Showing papers in "parallax in 2010"
[...]
TL;DR: One kills not by anger but by laughter: Friedrich Nietzsche as discussed by the authors, and today, it seems, everyone is a comedian. While wit has long had a place in the politician's arsenal, would-be leaders are now pushed t...
Abstract: One kills not by anger but by laughter: Friedrich Nietzsche. 1 Today, it seems, everyone is a comedian. While wit has long had a place in the politician's arsenal, would-be leaders are now pushed t...
21 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the connections between dispositions of generosity and the idea that we live on an inherently volatile planet, and proposed that one of the primordial forms of gifting is the offer of safe and stable ground to those who have been thrown off course by the upheavals of their environment.
Abstract: This paper was written for a special issue on `the life of the gift' that explored themes of generosity in relation to embodiment, living things and materiality. The article looks at themes of generosity in the context of natural catastrophes - especially Hurricane Katrina. It suggests that theorists who face up to the opening of one person to another that characterizes `gifting' have a tendency to also be receptive to the idea that the earth is an open system, exposed to the energies and perturbations of the wider cosmos. The paper explores the connections between dispositions of generosity and the idea that we live on an inherently volatile planet, and proposes that one of the `primordial' forms of gifting is the offer of safe and stable ground to those who have been thrown off course by the upheavals of their environment.
17 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a model of the world that is notably we... is developed for metaphysics, which is both clear and interesting to those with little background in philosophy, and it can be seen as a metaphysics-based approach to metaphysics.
Abstract: This is an article on metaphysics, but I have tried to make it both clear and interesting to those with little background in philosophy. The article develops a model of the world that is notably we...
12 citations
[...]
TL;DR: Sokal's no... as mentioned in this paper, a man whose name has become synonymous with a particular kind of critical hoax, wrote: ‘While my method was satirical, my motivation was utterly serious.
Abstract: ‘Why did I do it?’ writes Alan Sokal, a man whose name has become synonymous with a particular kind of critical hoax: ‘While my method was satirical, my motivation was utterly serious’.1 Sokal's no...
11 citations
TL;DR: It's a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter, its inability to take the drumbeats seriously, to the threat of decapitation as discussed by the authors, which is a question that has been studied for a long time.
Abstract: It's a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter, its inability to take the drumbeats seriously, to the threat of decapitation. If man operates under the threat of castration, if mascu...
9 citations
TL;DR: Richter as discussed by the authors states that the making of pictures consists of a large number of yes and no decisions and a yes decision at the end, and that "I am the one who has to decide what they should ultimately look like".
Abstract: I am the one who has to decide what they should ultimately look like (the making of pictures consists of a large number of yes and no decisions and a yes decision at the end). Gerhard Richter 1 Loo...
6 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the risk of falling off the cliff is not as important as desiring a fall; yesness breeds this openness, making literary studies breathe, rendering more circulation to the "meaning" and "presence" of interpretation.
