Showing papers in "Substance in 2016"

The Commotion of Souls

Abstract: First, a couple of emotional dilemmas: I love bringing my six-year-old to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when we are in New York in the summer. On Thursdays, they have a special hour for children. A curator first talks with them about an artwork and then encourages them to draw pictures inspired by it. My son seems to enjoy it. Yet every time I tell him that we are about to go to the MET, he says that he doesn’t want to. Don’t you remember, I plead with him, that you liked it last time? No, he says, he didn’t. I cajole and bribe, and keep hoping that a day will come when he will remember how he felt about it last week. During a dissertation defense, I ask a question, and, as the candidate begins to answer, I realize that she must have misunderstood me. What she is saying is interesting, though. Should I just go with it, or should I restate my original query in different terms? I wonder, too, if other committee members think that she misunderstood the question or that she did understand it but didn’t know how to answer it and so decided to talk about something else. A thought within a thought. A feeling within a feeling. A feeling within a thought within a feeling. I hope that my son will remember next week how he feels about the MET this week. I wonder if the other committee members think that the candidate intentionally chose not to answer a difficult question. I am sure that if I ask you to think about your day, you, too, may recall an occasion on which you “embedded” (or “nested”) thoughts and feelings in this recursive fashion. Or: I am sure you will recall an occasion on which you were thinking about other people’s thinking. It’s difficult to say how often we do this, that is, how often we embed mental states within each other, especially since we don’t usually stop and think about it. On the one hand, many complex social situations seem to depend on this kind of cognitive construction. On the other hand, our days are not always chock-full of complex social situations, which means that we end up thinking about people’s thinking about people’s thinking relatively infrequently. Fiction is where it gets interesting. Embedded mental states—a thought within a thought within a thought, or a feeling within a thought within a feeling—are everywhere in fiction. That is, they are everywhere

Frankenstein's Brain: "The Final Touch"

Abstract: From the classic Frankenstein of 1931 to Matrix (1999), which offers a version of the philosophical fable of the brain in a vat (Chalmers) and on to Self/less (2015), in which the consciousness of a dying tycoon is transferred to a younger man’s body, cinema has variously explored the relationship between personhood and the body by means of fictions concerning the brain and its contents.1 From the crude disembodied brains of 1950s B-movies to the neuroimaging visuals of 21st-century cyberpunk, these films localize individuality essentially in the brain, and make personal identity transcend the body’s demise by transplanting the brain (or its contents) into other, typically younger or at least healthier bodies. Drawing credibility from both science and philosophy, they assume that, as Roland Puccetti nimbly put in 1969, “Where goes a brain, there goes a person” (70). Puccetti did not claim that we are our brains, but that since the brain operates as the physical basis of personhood, one cannot be separated from the other. For all intents and purposes, the brain is in such a perspective the somatic limit of the self. In film, as well as in literary works such as Hanif Kureishi’s 2002 short novel The Body, about a man in his mid-sixties whose brain is transplanted into the body of a thirtysomething, the brain, though material, behaves like the traditional immaterial and immortal soul—maturing but not aging, and insuring the personality’s survival after death. The non-cerebral physical body does not essentially partake in the definition of personal identity. However, its role as brain’s repository and as the recipient’s interface with the world shapes the hybrid subject’s predicament, and generates the motives and imbroglios that drive dramatic action (see Krüger-Fürhoff on transplantation fictions generally). Frankenstein films deserve a special place in the history of such fictions. At a general level, this is because “Frankenstein” designates “an authentic modern cultural myth” (Marcus 190). Though most frequently associated with the potential dangers of transgressing limits in the life sciences, the story has resonated much more widely “through its extraordinary resistance to simple resolutions and its almost inexhaustible possibilities of significance” (Levine 18). Film has been a major medium for dramatizing the “myth” and its myriad facets and ramifications, and has retained its power even after the decline, noticeable since the 1990s, in the popularity of the “mad scientist” it often portrays (see Frayling

Playing with Fire-Space: Site-Specific Placement and the Techno-pharmacology of Maria Irene Fornes's Mud

Abstract: Many who write about the playwright Maria Irene Fornes’s work comment with reverence about the experience of watching those productions she herself directed.1 Managing somehow to combine frank depictions of cruelty and violence with an odd, otherworldly charm, Fornes’s direction conveyed a distinct sui generis quality that has deflected analytic scrutiny—the exterior operates in such an exquisite fashion one hesitates to lift the hood and look beneath.

