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

{"title":"“Every Man His Specialty”: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence","authors":"M. Davidson","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201061325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201061325","url":null,"abstract":"I: \"To decompose is to live, too\" In Bending Over Backwards Lennard Davis coins the term \"dismodernism\" to describe the ways that disability challenges ideas of liberal autonomy and able-bodied normalcy that underwrite contemporary identity politics. As a social model, dismodernism shares with theories of postmodernism a skepticism toward grand narratives of Subjecthood and historical teleology, but Davis faults much postmodern theory for maintaining a social constructionist view of identity on the one hand while retaining a politics of multiculturalism and core group identity on the other. Reprising recent scientific discoveries in the field of genetics that disprove the biological basis of race, sexuality or ethnicity, he asks \"how does it make sense to say there is a social construction of it.\" (1) Discourses of race, gender, and sexuality are products of late nineteenth-century medical science--as is disability--but unlike these other areas, disability crosses all such categories and is the one identity position that all of us, if we live long enough, may inhabit. Its pervasiveness and instability permit Davis to see disability as a kind of ur-identity constructed within the technologies of bio-power yet a subject position not bound by specific genetic, economic, or racial markers. The dismodernist ideal \"aims to create a new category based on the partial, incomplete subject whose realization is not autonomy and independence but dependency and interdependence.\" (2) Although Davis conflates a postmodern philosophical stance toward performativity with a historical, post-civil rights cultural politics, he does point to a key limitation of rights claims that presume a healthy, independent (probably white, probably heterosexual, male) ideal to the exclusion of those deemed \"defective\" or unable to make \"rational choices.\" In this respect he joins a number of recent theorists--Albert Memmi, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Berube, Eva Kittay, and Alasdaire MacIntyre--for whom a consideration of dependency challenges the social contract as it has been conceived from Rousseau and Hume to Rawls and asks whether contractarian ideals can stand the test of differently abled bodies? (3) Stated succinctly by Eva Kittay, dependency critique asserts that the idea of society as an association of equals \"masks inequitable dependencies, those of infancy and childhood, old age, illness and disability. While we are dependent, we are not well positioned to enter a competition for the goods of social cooperation on equal terms.\" (4) Although liberal theories of social justice imply equal access to the public sphere, they do not account for individuals who, because of cognitive impairment or physical disability, cannot cooperate on \"equal\" and independent terms. Nor are dependent relations validated in the common weal. Citizens who need special accommodations are often stigmatized as narcissists, whiners, and drains on public funds. Their requests for \"reasonable accommodat","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131412702","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":"Ethnicity, Race and Question of Englishness","authors":"A. Pokhrel","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051220","url":null,"abstract":"Robert J.C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell Publication, 2008), Page 291, ISBN: 9781405101295. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over the past decade, more specifically since power devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in June 1999, there has been a revival of the discourses on Englishness and English national identity. Apparently the terms such as English or Englishness may sound overtly familiar to us; however, their discursive formations are complex and varied, suggesting deeper cultural and historical implications. Is one's English identity synonymous with a common political citizenry of England? Or is it framed in terms of common membership of an ethnic community based on one's affinity with language, religion, history, and blood or 'race'? What constitutes true English national consciousness? Robert J.C. Young's The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008) is a remarkable contribution to this renewed debate on the issues of Englishness and English national identity, which go beyond \"the challenges of devolution, or even the end of empire\" (1). For him, these issues are an outcome of complex historical and cultural discursive formations, in which \"Englishness was never really about England, its cultural essence or national character, at all\" (1). Framing the discourse of Englishness within the diverse discourses of \"race\"--in which \"race\" is evoked variously as the concepts of biology, genetics, lineage, physical typology, ethnicity, nation, and so on, Young fascinatingly explores the cultural implications of the racial discourses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He avers that