Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry最新文献

{"title":"Murrin, Lewis, Greenblatt, and the Aristotelian Self-Swerve","authors":"C. Ross","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138192","url":null,"abstract":"\"Know that I am Massinassa, king of the Maesuli, and since I believe that this land will fall to my lot, I should be loth to sack and burn it. So, as God is my witness, any harm which befalls you now will be through no fault but your own.\"--Gian Giorgio Trissino, Sophonisba (1) \"Fay had tried to get back to the Ranch--and it was just not there anymore--it had burned to the ground, nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was so strange, so strange..... \"You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part oil nous ne serons jamais separes; Ohio?\"--Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (2) The success and influence of Stephen Greenblatt's work-from Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which inaugurated the New Historicism, to his ode to the Epicurean Lucretius in the recent best-seller The Swerve-may be attributed to any number of things: the intelligence and writing talent of the author; a Yale education that gave the author a solid grounding in Renaissance texts; the application of insights from other fields, particularly anthropology, psychology, and sociology; a Marxist perspective sharpened by studying with Raymond Williams; the helpless experience of living through the Viet Nam era as a graduate student; chatty sessions at Berkeley with Foucault and De Certeau; and possibly an inordinate hatred of Harold Bloom's understanding of literature as a phenomenon isolated not only from cultural issues, but the self. For if Bloom's agon turns literature into some sort of analgesic that makes the pain of the world and the self disappear for some precious moments, Greenblatt's ego works as a sort of Salvation Army outreach program that regards literature as an education in the ills of society without quite admitting its own regimentation. One may wonder just whose libido was more repressed in 1980, that of the fictional Guyon, whose violent destruction of the Bower of Bliss (Greenblatt argues) reflected the colonial violence and dangerous desires of the English in Ireland, or the author of Renaissance Self-Fashioning, whose enormous range of interests included a stint, while he was at Cambridge, with the English, all-male boarding school cut-ups who became Monty Python's Flying Circus. In this paper I will argue that however brilliant Greenblatt's work-and I think I am second to none in the fan club-he overlooks or simply has no sympathy for Platonism. I don't think he could have written Hamlet in Purgatory otherwise, but for the most part I will confine myself first to his chapter on Spenser in Renaissance Self-Fashioning and then more briefly to The Swerve. I will first argue that Christian Platonism created the allegorical mode i","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132565888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Philosophical Tensions in Modern Dramatic Literature","authors":"J. Westgate","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138199","url":null,"abstract":"Philosophical Tensions in Modern Dramatic Literature Michael Y. Bennett, Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension Between Empiricism and Rationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Pages 179. Behind Michael Y. Bennett's Words, Space, and the Audience is the defining and decidedly intractable question of reception theory, namely, \"how does meaning get made in the theatre?\" Bennett's answer is that meaning is produced through negotiating tensions between \"empirical and rational ways of knowing,\" particularly at those historical moments when such tensions are encoded in local and global concerns (8-9). Adeptly blending philosophy, history, and politics, Bennett demonstrates how the philosophical debate between empiricism and rationalism is thematized in four major works of modern drama: Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953), and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woof (1962). Through thoughtfully researched and engagingly argued case-studies, Bennett accomplishes two overlapping aims: to offer new readings of these canonical works and, more significantly, to develop a heuristic for considering the key question from reception theory as it relates to modern dramatic texts. Deeply interdisciplinary, Bennett's argument is convincingly developed as part of a rich and complex study of four crucial historical moments, marked by tensions between empiricism and rationalism, which helped produce these dramas and which these dramas helped produce. The Importance of Being Earnest (and, briefly, Salome) is read against the height of British Idealism and the beginning of pragmatism and analytic philosophy during the fin de siecle. Six Characters in Search of an Author is considered against the struggle between pragmatism and idealism (in its worst manifestations, the rise of the fasci and Benito Mussolini) during post-World War I Italy. Waiting for Godot is read against the \"The Great Quarrel\" between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus regarding existentialism during post-World War II Paris. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woof is considered against the demise and normalization of analytic philosophy during the Cold War and the Cultural Revolution in the United States. Through these chapters, Bennett traces \"the waxing and waning of rationalism and empiricism in key historical moments\" (25). More impressive is Bennett's meticulous examination of how the empiricism-rationalism dispute manifested in these historical moments and across the more than seventy years covered by the book. Naturally, he documents the major figures involved in these disputes, including T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley who advanced idealism in response to the empiricism of John Locke and David Hume at Oxford University during Wilde's tenure; and including the letters between Sartre and Camus, printed in Les Temps modernes, just one year before Beckett's pl","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116608520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Busting the Hermeneutical Ghosts in the Hamlet Machine","authors":"John DeCarlo","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20138194","url":null,"abstract":"Considering the title page of the Second Quarto, which reads The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, (2) claims