In Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds, Donald Beecher explores the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the brain as they affect the study of fiction. He builds upon insights from the cognitive sciences to explain how we actualize imaginary persons, read the clues to their intentional states, assess their representations of selfhood, and empathize with their felt experiences in imaginary environments. He considers how our own faculty of memory, in all its selective particularity and planned oblivion, becomes (...) an increasingly significant dimension of the critical act, and how our own emotions become aggressive readers of literary experience, culminating in states which define the genres of literature. Beecher illustrates his points with examples from major works of the Renaissance period, including Dr Faustus, The Faerie Queene, Measure for Measure, The Yorkshire Tragedy, Menaphon, The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus, and The Moral Philosophy of Doni. In this volume, studies in the science of mind come into their own in explaining the architectures of the brain that shape such emergent properties as empathy, suspense, curiosity, the formation of communities, gossip, rationalization, confabulation, and so much more that pertains to the behaviour of characters, the orientation of readers, and the construction of meaning. Discussing a breadth of topics – from the mysteries of the criminal mind to the psychology of tears – Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds is the most comprehensive work available on the study of fictional worlds and their relation to the constitution of the human brain. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: From Tennis for Two to Worlds of Warcraft Imaginary Worlds and Works of Fiction Fictional or Virtual? Interactive Fiction.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:JOSEPH MARGOLIS THE LOGIC AND STRUCTURES OF FICTIONAL NARRATIVE The fascination of fiction and narrative is plainly immense, sind current analyses are notably fresh and ingenious. But ifone were to venture a compendious account of die most strategic conceptual claims bearing on those notions, they might well be captured by the following three theses: (i) that fiction and narrative are logically quite distinct, without necessarily excluding one (...) anodier; (ii) that fictional worlds are no worlds at all; they are merely imagined to exist; and (iii) that events, whether actual or imagined, cannot be specified independently of the categories by which we identify them as the events they are, categories subject to change over time. What is intriguing about mese three claims is that they strike the ear as utterly commonplace and obvious. But that is dieir strength. For it would be a great convenience if the relevant puzzles generated by analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, the new narratology, semiotics and the like could be resolved, convincingly, by appeal to die implications of these diree homely trudis. In addition, diey affect one another in a rather complicated way, and, taken joindy, easily expose certain influential false starts. The import of (iii), for example, is notably ignored in die otherwise powerful analysis of narrative afforded by Gérard Genette. Its bearing on (i) utterly undermines the explicit dualism favored by Seymour Chatman, who is clearly influenced by Genette himself. The failure to mark die force of (i) and its analogue regarding poetry is most obvious in I. A. Richards's contrast between poetry and science, the work of the Prague circle, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, and such recent speech-act theories of poetry and fiction as those proposed by Richard Ohmann, Monroe Beardsley, and Mary Louise Pratt. The corresponding failure widi respect to (ii) is clear in John Searle's theory of reference and in die ontological claims made by Nicholas Wolterstorff. The connection between (i) and (ii) is muddled most famously by G. E. Moore. These charges suggest die quarrelsome promise of the intended economy. But, as we shall see, they also lead in the direction of a more constructive theory of texts and their interpretation and of die constraints of narrative and style diat affect fiction. 162 Joseph Margolis163 Fiction, we say, differs from reality as well as from legend. But in speaking thus, we betray an understandable confidence that these three kinds of"world"— or, these three worlds — are conceptually well-behaved and open to straightforward demarcation. Once more, we slip altogether too easily between talking about certain worlds and about the narrative accounts by which we do so. What distinguishes fictional reference? we ask, and what is a fictional world? The best way to proceed here is to begin with strong intuitions and to trace dieir systematic consequences in order to test how far they are unassailable — or whether and where they must yield to others that are more accommodating. One particularly promising equivocation is the following. We speak of fictional worlds as possible (but not actual) worlds; but even if what is possible in a fictional world corresponds (in some sense) to what is possible in the actual world, it is not, as such, a possibility of or at the actual world. The "possible worlds" idiom is fundamentally and doubly equivocal. For, a "possible world" signifies either what is merely logically or conceptually compossible, or what (under suitably referential, predicative, causal, and similar constraints) is compossible specifically with respect to the actual world (or some part of it). Certainly, Balzac's La Cousine Bette "presents" an imaginary world that is internally coherent and compossible. One might even say, ignoring its fictive nature, diat such a world — or events very much like those of the story — is compossible with a certain portion of the actual world of nineteenth-century France. But Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderfond, though it scrupulously presents a coherent world of compossible events, does not present a world compossible with the actual world. And, on certain views at least, Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads presents a possible world that is a conceptual impossibility. There is, however, no need to quarrel about particular cases... (shrink)

