reconfigured, in relation to consumer capitalism, such that it takes the form of a purely machinic imperative that turns the subject into an economically dividuated producing/product. The subject has become a little machine hooked up to the big machine that maintains it in debt in a continual process of consumption‐production of commodities, brands and identities. (shrink)

Education for Sustainable Development is a broad and varied field of study replete with compelling advocacies for a more humane world. Across a majority of its instances however, ESD might yet be seen to labour in stealth fidelity to a mode of political economy and model of human-nature relations complicit with planetary ecocide. This essay draws largely from the thinking of Jean Baudrillard in an effort to identify the implications of ESD’s mainstay commitments, particularly as expressed in the field’s lingering (...) fidelities to anthropocentric production and modes of protagonistic optimism. Such alliances are contrasted by the immanence of inhuman planetary difference as it might habilitate more eco-centric approaches and attitudes for thinking the very possibility of sustainable development in the present era of rapid ecological transformation. (shrink)

:This article revisits Michael Haneke's Caché as a filmic transformation of the traditional bond between sacrificial violence, morality and community building. By drawing mainly on striking correspondences with Jacques Derrida's view of the “mystical” origin of authority and of the limits of moral representation, the article aims to probe into Haneke's strategies of concealment. In so doing, the article proposes a “postsecular” interpretation of the symbolic meaning of the enigmas of the “ghost director” within the film, and of Majid's theatrical (...) self-sacrifice. (shrink)

Baudrillard interpreta el «nuevo terrorismo» como un intercambio simbólico de regalo y contra-regalo: la muerte del terrorista es un contra-regalo irrefutable que rompe el círculo coercitivo de las relaciones sociales «impuestas» por el sistema global. A su vez, la concepción de Derrida tiene dos dimensiones, explicativa y normativa: en primer lugar, Derrida considera el 11-S como un síntoma multifacético de una crisis autoinmune que tiene aspectos políticos, religiosos y tecno-capitalistas. En segundo lugar, Derrida arguye que existe un «momento» de terror, (...) violencia y sacrificio que es constitutivo en las decisiones y en la responsabilidad éticas. De forma crítica, argumentaré que la concepción de Baudrillard se basa en una noción extremada y partidista de un sistema que se interpreta como un inmenso mandato de un gobernante totalitario. Por su parte, Derrida convierte de forma innecesaria la observación de que las acciones humanas pueden tener consecuencias perversas en una ley de la autoinmumidad inspirada en la biología. Al considerar el terror como algo constitutivo incluso en las relaciones éticas más comunes, Derrida corre también el riesgo de convertir un fenómeno extremado en un concepto que lo abarca todo, y de perder contacto con la práctica ética corriente. Concluiré que las concepciones de Baudrillard y de Derrida sobre el terror y el terrorismo comparten un «gusto por lo extremado» que las hace en última instancia poco convincentes. (shrink)

The reemergence of the question of suicide in the medical context of physician-assisted suicide seems to me one of the most interesting and fertile facets of late modernity. Aside from the disruption which this issue may cause in the traditional juridical relationship between individuals and the state, it may also help to transform the dominant conception of subjectivity that has been erected upon modernity's medicalized order of death. To enhance this disruptive potential, I am going to examine the perspectives on (...) death offered by two contemporary writers: Zygmunt Bauman and Jean Baudrillard. Each of these writers recognizes the centrality of death to modern culture, as Heidegger did, but they also go beyond him in specifying the ways in which death maintains a presence in late modernity, despite efforts to conceal it. In particular, both of these writers recognize the important role that medicine has played in ordering the modern conception of death. After situating these two perspectives in relation to each other, and in relation to Heidegger, who will serve here as a sort of benchmark, I will return to the issue of suicide. Given the differences in their readings of the role that death and medicine play in modern culture, these post-Heideggerians take strikingly different positions on this issue. By engaging these perspectives, I intend not only to point out the tremendous potential which this issue holds for a fundamental rethinking of modern subjectivity, but also reveal some of the dangers that may beset any naive optimism about the right to die. (shrink)

This article identifies the emergence of the problematic of the body as a consequence of the forces of technology and bureaucracy which have run through the 20th century. It explores the hypothesis that the problem of the body has emerged out of the wreckage of the aura of the individual. It is proposed that aura was destroyed in the First World War, but it is also shown that for Benjamin anticipations of the destruction can be found in the technologies of (...) photography. Yet, out of the ruin of the auratic individual, there emerged a vision of the armoured body in the work of fascist writers such as Ernst Jünger. A variation on the theme of armour can also be found in Kracauer's discussion of the Tiller Girls. The article concludes that the Holocaust can be read, at least in part, as a logical product of the destruction of the aura of the individual and the subsequent identification of the individual with her or his body alone. (shrink)

The paper gives insight into the revaluation of popular Gothic aesthetics in Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 production Only Lovers Left Alive. Drawing on critical theory and the postmodern theoretical framework, the article suggests that the film transgresses contemporary culture immersed in a “culture of death” that has produced a vast amount of cultural texts under the rubric of “Gothicism.” By considering Jean Baudrillard’s concept of transaesthetics and Judith Halberstam’s writings on contemporary monstrosity, the paper shows that a commodified Gothic mode has (...) lost its older deconstructive functions that operated on the margins of the mainstream. Now entirely focused on the duplication of the same aesthetic codes and signs, Gothic productions conform to the rules of postindustrial culture, enriching entertainment imagery with the neutralized concept of “otherness.” Hence, the article engages primarily with Jarmusch’s indie aesthetics that goes beyond easily recognizable patterns and generic conventions and allows the director to emphasize that the arts are rejuvenating forces, the antidote to a commoditized environment. Then, the focus is on the construction of main characters—Adam and Eve, ageless vampires and spouses—who thanks to nostalgic theatricality and performance reconfigure the mainstream monstrosity. Ultimately, the article emphasizes that Jarmusch’s film, to a large extent, becomes a warning against the inevitable results of advanced capitalism practiced on a global scale. (shrink)

The following thesis is a work of cultural psychoanalysis in an era properly defined as "post-Holocaust". It begins with an extensive working through of Lacanian concepts, followed by an examination of fantastical appropriations of the trauma of the Holocaust---fantasies that serve as the very frame of our reality, or rather, hyperreality. After a further working through of the relations between the crypt and the unconscious, the thesis then brings in Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard to help further elucidate some of (...) the key arguments. (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard's first simulation stage re-interpreted in the light of architectural theory and psychoanalysis.

The study aims to identify the mechanisms of communication humanization in the virtual environment with the help of new signs as the means of communication. The factors which limit emotional connections while using written signs in digital communication as a form of alienation are provided in the article. The scientific novelty is shown through the essential role of nonverbal signs and symbols used to overcome alienation under conditions of limited communication. The widespread use and evolution of nonverbal signs and symbols (...) in the process of digital communication is becoming a new frame that promotes communication to expand in the interactive sphere and make it more human. Understanding new signs and symbols go with socio-cultural issues of the current age and provides integrity and unique character of the individual. (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard's 3rd simulation stage reinterpreted through the theory of architecture, Marxism and Jaques Lacan.