This article aims to conceptualize the interplay between sarcasm, scatology and writing in Darija (Moroccan Arabic or Al-Maghribia) on the web in a post-uprising era. It focuses on the new Darijophone prose that emerged after 20 February 2011 protests in Goud and The Newزحيليكر‎ (The New Bumpkin). Originating with absurdist February 20 movement founder member, Mohammed Sokrat, this writing genre is realist, vulgar, profane, taboo-breaking, and borrows from the toilet space to poke fun at the schizophrenia, herd mentality and populism (...) that attend a modernizing society under a neoliberal regime. A vocabulary of trash, waste, filthy social types and risqué gags has informed a unique online minoritarian prose that is unpopular, yet widely read. This article studies the virtual politics and poetics of dirt and laughter in written Darija. Writing at the interstices of commitment and co-optation, this subcultural mode of knowledge production reveals Moroccan youth's heretofore suppressed yet incessant longing for change in a post-uprising context of disillusionment. (shrink)

This article begins by asking if the project to write a philosophical novel is not inherently flawed; it would seem that the novelist must either write an ambiguous text, which would not create a strong enough argument to count as philosophy, or she must write a text with a clear argument, which would not be ambiguous enough to count as good fiction. The only other option available would be to exemplify a preexisting abstract philosophical system in the concrete literary world. (...) To move beyond such an impasse, this article turns to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's unique aesthetic theory in “Literature and Metaphysics” envisions philosophy as an integral part of the literary text and sees the novel not as an argument but as something called a “philosophical appeal”. In her first novel, She Came to Stay, such a concept of the philosophical novel allows Beauvoir to make an original contribution to the philosophical tradition—one in which Beauvoir rethinks the problem of solipsism—while still creating a stunning literary work. A study of the theory and the novel together thus provides a solid understanding of what philosophers stand to gain from the philosophical novel. (shrink)

This paper argues that an essential and often overlooked feature of jealousy is the sense that one is entitled to the affirmation provided by the love relationship. By turning to Sartre's and Beauvoir's analyses of love and its distortions, I will show how the public nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one's sense of self can trigger (...) anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one's self-value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person's freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self-perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person's psychic structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present an argument against Husserl’s analysis of picture consciousness. Husserl’s analysis of picture consciousness (as it can be found primarily in the recently translated volume Husserliana 23) moves from a theory of depiction in general to a theory of perceptual imagination. Though, I think that Husserl’s thesis that picture consciousness is different from depictive and linguistic consciousness is legitimate, and that Husserl’s phenomenology avoids the errors of linguistic theories, such as Goodman’s, I submit that his (...) overall theory is unacceptable, especially when it is applied to works of art. Regarding art, the main problem of Husserl’s theory is the assumption that pictures are constituted primarily as a conflict between perception/physical picture thing and imagination/picture object. Against this mentalist claim, I maintain, from a hermeneutic point of view, that pictures are the result of perceptual formations [Bildungen]. I then claim that Husserl’s theory fails, since it does not take into account what I call “plastic perception” [Bildliches Sehen], which plays a prominent role not only within the German tradition of art education but also within German art itself. In this connection, “plastic thinking” [Bildliches Denken] was prominent especially in Klee, in Kandinsky, and in Beuys, as well as in the overall doctrine of the Bauhaus. Ultimately, I argue that Husserl’s notion of picture consciousness and general perceptive imaginary consciousness must be replaced with a more dynamic model of the perception of pictures and art work that takes into account (a) the constructive and plastic moment, (b) the social dimension and (c) the genetic dimension of what it means to see something in something (Wollheim). (shrink)

This paper reads Simone de Beauvoir's travel journal America Day by Day for its philosophical content. I argue that this work provides a unique approach to feminist, embodied philosophy, one that has been overlooked by the categorization of her writing into philosophical works and feminist ones. Such an approach, I contend, is enacted here through her use of Heidegger's concept of the everyday to inform her own treatment of understanding and experience.

Just as becoming-woman is a divided concept, looking back to a seemingly redemptive figure of the feminine beyond rigid being, but also forward to a positive annihilation of fixed genders, so modernism was also a doubled movement. But modernism was a pulverisation of ‘the’ subject for the sake of a plural and multiplying point of view, and like ‘becoming-woman’, should be read as a defiant and affirmative refusal.