Abstract: The aesthetics of literary studies paradoxically begin in the ‘yes’ and then within the politics of ‘yes-ing’ investigates, sans monistic and relativistic biases, the areas which can possibly enmesh, get intertextualised and be conflated. Yes-ing is what brings risk and romance into interpretation – the productive risk emerging from a conflict of views. ‘Yes’ promotes the investigative spirit, the desire to fall off the precipice and see if extinction is possible. Falling off the cliff is not as important as desiring a fall; yesness breeds this openness, making literary studies breathe, rendering more circulation to the ‘meaning’ and ‘presence’ of interpretation. This risk promotes the ‘libido’ to experiment. Engagements with disciplinary societies are a face-off with fear, a wrestle with an anxiety that the convergences of disciplines easily evoke. This fear is hand in glove with risk – undertaking which is no meretricious vanguardism – and, importantly, needs contextualisation. But it must be admitted that the fear is most when the ‘bias’ in disciplinary and conceptual navigations is minimal: areas of possible libidinous convergences are greater when disciplinary prejudices are less. Complicit in risk, romance, horizon-fusing, freshness, culture of dissent and democratic criticism, (In)fusion approach, in its ingrained ‘cultivated yesness’, has come to question the politics of ‘border patrol’, the logic of interpretive knowledge formations and ‘talking’ across cultures, traditions, systems in our understanding of the other. It is through (in)fusion approach that one comes to acknowledge the scientific, moral, aesthetic and religious claims of the text without the monadic conceptual matrix, the one theory jacket, single-concept strapping. Critical orientation need not be baggaged with commodified theory; rather, a deep understanding of conceptual paradigms can make our habitation with texts transgressive, mobile, transitive and, sometimes, manifestly difficult. The text breathes better under the efficacy of a transcendent horizon of possibilities that ingresses into the economics of theory-conceptual spheres without being assimilated or absorbed into any one of them. In tune with the spirit to welcoming all, (in)fusion approach, thus, demands a ‘decolonised’ mind (I mean discounting the hegemony of one paradigm)—a mind privileged to pry into any theoretical premise, East or West, sans prejudice. It vouchsafes for a transversality, a transpolarity, that fraternises the identity and multiplicity of several epistemic foundations and manifestations. Within a professed ‘competent fluidity’, (in)fusion approach works out the interpretive experiences, extrapolates gestaltic games, based on translational, tangential and transactional formations, preventing the ‘suppression of questions by dominant opinion’. As a compellingly conceivable mode it invents itself and
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that there is something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence.
Abstract: Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Judith Butler.
5 citations
[...]
TL;DR: The Life of the Gift as discussed by the authors is a special issue devoted to the study of gifting in online games, where the authors explore the paradox that "presentation" (money) gifting presents, since the worth of a gift is meant to be calculated in other-than monetary terms.
Abstract: This special issue,The Life of the Gift, began as a series of questions precipitated bymy own interest and research on gifting. Marcel Mauss’ early influential work anchors the literature, and characterizes gifting as a closed economy in which individuals exchange goods and services as a primary means of securing and reproducing community. While acknowledging that gifts are not limited to physical objects but extend to an individual’s ‘soul’, Mauss conceptualized gifting in terms of exchange, debt and obligation. For this reason, Jacques Derrida argues that gifts are impossible insofar as a gift is recognized as such and becomes a commodity, thus bestowing a debt on the recipient. Put another way, gifts are only possible in a forgetful world. This paradox is explored in Greenhill and Allen’s ‘The Most Ambiguous Gift: Cash and the Presentation Wedding Tradition in Manitoba’, which analyzes the paradox that ‘presentation’ (money) gifting presents, since the worth of a gift is meant to be calculated in other-than monetary terms. Joost Van Loon’s article ‘Networked Being: Transactions in On-Line Gaming Communities’ moves the analysis to the context of on-line communities. Gamers are constantly negotiating between individual profit (the accumulation of virtual penguins) and gifting time and energy in mapping the virtual terrain to benefit other gamers. On-line gaming is corporeal (it engages real bodies), virtual (it engages bits of information through time and space), and calculating (the cost-benefit analysis of generosity).
5 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the concept of empathy as an affirmative feminist engagement with Tracey Emin's short film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998).
Abstract: This article explores the concept of empathy as an affirmative feminist engagement with Tracey Emin’s short film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998). I consider the ‘work’ that art does in terms of empathic possibility asking why the film triggers this response and what this means for empathy research as an extension of the cross-disciplinary turn towards affect. I argue for empathy as the ethical negotiation of differences made possible by the affirmation of ‘what-is’. In particular, I focus on the status of the scream, which retains an ambiguous relation to what Barbara Bolt has called the ‘regime’ of representation (2004) yet remains a crucial aspect of the experience of Emin’s film.
4 citations
TL;DR: For a very long time, the question of the yes has mobilized or traversed everything I have been trying to think, write, teach, or read as discussed by the authors, and it has been the most famous yes in the history of literature.
Abstract: For a very long time, the question of the yes has mobilized or traversed everything I have been trying to think, write, teach, or read. Jacques Derrida. 1 The most famous yes in the history of lite...
TL;DR: The term bio-art as mentioned in this paper is defined as an artistic practice that includes either biological materials, or techniques, and includes well-known work by individual bioartists such as Orlan, Stelarc...
