scholarly journals Dividuated selves: on Renaissance criticism, critical finitude and the experience of ethical subjectivity

Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 47-71
Author(s):  
John J. Joughin
Keyword(s):  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Criticism ◽  
Ethical Subjectivity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Work Of Mourning ◽  
Gillian Rose ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Modern Form

This paper situates the work of Renaissance criticism as a type of belated work of mourning or memorial aesthetics. In particular I want to focus on the emergence of a supposedly “modern” form of subjectivity during the theorisation of Renaissance criticism in the eighties –its distinctiveness as well as its occlusions. For the purpose of this essay I take the work of the British critic Francis Barker as, in some sense, broadly representative of a trend in political criticism that was focused on a recovery of the lost significance of the body as a site of subjection. However, I will also argue that the relocation of the mind-body split in the first wave theorisation of Renaissance criticism needs to be read again. The founding dividuation of self in this early criticism is now often criticised for positioning the subject in reductively functionalist or mechanistic terms, as the product of the discourse of power/knowledge that produced it. However, in much of the work that we label cultural materialist or new historicist, the experience of dualism also secreted an ethical standpoint that is worthy of our re-evaluation. In particular, and in building on the insights of Gillian Rose and Judith Butler on mourning, I suggest that the lyrical contemplation of lost bodies in radical criticism implicates our ties to others, as well as the relational ties to others implicit in any political sense of community. In turn, this suggests a more sophisticated account of political subjectivity, as well as a potential reparation of the concept of a political self for radical criticism.

The body in group analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 544-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bracha Hadar
Keyword(s):  
Group Analysis ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bodily Sensations ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Embodied History

This article explores the history of the exclusion/inclusion of the body in group analytic theory and practice. At the same time, it aims to promote the subject of the body in the mind of group analysts. The main thesis of the article is that sitting in a circle, face-to-face, is a radical change in the transition Foulkes made from psychoanalysis to group analysis. The implications of this transition have not been explored, and in many cases, have been denied. The article describes the vicissitudes of relating group analysis to the body from the time of Foulkes and Anthony’s work until today. The article claims that working with the body in the group demands that the conductor gives special attention to his/her own bodily sensations and feelings, while at the same time remaining cognizant of the fact that each of the participants is a person with a physical body in which their painful history is stored, and that they may be dissociated because of that embodied history. The thesis of the article is followed by a clinical example. The article ends with the conclusion that being in touch with one’s own body demands a lot of training.

A Wojtyłian Reading of Performativity and the Self in Judith Butler

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Franks
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Divine Power ◽  
John Paul Ii ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Power Of God

Abstract Drawing on Hegel, Judith Butler argues that the subject is the product of its desire for subject-ion. The subject, its gender, and even the sexed body itself come into being through reiterating or parodying preexisting norms and discourses of power (“performativity”). Butler rejects the realities of substance and a fixed human nature that would limit the possibilities of performativity. I summarize and assess Butler’s proposals, highlighting both the value and the drawbacks of her theory. I then show how John Paul II’s understanding of meaning and of the body as tasks takes up what is positive in Butler. He escapes the pitfalls of her thought, however, by retaining both metaphysics and revelation. He argues that the subject exists as substance or suppositum, which defends it against the encroachment of power. He also insists on the importance of human nature, which makes the human person to be the kind of substance who can form herself through the God-given task of creative action directed toward meaningful self-gift. Lastly, John Paul II emphasizes that the divine power of God enables the person to transcend the power dynamics of the culture of death.

scholarly journals The Idea of the Posthuman: A Comparative Analysis of Transhumanism and Posthumanism

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 132-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. I. Kriman
Keyword(s):  
Outer Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Influence ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Vitruvian Man ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

The article discusses the modern philosophical concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism. The central issue of these concepts is “What is the posthuman?” The 21st century is marked by a contradictory understanding of the role and status of the human. On the one hand, there comes the realization of human hegemony over the whole world around: in the 20th century mankind not only began to conquer outer space, invented nuclear weapons, made many amazing discoveries but also shifted its attention to itself or rather to the modification of itself. Transhumanist projects aim to strengthen human influence by transforming human beings into other, more powerful and viable forms of being. Such projects continues the project of human “deification.” On the other hand, acknowledging the onset of the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene, there comes the rejection of classical interpretations of the human. The categories of historicity, sociality and subjectivity are no longer so anthropocentric. In the opinion of the posthumanists, the project of the Vitruvian man has proven to be untenable in the present-day environment and is increasingly criticized. The reflection on the phenomenon of the human and his future refers to the concepts that explore not only human but also non-human. Very often we can find a synonymous understanding of transhumanism and posthumanism. Although these movements work with the same modern constructs and concepts but interpret them in a fundamentally different way. The discourse of transhumanism refers to the Cartesian opposition of the body and the mind. Despite the sacralization of technology and the desire to purify the posthuman from such seemingly permanent attributes of the living as aging and death, transhumanism in many ways continues the ideas of the Enlightenment. For posthumanists, the subject is nomadic and a kind of assembly of human, animal, digital, chimerical. Thus, in posthumanism the main maxim of humanism about the human as the highest value is rejected – the human ceases to be “the measure of all things.”