What gives (Donner le change)

Abstract: The care taken always to pursue if possible the prey first started, and to call off the dogs and punish them whenever they get upon a false scent, gradually accustoms them to distinguish by scent the stag they are pursuing from all others. But the stag, wearied by the pursuit, seeks to join himself to others of his own kind, and then a more acute discernment is required by the dog. In this case there is nothing to be expected from those that are young. It appertains to consummate experience to form a sure and prompt judgment in this perplexity. It is the old dogs alone who are what is called hardis dans le change; that is, who untangle without hesitation the trail of their stag from among all those of the herd he has joined. ... If the dogs, carried away for an instant by their ardour, overrun the scent, and come to lose it, the leaders of the pack will, of their own accord, adopt the only means which men could use. They try backwards and forwards, in hope of finding in the circle they traverse the trace that has escaped them. The huntsman’s industry can go no farther, and, in this respect, the experienced dog seems to attain the limits of knowledge. — Charles Georges Leroy, The Intelligence and Perfectibility of Animals from a Philosophic Point of View (1768)

The Conventional and the Queer: Lily Bart, An Unlivable Ideal

Abstract: In criticism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, more attention has been paid in recent years to the unconventional side of Lily Bart. Wai-Chee Dimock, for example, calls Lily “something of a rebel” (783), while Benjamin D. Carson and Elaine Showalter place her as “intruder” (707) and “outsider” (138) in her society, respectively. Ruth Bernard Yeazell admits at least “the faltering pulse of resistance” in Lily (731), and Maureen Howard describes her as “just unconventional enough” (139). Lily as a conformist is an obvious picture to paint, which is why exploring her non-conformism in criticism has been so stimulating and fruitful. However, even with so much focus on her unconventionality, few critics have questioned the one aspect that keeps criticism of The House of Mirth from becoming even more comprehensive: Lily’s sexuality. In her 2000 PMLA article, Jennie A. Kassanoff argues that the idea of “race” is the “missing but historically crucial component complicating progressive interpretations of Wharton’s project” (61). In truth, I agree that “race” must be addressed in connection to Wharton studies and the novel itself, but I do not believe it is the only “missing [...] component.” In all of The House of Mirth criticism, perhaps three articles give substantial weight to the subject of sexuality in The House of Mirth.1 Lily’s sexuality is assumed from the start because she is a woman and desired. In order to open wide the novel’s critical realm, this paper argues, sexuality must be one of the factors that is explored more thoroughly. Therefore, this study will actively read against past heteronormative impulses by investigating the convergence of conventionality and queerness in Lily Bart, and how, paradoxically, the one sustains the other. In the spirit of Dimock’s argument in which Lily’s “deviance” (787)2 is explored via exchange, this paper will expand Lily’s queerness through her idealized status, but will focus on gender and sexuality rather than the marketplace.

What Is Neuro-literature?

Abstract: Neuroliterature: this word is not a name for a new discipline, which—like neurolinguistics, neuropsychoanalysis, or neurophilosophy—would tend to explain the way in which our mental acts are rooted in biological neural processes. Even if we have to pay these new sciences the most acute attention to the extent that they are currently re-sketching the inner and outer boundaries of the Humanities, my purpose here is different and wishes to escape all forms of reductionism. Current neurobiology will be present in my discourse, but not as a possible new foundation for literature. Speaking from the continental philosophical point of view, I am interested in the way neurological research helps both radicalizing and challenging certain major motives of what took place in the second half of the twentieth century under the names of “deconstruction of subjectivity” in Derrida on the one hand, of “archeology of knowledge” in Foucault on the other. These two movements—let us call them movements for want of a better name—as different and sometimes opposed as they might have been, have shared what I will call a common faith in literature. I will limit myself here to exploring the Foucaultian structure or economy of this faith, which might be formulated as a faith in the outside. According to Foucault, literature promises the opening of an outside: outside of philosophy, outside of representation, outside of “discourse,” and, of course and above all, outside science, which has always been identified with power, regulation, normalization, and discipline. This “outside” will actually be my topic, and I will focus on Foucault’s reading of Blanchot in his short but fundamental book entitled The Thought From Outside. In this book, Foucault declares:

Introduction: Film and / as Ethics

Abstract: The relationship between film and philosophy, along with the idea of film as philosophy, has attracted widespread interest over the last decade. Film theorists and philosophers of film have explored not only the philosophical questions raised by cinema as an artform, but also the possibility that cinema might contribute to philosophical understanding or even engage in varieties of “cinematic thinking” that intersect with, without being reducible to, philosophical inquiry. Inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, many theorists are now engaged in what has come to be known as “film-philosophy,” developing philosophical insight out of their close engagement with film, and bringing philosophical concepts to bear on the aesthetic experience cinema affords. Despite the flourishing of this encounter between film and philosophy, there has been as yet comparatively little attention given to the relationship between ethics and cinema (see Choi and Frey, Cine-Ethics; Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics; Terman, “Ethics”). Prior to the emergence of film-philosophy, questions about cinematic ethics came to the fore in relation to the photographic basis of the medium. André Bazin’s statement that the photograph has an irrational power to “bear away our faith” undoubtedly indicates some qualms about the ethics of the artform (14). And it is unsurprising that the first point of focus on cinematic ethics was the documentary film. The direct cinema and cinéma verité movements emerged in the wake of concerns about the ethics of the medium and its purported objectivity in representing “others,” and such movements were explicitly oriented toward developing more assuredly ethical and political means of telling stories. And there have always been filmmakers whose interest in cinema lay in its capacity to show us realities that were ethically complex. We only need to think of the cinema of Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick to remind ourselves that ethical work has always been among cinema’s enterprises. The ascendancy of Hollywood cinema was made possible in the 1920s and 1930s by illegal and immoral monopolistic and exploitative practices that put national cinemas around the globe out of business, but such practices were actually buttressed by the implementation of the Production Code and a lot of loud talk about

Deep Dream (The Network's Dream)

Abstract: It seems that brain, thought and computer have become intertwined and now share a common fate. An important part of neuroscience not only requires a computational paradigm but also relies on technology to be operational. Experiments in neuroscience are built on the use of material apparatuses dependent on the computer. Isn’t the emergence of the computer in the last century based on a certain representation of thought and the brain? It has become difficult to distinguish among these three representations (computer, thought and brain) since they seem superimposed upon one another through a fiction that operates in a very concrete way on the world. I would like to explore this fiction in order to analyze how a form of speculation that favors what is possible over what is real can produce a technological “reality” that challenges all certainty. Our contemporary world seems to contain an anomaly of which we can only trace the shadow: parallel to the progress made in neuroscience, our nervous system is increasingly stimulated by an interconnected digital environment that leaves us no respite. It consumes us and we in turn consume it. Is this a simple coincidence or can we analyze this phenomenon as a structural convergence? What relationship exists between the Web, which has assimilated an increasing number of human behaviors, and the human brain considered from the point of view of a programmed machine that has also learned to act like a brain?

"The Power of a Form of Thought that Has Become Foreign to Itself": Rancière, Romanticism and the Partage of the Sensible

Abstract: The recent wave of interest in the work of Jacques Rancière in North America can likely be traced back to the unique status he gives to the category of the aesthetic in its relation to the political. Coming after the exhaustion of debates surrounding the notion of “aesthetic ideology,”1 and expressing dissatisfaction with familiar arguments about the aestheticization of politics, Rancière’s oeuvre seems to offer the promise of a critical theory that develops an entirely novel understanding of the history of the relation between aesthetics and politics. It promises, among other things, to revitalize the study of literature as a privileged form of intervention into established modes of expression. Rancière weds aesthetics and politics through a particular reading of Romanticism. According to him, the early nineteenth century saw the invention of a form of literature that proved capable of articulating a new relationship between the aesthetic and the ground of the political community, or polis—the arche of politics itself. The articulation of this arche brings to the fore a part of the polis that had hitherto not been able to articulate itself, thereby suggesting that the foundation of the political is never stable or timeless, but always in the process of reinvention. In what follows, I explore the stakes of this argument in Rancière, and suggest that the reading of Romanticism he engages in produces a far more ambivalent conception of the relation between aesthetic and politics than his work often implies. While offering a philosophy that claims to break with a classical conception of politics, Rancière’s work makes literature—as interpreted through a particular understanding of the aesthetic as the “distribution of the sensible”—the central figure of a historical disruption which transforms the idea that aesthetics and politics are either dangerous bedfel-

