Showing papers in "parallax in 2006"
TL;DR: Adams as mentioned in this paper argues that women are not animals, but human beings, and that human has always been a label that is tied to power and power is defined by humans versus (other) animals.
Abstract: Carol J. Adams: Well, first, hoorah! Any writings that explore and extend the discussion of our being animals, and our relationships to other animal beings, makes me hopeful. Of course, as you well know, the concept of the ‘animal’ or ‘animal beings’ usually exists in relationship to concepts of human beings in a dyadic dance of definition by negation. When we eliminate the negation that animal has meant to the human, the absence of the human (qualities) that being animal has meant, how does this also redefine, and perhaps dethrone ‘human’? A popular feminist button in the States asserts that ‘Feminism is the radical notion that women are human.’ I won’t wear that button. I don’t find that a radical notion; I find that a conformist notion even though I understand why it is so insistent on this point. While it goes without saying that ‘humans are animals’ the way this insight has been used has been hierarchically, i.e., racial and sexual distinctions were used to equate people of color and women with other animals or to impute animal characteristics on those who were not white, propertied men. ‘Human’ became a definition not only about humans versus (other) animals, but also defining who among Homo sapiens would have the power to act as ‘humans’ – voting, holding property, making laws, committing violence with impunity. Human has always been a label that is tied to power. But for feminism to want firmly to establish women’s ‘humanness’ while upholding the boundary between humans and other animals, defeats what I believe to be the truly radical insight of feminism. Josie Donovan and I articulated what we saw as the radical insight of feminism in our introduction to Animals and Women: ‘We believe that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities. We believe that all oppressions are interconnected: no one creature will be free until all are free – from abuse, degradation, exploitation, pollution, and commercialization.’
36 citations
TL;DR: The authors begin at the intersection of two questions: one, apparently quite complicated, and the other, quite simple, which is invoked but not really articulated by the author in the first question.
Abstract: This essay begins at the intersection of two questions: one, apparently quite complicated; the other, apparently quite simple. The first question – which is invoked but not really articulated by th...
20 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the object of scholarly attention is the opaque condition within each subject enabling the competencies of learning, rather than a self, which is the outcome of a range of social manipulations, its object status ignored.
Abstract: Jonathan Crary’s comprehensive history of the problem of modern attention argues that, ‘in the second half of the nineteenth century, attention becomes a fundamentally new object within the modernization of subjectivity’. Academics are subject to their own version of economically enforced attention management, of course, in the form of the watchful eye of audit culture. Mentioning students diagnosed with attention deficit disorder Crary admits that attention is ‘an object’ for him ‘only in terms of th[e] [...] accumulation of statements and concrete social practices during a specific historical period that presumed the existence and importance of such a capacity’. Whereas for Crary, a self is merely the outcome of a range of social manipulations, its object status ignored, I will argue that the object of scholarly attention is the opaque condition within each subject enabling the competencies of learning.
11 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors attempted to think Maurice Blanchot's positions, on the basis of the interpersonal relation between individuals, would necessarily determine how one conceives of politics.
Abstract: What one thinks of community, and its genesis out of the interpersonal relation, will necessarily determine how one conceives of politics. In attempting to think Maurice Blanchot's positions, on la...
6 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture room with the words, ‘Here is Plato's Man' and the crowd applauded.
Abstract: Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture‐room with the words, ‘Here is Plato's Man’. In consequence of w...
6 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a structural portrait of a person speaking within himself, amorously, is proposed, but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site.
Abstract: What is proposed, then, is a portrait – but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously...
5 citations
TL;DR: The article discusses the perspectives of some famous evolutionists relating to social evolution with a focus on sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, gene-culture co-evolution and memetics.
Abstract: The article discusses the perspectives of some famous evolutionists relating to social evolution. The modern evolutionary approach to culture and human behavior were categorized into those produced from biological and psychological perspective, or those produced from an anthropological, archaeological, and sociological perspective. The biological and psychological perspective included sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, gene-culture co-evolution and memetics. [EBSCO]
3 citations
TL;DR: Bacon lived and worked at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, London from 1961 until his death in 1992, and the room of the actual studio measured eight metres by four metres as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: From 1961 until his death in 1992, Francis Bacon principally lived and worked at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, London. The artist’s kitchen doubled as a bathroom and the living room doubled as a bedroom. The room of the actual studio measured eight metres by four metres. It was a modest place. It was and it is. 7 Reece Mews has been preserved. In 1998 it was dismantled and transported to Dublin where it was then reassembled. It currently forms a part of the Hugh Lane Gallery. The studio is now, however, unused, quiet and inert. This is a studio post-production. The bustle and motion of picture making has stopped. All the materials required for manufacturing an image, however, persist. It is as if Bacon has merely stepped out, taken a break from his work like the painter in Rembrandt’s Painter in his Studio (c.1629, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Rembrandt depicts a painter paused, in the midst of contemplating a panel, either poised to begin, preparing to continue or, perhaps, at an end.