Imaginary worlds are not a consequence of humans' exploratory tendencies as argued in the target article but a recent spinoff of a strong human tendency to create imaginary realities, that is, versions of how the world works that are fabricated (although we believe they are real) in order to allow us to believe we understand it and can control it.

Imaginary worlds are extremely successful. The most popular fictions produced in the last few decades contain such a fictional world. They can be found in all fictional media, from novels (e.g., Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter) to films (e.g., Star Wars and Avatar), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece and Naruto), and TV series (e.g., Star Trek and Game of Thrones), and they date as far back as (...) ancient literature (e.g., the Cyclops Islands in The Odyssey, 850 BCE). Why such a success? Why so much attention devoted to non-existent worlds? In this paper, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt our preferences for exploration, which have evolved in humans and nonhuman animals alike, to propel individuals toward new environments and new sources of reward. Humans would find imaginary worlds very attractive for the very same reasons, and under the same circumstances, as they are lured by unfamiliar environments in real life. After reviewing research on exploratory preferences in behavioral ecology, environmental esthetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary and developmental psychology, we focus on the sources of their variability across time and space, which we argue can account for the variability of the cultural preference for imaginary worlds. This hypothesis can, therefore, explain the way imaginary worlds evolved culturally, their shape and content, their recent striking success, and their distribution across time and populations. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the issue of truth-telling in non-fictional narratives of (in)justice. Based on examples of rape narratives, domestic abuse narratives, human trafficking narratives and asylum seeker narratives, I examine the various difficulties in telling the truth in such stories, particularly those related to various culturally conditioned ideas of how the world works, which at the same time form the basis of, among other things, legal discourse and officials’ decision-making processes. I will also demonstrate that such culturally conditioned (...) ideas, which are the basis of official discourse, can be considered within the category of both the social imaginary of the just world in the Taylorian sense of the term, and the social master narrative, which in the case of stories of (in)justice is often based on the just world hypothesis. (shrink)

The new art of videogames -- What are videogames anyway? -- On definition -- Theories of gaming -- A definition of videogames -- Videogames and fiction -- From tennis for two to worlds of warcraft -- Imaginary worlds and works of fiction -- Fictional or virtual? -- Interactive fiction -- Stepping into fictional worlds -- Welcome to rapture -- Meet niko bellic -- Experiencing game worlds -- Acting in game worlds (...) -- Games through fiction -- The nature of gaming -- What are the rules of this game? -- Playing, cheating, fragging, and griefing -- Videogames and narrative -- The stories games tell -- Would you kindly put down that wrench? -- Reconciling games and narratives -- Emotion in videogaming -- How can we be moved by the fate of Niko Bellic? -- My fear of mutants -- The role of the emotions in gaming -- The morality of videogames -- The problem with crime simulators -- Are games bad for you? -- On being offensive -- Sticking up for videogames -- Videogames as art -- Are videogames art? -- A cluster theory of art -- The art in videogames -- New art from old bottles. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to provide a critical discussion of some key issues concerning the possible-world analysis of fiction. After a review of the most important philosophical questions concerning truth, reference, names and identity, and their bearing on fiction, I outline the possible-world framework, as used by David Lewis (1978) in his analysis, and examine its most important problems. A special interest is granted to the limits of the Lewisian pretense interpretation of fiction that (...) are highlighted by works of cinema. I conclude with an appraisal of the puzzles generated by the attempts to draw borders between and within the worlds of fiction, and emphasize the need for a better mutual understanding of the two perspectives that are essential for a possible-world interpretation of fiction: literary theory and philosophy. (shrink)

