Prompted by Eryximachus’ speech about the relationship between Eros and health in Plato’s Symposium, this paper engages the nature of poiēsis as it arises in the works of Martin Heidegger, Julia Kristeva, and Aristotle. All three address poiēsis as a human activity that points beyond an individual person, and in so doing speaks to what’s possible for human life. Section I addresses Heidegger, whose insistance on the interplay between “earth” and “world” in “The Origin of a Work of Art” speaks (...) to a continuous strife at the heart of poiēsis. Section II explains Kristeva’s situating of rhythm as the unarticulated undulation driving human life, grounding any subsequent articulation in poiēsis. Section III engages Aristotle, who, in his Poetics, opens his discussion of poiēsis and mimesis through rhythmos. All do so, I submit, with catharsis—itself a kind of love and health—in view. This catharsis is seen through an affirmation of poietic possibility in art (Heidegger), the practice of the speaking subject (Kristeva), and tragedy (Aristotle). (shrink)

Biomechanical engineering is marked by highly experimental efforts to craft mechanical devices that might one day alleviate the scarcity of transplantable organs in the USA. A pronounced desire among bioengineers involves melding humans with machines, bearing the promise of perfecting the natural yet messy flaws of the ‘natal’ body. Not all bodies are considered equal within this field, however. Visual renderings of heart devices — as an unusual sort of body prosthesis — foreground a specialized aesthetic, where the well-toned male (...) form defines an idealized generic of beauty and perfection. This analysis considers the moral underpinnings of the embodied aesthetic in specific reference to engineers’ efforts to fabricate implantable ‘artificial’ hearts. Of central concern are the sociomoral consequences of a standardized male beauty, set alongside the striking absence — or invisibility — of the female form within this rarified field of science. (shrink)

This article is an exploration of the ways in which maternal subjectivity is negotiated and defined in the context of the act or process of giving birth. As such, it is offered as a contribution to and discussion of recent feminist evaluation of childbirth management systems. Written from the partial perspective of my own experiences of pregnant and maternal embodiment, the article considers whether the ethic of the birth plan is a satisfactory representation of consumer needs and participation in contemporary (...) maternity care. By way of a selective personal account of various models of consumer-orientated and woman-centred childbirth management services that exist in Australia and New Zealand, I draw on ideas from feminist theories of corporeality and the dialogical tradition of social thought in order to rethink the ethical encounter between the labouring woman or consumer and her care provider or practitioner. (shrink)

Neglected tropical diseases are defined operationally as diseases that prevail in “tropical” regions and are under‐researched, under‐funded, and under‐treated compared with their disease burden. By analysing the adjectives “tropical” and “neglected,” I expose and interrogate the discourses within which the term “neglected tropical disease” derives its meaning. First, I argue that the term “tropical” conjures the notion of “tropicality,” a form of Othering which erroneously explains the disease‐prevalence of “tropical” regions by reference to environmental determinism, rather than colonialism and neocolonialism. (...) Second, I examine the way in which this Othering enables the abjection of tropical regions and their peoples, leading to neglect. I recommend that the term “neglected tropical diseases” be more carefully contextualised within health scholarship, education, and policy. (shrink)

There are two focal points to this article. One is to address Julia Kristeva’s theoretical corpus in the context of philosophy of education. Kristeva’s notion of subject in process problematises education with its habitual emphasis on ‘product’. Another is to consider her impact from the perspective of edusemiotics. Edusemiotics is a new direction in educational philosophy and theory, and Kristeva represents one contemporary French intellectual who implicitly inspired the creation, research and development of edusemiotics. The article will briefly address the (...) distinguished features of edusemiotics, the central of which is process ontology in contrast to the old Cartesian paradigm of substance dualism that continues to haunt education. The article will also address the role of presymbolic dimension in the process of self-formation and, as a follow up, reformulate the concept of lifelong education and teacher training. (shrink)