3 citations
TL;DR: For Blanchot, like the early Levinas, the world of things is a dead world, but it is one that is not inert as mentioned in this paper, a world possessed of a strange kind of life, a dying that is active.
Abstract: For Blanchot, like the early Levinas, the world of things is a dead world, but it is one that is not inert. It is a dead world, but one possessed of a strange kind of life – a dying that is active,...
3 citations
TL;DR: This paper introduced the concept of fabula, which they defined as a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors, and used it to separate the notion of character from that of actor in fiction.
Abstract: Fiction is chiefly the domain of the human being, although we certainly have instances where non-human animals function both as tellers and protagonists of stories. This is true not only of the anthropomorphized animals in Aesop’s fables and children’s stories but also of such complex fictions as the stories of Franz Kafka in which apes, dogs, rodents, and mice speak not as humans in animal guise but as animal qua animal. But how does the human animal function in the work of fiction? How does the human narrator or character in fiction function as the human qua animal? This question raises not only ontological questions about the nature of the human’s animal existence and being, but also narrative questions about story-telling and representation that are best addressed through the concepts of modern narratology. Narratology, or theory of narrative, has in the last two decades acquired some of the conceptual rigor of analytical philosophy. This in turn has allowed it to formulate tools we may find useful for bringing some theoretical specificity to the question of how a human narrator or character might function in a story as a de-anthropomorphized human actor or agent. One of the most intriguing shifts in the field of narrative theory has been precisely the conceptual difference introduced to separate the notion of character from that of actor in fiction. In her 1985 study, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Mieke Bal replaces the concept of story with the more specific term fabula, which she defines as ‘a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors’. She then goes on to say of actors: ‘They are not necessarily human.’ Although the notion of character is not abandoned, Bal clarifies that ‘I shall employ the term character for the anthropomorphic figures the narrator tells us about’.
TL;DR: For instance, Derrida has institutionalized his belief that philosophy must be integral to the founding of any university as discussed by the authors, and in 1982 he presented, with others, a report to the French government ‘to justify...
Abstract: Jacques Derrida has institutionalized his belief that philosophy must be integral to the founding of any university. In 1982 he presented, with others, a report to the French government ‘to justify...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors suggest a fissure between the liminal, atemporal, fleeting instant and the more weighty inertia of presentness, the inertia of being.
Abstract: There is hardly a more consistent thinker than Maurice Blanchot. His work is disarming in its weave of fiction and philosophy, in its timeless anonymity, its undoing of the dialectic, and the affirmation of worklessness and the community of those who have nothing in common. Though in a sense elusive, this work is also infinitely substitutable. Almost any paragraph of Blanchot’s is quintessentially Blanchotian. It is daunting, then, if not impossible, to suggest and delineate a fissure that runs through Blanchot’s oeuvre, a fissure between the liminal, atemporal, fleeting instant and the more weighty inertia of presentness, the inertia of being. It is this fissure that also marks a profound yet barely palpable divide between the thought of Blanchot and Deleuze, especially with regard to the realms of temporality and ontology. While Blanchot’s notion of Midnight resonates most strongly with a Deleuzian insistence on temporal becoming (as opposed to present being), it also gestures to a state that is beyond becoming in that it is too unworkable, too inert. It is my claim that this inertia, rather than marking a lesser or pathological state, may point to a new path for ontology.
TL;DR: The essays in this issue of parallax circle around Jacques Derrida's 1983 inaugural address at Cornell University, "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The essays in this issue of parallax circle around Jacques Derrida's 1983 inaugural address at Cornell University, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’. That essay is...
TL;DR: In this article, the question of politics and filiation is approached by way of a reading of Maurice Blanchot and through a consideration of Derrida's reading of the same author in Politiques de l'Amitie.
Abstract: I would like to approach the question of politics and filiation by way of a reading of Maurice Blanchot and through a consideration of Derrida's reading of Blanchot in Politiques de l'amitie.1 Alth...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors take up the references to the sublime in Derrida's "The Principle of Reason: the University in the Eyes of Its Pupils" and present a critical language capable of foregrounding the relation between thinking and feeling, that does not run the risk of being assimilated to psychology in one form or another.
