This paper suggests an approach to the various possibilities of reading as a practice responsible for generating thought. It might be said that it is an approach to the dismissal of reading as the origin of other paths of thought. Utopia, understood as anticipation, yields its place to the figure of redemption (in Benjamin’s sense of the word) as imminence of the absolutely other, expectation and extreme attention. The text invites the reader to try other routes in the practice of (...) reading (other than solitary silent reading), in which the body and the senses play a part, and - especially - the other, to allow the advent of a thinking that welcomes justice. In an act of memory, reading - as heteronomy - opens onto the future. (shrink)

This thesis explores how the novels of Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys – To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Wide Sargasso Sea – despite being set in times of wars and social change that influence personal lives, maintain an attachment to and love for life. This thesis proposes that Woolf and Rhys ‘locate’ this attachment to life in the moments and atmospheres of ‘strange intimacy’ – in sensual, affective, and oddly intimate moments and settings where (...) characters realise their bodily connection to the world of others, things, and places. This work suggests that this love for life is cultivated when life is seen as ‘a life’ and selves as ‘haecceities’ in the Deleuzian sense, and when we consider modern life as enchanted, not disenchanted. To examine the love for life and strange intimacies further, this thesis rethinks the works of Hélène Cixous in the light of contemporary theories of affect and new materialism that are inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophies. This theoretical framework allows the examination of the complex ways in which intimacy, selfhood, and desire are portrayed in Woolf’s and Rhys’s modernist fiction. This thesis also demonstrates how post-structural feminism’s focus on radical alterity and its emphasis on and turn to materiality, the non-human, bodies, and affects, which are drawn together in the notion of écriture féminine, pre-figures the concerns of affect studies and new materialisms. The reading of Cixous’s, Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Bennett’s works performed in this thesis demonstrates how their theories of affect and the non-human help us to further our understanding of intimacy in the works of Woolf and Rhys and to reconsider the life-affirming, affective, and anti-Oedipal qualities of their modernism. Such an approach allows not only the discovery of a new understanding of Woolf’s and Rhys’s writings, but it contributes significantly to how we understand these theories and modernism in general. (shrink)

This essay came about as the result of my suspicion that, in our societies of written traditions, the way we write and the thoughts we generate are intimately linked to the way we read. The practice of reading, in its many forms, is more than just a simple technique that allows us to familiarize ourselves with what other people think and thought: just as there exists a close relationship between the content and the form of a given text, the practice (...) of reading has an effect on the reception of what has been written. But even before any text was written, reading had had a critical effect on the form in which it would exist, informed by so many previous experiences of reading. (shrink)

“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re-explain Derrida's (...) “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the phenomenon of writing online. We ask, ‘Is writing by means of online technologies affected in a manner that differs significantly from the older technologies of pen on paper, typewriter, or even the word processor in an off‐line environment?’ In writing online, the author is engaged in a spatial complexity of physical, temporal, imaginal, and virtual experience: the writing space, the space of the text, cyber space, etc. At times, these may provide a conduit to (...) a writerly understanding of human phenomena. We propose that an examination of the phenomenological features of online writing may contribute to a more pedagogically sensitive understanding of the experiences of online seminars, teaching and learning. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 13, Issue 4, Page 282-288, October 2021. Efforts to identify in the expression “being moved” a new emotion have found a hospitable environment in the recent turn to the body in emotion and cognitive studies, exemplified herein affect theory, with a particular focus on the effects of music. Although classical Greek and Latin had comparable expressions, however, they did not single out a specific emotion. Given that music played an important role in ancient educational theories, and was (...) imagined as having arousing powerful reactions, this might seem a curious absence. The reason, at least in part, maybe the strong cognitive conception of emotions characteristic of classical theories. But this should not discourage the search for emotions that are not included in the ancient canons. (shrink)

HélèneCixous, the renowned contemporary philosopher and feminist, provides such a heretic account of femininity which transcends the feminist social or political movements. She believes that “the female” can create a new identity for itself, when keeps its distance from the masculine symbolic order. Of course, this has nothing to do with the absence of women in the cultural realm, rather the problem is that if the female aspects of human being are not to be eliminated, a new ontology is required (...) to sustain it in a pointlessness situation, so that it can always resist the conventional perceptual patterns. In other words, the female can only make its identity and the nature of rationality dynamic, when it injects the strangeness in the masculine order. This means keeping a position on the margins of history, while also infusing the feminine energies into the symbolic body. In this research, we try to show that for Cixous, emergence of the new is dependent both on some kind of feminine otherness and the marginality. This can be realized by various dismantling tools such as women’s writing and polyphonic identities. Finally we make it clear that through the female otherness or being on the margins, the feminine can provide a way of thinking about those realities which have not been thought up so far in the symbolic rationality, or have always been rejected as the unthinkable. (shrink)