This paper locates the concept of learning among real-life human experiences and events. Functioning as a sign, a meaningful event can be understood in terms of a cultural extra-linguistic “text.” Reading and interpreting diverse cultural “texts” are equivalent to constructing and learning critical symbolic lessons embedded in a continuous process of our experiential, both intellectual and ethical, growth. The paper employs Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abjection and her method of semanalysis as a synthesis of philosophy, psychoanalysis and semiotics. Extending (...) semiotic analysis to the level of informal education, the paper asserts that real-life events, such as the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, can become a means towards constructing the cultural pedagogy of hope paramount to sustaining a global society. (shrink)

The externality of the inside: body images of pregnancyThis paper draws on literature, empirical data and a range of theoretical perspectives on the maternal body to examine understandings of the relationship between a pregnant woman and her foetus, with a particular focus on the body images used by women to represent this relationship. Psychoanalytic and nursing accounts of the relationship between mother and foetus have often described a symbiotic ‘oneness’ or unity during pregnancy. Such accounts, however, stress the temporary nature (...) of this unity and identify a series of ‘stages’ of separation or ‘polarisation’ between mother and foetus during pregnancy. In contrast, many of the 25 women who participated in our interview study of new motherhood described a confusion of the boundary between self and foetus. For many women the experience of pregnancy and the relationship with the unborn baby was ambiguous and uncertain. Importantly, none of these women described her relationship with the foetus as a series of developmental stages, but rather saw it as fluctuating throughout pregnancy. These findings are more consistent with the work of feminist theorists who describe pregnancy as a dynamic and fluid merging of the inside and the outside of the body/self. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an increase in bear sightings in Latvia, causing a change of tone in the country’s media outlets, regarding the return of “wild” animals. The unease around bear reappearance leads me to investigate the affective side of relations with beings that show strength and resilience in more-than-human encounters in human-inhabited spaces. These relations are characterized by the contrasting human feelings of alienation vis-à-vis their environments today and a false sense of security, resulting in disbelief to encounter beings (...) capable of challenging human exceptionalism. In a broader sense, the unease connects to human self-constitution and the fragility of the self, fueled by the domination of substance ontologies. This article considers bears as beings “in exile,” as potential threats to human self-pronounced exceptionality, and thus, examples of experienced abject regarding human subjectivity. The article aims to analyze the way the constitution of human selfhood is tied to the alienation of wildlife and its genealogical and biopolitical context and to question if a reconceptualization of the human/nonhuman relations via process, instead of substance ontology, is needed. (shrink)

This article explores the negative framing of environmental concern in the context of food procurement and consumption, through the lens of the myth of Eden considering the ontological and genealogical aspects of the experienced exile from nature. The article first considers the theoretical context of the negative framing of food ethics. Demonstrating the consequences of the experience of food as abject, the article then goes on to discuss the exile from Eden as an explanatory myth for the perceptual inbetweenness of (...) humankind. The aim of the article is to outline the genealogical markers of the negative framing of food ethics via the discussion of the exile from Eden. In the context of a new materialist understanding of the nature–culture continuum, the article depicts the exile as a perceptual rather than ontological divide that does not reflect a factual human inbetweenness but mirrors the objectification of nature by stripping the flesh of its spirit. Such reenvisioning is thought to be a pivotal aspect for mitigating the affectual abjectivity of food and recapturing the factual entanglement of body–environment to enable affirmative environmental ethics. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have long debated on a key contradiction in the political theory of Thomas Hobbes: While he sees women as free and equal to men in the state of nature, he postulates their subjection to male rule in the civil state without any apparent explanation. Focusing on Hobbes’s construction of the mother–child relationship, this article suggests that the subjugation of the mother to the father epitomizes the neutralization of the ancient principle of ‘governance’, which he replaces with a novel (...) concept of ‘power’ as formally authorized command. This scrutiny leads to three main conclusions: a radicalization of Pateman’s concept of ‘sexual contract'; the acknowledgement that patriarchy is inseparable from the logic of political authority constructed by Hobbes; and the claim that criticism of patriarchal rule requires an overall problematization of the mainstream conception of political participation we have inherited from modern political science. (shrink)