The Problem of Wild Minds: Knowing Animals in Grizzly Man and Ming of Harlem

Abstract: I recollect that I myself saw a family of fallow deer gathered together by a manger of hay near the perimeter fence of a dusty enclosure where no grass grew, a living picture of mutual trust and harmony which also had about it an air of constant vigilance and alarm. Marie particularly asked me to take a photograph of this beautiful group, and as she did so, said Austerlitz, she said something which I have never forgotten, she said that captive animals and we ourselves, their human counterparts, view one another à travers une brèche d’incomprehension. (268)

Letters for the Blind

Abstract: In the autumn of 1798, Immanuel Kant published what was (excluding lecture notes) his final work, The Conflict of the Faculties. The latter comprises three essays, which ostensibly address the conflicts between the lower faculty of philosophy and the higher faculties of, respectively, theology, law, and medicine. Each of the three essays was written for a different purpose and at a different time (CF 7:11; 243):2 the first, completed in 1794, deals with the relationship between theology and philosophy in the modern German university; the second, probably written in 1795, addresses the progress of the human race and the possibility that this progress is visible in the positive responses of uninvolved spectators to the French Revolution; the third and final essay, written in 1796, is Kant’s philosophical reply to a recent book on The Art of Prolonging Human Life (1796) by the physician C. W. Hufeland. Kant acknowledges in his prefatory remarks that The Conflict of the Faculties was not initially conceived as a cohesive work, that only upon returning to the three essays did he recognize “their systematic unity” and the need to publish them together in a single volume “in order to prevent their being scattered” [um der Zerstreuung vorzubeugen] (7:11; 243). The systematic unity that Kant recognized has, however, seemed less certain to The Conflict’s readers. Ernst Cassirer, for example, in his 1921 study of Kant’s Life and Thought, notes that the third essay, at least, “is only superficially hooked on” (407-08). More recently, Manfred Kuehn has described the composition of The Conflict as Kant’s last attempt at “tying the bundle” of his occasional writings before age—Kant was seventy-three at the time—and illness made this project impossible (393). The result, Kuehn concludes, is a “mixed bag” (404).3 Most commentators would probably agree with Kuehn’s assessment, as evidenced by the fact that a number of the best readings of The Conflict begin by disintegrating it, ignoring its putative unity and focusing instead on one of the essays in isolation from the other two—so, we have Jacques Derrida’s “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties,” which addresses only the first essay; and we have Jean-François Lyotard’s Enthusiasm: The Kan-

Belief in this World: The Dardenne brothers' The Son and Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

Abstract: Introduction This paper takes Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s film Le Fils (The Son) and its critical reception as an occasion to explore Gilles Deleuze’s proposition that cinema’s capacity to show belief in this world—as a secular corollary to Søren Kierkegaard’s religious belief as a leap of faith—is one avenue by which the medium might rediscover its pertinence after the demise of the movement-image. Previous interpretations of The Son have taken up the film’s connection with the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (the problemata under contemplation in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling) to argue that the film’s ethical stance rests in its allusion to and rejection of the conception of faith demonstrated in the Hebrew Bible myth. These interpretations claim that where Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac to God represents a “teleological suspension of the ethical” (Kierkegaard 83), the central character of this film is ethical precisely because he overcomes his passion for vengeance. They rest on the conviction that Olivier looks to all intents and purposes as if he is luring the boy Francis out to the sawmill (the trip being compared to Abraham and Isaac’s journey to Moriah) in order to seek personal retribution for the murder of his son. The treatment of the film that follows takes issue with this interpretation on two levels. It questions the construction of this look by indicating a dissonance between how the character acts and how he is seen by the camera-consciousness that conveys his story. And it finds the comparisons made between Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Abrahamic myth and the film wanting, both in being too quick to side with Kierkegaard’s unreliable narrator Johannes de Silentio, who denounces Abraham’s actions as ethically unjustifiable, and in their failure to heed Kierkegaard’s understanding of religious passion as affording a higher plane of existence than the merely ethical. To provide a fuller treatment of the film’s development of ideas about ethics and passion, I reach toward the privileged place in his cinema books that Deleuze gives to Kierkegaard’s idea of ‘belief in the absurd.’ In so doing, I endeavor to show that far from offering the West the simple parable of ethical behavior it needed to sustain itself in the wake