English national identity is a diasporic global identity. To explicate the cultural aspects of unstable English national identity, Young's book, from the very beginning, examines different race theories and the contesting ideas of race in English cultural history and science, where the term \"race\"--more particularly 'Saxonism' or 'the Anglo-Saxon'--is used interchangeably with the concepts of both nation and ethnicity. Similarly, he shows a dialectic between the English race and the Irish race, or Saxon and Celt, as a part of the popular racial discourses of the nineteenth century. For the English as a race was usually conceived and defined in terms of their relationship with the Irish as a race. Although Young alludes to different scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses about race, such as the notions of Aryan superiority supported by the scientific evidence of cranial measurements and similar other practices, the main purpose of his book seems to lay emphasis on the heterogeneous and dynamic global English identity. In his attempt to define global English identity, what he prefers to call English ethnicity, Young uses the lens of a binary dialectic between Saxon and Celt, especially the Irish Celts, again and again. Mainly in chapter four \"The Times and Its Celtic Challenges,\" he not only discusses different race theories but al","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125764935","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":"Deleuze and Cinema in the Digital","authors":"J. Litaker","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051219","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116371509","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":"Heidegger in Plain Sight: “The Origin of the Work of Art” and Marcel Duchamp","authors":"A. Alkhas","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051212","url":null,"abstract":"I. Introduction \"The picture hangs on the wall like a rifle or a hat.\" This statement might well be attributed to Marcel Duchamp, the 'originator' of the readymade, if one were to hazard an educated guess, but it is in fact from the introductory pages of Martin Heidegger's 1936 essay \"The Origin of the Work of Art\" (\"Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes\"). (1) Heidegger (1889-1976) and Duchamp (1887-1968) lived parallel lives that do not seem to have crossed on the historical plane. And yet, intersection occurs as Heidegger moves toward an aestheticization of philosophy and Duchamp moves toward a philosophization of art. This intersection is seemingly disavowed on both sides. Heidegger, who catalogs more than a dozen exemplary \"great\" works of art in his influential essay, chooses none from the twentieth century. (2) Duchamp satirizes the question of ontology in his remarks to Pierre Cabanne: \"I don't believe in the word 'being.' The idea of being is a human invention ... It's an essential concept, which doesn't exist at all in reality.\" (3) The contradiction stemming from Duchamp's avowed disbelief in \"being,\" which he then explains using terms related to being (\"human,\" \"being is,\" \"essential,\" \"exist,\" \"reality\") suggests, however, his awareness that one cannot escape from the question of being. Indeed, Duchamp's works explore forms of being and display striking affinities with Heidegger's explorations in \"The Origin of the Work of Art.\" Heidegger, on the other hand, surreptitiously slips a twentieth century work of art into his catalog of \"great\" art: his own essay, \"The Origin of the Work of Art,\" thus acknowledging the potential of contemporary art to be \"an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence.\" (4) \"The Origin of the Work of Art\" is based on lectures given in 1935 and 1936, over twenty years after the advent of Duchamp's readymades. The essay appears soon after Heidegger's so-called Kehre, or turn, when he purportedly switched course and began to pursue a more radical questioning of metaphysics, attempting to return to the beginnings of Greek thought and abandoning traditional philosophical discourse in favor of a more poetic style. (5) Thomas McEvilley in his article \"Empyrrhical Thinking (and Why Kant Can't)\" has described Duchamp's abandonment of painting, (6) which occurred soon after he introduced the readymades, as a decisive \"turn,\" one that \"was to be so portentous for the art of the rest of the 20th century.\" (7) McEvilley outlines how critics sought the cause of this important shift, ascribing it, for example, to Duchamp's two-month visit to Munich in 1912. For McEvilley, however, it was Duchamp's (re-)reading of Greek philosophers during his stint as a librarian at the Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve in 1913 that had the greatest influence in triggering his \"turn away from subjectivity.