scholarly journals Exile and the Disabled Body in Randa Jarrar’s “The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie”

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-71
Author(s):  
Shahd Alshammari
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Body ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Transgenerational Trauma ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Mind

This paper seeks to analyse the notion of exile as one of paradox, of being both within and without, as a disconnect between the mind and body. Edward Said has noted that exile is “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience”. Said’s suggestion of a mind/body split gives us room to consider the sense of self as already in-between, as the exiled ‘I’ attempts to find a home within a new land and a new body. Exile from one’s own homeland is also exile from one’s body in Arab-American author’s Randa Jarrar’s latest novel Him, Me, and Muhamad Ali (2016). The collection of stories moves away from reclamatory approaches to ethnic identity and examines the characters’ trajectories of selfhood through a gendered, racialized, and embodied image. Disability features as a site of tension, a site of interrogation of Zelwa’s (the protagonist) sense of self. It is a peculiar coming-of-age narrative in the sense that it is an anti-Bildungsroman, a probe into bodies that fail to be integrated, assimilated, or acclimated to American culture, while also failing to maintain their association with an Arab collective identity. Jarrar’s text underscores and redefines the “I” of the Arab immigrant exploring transgenerational trauma and reclaiming her identity through celebrating the body.

Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease, with Especial Reference to the Imagination

1870 ◽  
Vol 16 (74) ◽  
pp. 166-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel H. Tuke
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Especial Reference ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind

A few weeks∗ ago a gentleman informed the public, through the newspapers, that he had been cured of rheumatism by the fright he had experienced in a railway accident. The remarks which the circumstance has elicited lead me to think that the whole subject of the influence of the mind upon the body deserves more serious and systematic consideration than it has received. It is now some time since I endeavoured to formularise the generally admitted facts of physiology and psychology so far as they bear on this question, and to collect from the sources at my command all authenticated facts illustrative of this influence. Dissatisfied with my work, I laid my cases aside. Judging, however, from the remarks above-mentioned that, imperfect as they are, they may be of some service, I conclude to forward my observations to the Journal of the Association. I must apologise to the reader for treating the subject in so elementary and aphoristic a manner; but I trust the advantage of this method will be apparent as I proceed.

Edusemiotics and Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental semiotics

Semiotica ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (212) ◽  
pp. 179-198
Author(s):  
Marianna Papastephanou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Unique Challenge ◽  
The Public ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind

AbstractThe semiotic turn and the twentieth century critique of the philosophy of consciousness presented a unique challenge and stressed the problematic status of old binary oppositions such as the subject versus the object, the mind versus the body, and the private versus the public. Karl-Otto Apel has responded to this philosophical occurrence with a theory of transcendental semiotics, a highly original endeavor to avoid mere reversals of older binary oppositions and pernicious consolidations of new hierarchies. This article aims to unravel Apel’s semiotics and to make it relevant to the philosophical-educational themes that preoccupy edusemiotics. After a brief overview of how Apel reworks the theories that influenced him into his own transcendental-semiotic account, the article focuses on some specific points adding more depth to the venture of associating Apel’s theory and edusemiotics.

scholarly journals Croonian Lecture.―The messages in sensory nerve fibres and their interpretation

1931 ◽  
Vol 109 (760) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nervous Activity ◽  
Sensory Nerve ◽  
Electrical Measurement ◽  
The Body ◽  
Local Motion ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Nerve Fibres ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Nervous Conduction

The nervous apparatus which intervenes between stimulus and sensation has been the subject of more than one Croonian lecture. It may claim to be a suitable topic for a discourse on the “Causes and reasons of the phenomena of local motion,” but it is a dangerous topic as well, since it forces us to consider the mind as well as the body and to attempt the measurement of phenomena which lie outside the framework of the physical sciences. But in spite of its many difficulties the field is one in which mental and material changes are brought into the closest possible relation, and it should be worth exploring if for this reason alone. The sensory apparatus is most often studied by comparing stimulus and sensation. The method discussed in this lecture is a recent introduction scarcely assimilated to the older lines of work; it deals with an intermediate link in the chain, for it attempts to compare both stimulus and sensation with the messages which pass up the sensory nerve fibres. It has depended on an improvement in the technique of nerve physiology and it is sad to recall that this improvement followed closely on the death of the investigator who was most fitted to profit by it. Nineteen years ago Keith Lucas, then only 33 years of age, delivered the Croonian lecture on the "Process of Excitation in Nerve and Muscle.” His lecture is a characteristic example of the rigid analytic method which he used in formulating the problems of nervous activity, but it does not reveal the mastery of experimental technique which enabled him to solve them. Much of his later work dealt with the action currents of nerve, the brief electric changes which are our main clue in the study of nervous conduction. He used the capillary electrometer to record them and his design of the electrometer system and of the machine for analysing its records showed his remarkable gifts on the instrumental side; it is quite certain that our knowledge of all that takes place in the nervous system would have advanced much further by now had he lived to make use of the newer methods of electrical measurement.