The Technology of the Question and the Responsibility for Sense

Abstract: 1. The Technology of the Question When Heidegger wrote “The Question Concerning Technology,” he was well aware that we are not in a situation to know what we are questioning when we question technology. For that reason, the very first sentence of his essay is: “In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology” (Heidegger, “The Question” 3). And Heidegger even puts ‘questioning’ in italics to get his point across: the title of the essay should not be read as an indication—“The Question Concerning”—of a specific topic—“Technology.” Rather, it is altogether the topic. The essay is as much about the question as it is about technology. In fact, it is first of all about the question. And it is not about answering the question. Nor is it about determining the scope or content of the question as a preparation to such an answer. It is simply about posing the question. If anything is done in Heidegger’s essay, it is nothing other than this: “In what follows we shall be questioning...” Having then abandoned all expectations of a theory of technology informing us what technology is; having abandoned all expectations of a preliminary investigation into the possibility for us to have such a theory—we are left simply with questioning. What does it mean to pose a question? How does one do it? As will be noticed, I just did it—twice even—but nevertheless I do not know. I cannot account for it. Therefore, in order to answer this question about the question we will need some orientation—and now we come to observe the title again. For it is not, as we should think at this point, just “The Question,” but indeed “Concerning Technology.” In the predicament of asking without knowing how, this addition to the question—or supplement, to anticipate Derrida’s intervention—approaches us as a piece of guidance. In this respect, the title is neither, as we first discovered, an indication of a specific topic, but

Spatial Memory: Variations on Classical Themes

Abstract: In March 2012, Joshua Foer presented a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talk to a mesmerized audience. As he began, Foer asked the audience members to close their eyes, and he proceeded to describe a scenario in which a series of striking images appeared as he talked his spectators through various architectural spaces in a house they were to imagine as their own. First, a group of nude bicyclists materialized at the front door, crashing before the very eyes of the bemused beholders, sending bicycle pieces flying in all directions. An encounter with Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster in the entrance foyer ensued, during which salient details of the Muppet’s appearance were described down to the smell of his constant companion, a cookie. Then a visit to the kitchen provoked the emergence of The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow from the oven, who proceeded to skip along the kitchen floor, now imagined as paved in yellow bricks. The demonstration halted there, and Foer explained to his audience that he had just provided a very small sampling of the workings of an ancient memory technique, sometimes called the method of loci, which utilizes spatial architecture and striking images as a means for recalling a series of items in order. These can be random things, or the topics of an argument, or any other sequence of elements one has reason to remember. Those who are proficient in this exercise can perform astounding feats suggesting a mind quite out of the ordinary. How do they do it? Is this an innate gift akin to the notion of “photographic memory,” which immediately comes to mind when one witnesses such a performance, or is this a skill that can be developed through practice and exercise? Foer’s investigation quickly sent him to Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory, published in 1966, which has become indispensable for scholars reflecting on the importance of memory as an educational, artistic, political, and social tool in classical Greek and Roman cultures (see Foer 89–105). Yates scoured ancient Greek texts searching for descriptions of memory techniques and discovered very few writings on the topic. The main problem, of course, is the fragmentary nature of the Greek manuscripts that have survived over the centuries. As Yates suggests, “There were certainly many [textbooks on rhetoric] in Greek but they have not come down to us, hence our dependence on the three Latin sources for any

Posing Sex: Prospects for a Perceptual Ethics

Abstract: Sexuality and sexual desire remain tantalizing conundrums for the universalizing intellect, desirous of comprehending the human condition even in its most unconditional manifestations. The representation of sexuality in the history of art is of course ubiquitous. But our equivocal familiarity with this subject matter, whether through attraction or repulsion, too often goes unacknowledged as an opportunity for reflecting upon the bounds of our subjectivity with unusually rigorous candor. This speculative failure is nowhere more conspicuous then in our attempts to make aesthetic judgments with respect to representations of sexuality while ignoring our intuitional complicity in the perceptual grounds adduced by such representations. Our encounter with images or discursive accounts of sexual activity, especially when they incite a moralistic recoil from the sensorium they animate, stymie the very agency which is presupposed in our attentiveness to them. Roger Scruton has succinctly grasped the horns of the dilemma in his Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation:1