to be an enlargement and correction of the First Quarto, it is curious to note that the main role that Hamlet plays throughout the play is in keeping with the description of his childhood mentor, Yorick, the court jester. When the gravedigger unearths Yorick's skull Hamlet immediately recalls how Yorick \"poured a flagon of Rhenish on [someone] once\" and refers to the old jester as a \"mad fellow\" and \"mad rogue\"(V.i.155-159). (3) In this respect, Hamlet's \"antic disposition\" or mask of madness seems to be a 'chip off the old block.' More specifically, considering the fact that the jester made a profession of playing with, poking at, and exposing others peoples' vices, errors, mistakes, faults and general human foibles, Hamlet's biting wit continues in this tradition. In fact, the central plot of the play consists in Hamlet trying to reveal what others, whether it be his mother, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and of course, Claudius, wish to hide away. Hamlet also balances his polemical attacks against everyone, by including himself, not unlike the medieval court jester. For example, during the Play scene, after indicting the king via the dumb play, and his mother via the Player Queen who will \"keep her word\"(III.ii.219), Hamlet, like a jester who does not wish to cause the royal family to feel that the jester feels superior to them, indicts himself with his reference to Lucianus; thus rounding out his claim that the players do merely \"poison in jest\"(III.ii.221). In this respect, like many medieval and Renaissance jesters who learned the hard way, often becoming a meal for the king's hungry dogs after offending their royal and cankerous master, Hamlet must carefully monitor his behavior, juggling/judging when to 'let go' and 'hold on' to his satirical thoughts. In relation to this jester like aspect of Hamlet's behavior there have been two recent pieces of scholarship, namely, \"Hamlet\", Without Hamlet (2007) by Margreta de Grazia and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003) by Harold Bloom. Curiously, both explore Hamlet's playfulness but in two divergent ways. On the one hand, Bloom re-addresses Shakespeare's most enigmatic and memorable character by qualifying in the preface that the present volume is a postlude to his earlier work Shakespeare: Invention of the Human. In deriving the present thematic title, Bloom cleverly quotes Polonius, \"The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy ... or poem unlimited\"; and asserts that \"There is no end to Hamlet or to Hamlet, because there is no end to Shakespeare.\" (4) Accordingly, Bloom ends his new volume by noting: \"We want to hear Hamlet on everything, as we hear Montaigne, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud. Shakespeare, having broken into the mode of the poem unlimited, closed it so that always we would go on needing to hear more.\" (5) Essentially, Bloom asserts that meaning for ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126439136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"History and the Traumatic Narrative of Desire and Enjoyment in Althusser","authors":"Geraldine S. Friedman","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271814","url":null,"abstract":"According to the common image of Althusser that circulates today, my title names everything that is missing from his work. For decades, he has mainly been known--and dismissed--for his allegedly puritanical and sterile project, principally in For Marx and Reading \"Capital,\" to elaborate a theoretically rigorous Marxist science. Where in such an undertaking to attain correctness is there room for anything as referentially particular as history, as literary as narrative, or as emotionally fraught as trauma, desire, and enjoyment? Yet I contend that while these things are certainly not at the center of his theory, they are nonetheless crucial to it. Of all these topics, Althusser's relationship to history has received the most attention and generated the most controversy. His pronouncement in Reading Capital that \"Marxism Is Not a Historicism\" has often been taken to evince a hostility to historical studies as a whole. (1) Yet what Althusser attacks is not the study of history as such or its relevance to Marxism, but the concept of a homogeneous, linear time that underlies many diverse ways of doing history. (2) Indeed, Althusser's critique of historicism in this special sense is also a call for a new historiography that would rethink historical time \"explicitly as a function of the structure of the whole\" uneven social formation. (3) The importance of history to Althusser can be seen in the fact that he not only credits Marx with founding history as a science, he also insists in the liminal texts of For Marx that his \"philosophical essays do not derive from a merely erudite or speculative investigation. They are, simultaneously, interventions in a definite conjuncture\"; \"Each the result of a special occasion, these pieces are none the less products of the same epoch and the same history.\" (4) But despite this emphasis on conjunctural pressures, Althusser never delineates them very fully in his theoretical corpus, which lacks the fully elaborated historical case studies that abound in Marx. Even in the autobiographical The Future Lasts Forever, he coyly withholds any \"systematic\" discussion of such matters, referring the reader instead to his published writings, which he then declares do not treat history inadequately: I know you are waiting for me to talk about philosophy, politics, my position within the Party, and my books, how they were received; to reveal those who liked them and those who were implacably opposed to them. But I do not intend to discuss these totally objective matters in a systematic manner because the information is available to anyone who does not have it already, just by reading what I have written (a vast number of books published in many different countries.) You can however rest assured that I only ever trot out the same old themes which can be counted on the fingers of one hand. (5) To a large extent, Althusser in his own practice replaces history as commonly understood with the history of the production of knowledge, att","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124140311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Living Together in an Ecological Community","authors":"D. E. Schrader","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271815","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271815","url":null,"abstract":"There is perhaps no area of ethical thinking that pushes us to examine the foundations of ethical thought more than environmental ethics. Should we think of the ethical demands placed upon our behavior in terms of the maximization of pleasure over pain? If so, should it be human pleasure and pain or the pleasure and pain of all sentient beings? Should we think of those demands in terms of the maximization of human happiness or of some other notion of human well-being? Should we think of those demands in terms of the promotion of certain types of virtue? Should we think of those demands in terms of rules governing some sort of moral community, perhaps a Kantian \"kingdom of ends\" or a Jamesian \"Ethical Republic?