\" (8) Among the philosophers that he studied, it was Pyrrho, the first great skeptic, wh","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130423895","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":"The Crisis in the Humanities","authors":"Jerome McGann","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051217","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121099470","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":"Media Representations of Women and the \"Iraq War\"","authors":"Kelly Oliver","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051213","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines media images of women in recent conflicts in the Middle East. From the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to protests in Iran, women have become the public face of violence, carried out and suffered. Women’s bodies are figured as sexual and violent, a potent combination that stirs public imagination and feeds into stereotypes of women as femme fatales or “bombshells.” Because the so-called war in Iraq is unlike others in that there is no front-line, U.S. women have been engaged in combat along with men. Women soldiers, not technically allowed on the front lines, continue to see action, to kill and to be killed. A shortage of military personnel leads to stretching the rules regarding women in ground combat forces. But, reportedly, the American public is no longer shocked at the idea of women dying in war; there is no more attention paid to fallen women than fallen men. Women’s participation in integrated units for the most part goes unnoticed. The women in these units adjust by using newer forms of birth control to make their periods less frequent or eliminate them altogether; and the military has disbursed a portable urination device that women soldiers call a “weenus” for long road-trips. They find ways of adapting their bodies to the male standards of war. Women are serving and dying, but conservatives think women should be mothers and not killers. And some military policy-makers foresee reopening debates about women’s participation in combat once the war is over. It is telling that although women’s deaths in Iraq get little attention in the media or from the American public, women’s involvement in abusive treatment of “detainees” at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba continue to haunt debates over acceptable interrogation techniques and American sentiments toward the war. In addition, the sexual nature of the abuse was used by some commentators to argue that women shouldn’t be in the military; and that their very presence unleashed sexual violence. Although the deaths of women in the war in Iraq received little attention, reports of women’s violence and abuse captured public imagination. Why? Why did the images of women abusers from Abu Ghraib generate so much press and media speculation? Elsewhere, I answer this question by analyzing both the media coverage and the events themselves within the context of a pornographic, or voyeuristic, way of looking at sex and violence, which is normalized through popular media. 1","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128215730","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":"Voyaging Out: The Woolfs and Internationalism","authors":"Paul Kintzele","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051216","url":null,"abstract":"In her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), Virginia Woolf used the occasion of a \"pageant\" given at a country house to present, in compressed form, the long march of history. As Mr. Page, a reporter, watches the final tableau, \"The Present Time,\" he makes notes for himself: \"Miss La Trobe conveyed to the audience Civilization (the wall) in ruins; rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort; witness also woman handling bricks. [...] Now issued black man in fuzzy wig; coffee-coloured ditto in silver turban; they signify presumably the League of....\" (1) The word that Mr. Page does not write down is--presumably--\"Nations,\" the League of Nations being the international organization founded in 1919 after World War One, which, at the time Woolf was writing Between the Acts, was conspicuously failing to stop the war it was designed to prevent. Woolf's connection to the League was not only as an interested observer of international politics, but also at a more personal level; her husband, Leonard, had long championed the League, and his 1916 book, International Government, was instrumental in drafting the very charter for the League. (2) The fact that Mr. Page is only able to get \"League of ...\" down in his notes suggests that Virginia saw the incompleteness of the international project that the League represented. When a member of the audience, Mr. Streatfield, offers his thoughts on the meaning of Miss La Trobe's historical pageant, he says, \"To me at least it was indicated that we are members one of another. Each is part of the whole. [...] We act different parts; but are the same.\" He concludes, \"Scraps, orts and fragments! Surely, we should unite?\" (3) But moments later, the appearance of warplanes in the sky over Pointz Hall destroys any hope for unity. It was through this devastating and despairing juxtaposition at the end of Between the Acts that Woolf concluded a writing career that, in ways subtle and overt, fully engaged the political questions of the time. In particular, I argue that the internationalist convictions that were held by Leonard Woolf were also held and indeed shaped the modernist style of Virginia. In the aftermath of the first World War, one of the most pressing questions was how to prevent another such conflagration from ever happening again. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, talk of extracting reparations from Germany stood in contrast to equally earnest negotiations regarding an international organization that would, in some way or another, keep the peace. Woodrow Wilson often receives the credit for the founding of the League of Nations, and no doubt it was through his advocacy that the Conference linked the question of the immediate post-war settlement to the larger, if more nebulous, question of international law. But the idea for an organization that would collectively ensure peace and facilitate political and economic relations did not originate with Wilson or any other single person. Immediately after the outbre","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117043483","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":"Affective Criticism of Literature: Recasting Social in a New Key of Affects","authors":"Yubraj Aryal","doi":"10.5840/jphilnepal201051211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/jphilnepal201051211","url":null,"abstract":"My aim in this editorial is to prove that only an affective criticism of literature and society, unlike the Jamesonian political reading, can broadly correspond to social facts' relation to the human subjectivity. And such criticism of literature recasts our interpretation of the social in a new key of affects in order to confute any readings that impair the deep aesthetic conditions of affect underneath the social. I argue that the social/political is a manifestation/'symptom' of the affects, and therefore, to understand any social phenomena or 'political unconscious' of the literature and society, the incorporation of affect under discussion is imperative. I claim that every social is already an aestheticized social. There is no social which is not aesthetically conditioned. So when we interpret the social, we always need to weigh the underlying affective aesthetic dimension of the social. My use of the term 'aesthetic' here refers to the body and its affective engagement with the world, and 'social' to political, economic and ideological representations. And also, my sense of affective criticism refers to the body, affectivity and affects rather than language, text and emotion. I would first like to begin with my surgery of the social. A common question: What does it mean to 'think' the social? If the social constitutes economic and political practices of a given society and relationship of its members of a particular time, what forces constitute the fundamental substance of such practices and relationships? In other words, what constitute a socialized self (and even cognitive apparatus) in which are made manifest our economic and political practices, as well as the sets of relationships between social members manifest? My answer to these questions is that it is the affects and the affective relations of bodies that constitute the very phenomenon of a social self. The social-the content of subjectivity-is mere a surface effect or a 'symptom' of the affects. Every social representation is a codified affect. As Nietzsche says, \"the relation of representation and power [affect] is so close that all power is represented and every representation is of power.\" (1) The latent content of every social code is affect. If we remove the rubble of the social, we reach out to the bottom of human existence, where aesthetic processes are active in the formation of the socialized self. In an attempt to reread the nature of social, we find its underpinnings in the creativity and affirmation within [human] body. The body is a power house of auto-affects, which impose becoming in social realities and its semiotics, and thus create socialized self. One example for such imposition of auto-affects to social reality, as Foucault refers to, is the constitution of the gay community in San Francisco in the 1980s which was formed, not from the top down (state to society to individual), but from the \"self-affectivity\" of men who constituted themselves as gay, and eventual","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125560979","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":"Nomadography: The ‘Early’ Deleuze and the History of Philosophy","authors":"R. Tally","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105113","url":null,"abstract":"I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy. [...] Many members of my generation never broke free of this; others did, by inventing their own particular methods and new rules, a new approach. I myself \"did\" history of philosophy for a long time, read books on this or that author. But I compensated in various ways: by concentrating, in the first place, on authors who challenged the rationalist tradition in this history (and I see a secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, constituted by their critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the denunciation of power ... and so on). Gilles Deleuze, \"Letter to a Harsh Critic\" (1) In his Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that \"What the history of philosophy displays to us is a series of noble spirits, the gallery of the heroes of reason's thinking,\" but that the history of philosophy would have little value if thought of as a mere collection of opinions, in themselves arbitrary and thus worthless: \"But philosophy contains no opinions; there are no philosophical opinions.