Mind-Reading for the Sake of Justice

Abstract: 1. Neuroimaging, fantasy and law To read into the mind of another person has for a long time been a fantasy—and sometimes a vague possibility. In science fiction, there are stories of aliens who are able to decipher the thoughts of other beings using some type of device. When I was a boy, I remember reading a cartoon of Bibi Fricotin, in which Bibi, a young boy like me, found some glasses that allowed him to read other people’s thoughts. For a time, I was afraid when I came across adults wearing glasses. With such devices, privacy and childish innocence would be in jeopardy, but fortunately, this was only a remote possibility. The idea would be worrying for lay people, ethicists and lawyers, but it is only a fantasy. Recently, with the development of brain imaging, the reality of this old fantasy seems less remote and even possible. Many people and institutions are now interpreting images from the brain: physicians, of course, in their efforts to cure the human brain, but also psychologists, in their endeavor to understand the human mind better. Nowadays, the practice particularly interests lawyers. For a long time, the U.S. courts have tried to assess the truthfulness of witnesses and defendants with the aid of the polygraph. The device was not very efficient. There is now some hope that brain imaging will fare better. In order to detect liars and deceivers, human beings have always tried to decipher the mental states of their fellows without relying on what they said or might have said about themselves. There are good reasons for this in everyday life, and we are not bad at reading facial expressions and body language; but this has limits, as we know too well (who has never been deceived in his life?), and we tend to think that it would be a good thing if we could improve our abilities in this domain. In particular, if we could reliably read the minds of other people, some drawbacks in our social and moral life could more easily be avoided. Importantly, we could detect liars and cheats, and it is a very crucial matter to assess others and to improve human cooperation (Cosmides and Tooby). It is far from clear that this would constitute a net benefit in the end, but it is not surprising that our criminal institutions are interested in mind-reading, since truth is one of the main things that interests justice. For justice, the detection of lies is not the only topic of interest in mind-reading. The law is using, or is tempted to use, neuroscientific data in four other domains: insanity as a defense (and more generally the determination of responsibility), the prediction and prevention of serious

Saints, Scandals, and the Politics of Love: Simone Weil, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini

Abstract: The reputation of political thinkers is a tricky thing. Sometimes your strongest supporters are your worst nightmare. At other moments, your best friends can see you more clearly than is strictly comfortable. The French militant, philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a good example. In the years 1932 to 1933, she was connected to the dissident, Trotsky-leaning Communist Boris Souvarine and his Cercle communiste démocratique. She taught philosophy to well-bred young women, organized the unemployed, led strikes and shouted from the barricades, while writing disciplined, methodical analyses of the limits of Marxism and the rational necessity of revolution. Édouard Liénert, who was her comrade on Souvarine’s journal La critique sociale, describes her:

Redeeming Kracauer's Theory of Film: An Examination of the Importance of Material Aesthetics

Abstract: By way of an analysis of his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), and a comparison with Martin Heidegger’s “What Are Poets For?” (1946), this paper argues that Siegfried Kracauer conceives of film as a representation of the external world in its purity – an image of physical existence free of the abstractions of science and ideology - and that this redemption of physical reality also effectuates the redemption of humanity by revealing another mode of existence. As such, Kracauer’s film theory is anchored not by indexicality, but by the metaphysical and socio-political implications of the medium.

Anti-Oedipus: The Ethics of Performance and Misrecognition in Matsumoto Toshio's Funeral Parade of Roses

Abstract: James Phillips A story goes that the king of Scythia had a highlybred mare, and that all her foals were splendid; that wishing to mate the best of the young males with the mother, he had him brought to the stall for the purpose; that the young horse declined; that, after the mother’s head had been concealed in a wrapper he, in ignorance, had intercourse; and that, when immediately afterwards the wrapper was removed and the head of the mare was rendered visible, the young horse ran away and hurled himself down a precipice. (Aristotle, History of Animals 631a1-8)