Literature for children is often designed to stimulate imagination through variants of the “real” world that we inhabit, expanding their potential for construing different possible worlds – variants that include imaginary characters like animals with human traits or toys that are somehow animated and conscious. Here we will examine one version of Margery William’s classic nursery tale The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real, where the theme of “real” and imaginary characters and worlds is construed (...) both linguistically and pictorially. We will show how the theme is construed in both text and image, and how the two complement one another, together keeping the two worlds apart while at the same time representing the Velveteen Rabbit’s transformation from toy rabbit to real rabbit. (shrink)

The usual question, “Are models fictions?” is replaced by the question, “Should scientific models be regarded as works of fiction?” This makes it clear that the issue is not one of definition but of interpretation. First one must distinguish between the ontology of scientific models and their function in the practice of science. Theoretical models and works of fiction are ontologically on a par, their both being creations of human imagination. It is their differing functions in (...) practice that makes it inappropriate to regard scientific models as works of fiction. Three reasons for thinking scientific models should be regarded as works of fiction are rejected. First, scientists themselves sometimes invoke the idea of fictions in their discussions of specific models. Second, many scientific models are physically impossible to realize in the real world. Third, regarding scientific models as works of fiction supports a general fictionalist understanding of scientific theories. It is concluded that promoting the general idea that scientific models are works of fiction unnecessarily supports attacks on the legitimacy of science itself. (shrink)

The contemporary debate in the philosophy of literature is strongly shaped by the anticognitivist challenge, according to which works of literary fiction (that contain propositions that are neither literally true nor affirmed by the author) cannot impart (relevant) knowledge to the readers or enrich their worldly understanding. Anti-cognitivists appreciate works of literary fiction for their aesthetic values and so risk to reduce them to mere ornaments that are entertaining, but eventually useless. Many philosophers have reacted to (...) this challenge by pointing at ways in which works of literary fiction can be informative even though they lack worldly reference: it has been argued, for example, that works of fictions are thought experiments; that they add not to our theoretical knowledge, but to our know-how or to our phenomenal knowledge; or that that they help readers to understand the perspectives of others. A stubborn defense of literary cognitivism, however, risks to collapse into an instrumental understanding of literature. In my paper I suggest that both sides in the debate focus too narrowly on semantic features of the works in question that is tied to what I will call the “referential picture” of language. A shift perspective is needed: for one, we ought to fully appreciate that the term “literature” does not refer to a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather to a very heterogeneous and multifarious set of works that are read by many different readers for many different reasons in many different ways. Second, we need to understand that these works have in common much more than the semantic peculiarity of lacking worldly reference: they are a unique means of communication between authors and readers – and in particular the role of the latter is often neglected in contemporary debate. These two points should help us to get a more comprehensive understanding of the practice of literature and the vast range of values we can find works of literary fiction – and the interplay between them. (shrink)

Some works of fiction are widely held by critics to have little value, yet these works are not only popular but also widely admired in ways that are not always appreciated. In this paper I make use of Kendall Walton’s account of fictional worlds to argue that fictional worlds can and often do have value, including aesthetic value, that is independent of the works that create them. In the process, I critique Walton’s notion of (...) fictional worlds and offer a defense of the study and appreciation of fictional worlds, as distinguished from the works of fiction with which they are associated. (shrink)