Abstract: The term ‘bio-art’ serves to define an artistic practice that includes either biological materials, or techniques. Such art includes well-known work by individual bio-artists such as Orlan, Stelarc...
TL;DR: In Dance as a Metaphor for Thought as mentioned in this paper, Alain Badiou deploys elements of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in apposition to works by Mallarmé and his own Event theory, to define dance as a simple affirmation, showing itself under the vanishing sign of a capacity for art.
Abstract: ‘[T]o think philosophically means to re-work philosophy, to deploy it . . . each time as if for the first time, in the abeyance of tradition’. In Dance as a Metaphor for Thought, Alain Badiou deploys elements of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in apposition to works by Mallarmé and his own Event theory, to define dance as ‘simple affirmation’, ‘the thought-body [i.e. the body that can think] showing itself under the vanishing sign of a capacity for art’.
TL;DR: In this paper, a force of attraction engages with the notion of particle attraction and concentration to form a dense and spherical center, and the positive is proposed for the positive of the positive.
Abstract: 10.1080/13534645.2010.486667 Force of attraction engages with the notion of particle attraction and concentration to form a dense and spherical centre. In this artwork the positive is proposed thro...
TL;DR: Following Teresa de Lauretis's analysis of the disruptive effect of disassociative editing on the power relations of voyeurism and knowledge in Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1983), a reading of another...
Abstract: Following Teresa de Lauretis's analysis of the disruptive effect of disassociative editing on the power relations of voyeurism and knowledge in Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1983), a reading of another...
TL;DR: In this paper, Stezaker explains why he prefers giving interviews as opposed to writing texts or essays about his work, and why it is more an act of forbearance than an active choice.
Abstract: Andrew Warstat: Why do you prefer giving interviews as opposed to writing texts or essays about your work? John Stezaker: It's more an act of forbearance than an active choice. I haven't had the ti...
TL;DR: The authors proposes a historical thesis that there is a growing suspicion among philosophers that a certain epoch of "theory" that we might have once called "the age of deconstruction" has come to end.
Abstract: There comes a moment in the history of every thought that we could call a moment of judgment. These are indeed hazardous times for the spirit, since what is at stake in them is either a certain experience of redemption or its very opposite, damnation. Thus, I would like to start here with proposing a historical thesis. Although the apocalyptic passion of such a hyperbolic statement might not be fully justified, nevertheless I want to invite you to consider the possibility of an impending judgment day for deconstruction. As a historical rather than a theological claim, it simply calls attention to the fact that there is a growing suspicion among philosophers that a certain epoch of ‘theory’ that we might have once called ‘the age of deconstruction’ has come to end.
TL;DR: In this article, the unlikely affinity between contemporary philosophy and embodiment, theory and the question of transplantation is explored in Jean-Luc Nancy's 'Nancy' book, and it is discussed in detail.
Abstract: Nowhere is the unlikely affinity between contemporary philosophy and embodiment, theory and the question of transplantation, more complexly evident and consequentially alive than in Jean-Luc Nancy'...
TL;DR: It is no coincidence Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the principle of evolution, gave such attention to the birds of paradise in his popular book on Southeast Asia dedicated to Darwin.
Abstract: Some species are clearly emblematic of life's abundance, but not simply because humans picked them. Over millions of years the processes of natural and sexual selection have crafted the rare, the f...
TL;DR: Through discussion of Stezaker’s work an approach specific to collage is developed in order to understand not only what it means to place in image next to another image, but also to place an image on top of an image, to find another image in an image.
Abstract: The thought of Blanchot is drawn upon to understand the strangeness of image as distinct from object in that it includes a dimension of absence. Philosophy’s to approach in terms of a ground is criticised, and instead through discussion of Stezaker’s work an approach specific to collage is developed in order to understand not only what it means to place in image next to another image, but also to place an image on top of an image, to find another image in an image, and to render the single image a site of potential becomings though intense attention and reverie.
TL;DR: The life of the gift and of givenness has for much of its recent history been a favoured metaphor for phenomenological discourses of the self as mentioned in this paper, and these phenomenologies have often focused on a particul...
Abstract: The life of the gift and of givenness has for much of its recent history been a favoured metaphor for phenomenological discourses of the self. These phenomenologies have often focused on a particul...