Living our Skepticism of Others through Film: Remarks In Light of Cavell

Abstract: In Stanley Cavell’s ethical universe, no concept is of more moment than that of acknowledgement. In Cavell’s view, the question of acknowledgement is not a matter of choice but is at issue whenever we confront, or are confronted by, others. To acknowledge is to admit or confess or reveal to someone, typically another, those things about oneself and one’s relations to the world and others that one, being human, cannot fail to know – except that “nothing is more human than to deny them” (Must 96). The question of whether I acknowledge others and whether others acknowledge me and the character, depth or failures of our reciprocal acknowledgement, are central to Cavell’s articulation and exploration of the ethical dimension of our lives together.2 What motivates the present paper is the intensely paradoxical character of Cavell’s treatment of the question of the acknowledgement of the human drama we witness on film. In both theater and film, there is no question of the performers acknowledging us, the audience. We are, by convention or mechanical means, simply not present to the characters in a play or a film. But this does not stop Cavell from inquiring, in relation to the characters we confront in theater, what acknowledgement of them requires of us.3 So, too, even if we are not in the presence of the “human something[s]” (World 26),4 we witness on film there is, presumably, an analogous call upon us for some acknowledgement of them. And yet, in apparent tension with this compelling line of thought, it is Cavell’s view that there is, in fact, no call upon us to acknowledge the characters we witness in the fictional worlds of cinema. As Cavell puts it: “I do not have to make good the fact that I do nothing in the face of tragedy, or that I laugh at the follies of others” (26). As he sees things, the “automatism” of film – by which I mean to refer to the causal-mechanical basis of the photographic transcription and filmic projection of reality – screens viewers from the world past, a now non-existent world, whose transcription onto film happened without human involvement or complicity. The crucial difference from theatrical

Once More, with Feeling: Cinema and Cinesthesia

Abstract: 1. Affect/Theory Asked to characterize the critical history of cinema studies over the past several decades, one could do much worse than to speak of the age of affect of affect.1 This is a big claim, of course, but it’s not without precedent or parallel. The engagement with affect describes a remarkably widespread shift in the humanities, social sciences, and the neurosciences. Cinema studies is among a number of disciplines that have sought to prioritize matters of sensation and feeling, and for roughly the past thirty years the persistence of affect has played a critical role in the field. In the historicist recovery of the “cinema of attractions” and the feminist reappraisal of film melodrama (“weepies”), in the cognitivist study of film emotion and the growing neuroscience of cinematic experience, in the renewal of film phenomenology and the avowal of cinephilia—in all these instances, and still others, cinema studies has declared its “affective turn.”2 Few readers will be surprised by this suggestion, but what ought to raise our interest is the extent to which cinematic affect implies an active subject. There are many terms for this attribute (engaged, actualizing, creative, even interactive), but what they tend to imply is the kinship of affect and agency. This conceit appears even more starkly when we weigh the alternative: if the activity of affect has been increasingly proclaimed in recent years, cinema studies remains decidedly more reluctant to embrace a passive spectator. Of course, there are exceptions, as we see in the study of certain film genres (e.g., melodrama, horror), but perhaps fewer than we’d imagine if we designate by passivity something more, or less, than identification. In any case, what’s surprising is that in the very places that we would expect to encounter the avowal of passivity (in cognitivist, phenomenological, and other discourses), we tend to find a spectator promoted as the agent of her affects. As a result, affect is conceived in the language of operating functions, response and recognition, affective schemata, subphenomenal consciousness, and embodied intentionality. While these processes can scarcely be deemed conscious in any traditional sense, they have been deployed in the interest of making the spectator an active, participative, even collaborative agent. As Laura Marks declared in The Skin of the Film, a landmark of cinematic affect theory, “the characterization of the film viewer as passive, vicarious, or projective must be

Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (review)