This volume explores the broad and rich spectrum of contemporary phenomenological engagement with digital technologies. By focusing on plural forms of the digital, it offers a robust and flexible framework for contemporary phenomenological investigations in the digital age. It contends that the impact of digital technologies on the lifeworld involves both the emergence of novel fields of lived experience in need of phenomenological analysis and the transformation of the method and attitude of phenomenologically oriented philosophers towards the world. The chapters (...) cover topics including immersion in virtual environments, the impact of digital cognitive devices on our perception of time, the invisibility of digital technologies in the lifeworld, the new extension of reality rendered possible by the employment of digital devices, how new technologies affect our intimacy and sexual body, the new methodological paradigm for phenomenological research prompted by digital technologies, the additive upshot of virtual imaginary, the intersection of the real and the virtual in augmented reality experiences, the structures of perception in the regime of digitally generated environments, how it feels like to empathize with others in a regime of virtual reality, process of en-rolling in the constitution of a virtual subject, the transformation of virtual reality into conspiratorial reality by means of on-line media platforms, and the problem of the extent to which technological environments impact human cognitive and perceptual experience. Phenomenologies of the Digital Age will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of technology, science & technology studies, and media studies. (shrink)

This paper defends what the philosopher Merleau Ponty coins 'the imaginary texture of the real'. It is suggested that the imagination is at work in the everyday world which we perceive, the world as it is for us. In defending this view a concept of the imagination is invoked which has both similarities with and differences from, our everyday notion. The everyday notion contrasts the imaginary and the real. The imaginary is tied to the fictional or the (...) illusory. Here it will be suggested, following both Kant and Strawson, that there is a more fundamental working of the imagination, present in both perception and the constructions of fictions. What Kant and Strawson failed to make clear, however, was that the workings of the imagination within the perceived world, gives that world, an affective logic. The domain of affect is that of emotions, feelings and desire, and to claim such an affective logic in the world we experience, is to point out that it has salience and significance for us. Such salience suggests and demands the desiring and sometimes fearful responses we make to it; the shape of the perceived world echoed in the shapes our bodies take within it. (shrink)