\" The practical question, of course, is how we are to live our lives. In particular, how are we to conduct ourselves when what is involved is our behavior as it affects the environment in which we and our children, grandchildren, and later descendants will live well into the future? The philosophical question is what kind of analytical framework can help us to think more clearly about how we are to live. To address the philosophical question adequately it is important to keep clear focus on the range of practical problems that arise in our interaction with our environment. Suppose that we adopt an ethical framework according to which we judge our behavior on the balance of pleasure over pain that we produce. As Peter Singer has rightly noted in a large body of work, if pleasure and pain are the key moral criteria, it seems arbitrary to privilege human pleasure and pain over pleasure and pain in other forms of sentient life. At the same time, if we adopt a principle of determining our behavior so as to promote pleasure over pain in whatever forms of sentient life they may arise, we find some seriously counter-intuitive consequences. Suppose that we find ourselves in the wilderness needing food, confronted with a choice of killing a common white-tailed deer or an endangered caribou. If our ethical principle is simply promoting the highest level of pleasure over pain it would seem that we could equally well kill the deer or the caribou. Either would likely experience roughly the same level of pain in its death, and, if we kill efficiently, less pain that either would likely experience later in starvation, as road-kill, or as prey to some hungry wolf. We find ourselves with an ethical principle that has no place for consideration of species membership. Such an ethical approach is unable to support the broadly shared view that preservation of species is a good. A number of philosophers have attempted to frame environmental ethics in terms of the alleged intrinsic goodness of various natural objects. Quite apart from the inadequacy of most of the popular arguments for the position, it also fails to provide an analytic framework for addressing species problems. Perhaps worse yet, it would fail to provide any principled distinction between caribou a","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"12360 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126132019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Renewal of the Sociology of Knowledge","authors":"Dušan Ristić","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271819","url":null,"abstract":"Renewal of the Sociology of Knowledge Tim Dant, Knowledge, Ideology & Discourse: A Sociological Perspective (New York: Routledge Revivals, 2012), ISBN-10: 0415615828, Pages 254. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This student textbook brings together a wide range of theoretical issues in social theory, but its main contribution is to the field of sociology of knowledge. Traditional problems of the discipline are analyzed from a new perspective. Chapters of the book progressively introduce the main effort of the author-his intent to show that sociological analysis of knowledge and ideology is possible through the empirical analysis of discourse. In this respect, the author develops a sustained argument for the sociology of knowledge and its renewed relevance in contemporary sociology. The central claim of the author is that knowledge, ideology and discourse are social processes that are inextricably linked. Discourse is the form in which knowledge appears as empirical and social phenomenon. At the same time, the process of discourse has ideological effects because the lived relations are rendered into representations in language and can be traced within utterances, where those relations are simplified and transformed. For that reason, the discursive analysis proposed by Dant is oriented to practical and empirical problems in sociology of knowledge and concerned with the contents of discourse that are related to the world of experience and action. The point of departure for the analysis is definitions of knowledge, ideology and discourse, where knowledge is the construal of the relation between abstract entities that are taken to represent the world of human experience. Here, knowledge is shared by humans through communication for the purpose of understanding both the experience of the world and for guiding actions (p.5). Discourse is the material content of utterances exchanged in social contexts that are imbued with meaning by the intention of utterers and treated as meaningful by other participants. Exchange of meaning is a social action and is introduced as a way of empirical analysis of the process of knowledge, ideology and discourse. However, because it is taken as a theoretical category, discourse does not do the same work as knowledge or ideology, but it does describe an empirical phenomenon where knowledge and ideology are effectively produced (p.195). The concept of ideology has been developed by Dant to describe the management of contradictions involved in the social process of knowledge. …","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123049936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dialogue Between Fukuyama’s Account of the End of History and Derrida’s Hauntology","authors":"Chris Hughes","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271813","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction This paper examines Derrida's theory of hauntology, a theory which Derrida, himself, sets up in binary opposition to Fukuyama and Modernist-Enlightenment thought. It is not my aim to examine Derrida's direct criticisms of Fukuyama, per se; instead my aim is to examine the theory of hauntology, in order to see what might be useful for political theory in this notion of time. The first section of this paper elucidates how Derrida uses hauntology as a critique to the idea of a universal, teleological account of history and, especially, the idea of a history that can reach an end point. (1) I outline Derrida's theory of specters (2) and show that Derrida's theory of hauntology is based on the idea that there are specters which haunt the present and prevent the end of history. The theory of hauntology keeps the future open, since the specter ends, only by coming back: \"the specter is the future; it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back.