Abstract: This essay takes up the references to the sublime in Derrida’s ‘The Principle of Reason: the University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’. Kant associates reason, which is the essence of the university, with the sublime. We will approach learning in the university by way of astonishment and admiration, as they are outlined in the account of the sublime in the Third Critique, where Kant relates feeling to reason in a way that explicitly resists the reduction of feeling to what he calls ‘empirical psychology’. Despite this resistance on the part of Kant and others since, including Freud, there is as yet no critical language capable of foregrounding the relation between thinking and feeling, that does not run the risk of being assimilated to psychology in one form or another, whether it be the eighteenth century faculty-psychology familiar to Kant, or a more recent one. To paraphrase Kant on the sublime is to risk merely reproducing a conventional description of learning in terms of the ultimately exalting effect upon the mind of our initially unpalatable encounter with reason in the form of what’s too big to take in – huge mountains, chasms, cataracts and so forth. As if what exceeds the self could by means of reason return to the self and as if everything were to be understood in terms of property. However, there is a reading of Kant that offers us a different risk, one that is powerfully resistant to psychological recuperation: that of bathos, sinking into what Paul de Man calls ‘the prosaic materiality of the letter’. Derrida shows us how much takes place at the surface of writing, where creation begins with letters and sounds, never to return to the one who writes. At this superficial level we also recognize what is traditionally called verbal beauty: the pleasures of rhythm, phonic repetition, accent and tone in writing.
TL;DR: Basil Hallward as discussed by the authors was a tall, graceful young man who was standing by him and his romantic, olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him and there was something in his low, languid voice that was fascinating.
Abstract: He could not help liking the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him. His romantic, olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him. There was something in his low, languid voice that was absolutely fascinating. His cool, white, flower-like hands, even, had a curious charm. They moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their own. But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid. Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself? He had known Basil Hallward for months, but the friendship between them had never altered him. Suddenly there had come some one across his life who seemed to have disclosed to him life’s mystery. And, yet, what was there to be afraid of? He was not a schoolboy or a girl. It was absurd to be frightened.
TL;DR: The humanist discovery of man is the discovery that he lacks himself, the discovery of his irremediable lack of dignitas as mentioned in this paper. But it is facile, virtually meaningless, to demand...
Abstract: The humanist discovery of man is the discovery that he lacks himself, the discovery of his irremediable lack of dignitas. Giorgio Agamben, The Open 1 It is facile, virtually meaningless, to demand ...
TL;DR: In the context of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series as mentioned in this paper, it is customary in this series to write a short chapter, at the end of the book, on the influence or impact of the author. Although this chapter was very brief, I found it particularly difficult to write.
Abstract: Some years ago now I was asked, with my friend and colleague Ullrich Haase, to write an introduction to the work of Blanchot for a series called Routledge Critical Thinkers edited by Robert Eaglestone. It is customary in this series to write a short chapter, at the end of the book, on the influence or impact of the author. Although this chapter was very brief, I found it particularly difficult to write – perhaps because I thought at the time that I was betraying Blanchot, because it was as if I was transforming his work into a commodity (not, I think, the intention of the editor of this series). Why read Blanchot, or even an introduction to Blanchot, unless he was significant and important? Those who have already read Blanchot, or even know a little about him, know there is something rather peculiar about writing a short piece about how fashionable and ‘trendy’ he is – for here is a writer who prized anonymity and silence more than any other (though all writers demand this to some degree). It is refreshing, in this day and age, to recognize a writer who does not wish to be in the papers and television, who does not publicize him or herself at any opportunity, at a time when many others (those who call themselves ‘writers’, but who are not) sell themselves as though they were a product like anything else (and haven’t publishers always wanted it thus?).
TL;DR: I love Elvis. So much that I'll say it again: Elvis, I love you; Elvis, je t'aime as discussed by the authors. And that's the best I can hope for.
Abstract: I love Elvis. So much that I'll say it again: Elvis, I love you; Elvis, je t'aime. OK, now that we've got that out of the way let's get down to business. My aim is to elaborate some thematic elemen...
TL;DR: In this paper, Blanchot argues that it is Kafka who can be said to teach the necessary coming into play of the neutre in the first part of the sentence, not just by any other but by a writer, Kafka.