Research into human trafficking for sexual exploitation often conceptualizes the experience through the lens of migration and/or sex work. Women’s bodies are often politicized and the corporeal experiences of trafficking are neglected. The gendered stigma attached to women who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation is clearly evident across cultures and requires further analysis as part of wider societal responses to sexual violence. Through the analysis of letters written by women who have been trafficked and sexually exploited from post-Soviet countries (...) to Israel, this article argues that conceptualizing women’s bodies as bounded spaces allows an investigation of the transgression of those boundaries and opens up a thought-provoking framework for theorizing experiences of, and social responses to, sexual violence, stigma and social exclusion. It explores themes of pollution and dirt as ways to communicate social exclusion through references to boundaries crossed and spaces rendered abject. Women’s narratives of trafficking are examined utilizing the theory of abjection, and the embodied effects of sexual violence and body boundary transgression are elucidated. This analysis shows that the women in this study articulate an embodied narrative of trafficking that is experienced in relation to body boundaries and expressed through motifs of dirt, smell, disgust and pollution. (shrink)

Marriage practices, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and the politics of sexuality are relatively under-researched themes in the study of Bengali communism. Historical scholarship on the revolutionary politics of the extreme left Naxalbari andolan of the late 1960s–1970s, the object of this piece of study, is no exception. The article engages with women and men's narratives on the practice of ‘revolutionary’ marriage in the movement through the prism of contemporary popular memory studies and narrative analysis. Drawing on field interviews with (...) middle-class male and female activists, the article draws attention to the contestatory nature of marriage in the collective memory of the movement. Narrative contestations over marriage in the Naxalite movement underscore, I argue, a tension between a utopian ideal of transgressive interpersonal relations and dominant middle-class codes of sexual morality. At the same time, individual attempts to ‘compose’ (in storytelling) socially recognizable and acceptable subject positions are grounded upon the silencing and abjection of more risky memories. Given the discrepancies and contradictions within the narrative repertoire from which individuals construct their identities, these ‘marriage stories’ are a tremendous resource for investigating the politics of love, sexuality and subject-formation in middle-class Bengali society. (shrink)

This paper focuses on private residential green space as a site of contested meanings. Recent research points to the emergence of an activism centered on ecological restoration and a shift away from the lawn as the only accepted landscape practice for private green space. However, it is clear that the lawn, a particularly powerful cultural landscape form in residential neighborhoods, still largely dominates this space across North America. This investigation examines the voices of two groups: traditional lawn owners and ecological (...) activists. We observe two sets of discourses centered on private green space. Both groups construct residential green space as a site of identity politics-a site wherein the self is defined as pure and the other excluded as different and necessarily inferior. And both perceive their discourse as ''natural.'' The critical finding is that they are almost entirely oppositional discourses. The contest over what constitutes appropriate landscaping practices for this space provides a locus for bringing to a discursive level, the kinds of socio-cultural perspectives and practices that create and dominate our places in late capitalist society. We suggest that at present the lawn remains a barrier to alternative green space practices. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers of technoscience have long argued that it is vital that we question biomedical and scientific claims to an immaterial and disembodied objectivity, and also, more specifically, that we disable the conception of medical visualising technologies as neutral or transparent conduits to the “fact” of the body. In this paper we suggest that corporeal feminism is well situated to provide such a critique. Feminist phenomenologists over the past decade have theorised embodiment in a number of critical ways, many deriving (...) concepts from the work of Merleau-Ponty, and emphasising the pliability and diversity of our body images and corporeal schematics. Others such as Elizabeth Wilson, Cathy Waldby and Drew Leder have considered the interdependence of our inner biology or viscerality with the socio-cultural inscriptions of embodiment. In this paper, these adaptations of phenomenology, and their account of the specificity and depth of embodied being, will be discussed and applied to the discourse of biomedicine and the apparatus of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 1 May 2006. (shrink)