\" (3) The theory of specters and hauntology is the idea of there always being a future to come, the idea of a democratie a venir. In the second section of this paper, I explore the idea of hauntology in more depth and begin to present my central argument, a claim that the idea of a specter haunting the present does not need to be constructed as one side of a binary opposition to Fukuyama's theory of an end of history. I explore what it means for the specter to come back and argue that a specter from the past does not necessarily pose a threat to either liberal democracy or the idea of a metaphysical, universal, teleological history. I argue that a dialogue can be constructed between Derrida's idea of hauntology and Fukuyama's thesis that liberal democracy is the end of history. This attempt to bridge the dichotomy between Modernist and Postmodern theory has a resonance with the work of Biebricher. In, Habermas and Foucault: Deliberative Democracy and Strategic State Analysis, Biebricher attempted to forge a way out of the Modernist/Postmodernism dualism by incorporating Foucaultian elements into a Habermasian framework. (4) This paper pursues a parallel line of argument, by suggesting that Derrida's theory of hauntology can be worked into Fukuyama's theory that liberal democracy is the end of history. This paper argues that Derrida's idea of a hauntology is a valuable tool for theorising about politics, not least, because Derrida shows that the death of a particular social/political system (e.g. Communism) does not entail the death/devaluing of the thinker(s) who inspired that system and that critics of the contemporary social/political order may have something valuable to offer contemporary political thought. However, I do not endorse the view that history cannot reach an end due to the presence of specters, which await their return; instead, I argue that the specters which Derrida discusses (e.g. Marx) do not haunt us per se, since they do not necessarily pose a ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115595709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Letters against Cultures: Neo-conservatism, Thomas Babington Macaulay and Three Centuries of the War between the Ancients and Moderns","authors":"A. Poudel","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271816","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127386930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond the “Techniques of Domination”: Affect, Capitalism and Resistance","authors":"Brian Mussaumi","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201271817","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"224 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126121543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing/Body: Symbolic as a Political Act in a New Way","authors":"Yubraj Aryal","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127171","url":null,"abstract":"If writing is a form of body (1), which of course is, how does the writing form its own body and style of its existence giving a symbolic a new dimension of political? This question first came to my mind when I began to think about modernist avant-garde writings in general and L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E writing and Conceptual writing in particular relating my own current ongoing research on body, political, and identity. I was wondering how the recent day writings like language poetry and conceptual poetry furnish an example to my point that certain community form their own body and identity by their own self-affectivity, without being overpowered by the dominant ideology and meaning. In my own ongoing research, I am trying to invent a new model of political identity moving away from the usual view of the political as a set of power relations between the binaries of ideology, class, gender, race, etc., always constructed by the instantiation of power on the level of state or government or other larger institutions. (2) My point is that there can be a new formation of our political identity going beyond the traditional way of attributing it to power relations such as ideology, discourse, and knowledge formations. My interest is to explore the possibility of developing a new model of identity beyond and sometimes within these boundaries of power relations, based (unlike the grand narratives of ideology, discourse, class, etc., which are often personalized or individualized) on prepersonal and preindividual affects, which shape our political; and this, I argue, occurs not on top of political formations such as states and governments but at the level of practices of individuals, or groups of individuals. To testify to my claim, I bring two communities--one from Eastern culture (the sadhu community (3)) and the other from Western culture (the homosexual community)--into my discussion as case studies. For example, the sadhus construct their own bodies and thoughts (here, the formation of one's body and thought means the formation of political identity or being political), not borrowing from existing ideology, discourse and knowledge as found in mainstream politics, but developing their own body practices through the arrangement of prepersonal or preindividual forces (affects) (4). Similarly, the community of homosexuals creates their identity (their invention of new erotic zones in the body and new discourses of sexuality--i. e. political identity) and becomes political differently from mainstream political codification. This short editorial is an attempt to observe how language writing and conceptual writing form their own modes of expression and their own identities as distinct poetic traditions as opposed to, what Charles Bernstein calls, \"official verse culture.\" I want to show how the avant-garde communities of poets in their different group variations fit into my political categories of sadhus and homosexuals who form their own bodies and identities beyond ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127421501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}