[...]
TL;DR: The second commandment serves as an all-embracing censorship paragraph, a combined ban on picture making and verbal rephrasing, a precursor of Plato's hatred of sculpture and poetry: of my face you must not make a caricature (always more revealing than a facsimile reproduction) and of my self-chosen name you must neither joke nor forge a definite description as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Twins they are, the self-referential LORD and the scheming DEVIL. True to their linguistic shiftiness they are always on the move, the fear of getting caught in the either-or net of conventional reason permeating everything they think and everything they do. This mania in turn explains why the second commandment serves as an all-embracing censorship paragraph, a combined ban on picture making and verbal rephrasing, a precursor of Plato’s hatred of sculpture and poetry: of my face you must not make a caricature (always more revealing than a facsimile reproduction) and of my self-chosen name you must neither joke nor forge a definite description (laughter always more threatening than truth itself). No wonder, therefore, that every map risks taking its holder to Siberia, for every map is an interweaving of picture and story; of present, past and future; of indicative and imperative. The result is an outstanding instrument of power, a triangulation through which the Sovereign learns not merely where his subjects are, but from where they came and to where they should go. Be warned, though, for no map can be perfect and that is not only because the world is round and the map is flat.
[...]
TL;DR: Only a few months later, Servin found that he could no longer keep all the details straight and there were things he remembered: a blinding flash, a fall, the brief glimpses of a baby on the way down...
Abstract: Only a few months later, Servin found that he could no longer keep all the details straight. There were things he remembered: a blinding flash, a fall, the brief glimpses of a baby on the way down ...
TL;DR: Sebald's dust has no defined revolutionary aim, but is rather an object linked to awakening and to messianic temporality that retains a revolutionary possibility, albeit one that does not challenge the sovereign directly.
Abstract: What is quintessential about dust? Two radically different answers might be given to this question. The first comes from ancient Greece and it refers to the dust that Antigone sprinkled over Polynices’s dead body. This is dust as a symbol of defiance, dust that signifies resistance to Creon’s sovereign authority by evoking ancestral, sacred law – dust as a metonymy for revolutionary power. And there is also Sebald’s dust, the emblem of natural history, as Eric Santner puts it, that is, as emblem of the destruction, the detritus that discloses a history that is not premised on progress and which does not promise an ultimate redemption. In other words, Sebald’s dust has no defined revolutionary aim, but is rather an object linked to awakening and to messianic temporality that retains a revolutionary possibility, albeit one that – unlike Antigone – does not challenge the sovereign directly.
TL;DR: The drive towards consonance is a necessity such that we will concretize its illusion and make it present even when it is not as mentioned in this paper, and music resolves to rest at a point where it resonates with the universe, as part of the universe.
Abstract: Is the drive towards consonance a necessity such that we will concretize its illusion and make it present even when it is not? Music resolves to rest at a point where it resonates with the universe, as part of the universe, a point where universal principles are affirmed and where there is affirmation that we are consonant with it, not dissonant to it. At times it seems we may fool ourselves and are prepared to invent consonance internally where it has not been given externally, and then for us to deny authorship and accept our invention as external to us, allowing us to experience affirmation where none is offered.
TL;DR: Jasbir K Puar as mentioned in this paper examined the "convivial" relation between men and women in the context of a terrorist assembly and homonationalism in Queer Times.
Abstract: Jasbir K Puar, Terrorist Assemblages Homonationalism in Queer Times, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) The focus of Puar's book is an examination of what she terms the ‘convivial’ relati
TL;DR: For a brief period in his youth, while away from home for the first time, studying at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, Karl Marx imagined that he might become a poet.
Abstract: For a brief period in his youth, while away from home for the first time, studying at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, Karl Marx imagined that he might become a poet. By 1836, the year he turne...
TL;DR: The authors argue that it is imperative to separate aesthetics and politics as it once was to link them, and that the separation of aesthetics from politics has become as imperative as that of politics.
Abstract: Lately, it has become as imperative to separate aesthetics and politics as it once was to link them. Many progressive literary critics have begun to react against the disturbing tendency in a lot o...