The ideology of ‘purity’, normalcy and hierarchy through food and its relations is a postcolonial, feminist, queer issue. In an increasingly intolerant Hindutva political climate in India, a politics of enforced vegetarianism-based-purity as a mark of authenticity and ideal national identity intersects with liberalisation of the economy and globalisation of tastes to produce complex hierarchies of taste and ideas of culinary belonging. Given that literary and other cultural products can play an influential role in issues of social change, my paper (...) critically investigates how queer contemporary anglophone Indian fiction reworks dominant attitudes towards abjection through consumption, queering the approach to disgust as a stable marker of unbelonging in the contexts of postcoloniality and the transnational. Specifically, I examine approaches to abjection through food and discuss transgression through food as a postcolonial re-reading of disgust-based politics and aesthetics in two novels: The Boyfriend (2003) by author and gay-activist R. Raj Rao, and A Life Apart (2010) by writer-reviewer Neel Mukherjee—both of whom are part of an emerging group of authors writing in English and explicitly dealing with male same-sex desire in the subcontinent and the diaspora. Using a transnational and intersectional queer feminist lens on disgust and queering through food, I discuss how by challenging the hidden codes of a disgust-based gastro-politics and aesthetics in culture, The Boyfriend and A Life Apart reveal new spaces of sovereignty and self-expression in the everyday. In the process, I show how they provide fresh positions of resistance and subjectivity that complicate narrow ideas of belonging—national, diasporic and bodily—the production of which becomes crucial in the context of carving out a transnational queer (gastro) aesthetics and politics. (shrink)

This article addresses the work of the German artist Hannah Höch in the light of the struggle for abortion rights in the Weimar Republic. I attempt to show how Höch’s uses of the technique of photomontage can be read as a way of introducing a distance between the work and the viewer that allows us to question the beliefs we use to make sense of the world. Specifically, I discuss her photomontage Mutter, a version of a photograph taken by John (...) Heartfield, and some of her writings and interviews. I also examine closely the material conditions and political debates in which Höch’s work – as a social practice – developed. After a brief introduction and a methodological outline, I present Höch in the context of Berlin Dada and summarise the main underlying arguments of my hypothesis. Namely, that the major interest of Höch’s photomontages lies in the complex articulation of activism and philosophy, and in the way in which they put mainstream categories into question by ‘distancing’ fragments of reality. (shrink)

In this article, I explore, through the novels of Elena Ferrante, the role played by the ‘abject’ in mediating ageing in women, focusing on its role in the movement from a disempowered to a more powerful subject position. The article has three sections. The first describes the role of the abject in constituting the feminine, focusing on the place of temporality and ageing in this process. Represented by the symbolic figure of the hag, the old woman is a source of (...) primal fear which forms the foundation of a violently misogynistic gendered (self-)formation. However, following Barbara Creed, there are two representational forms of the hag, that of victim (hag) and that of monster (Hag), which I argue also suggest alternative subjectivities associated with ageing femininity. In the second section, I explore the movement from one form to the other by means of conceptual models drawn from Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, in which process a battle over the symbolic meaning of abjection is central. Moreover, ageing itself is significant in mediating the shift from an oppressed/fragmented to a powerful/integrated subject position. Whilst the structures of feeling involved in this subjectivity are emergent, fiction and imaginative literature may provide helpful early depictions and in the last section I illustrate the psychosocial domain with material drawn from two early novels by Elena Ferrante. (shrink)

This paper reports on a particular aspect of a larger ethnographic study of nursing culture in an intensive therapy unit (ITU), accomplished through participant observation over a 12‐month period, followed by interviews with 15 nurses. The paper suggests that the ITU environment is perceived as ‘dangerous’, its dangerousness stemming from the ambiguity of its patients’ conditions. Drawing on anthropological concepts of liminality, pollution, anomaly and breaching of boundaries, the paper identifies various ambiguities inherent in ITU patients’ conditions. It then explores (...) the ways in which these anomalies are managed through sequestration and other ritual and symbolic practices. Notwithstanding the undoubted scientific reasons for particular nursing practices, the paper argues that there are also ritual and symbolic elements serving other more complex purposes, both protecting patients and staff and symbolising the highly valued phenomenon of keeping patients safe. The paper identifies a contradiction inherent in nursing work in this locale inasmuch as rituals and symbolism coexist with technical and research‐based elements of nursing care. (shrink)