Between 1648 and 1652, Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a small satirical work entitled The Other World, a fictional account of his imaginary epic voyage to the Moon.* The story not only describes “The States and Empires of the Moon,” (its subtitle in the original edition), it provides a critical view of his own civilization as well. The narrator's position in his depiction of the radically different, “other” entity allows him to maintain opinions which, however whimsical, still include elements of (...) social and philosophical examination. In the early stages of world migration, Europe was beginning to see the Other as a place for the expression, if not the transposition, of its ancient dreams; Cyrano, however, takes a different approach. He looks at ways the Other might be used to gain perspective on the Self. Looking down at Earth from above, he proclaims: “People, I declare that this moon is not a moon, but a world, and that world over there is not a world, but a moon.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity by Joseph R. WiebeJacob Alan CookThe Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity Joseph R. Wiebe waco, tx: baylor university press, 2017. 272 pp. $49.95The Place of Imagination is an artful narration of Wendell Berry's poetics focused distinctively on his works of fiction. Moralists concerned about (...) issues of land use or racialization could commend or criticize "what" they assume Berry's stories (re)present—nostalgia or some abstract, principial program. But Joseph Wiebe ventures a thesis about "how" Berry's imaginary Port William community discloses the nature of good, real-world community. Understanding how Berry's poetics reflect his real-world moral imagination clarifies what we may learn from his fiction. So, in part 1, Wiebe traces Berry's journey of local adaptation, through which he developed a moral imagination and discovered the agonizing details of his entanglement in his place's history and his neighbors' problems.Berry's poetics starts with imagination opening itself to the genius of a place and the other (friend and foe alike) as a living soul. Such imagination engages our sympathy to see others as complex subjects without controlling their stories, objectifying them to realize some idealist worldview. In sympathy, we [End Page 203] perceive the other as a neighbor and develop affection for them in their difference. This affection is no mere sentiment but a Humean moral sentiment that motivates behavior and, when properly nurtured, makes moral reasoning subservient to itself. Affection "disrupts habits of pity" that reduce others to mental objects and inspires a kenotic movement toward concrete neighbors (37). Problems felt at the societal level are habituated in local communities. While idealist solutions may satisfy the white, Western mind's impulse for complete knowledge, their resources prove incompetent before these problems as such. We must affectionately open ourselves to others who disrupt our mental worlds and draw us into real-world habits that change underlying communal dynamics. Relinquishing control of our storied identities (or idealist worldviews) to the others in our place, we might truly locate ourselves in those problems—and start undoing them.In part 2, Wiebe offers glimpses of "what" Berry's poetics teach us about a placed life together through select members of a quaint Kentucky farming community: Jack Beechum, Jayber Crow, and Hannah Coulter. His imaginative attentiveness to each character exemplifies the art of discovering the virtues of place-based identity. The way through Port William offers no shortcuts. Its imaginary community does not merely stand in for some universal idea of community. Neither potential solution nor nostalgic phantasm, Port William is the setting for parables that reveal something true about good community. "If there is something to imitate, it is the underlying processes that generate the particulars of Berry's narratives rather than the characters that furnish them" (152). In Port William, one can practice relinquishing control and patiently "imagining" the contours of a place; in the real world, one can deploy that imagination to develop fidelity to their place.Wiebe aptly follows Berry's method, yielding control over Berry's biography and work by taking a third-person narrator's perspective. He focuses on what Berry's life and writing reveal parabolically to the patient reader. The book beckons readers to hold Berry and his stories as a mirror—to engage in introspection and self-interrogation—that we might learn something about sympathy and affection needed for engaging our places non-imperialistically. Wiebe's adept style may appear to some as a flaw; the narrator gives no academic cues (e.g., "I will argue") for rapidly consuming principial content. There are only Berry's life and work and the reader, hopefully changed. The Place of Imagination will be of greatest interest to those who already have some affection for that "artful crank from Kentucky" (10). Beyond the agrarian crowd and its auditors, this book holds appeal for a range of explorations, from the fecundity of poetics in ethics to the disruptiveness of Christian imagination vis-à-vis whiteness. [End Page 204]Jacob Alan CookFriends UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society... (shrink)

Animals and Science Fiction is the first edited collection to be published focusing on the intersection of animal studies and science fiction studies. It offers a broad range of theoretical approaches and primary source texts—including novels, short stories, poetry, film and TV, photography, erotica, video games, and urban planning documents—that explore the ways works of science fiction can transform how we see and interact with nonhuman others. With an eye toward more just multispecies futures, it argues (...) that speculative imaginaries can be pivotal in changing attitudes toward and understandings of nonhuman animals in our world today. Chapters appeal to those interested in biopolitics, posthumanism, new materialism, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, ocean humanities, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, Indigenous studies, global sf studies, film studies, and food studies. Taken together, the collection works to showcase a diverse and growing field of scholarly inquiry into animals and science fiction. (shrink)

The authors do not compare readers who prefer imaginary world fiction to readers with other reading preferences, failing to rule out the hypothesis that their findings apply to all readers. The authors also do not test their hypotheses against plausible alternative ones, several of which are suggested here.

We support the idea of applying cultural evolution theory to the study of storytelling, and fiction in particular. However, we suggest that a more plausible link between real and imaginary worlds is the feeling of “presence” we can experience in both of them: we feel present when we are able to correctly and intuitively enact our embodied predictions.

Although Habermas has written about the cultural role of literature and about literary works, he has not systematically articulated a literary-critical method as a component of either communicative reason or post-metaphysical thinking. Habermas and Literature brings Habermasian concepts and categories into contact with aesthetic and cultural theories in and around the Frankfurt School, and beyond. Its central claim is that Habermas' contribution to literary and cultural criticism is the concept of literary rationality and the notion that literature performs a (...) key role in the formation of the modern social imaginary. -/- Habermas and Literature maintains that literary works have “two faces” – discursive intervention in the public sphere and personal integration of imaginative disclosures – that depend upon two modalities of literary reception: critique and identification. It develops the resulting literary theory through detailed discussion of the theories advanced by Habermas, followed in each case by synthetic and reconstructive argumentation that brings the framework of communicative reason into dialogue with literary methods, aesthetic theories and psychoanalytic categories. It does so through close engagement with debates around aesthetic rationality, world disclosure, social imaginaries, post-secular society and the utopian demand for happiness articulated by artworks. In the process, the Habermasian position is critically reconstructed when necessary, with reference to psychoanalytic and literary theories, and tested, in relation to demanding fiction and popular works. (shrink)