Abstract: There is surely something not quite right about the way it so confidently seems to propound a thesis or rather to know the thesis (and what else can it be but a ‘thesis’?) implicitly propounded by another, and not just by any other but by a writer, Kafka. Such a claim seems to sit oddly with so much of what Blanchot says about writing, literature, and literary language. No caution, no apology. This is what Kafka brings us. This is what he teaches. How could one ever know such a thing and know, without the evidence of a direct attribution, that one was entitled to claim it? Although the essay from which the sentence is taken, ‘The Narrative Voice (The ‘‘he’’, The neuter)’, and the book in which the essay is collected, L’Entretien infini, in their respective introductions of the word neutre, go to the most intricate lengths to insist that it is never straightforwardly proffered and written and so, from the beginning, radically problematize our reading of what it is that Kafka is said to teach us, they seem to provide no such service for the first part of the sentence. The apparent assertiveness of the claim that the thought of the necessary coming into play of the neuter is ‘taught’ and that it is Kafka who can be said to teach it seems to be neither expanded upon nor qualified. And if, as its excessively careful introductions would suggest, the neuter frustrates each and any attempt to present it in the form of a thesis, then the second part of the sentence cannot be contained or determined by the first. Indeed, it must surely be read against it.
[...]
TL;DR: The first type of resonance is about the tension between a philosopher (his resistance) and the interruptive power of the cracking of a whip as discussed by the authors, which is the one with which I would like to put this essay into resonance.
Abstract: The first type of resonance is about the tension between a philosopher (his resistance) and the interruptive power of the cracking of a whip. Whereas the resonance between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer is a catastrophic event and it gives way to distortion; and, moreover, its giving way to distortion is not something that can be addressed to ‘perception’ in the Schopenhauerian sense of the word. Already in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, it is not something which takes place as something visible or audible.This type of resonance between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is the one with which I would like to put this essay into resonance.
TL;DR: The link between terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism especially as the latter manifested itself in the Taliban's treatment of women and children in Afghanistan was highlighted by Laura Bush as discussed by the authors. But the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.
Abstract: Few progressive commentators on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have overlooked their troubling ironies. On November 17, 2001 Laura Bush preempted her husband, George II, by delivering his weekly radio address. Her topic: the link between terror and Islamic fundamentalism especially as the latter manifested itself in the Taliban’s treatment of women and children in Afghanistan. As she put it, ‘[T]he fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.’ Meanwhile, back at the ranch, her husband’s administration was busily preparing to criminalize so-called partial birth abortions (widely considered to be a first step toward rescinding Roe vs. Wade), and install W. David Hager as head of the Federal Drug Administration’s Commission on Reproductive Health. Dr. Hagar is an outspoken, anti-choice physician who actively promotes faith healing.
TL;DR: The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright as mentioned in this paper. But because our understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive so cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be follow’d in all discreet teaching.
Abstract: The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright [...] But because our understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive so cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be follow’d in all discreet teaching. John Milton
TL;DR: The enlightened university, based on philosophy, is under threat, assailed by managerialism, new levels of disciplining its members and increased centralization of power (now out of the hands of pr....
Abstract: The enlightened University, based on philosophy, is under threat, assailed by managerialism, new levels of disciplining its members and increased centralization of power (now out of the hands of pr...
TL;DR: The authors examines the teacher-student relationship in the university, and draws upon the writings of Plato (Phaedrus and Meno) and Freud (Wild Analysis), examining the teaching situation as necessarily a play of forces, resistances and counter resistances, transferences and counter-transferences: psychic, intellectual and erotic.
Abstract: This paper examines the place of the teacher-student relationship in the university, and drawing upon the writings of Plato (Phaedrus and Meno) and Freud (Wild Analysis), examines the teaching situation as necessarily a play of forces, resistances and counterresistances, transferences and counter-transferences: psychic, intellectual and erotic. What are the roles of the teacher and the student in this analytic scenario? What would be the implications, legal and otherwise, of seduction in a ‘university without condition?’ Would it be desirable or even possible to legislate against what might be a necessary condition for teaching, and for the existence and/or the survival/death of the university, or at least, of the teaching body? What, if anything, would survive the death of the teacher-student relationship?
TL;DR: The International College of Philosophy at the Sorbonne as discussed by the authors was the result of the work of the Greph Group on the Teaching of Philosophy (GOTP), a group of students and teachers who opposed the Haby reforms.