I Alderdommen (1970) fremsetter Simone de Beauvoir en filosofisk analyse av alderdom og eldre menneskers situa- sjon, og hevder at behandlingen de får er «skandaløs»; samfunnet «returnerer dem som en vare det ikke lenger er bruk for». Hun tilkjennegir et like stort engasjement mot den urett som eldre utsettes for som hun gjør i Det annet kjønn (1949) når det gjelder undertrykkelsen av kvinner. Likevel påstår Beauvoir at alderdommen først og fremst er et problem for mannen, og det har blitt (...) hevdet at Alderdommen er et verk om aldersdiskriminering hvor mannens aldringsprosess gjøres til norm – ikke et feministisk verk på linje med Det annet kjønn. I denne artikkelen argumen- terer Tove Pettersen for at det nettopp er den feministiske filosofien Beauvoir utvikler i Det annet kjønn som ligger til grunn for hennes undersøkelser av undertrykkelse og diskriminering av eldre. I tillegg demonstrerer Beauvoirs omfattende analyse av alderdommen at hverken alder eller kjønn kan studeres uavhengig av hverandre. Alder og kjønn virker sammen, og må ses i lys av den situasjon disse fenomenene fremtrer i hvor også klasse er av stor betydning. Alderdommen kan derfor leses som et verk hvor Beauvoir viser hvordan ulike former for undertrykkelse virker sammen og bidrar til marginalisering og diskriminering av eldre. Nøkkelord: Simone de Beauvoir, Alderdommen, Det annet kjønn, feministisk filosofi, Den andre, aldersdiskriminering, alderisme******* -/- In The Coming of Age (1970), Simone de Beauvoir presents a philosophical analysis of old age and the elderly’s situa- tion, and claims that the treatment they receive is “scandalous”; society ‘returns them as a commodity that is no longer needed.’ She exhibits the same level of commitment regarding the injustice to which the elderly are exposed as she does in The Second Sex (1949) when it comes to the oppression of women. Nevertheless, Beauvoir claims that old age first and foremost is a problem for men, and it has been argued that The Coming of Age is a work on age discrim- ination where the male aging process is made the norm – not a feminist work on par with The Second Sex. In thisarticle, Tove Pettersen argues that it is precisely the feminist philosophy that Beauvoir develops in The Second Sex that enables her to analyze the oppression and discrimination of the elderly. Additionally, Beauvoir's comprehensive analysis of old age demonstrates that neither age nor gender can be studied independently. Age and gender intersect, and must be be seen in light of the situation in which class is of great importance. Thus, The Coming of Age can be read as a work in which Beauvoir shows how different forms of oppression work together and contribute to the mar- ginalization and discrimination of the elderly. Keywords: Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, The Second Sex, Feminist Philosophy, The Other, Age Discrimination, Ageism. (shrink)

Based on materials collected during a fieldwork in Barnaul (Siberia, Russia) in 2001–2004, the article explores two provincial academic discourses that are focused on issues of Russian national identity. Ethnohistories of trauma address Russia’s current problems through the constant re-writing of the country’s past in order to demonstrate the non-Russian character of its national and state institutions. In the second discourse, ethno-vitalism, the struggle over constructing and interpreting the nation’s memory of the past is replaced with a similar struggle over (...) constructing and interpreting perceptions of the nation’s current experience. Produced by professional intelligentsia, these frameworks and discourses provide a useful link to understanding imaginary constructions of the national belonging in a situation where more positive ways of inventing traditions and imagining communities are unavailable or discredited. (shrink)