Abstract: In this landmark book, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen combines and culminates the two strands of his substantial scholarly work: ecology and Medieval and Early Modern studies. Stone is ambitiously synthetic and syncretic, framed not as critical exegesis but “a thought experiment, attempting to discern in the most mundane of substances a liveliness” (6). Rather than developing an ecological theory and applying it to particular texts, or practicing an ecocriticism that reads nature “in” texts, Cohen attempts to stage something like a symbiotic textual petric performance: “To tell a story with stone is intensely to inhabit that preposition with, to move from solitary individuations to ecosystems, environments, shared agencies, and companionate properties” (11-12). This conjoining of human and stone produces a “monstrous child of the meeting of incompatible scales, queer progeny of impossible taxonomic breach” that Cohen calls “geophilia,” defined as “the lithic in the creaturely and the lively in the stone” (20). Cohen marks his project as necessarily “’inhuman’ to encompass both difference (‘in-’ as negative prefix) and intimacy (‘in-‘ as indicator of estranged interiority”) (10). This inhuman ecology notably serves as both ontology and methodology; the mutual implication and intimacy of stone and human must be countered by tapping the distancing, disruptive power of stone’s difference:

Le Fils and the Limits of Philosophical Ethics

Abstract: Introduction This paper is a study in contrasts. In the first part, I describe one prominent set of approaches to representing the ethical: those of analytic philosophy and the experimental moral psychology inspired by it. I argue that what is missing in this approach is a perspicuous representation of the ethical. The term “perspicuous representation” is drawn from the work of Wittgenstein, where it means a way of representing phenomena that reveals the inner connections between their parts or aspects and makes apparent their meaning for us. Arriving at perspicuous representations is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s interpretative/philosophical methodology. In Philosophical Investigations he says, “The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things” (122). I use the term in a slightly broader way than this. I take it to indicate a kind of achievement: the Wittgensteinian achievement of elucidating the inner connections between aspects of a thing, but also a representation that captures some of its richness, complexity and ambiguity. The opposite of a perspicuous representation is a partial sketch that oversimplifies the phenomenon represented and gives unwarranted prominence to certain aspects of it over other equally, if not more, important aspects. I argue that what is missing in much contemporary philosophical ethics is a perspicuous representation of how ethics is experienced and the many and varied ways it enters into human affairs. This occurs in large part because of an unwarranted emphasis in contemporary philosophical ethics on moral judgment at the expense of moral experience. A perspicuous representation of the ethical must make lived ethical experience central; it must do justice to the complex phenomenology of ethical experience. Analytic philosophers and experimental moral psychologists tend to study the ethical in vitro; a perspicuous representation of the ethical needs it captured in vivo. In the second part, I contrast the analytic approach with that of film-philosophy. I examine the philosophical-ethical potential of cinema through Le Fils (2002), a film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. I argue

The Syndrome of the Thermometer: Two Machines for Reading Thoughts

Abstract: My uncle is obsessed with thermometers. I have seen him, in the street, stop in front of a chemist to check whether there would not be a thermometer in the window. Then he would carefully read the temperature. In his house, every room has its own thermometer (electronic, usually, as these are more precise). There are thermometers hidden in various places in the garden, too. When he is visiting, he often leaves a thermometer somewhere in the house. He may pity his hosts, living without a thermometer at hand. But, more likely, he just wants to make sure that he will be able to read the room temperature next time he comes. He is afraid to be too hot. He thinks that you are more likely to catch viruses when you are hot and sweaty. Apparently that is not true, but it is quite a common belief. However, the peculiar thing about my uncle is that he does not seem to know whether he is hot before he has checked the outside temperature. He is not a zombie, or a robot. He is my uncle. He does seem to have an inner life. It is just that he trusts his thermometers more than himself. I will call it “the thermometer syndrome.” It is not exactly that my uncle is making a grammatical mistake, confusing “I am hot” with “it is hot.” It is true that the two sentences have become equivalent for him. He is hot when, and only when, it is hot. Or, more precisely, he is hot when and only when the thermometer tells him that it is hot. I am sure he would say that he is hot (he may even start sweating) if the thermometer showed a high temperature when it is only mild. However, this equivalence between “I am hot” and “it is hot” (or “the thermometer shows a high temperature”) is not a grammatical mistake but rather a form of life that my uncle, and other supra-rational technophiles (I am sure you know one) have designed for themselves. Could not we be hot when, and only when, it is hot? It seems that life would be simpler in fact, more rational. What would we lose? The feeling of being hot, which would no longer count for anything, which might disappear altogether? But what do we need it for? It is unpleasant anyway to feel hot. My first point is that our fascination for neuroscience resembles the thermometer syndrome: we may come to rely on machines for reading our mind, in order to know what is in our mind, more than we rely on