This article focuses on three memoirs written by physicians who are specifically reflecting on their time in medical school to propose that the authors of these memoirs write not only to the reading audience, but also to their present and past selves. By addressing these former selves through the rhetorical figure of apostrophe, the authors write a new subjectivity into being. These memoirs serve as the material evidence of the formation what I call a bioaffective attachment, or, the way an (...) individual physician's subjectivity is affectively attached to their own sense of self and to the larger healthcare industry. (shrink)

After Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, pregnant people lost their Constitutional protection of abortion. The new, visible politics of susceptibility have invited a revisitation to the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. This article examines the trauma narrative of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the theory of the death drive in elaborating the enduring cultural investment in protecting fetal life while examining its implications for pregnant subjects.

Lyric is onanistic: masturbation is the latent content of lyric poetry. This article counters queer theory with a turn to onanist theory, pointing out the centrality of masturbation to the work of Jacques Derrida, and suggesting that rather than consider masturbation the supplement to sex, we might consider the opposite. Modern man has, according to Derrida, been mistaken in his metaphysics by a deluded fidelity to presence, an ontological error to which he has been attached as though to a lover; (...) instead, modern man is guiltily onanistic. This article argues that the apostrophic intimacies of lyric and the longings held therein are masturbatory. To do so it reads Rob Halpern's Music for Porn as a deconstructive reading of Walt Whitman's Civil War poetry. (shrink)

Robert Brandom’s notion of historical rationality seeks to supplement his inferentialism thesis by providing an account for the validity of conceptual contents. This account, in the shape of a historical process, involves the same self-integration of Brandom’s earlier inferentialism and is similarly restricted by reciprocal recognition of others. This article argues that in applying the synchronic social model of normative discourse to the diachronic axis of engaging the past, Brandom premises a false analogy between present community and past tradition, which (...) obscures the important differences between the two axes. This is explored by looking closely at how Brandom’s own engagements with the past exemplify his historical rationality. Taking its cue from Brandom’s critics, the article shows that Brandom’s own discourse with tradition is not, and cannot be, dialogical and, in accordance, that historical rationality is not, and cannot be, governed by the same social structure of inferentialism. The article concludes with the implications of such a claim on Brandom’s thesis as a whole and on the role of tradition in the process of normative change, in light of it. (shrink)