This article examines the political controversy in the United States surrounding a new process for the disposition of human remains, alkaline hydrolysis. AH technologies use a heated solution of water and strong alkali to dissolve tissues, yielding an effluent that can be disposed through municipal sewer systems, and brittle bone matter that can be dried, crushed, and returned to the decedent’s family. Though AH is legal in eight US states, opposition to the technology remains strong. Opponents express concerns about public (...) health and safety and about the dignity of our mortal remains. Proponents focus on AH’s environmental benefits over cremation and earth burial, aligning the technology with the “green burial” movement. Drawing from historical sources, Science, Technology, and Society literature, interviews with funeral professionals, industry literature, and various media sources, this article examines four prominent conceptions of the dead human body as they are deployed by various funeral stakeholders seeking to exercise authority over the dead human body, to influence the trajectory of AH technology in the United States, and to chart a course for US deathcare culture in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The built environment and the organisation of public spaces reflect the normative notions of male and female. Public toilets, amongst other widely common public spaces, underline these two opposing concepts and challenge the presence of transgender. Within the boundaries of public toilets, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals become a crucial point of debate, scrutiny and controversy. Analysing the politics of such gender-segregated space, this article explores the notion of uniformity and challenges the idea of single-ness as the absolute expression of (...) the self. (shrink)

Freezing is a common sign of panic, a response to accidents or events that overflow our capacity to react. Just as all civil airspace was cleared after the 9/11 attacks, the US-Canada border was also frozen, causing economic slowdowns. Border policies are caught between these two panics: security failures and economic crisis. To escape this paradox, American and Canadian authorities have implemented a series of security measures to make the border ‘smarter’, notably the implementation of biometric identity documents and surveillance (...) by UAV Predator drones. Psychoanalytic theory can help us explain why the Canadian and American governments have invested so much money for so little evident or measurable increase in either security or economic flows. The article uses the notion of phantastic objects to explain these (over-)reactions to risk management at the US-Canada border. (shrink)

This paper examines the discourse of war from a semiotic point of view and suggests some ideas for the development of practices of resistance to it. The discourse of war can be considered symptomatic in respect to underlying discourses of totality such as globalisation. By aiming at explanatory simplification, this kind of discourse takes the paradoxical form of an exhaustive paradigm which always engenders a residuum to be eliminated. Semiotics can develop practices of resistance to the discourse of war by (...) operating on the syntagmatic chains generated by its mediatic agencies. These practices are based on the postmodernist critique of totalising discourses. A process in which details are disconnected from the mediatic chains where they vanish might trigger the opening of a space of community that makes the residuum of war discourse presentable through metaphorical substitutions. Semiotic practices of resistance to the discourse of war presuppose a shift in theory from the paradigm of globality to that of partiality. Partiality must be understood both from a political and an epistemological point of view and it could therefore represent an important element in the development of a semioethics. (shrink)

Where does the object or idea begin, and where does it end as ‘unseen’? There is scope in Maori philosophising to think of the seen object or its idea in various ways, including as materially constituting the self and the rest of the world; as incomplete for a mental representation; as constituted in itself by the unseen ; and as co-constitutional with nothingness and presence. The possibilities of the seen object are several, especially if the concept of ‘seen’ is understood (...) as immediately determined by its other. This paper considers the consequences of the seen and unseen and the illogical in Maori thought for ‘teach-learn’ and in particular for the translation of teach-learn as ‘ako’ in the Maori language. It also discusses some possibilities for the term ‘porangi’, which is often quoted in relation to ‘madness’ but has deeper metaphysical potential that combines the reality of gloom/unseen alongside a heady potential. I refer to this phenomenon as ‘giddying abjection’ and turn it towards unpicking the certainty that ako as teach-learn replicates. Porangi can refer to self-derision, and I take certain statements of mine and destabilise them from their certainty. In that act I hope to show that students and scholars could follow a similar path with their own statements and, in so doing, subject their own utterances to madness. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of “the subject in procession trial” from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this “subject in procession trial” as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s conceptualization of ‘affirmative biopolitics’, this article examines the relationship between bedbugs and humans in the Glasgow neighbourhood of Govanhill. Through an analysis of ethnographic field notes and interviews with people who live in the area, this article traces their experiences from first encounters. The trajectory of this experience shows a shift from a desire to immunize their homes through total annihilation of the creatures to the more pragmatic position of learning how to live with them through (...) an orientation toward ‘shared vulnerability’. This case study raises interesting questions for biopolitical theory: how can we conceive of affirmative biopolitics when the limitations of species being are evident, and is it possible to conceive of a multi or even interspecies munus or obligation? (shrink)