The Cognitive Paradigm of Jingshen

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-550
Author(s):  
Zhong Chen ◽  
Tingting Yao
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
Objective World ◽  
Symbolic Cognition ◽  
Traditional Chinese Culture ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
At Home

AbstractAt present, semiotic studies at home and abroad generally attach importance to the interpretation of symbols themselves, while the efforts in researching on the cognitive subject of symbols needs to be intensified and more attention should be paid to the process of symbolic activities. Cultural semiotics of jingshen attempts to construct a brand-new cognitive paradigm, not only to interpret the meaning of symbols, but also to develop the study of the relationship between the subject and the object in symbolic activities. In fact, the process of symbolic activities has been constantly emphasized in traditional Chinese culture. Although for an individual “the known” is infinite and “the knowable” is finite, the limitation of “the knowable” can be overcome through “self-cultivation.” The Chinese sages raised the concept of the “unity of three-tiered self-cultivation,” namely “unity of the mind and the body,” “unity of the mind and the objective world,” and “unity of apriorism and empiricism.” From the perspective of the cognitive paradigm, this concept gives due attention to the process of symbolic activities by emphasizing the effect of the cultivation of the cognitive subject on symbolic cognition and interpretation. The unity of the “three-tiered self-cultivation” of the cognitive subject can promote the development of a cultural semiotics of jingshen to construct an ideal cognitive paradigm in pursuing jingshen freedom and liberating symbolic meaning.

Fat Feminism: Reading Shelley Jackson's ‘Fat’ through Elizabeth Wilson's Gut Feminism

Somatechnics ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tove Solander
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fertile Woman ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Author ◽  
The Mind

In this article, I treat a literary text as a form of somatechnics making an intervention in fat embodiment. I read contemporary American author Shelley Jackson's short story ‘Fat’ from The Melancholy of Anatomy through what Elizabeth Wilson terms ‘gut feminism’, a feminism accounting for the dynamism of the biological body and acknowledging ‘organic thought’ as an alternative to the mind/body split. Wilson's ‘gut feminism’ is related to theories drawing on Deleuze's concept the ‘Body without Organs’ such as hypertheorist N. Katherine Hayles’ argument for the ‘Text as Assemblage’. I show how the seemingly surreal narrative of ‘Fat’ provides crucial insights about fat, understood as an assemblage of images, affects and matter and as a liminal substance questioning the integrity of the subject. Fat is associated with the feminine in a reclamation of the early modern rhetorical term ‘dilation’, which figures the swelling text as a fat, fertile woman with voracious orifices. I describe how Jackson's ‘aesthetics of fat’ works through dilation, disgust and ‘bad taste’ to draw the reader into an experience of fat embodiment. I characterise fat as a ‘sticky sign’ in Sara Ahmed's sense, one that will not stay confined to the page but sticks to the reader and elicit gut reactions. In conclusion, I argue for a non-derogatory model of reading as incorporation

Sites

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison ◽  
John Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Archaeological Site ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Social Relevance ◽  
Spatial Continuity ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Contemporary Past

Sites are the staple of archaeological investigation, forming the basis of many an excavation or survey project, often within a wider landscape study where it is the relationships between sites that can matter more. Think of any archaeological project or great excavation of the nineteenth or twentieth century, and you have your archaeological site, defined by convention as incorporating either settlement or industrial, religious, or military remains. These sites are often the subject of either a lengthy process of investigation and then post-excavation analysis leading to publication of results, or sometimes a short Weld evaluation prior to their destruction through development or preservation in situ. Their initial discovery may be newsworthy, and perhaps the result of some significant new development, a new landmark in the making. As we have seen, by convention archaeologists and curators generally treat those places and objects from the past as precious, valued resources for their very historicity and their cultural value, and often (correctly) seek their protection from destructive forces of the present and future. But our view is slightly different. We do not recognize the distinction between that which is old/ancient and matters, and that which is new and does not. Rather we recognize all material culture, the artefacts and sites and the wider landscape, as being suitable for archaeological inquiry and potentially holding value for this reason: not just the objects of the deeper past threatened with destruction, but also the contemporary office building that now occupies the site. Archaeology of the contemporary past even gives recognition to the ‘site to be’, the places planned for the future, a site that exists only on a planning board or an architect’s computer, or as a model, or even in the mind. With the archaeology of the contemporary past, the past, present, and future are woven together in a way that gives the subject complexity, introduces new and unforeseen challenges and difficulties, and equally gives it a heightened sense of social relevance and meaning. That said, for archaeology of the contemporary past, many of the same rules apply as for earlier periods, although, as we have seen, the sheer numbers of modern sites, and the spatial continuity of human activity and our perception and experience of it, do complicate things somewhat.

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