The paper suggests that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s arguments against sympathy after the French Revolution, Walter Benjamin’s claims against empathy following the traumatic shock of Modernity and the First World War, and Hannah Arendt’s critical take on compassion. after the Holocaust are similar responses to singular historical crises. Reconsidering Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) and its evocation of Hermann Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1891), I show first that the novella bears the traces of an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Appeal to (...) Law” (1809). Then, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings on trauma in Illuminations (1968, edited by Arendt), I discuss the political importance Arendt attaches to the proper way of telling a story, at a time when “the communicability of experience is decreasing” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 86). Through the analysis of Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and Arendt’s “heartless” report on the Eichmann trial (1963), I equally show that, according to Arendt, testimonies must be narrated, or rather performed, in a dispassionate, dry, and compact manner so that they can be historically and politically relevant. (shrink)

Chapter 14. Andrea Timár engages with literary representations of the experience of perpetrators of dehumanization. Her chapter focuses on perpetrators of dehumanization who do not violate laws of their society (i.e., they are not criminals) but exemplify what Simona Forti, inspired by Hannah Arendt, calls “the normality of evil.” Through the parallel examples of Dezső Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes (1926) and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950), Timár first explores a possible clash between criminals and perpetrators of dehumanization, (...) showing literature’s exceptional ability to reveal the gap between ethics and law. Second, she examines novels focalized through perpetrators and the difficult narrative empathy they provoke, arguing that only the critical reading of these novels can make one engage with the potential perpetrator in oneself. As case studies, Timár examines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which may potentially turn its reader into an accomplice in the process of dehumanization, and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which puts on critical display the dehumanizing potentials of both aesthetic representation and sympathy as imaginative violence. Third, she reads Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones [Les Bienveillantes, 2006], which can make the reader question, through the polyphony of the voice of its protagonist, the notions of narrative voice and readerly empathy, only to reveal that the difficulty involved in empathizing with perpetrator characters lies not so much in the characters’ being perpetrators, but rather in their being literary characters. Eventually, Timár briefly touches upon the problem of the aesthetic and the comic via Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) to ask whether one can avoid some necessarily dehumanizing aspects of humor. (shrink)

A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.

Les pensées de la différence selon Gilles Deleuze et Jacques Derrida se touchent dans leur sujet même, le Sujet qui « fait des histoires et des scènes » construisant le même système différentiel, le monde. C’est ce qui assure une sorte de continuité entre les deux philosophies. Concernant les « thèses » il n’y a aucune différence entre Deleuze et Derrida. Et pourtant, ils ne se laissent pas unir dans une seule et même philosophie de la différence. Les deux histoires (...) ne se laissent pas identifier dans un seul et même discours, elles exigent deux discours différents. Leur Sujet se raconte de deux façons, se joue sur deux scènes parallèlement, alternativement – cela relève d’une différence minime, différence de genre, de style, de geste, qui pourtant change tout. Penser pour Deleuze consiste à entrer dans le jeu, dans l’acte de la différence, à « faire la différence » – pour Derrida c’est comprendre la différence. Une philosophie comme celle de Derrida suspend les philosophies comme celle de Deleuze – une philosophie comme celle de Deleuze ne prend pas au sérieux une philosophie comme celle de Derrida. Leurs pensées s’excluent réciproquement tout en faisant signe l’une vers l’autre - comme le dirait Derrida : selon un certain graphique de la supplémentarité. Renverser le platonisme : changer son ontologie « en hauteur » pour une ontologie « en profondeur » , c’est un jeu immanent de l’ontologie. Le renversement deleuzien du platonisme est de se déplacer insidieusement en lui, mais aussi de se décaler légèrement par rapport à lui, lui ouvrir la porte, y instaurer une autre série de pensée divergente, constituer un para-platonisme, en d’autres mots : le déconstruire. L’effet en sera, selon Foucault, un « Theatrum Philosophicum » de fantasmes, de simulacres, d’événements, d’effets corporels où Freud et Artaud entrent en résonance même en s’ignorant. Derrida joue un tout petit peu différemment, du dehors, ou plutôt à la limite de son dehors. Si on se sert de l’allégorie de Rodolphe Gasché : Derrida s’installe au bord de la réflexion, dans le tain du miroir – on peut dire alors que Deleuze se déplace dans le miroitement, entre les images reflétées. Ils tiennent tous les deux, chacun à leur manière, à la limite de la réflexion, limites internes et externes. L’exemplarité de la relation Deleuze/Derrida réside en ceci : c’est une image de la doublure en soi de la pensée qui tente ses limites. Elle « illustre » la doublure inévitable de la pensée – doublure qui, par ailleurs, appelle à la déconstruction et à son mimétisme. (shrink)

We have been observing how infants between 3 and 21 months react when a vibrotactile stimulation (a buzzer) is applied to different parts of their bodies. Responses included in particular movement of the stimulated body part and successful reaching for and removal of the buzzer. Overall, there is a pronounced developmental progression from general to specific movement patterns, especially in the first year. In this article we review the series of studies we conducted and then focus on possible mechanisms that (...) might explain what we observed. One possible mechanism might rely on the brain extracting “sensorimotor contingencies” linking motor actions and resulting sensory consequences. This account posits that infants are driven by intrinsic motivation that guides exploratory motor activity, at first generating random motor babbling with self-touch occurring spontaneously. Later goal-oriented motor behavior occurs, with self-touch as a possible effective tool to induce informative contingencies. We connect this sensorimotor view with a second possible account that appeals to the neuroscientific concepts of cortical maps and coordinate transformations. In this second account, the improvement of reaching precision is mediated by refinement of neuronal maps in primary sensory and motor cortices—the homunculi—as well as in frontal and parietal corti- cal regions dedicated to sensorimotor processing. We complement this theoretical account with modeling on a humanoid robot with artificial skin where we implemented reaching for tactile stimuli as well as learning the “somatosensory homunculi”. We suggest that this account can be extended to reflect the driving role of sensorimotor contingencies in human development. In our conclusion we consider possible extensions of our current experiments which take account of predictions derived from both these kinds of models. (shrink)