In this paper I focus on recent artworks by South African artist Nandipha Mntambo. I read these for the ways in which the discourse of species works within and against the humanist sacrificial economy of the subject that Jacques Derrida calls “carno-phallogocentric”. Drawing on Derrida's “metonymy of ‘eating well,'” Achille Mbembe's analysis of colonial violence, and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, I argue that these works inscribe and disturb a speciesist, sexual, and racial politics of animalization, and do so by (...) figuring a transgressive animality that stalks the “origins” of “the human” and troubles its carnivorous and colonial relations of “eating the other.” The works render ambiguous the humanist border that separates “man” from what he calls “the animal” and thicken the singular division between edible and inedible bodies, and literal and figurative eating. I suggest that this figures what Haraway might call an “eccentric subject”, one that not only holds open the possibility of a nonanthropocentrism but, as Haraway would say, “nourishes indigestion” at the heart of “carno-phallogocentric” power. But this is risky practice, as a recent controversy about reading Mntambo's work shows. (shrink)

The research presented in this work represents reflections in the light of Julia Kristeva's philosophy concerning empirical data drawn from research describing the everyday life of people dependent on ventilators. It also presents a qualitative and narrative methodological approach from a person‐centred perspective. Most research on home ventilator treatment is biomedical. There are a few published studies describing the situation of people living at home on a ventilator but no previous publications have used the thoughts in Kristeva's philosophy applied to (...) this topic from a caring science perspective. The paper also addresses what a life at home on a ventilator may be like and will hopefully add some new aspects to the discussion of philosophical issues in nursing and the very essence of care. Kristeva's philosophy embraces phenomena such as language, abjection, body, and love, allowing her writings to make a fruitful contribution to nursing philosophy in that they strengthen, expand, and deepen a caring perspective. Moreover, her writings about revolt having the power to create hope add an interesting aspect to the work of earlier philosophers and nursing theorists. (shrink)

Should the remains of aborted fetuses be treated as human corpses or medical waste? How can feminists defend abortion rights without erasing the experiences of women who mourn fetal death or lending support to pro-life constructions of fetal personhood? To answer these questions, I trace the role of abjection and mourning in debates over fetal remains disposal regulations. Critiquing pro-life views of fetal personhood while challenging feminists to develop richer and more compelling accounts of fetal remains, I argue that embracing (...) the ambiguity and diversity of pregnant bodies can strengthen rather than undermine reproductive autonomy. I conceptualize reproductive autonomy relationally, contending that it entails the pregnant subject’s authority to construct as well as to interpret her lived body, including the fetus. Additionally, because the embodied self is inextricable from social context, reproductive autonomy also requires community support. To support these claims, I develop an account of pregnant bodies as ontologically multiple and advocate embracing abjection rather than suppressing it. Finally, I object to fetal remains regulations because they inscribe fetal grievability into the law. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the popularity of phenomenologies and the tensions that arise from their use as research methodologies in nursing. Among these tensions are: the troublesome issues of adapting a fundamentally philosophical means of understanding human being(s) for use as a more pragmatic and robust research approach in a practice discipline; the various types of phenomenology and the confusions that surround these and other interpretive methodologies, particularly within different intellectual and cultural traditions; and the need for nursing to (...) find a space in which it can give voice to aspects of its practice that are silenced in less existentially oriented methodologies. Although phenomenologies are currently popular and possibly fashionable in nursing, there are important issues in relation to their use in a methodological sense that remain to be addressed. (shrink)

The repertory of theories, practices, and stories associated with Greek and Roman Stoicism fills a significant compartment in the Western philosophical archive, the meaning and value of which are ceaselessly reconfigured by each generation’s archivists. In the recent decades, it is not only specialists who have browsed, rearranged, and relabeled these shelves; following Foucault’s Hermeneutics of the Subject as well as a powerful synergy between Anglophone scholars and cognitive-behavioral therapists, there is now a wave of enthusiasm, inquiry, and experimentation.1 Into (...) these vigorous currents I propose that we release yet another stream, namely the numerous commentaries on Stoicism in the psychoanalytic.. (shrink)

Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge of (...) the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the “traumatic mood” of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat. (shrink)

Noël Carroll has suggested that scary films scare because our emotions are structured by the disgusting and dangerous properties of the films’ monsters. By contrast, this essay argues that some scary films scare through more direct means than can be explained by entertaining in thought, say, the impure properties of Count Dracula. It is the film itself that disgusts and frightens, by ‘taking over’ the spectator so that their consciousness of the film is ‘contaminated’ by the ‘spirit’ of horror. In (...) this essay, I discuss this state of ‘being done by disgust-horror through Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). In my reading, Repulsion is about ultrasensitivity to the world and the subsequent, insane fear of intimacy that the film itself directly induces in its spectator. The spectator is threatened with possession in a fashion analogous to the way in which Carole’s apartment (her own mind) keeps her captive in her own disgust. This disgust that Carole feels is not merely disgust towards men, but disgust towards the world in general. The effect of this is the devastating, disgusting, schizophrenic terror of being unable to trust one’s own senses. (shrink)

Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language offers a challenge to theories of the subject in psychoanalysis, linguistic theory, and in philosophy. Central to that challenge is Kristeva’s conception of negativity. In this article, I trace the development of the concept of negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language from its root in Hegel, to rejection, which Kristeva develops out of Freud. Both are crucial to the development of the material dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic that makes up Kristeva’s subject-in-process/on trial. (...) I argue that a clearer understanding of Kristeva’s conception of negativity helps us to better appreciate the force of Kristeva’s challenge, both philosophically and politically. Finally I argue that Kristevan negativity also helps us to clarify the relation between the delimited space of politics and its conditions, laying the groundwork for constitutive exclusion as political critique and opening a space for the possibility of political re-constitutions. (shrink)

In this article, I rely both on Derrida's 1974 work Glas, as well as Derrida's 1971–72 lecture course, “La famille de Hegel,” to argue that the concept of the quasi-transcendental is central to Derrida's reading of Hegel and to trace its implications beyond the Hegelian system. I follow Derrida's analysis of the role of Antigone—or, as the lecture course has it, “Antigonanette”—in Hegel's thought to argue that the quasi-transcendental indicates a restriction of empirical difference into the transcendental, which is thereby (...) only ever provisionally transcendental. I then argue that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi-transcendental is neither a general economy, nor is it in each case singular, but rather it ambivalently oscillates between these two. Finally, I treat the temporality of the quasi-transcendental, arguing that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi-transcendental is not prior to the restriction of empirical difference, but is paradoxically produced by it by being retroactively constituted. I take up this analysis for the sake of describing what I contend is the quasi-transcendental structure of constitutive exclusion, a way of understanding the conceptual structure of political bodies, and the political structure of concepts. (shrink)

This article aims at introducing the matrixial theory of Bracha L. Ettinger to the field of academic teaching. As it intends to prove, feminist pedagogy would benefit from a matrix-informed approach to teaching, especially in the times of social distancing imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since of all student groups it is the university students who have been most directly affected by precarity and employment instability, they seem to be in an urgent need of openness, compassion, and understanding; the matrixial (...) theory – as this article demonstrates – responds to this necessity. Bracha L. Ettinger is a psychoanalyst, feminist, artist, and daughter of Holocaust survivors; her matrixial theory, based on the notions of the matrix and subjectivity-as-encounter, is a feminist supplement to psychoanalysis. The article begins with introducing the underpinnings of this psychoanalytical system and outlining its application in various areas, ranging from art history to trauma studies. Subsequently, the research joining Ettinger’s work and pedagogy is analysed; as it is shown, while these studies recognise the pedagogical potential of the matrixial theory, their scope is currently reduced to art-related disciplines. The next part is devoted to selected matrixial concepts that come out as especially relevant in the pedagogical context. What the article offers is a theoretical incentive to reflect on an approach to teaching based on reciprocity, responsibility, and participation despite the limit posed by the computer screen: an approach which – in the times of global precarity – can help define anew the student–teacher partnership. (shrink)