Abstract: ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’ was first presented, in English, in 1983, as the inaugural lecture for the Andrew D. White Professor-atlarge chair at Cornell University. As Derrida notes in his paper, this was a time when he was closely involved in a complicated planning process which would eventually lead, that same year, to the establishment of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. The political context for such an initiative was the election of a Socialist government in France in 1981, on a platform which included proposals by the Greph (Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy) to maintain and extend the teaching of philosophy in the French educational system. Greph was the name assigned to a disparate and diffuse activist grouping, whose members engaged in the theoretical analysis of institutional conditions while also operating as a pressure group. Derrida was a leading figure in the Greph, and as such he helped to organize resistance to the previous government’s proposals to limit philosophy teaching (the so-called Haby reforms). This resistance included an Estates General of Philosophy, held at the Sorbonne on June 16–17, 1979, which brought together more than 1,200 individuals from a variety of backgrounds both inside and outside the university and the French educational system. The activism of the Greph and the Estates General helped obstruct and reverse the proposed Haby reforms; and, while Mitterand’s presidency was ushered in alongside a promise – which never materialized – to extend philosophy teaching within the curriculum, the new government minister of research was mandated to establish a committee whose intention was to explore the possibility of an international college of philosophy. ‘The Principle of Reason’ must therefore be situated and read in terms of this ‘background’ – one in which the discipline of philosophy and the institution of the university raise questions which, for Derrida, demand both philosophical investigation and practical action. Indeed, in the various texts by Derrida associated with this period, the interrelationship between a series of well-rehearsed binaries – theory and practice, thought and deed, philosophy and activism, ‘basic’ and ‘end-oriented’ research – is subjected to an unremitting deconstructive interrogation. Here, Derrida repeatedly calls for strategic yet singular negotiations which recognize the heteronomous interdependency and supplementarity of such supposed ‘pairs’ of opposites, notably in the interests of a more astute ‘politics’ (as we shall see). parallax, 2006, vol. 12, no. 3, 85–98
TL;DR: Ronell as mentioned in this paper describes the call of a male god, a god that is not full, since he is full of resentment, jealousy, suspicion and so on: Come here, Watson, I want you.
Abstract: Bell conjured up Thomas A. Watson with a commanding utterance[...] ‘Watson, come here! I want you!’[...] Come forth, manifest yourself, Wat-son, cut the lines that separate us but whose wound enables me to command your arrival, your destination and destiny... Whether issuing from the political or the private sector, the desiring command inches you towards annihilation. It emerges from what is not present-at-hand: thus, ‘I want you’ phantomizes you. I want that which I do not possess, I do not have you, I lack you, I miss you: Come here, Watson, I want you. Or this may echo the more original call of a male god, a god that is not full, since he is full of resentment, jealousy, suspicion and so on. He calls out, he desires, he lacks, he calls for the complement or the supplement or, as Benjamin says, for that which will come along to enrich him. The god is at the controls but without knowing what he controls until the Other still lacking answers his call. Where the call as such suggests a commanding force, the caller, masked by the power apparatus, may in fact be weak, suffering, panicked, putting through a call for help. We suppose that the phonetic inscription has been rendered faithfully. Yet [...] the unavailability of a primary script frees a language into the air whose meaning, beyond the fact that it constitutes a demand, remains on shaky, if any, ground. Avital Ronell
TL;DR: In this paper, it is assumed that the present does not exist from a fictional point of view, because it is the time mode of the real, generally opposed to the fictional.
Abstract: Narrative consistency is based on development. The reader assumes there will be a given progression between textual events. From this progression develops the fictional construct. In Maurice Blanchot’s fiction, the author does everything possible to undermine the expectations of the reader in constructing a fictional universe. There are several aspects to this disruption. The first aspect is temporal. Narrative expectations, which are based on memory, refer to previous allusions to a given plot line in the text. This is called prefiguration from the point of view of the past, and anticipation from that of the future. The present does not exist from a fictional point of view, because it is the time mode of the real, generally opposed to the fictional. It is now largely accepted that the narrator may insert in the text any material from his or her own temporal past, whether conscious, subconscious or actual. Thus the insertion of dream sequences is part of a film script, and the viewer automatically interprets this sequence as deriving from the script writer’s own psychological past. It is assumed that the present is not involved, because for the necessary control of the raw material of the dialogue and cinematographic sequences, a certain temporal distance is required.
[...]
TL;DR: To say "I'm hearing things" is not simply to announce that I have perceived sonic information; it is to say that I thought I heard something happen but I can find no visual or other evidence to confirm my perception as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: To say ‘I’m hearing things’ is not simply to announce that I have perceived sonic information. It is to say that I thought I heard something happen but I can find no visual or other evidence to confirm my perception; it is to say that I have heard something that I cannot or will not believe to be true; it is to say that I am hallucinating. The straightforward declaration about the activity of the senses has come to signify the absence of faith in those senses as sources of information: the uncertainty as to whether I can reliably represent the world to myself by means of my perception. My ears are suspect, and the ‘things’ I hear are no longer ‘things’, they are voices from beyond, a singing ceiling, a piano note from another time, an inaudible brothel, a foetal voice, a dead philosopher.