\" (2) Hence, Hegel says, those who wish to understand the history of philosophy by studying the individual philosophers it comprises, rather than achieving a more universal idea of the totality of its thought, will be missing the forest for the trees. \"Anyone who starts by examining the trees, and sticks simply to them, does not survey the whole wood and gets lost and bewildered in it.\" (3) For Hegel, the history of philosophy is the overarching concept, and the evolutionary realization, of philosophy itself. Let it be said up front: Gilles Deleuze hates this history of philosophy. Indeed, he does not care for the philosopher and philosophy underlying that view: \"What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics.\" (4) However, Deleuze does not abandon or reject the history of philosophy. Rather, he transforms the project into something else, a \"nomadography,\" which projects an alternative history of philosophy that not only allows Deleuze to \"get out\" of that institution, but allows us to re-imagine it in productive new ways. Deleuze's distaste for the history of philosophy, the Hegelian institution presented to him and his contemporaries in school and which formed a basic requirement of the profession of philosophy in France, is overcome by his peculiar approach to the history of philosophy, an approach that redeems philosophy as it transfigures it. Typically, any discussion of Deleuze's career draws a line between his \"early\" work, those monographs produced between 1953 and 1968 dealing with individual figures from the history of Western philosophy, and Deleuze's later work \"written in his own voice\" (such as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense), (5) followed by his 1970s-era collaborations with Felix Guattari, and finally with his diverse post-Capitalism and Schizophrenia writin","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127704957","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":"Against Oblivion and Simple Empiricism: Gilles Deleuze's 'Immanence: a life. . .'","authors":"J. Williams","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105114","url":null,"abstract":"So each year you bring the object to C and you nail it to her door, at the beginning of winter, because she dreads the season where all things turn inwards. Each year you do the same. But it is never the same. Neither the season, nor the gift, nor the trees, nor the early winter wind turning from lowlands to hills, nor the wood cracking on the door, nor the newly polished handle, shining against the tarnish built up over time; an ever rougher grain under your hand, until now, as once again you fail to open the door, but this time because your damp hand slips; you still turn away and everything still passes. Will you open it before oblivion strikes one of you from the earth? In 1995, a few months before his death by suicide, in the final stages of a very long illness, Gilles Deleuze revisited his impressions, sources, ideas and new metaphysics for the problem of empirical oblivion. (1) The resulting essay \"Immanence: a life...\" draws upon many of his earlier books and traces new relations between their concepts. It is therefore a work of reminiscence and new beginnings. There is never one without the other for Deleuze. His argument is of rare philosophical courage, intensity, depth, gentleness and troubling difficulty. It is comparable to moments in Montaigne, Pascal, Hume and Barthes, where a philosopher condenses years of investigation and reflection into a very personal, yet universally resonant pattern of observations, deductions and problems. Montaigne prepares for Deleuze's fearless account, indeed shares its Stoic roots, where anguish and the consequent cruel baseness we humans draw from our terror of death are overcome not through certainty, either in annihilation or ethereal survival, but in the tempered tracing of a new line of thought on life and death, free of the commonplace disguised as knowledge and of the government of living and dead souls disguised as faith. (2) The essay is then a two-fold resistance to oblivion. It counters the process of effacement in death and disintegration, but it also strikes against evasive and illusory resolutions of natural loss and our anguish. What then is empirical oblivion? It one side only of a larger problem Deleuze reconstructed and shaped, by trying to create positive concepts adequate to its overcoming. A problem for Deleuze is never resolved. (3) Instead, it interacts with different times in different ways such that each must find the best way to balance its positive and negative effects by transforming it. (4) For example, the problem of how to raise a child is different depending on the cultures, epochs, families, clans, tribes, societies and places where it is considered. The right 'solution' at one time can well be a mistake earlier or later. This does not mean that each epoch has its own problem independent of all others; on the contrary, they are related and earlier solutions bequeath new components to later ones, while later ones can reveal the limits and errors of earlier ones. How cou","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125380669","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}