Dubourg and Baurmard ask why people consume fiction with imaginary worlds. We extend this inquiry to ask why people engage in creating imaginary worlds. In Fanfiction, the writing of fiction by fans involves both an immersive creative experience and a very interactive community that may explain the high (social) engagement of people with Fanfiction.

In addition to satisfying a predisposition for exploration, fiction with imaginary worlds may also appeal to morbid curiosity, an adaptive motivation to seek out information about dangerous situations. Most imaginary worlds contain narrative elements of danger, and immersion in such worlds may provide people with information that would be costly to acquire in the real world.

Resumen: La obra videoescénica es un producto híbrido que presenta un mundo posible significado por medios teatrales y audiovisuales procedentes de dos modos de representación diferentes, el narrativo de enunciación audiovisual y el dramático. Esta investigación tiene como objetivo descubrir su funcionamiento. Para ello utiliza una metodología que pone en relación el campo interno de referencia del texto y el campo externo de referencia. Se señala a la pantalla de proyección, soporte material de la representación audiovisual, como interfaz entre medios (...) y modos de representación, permitiendo el acceso del personaje teatral al universo audiovisual y activando la participación del espectador en la construcción de sentido, porque comparte con el propio texto los niveles de producción y recepción de la cultura de la imagen en la que se encuentra inmerso. Abstract: The videoscenic play is a hybrid product that presents a fictional world meaned through theatrical and audiovisual media from two different modes of representation, the narrative of enunciation audiovisual and the dramatic one. This research aims to discover how it works. To do this, it uses a methodology that relates the Internal Reference Field of the text and the External Reference Field. It is pointed to the projection screen, material support of audiovisual representation, as an interface between media and modes of representation, allowing the access of the theatrical character to the audiovisual universe and activating the viewer's participation in the construction of meaning, since it shares with the own text the levels of production and reception of the culture of the image in which it is immersed. (shrink)

Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation (...) of imaginary worlds, and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation (...) of imaginary worlds, and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FÉLIX MaRTÍNEZ-?????? TOWARDS A FORMAL ONTOLOGY OF FICTIONAL WORLDS In this discussion ' I propose a few concepts for the description and classification of fictional "worlds." The variety of fictional systems of"reality" can be understood, I diink, as an aspect ofthe phenomenon of style in literary imagination.2 But styles of imagination or of vision, and die style of literary works, are more than simply kinds of (...) fictional worlds. To put in some perspective my attempt at classification of literary works according to their systems of reality, I will make first a few remarks on the notion of style. It is a well-known preliminary problem when speaking of style diat this word seems to have more than one meaning in ordinary usage. I think that some ofits current meanings are rich and important, and that literary knowledge would profit if we could reconstruct them in abstract and defined concepts, so that the notions involved were somewhat clarified. I doubt diat diis is possible with current conceptual tools. We can see what is meant, say, when we hear diat a certain person we know "has style"; and we certainly distinguish diis attribute from others such as elegance, good manners, character, taste, originality, mannerisms, or idiosyncracies. Thus, we occasionally perceive in personal behavior a phenomenon called style. A conceptual description or a satisfactory definition of such a given, however, seems very difficult. Speaking of matters of art and literature, "style" has been used, among other things, to designate both the conventional forms of traditional expression (as in "manuals of style") and the anomalous, convention-breaking forms of highly individuated creation (as in die classic conception of Vosslerian-Spitzerian Stylistics, or in Buffon's "Le style c'est l'homme même," as usually understood). Style, dien, as conformity and style as singularity and deviance; style as impersonal decorum and as presence of a unique personal essence in the work. This perplexing ambiguity may be reducible though. Whether conventional and common or personal and innovative, style appears to be a form that characterizes and holds together a creation or a phenomenal entity. Indeed, the fact that 182 Félix Martínez-Bonati183 singular innovations of style often become the common trait of a school or current and sometimes a part of general tradition seems to indicate that neither singularity nor general acceptance are the most basic elements of die notion of style. On first reflection, we may conceive of style as a formal principle that consistently determines the constitution of die pertinent objects. Nonetíieless, constitutive form is too weak a definition for style, since it would also apply to what is called "technique" and even to genre. We must look for a more specific determination. There is anodier ambiguity in everyday uses of die word "style" diat deserves attention. We speak often of "good style" and "bad style." But sometimes we speak as if no style is bad and the thing that matters is to have style at all and as much of it as possible. Thus, we condemn a work because of its having no style or only a weak one. This contradiction probably derives from the confusion of a particular normative, a general normative, and a merely descriptive notion of style. We should keep, if possible, to a merely descriptive notion. Still another uncertainty of usage, in literary matters, relates to the (not universally accepted) restriction of the notion of style to a linguistic one; style, in this restricted usage, is seen as primarily an attribute of diction. The most numerous of literary studies of die style of singular works have been, so far as I can see, descriptions of idiolects. In many cases, the linguistic peculiarity is taken as an index of the world-view or die style of imagination diat is supposed to have produced the work. Alternative to this approach, indeed complementary, is the study of literary style as an attribute of die fictional entities to which literary discourse refers. We find the latter kind of approach mostly in characterizations of genres or of periods ("the naturalist novel," "romance," "classicism," etc.). One may suppose that an exhaustive analysis of the idiolect of a work... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary AnthropologyPeter J. RabinowitzThe Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, by Wolfgang Iser; xix & 347 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, $55.00 cloth, $15.95 paper.Iser’s book argues that “the special character of literature is its production through a fusion” (p. xiii) of the fictive (“an act of boundary-crossing which, nonetheless, keeps in view what has been overstepped”) (...) (pp. xiv-xv) and the imaginary (“a featureless and inactive potential”) (p. xvii). As a consequence, he anchors his “different form of heuristics” (p. xiii) in two dense meditations on the history of these terms. The first, chapter 3, teases out the way “fiction” has been “thematized” in philosophical writings—with detailed explications, in particular, of the works of Bacon (who views fiction as an idol), Bentham (“who stands for a paradigm switch” [p. 112] in which fiction becomes “a mode of bridge-building” [p. 123]), Vaihinger (“fiction as a transparent posit” [p. 130]), and Nelson Goodman (who sees fictions in terms of worldmaking). The second, chapter 4, deliberates on the nature of the imaginary, with particular attention to Coleridge (who made “the last significant attempt” to treat imagination as a faculty [p. 186]), Sartre (for whom the imaginary is an act), and Cornelius Castoriadis (who has developed the notion of the “radical imaginary”).But while the book deals exhaustively with the twin terms of its main title, its relation to its subtitle is more vexed. Certainly, this book is not about anthropology in any conventional sense. Although Iser pays lip service to “culture-bound patternings” (p. 297), in fact his inquiry almost entirely ignores the pressures of particular cultural contexts; and to the extent that he deals with “the human condition,” he does so by universalizing from a narrow slice of the Western intellectual tradition. Nor, more surprisingly, is the book really very much concerned with literature. True, the second chapter—the most compelling—offers revealing insights into the literary fictionality of some specific instances of Renaissance pastoral; but it is significant that this analysis precedes, rather than follows from, Iser’s philosophical explorations. And while he returns, in his last chapters, to literature—specifically, to a notion of literature as play—this discussion is almost completely divorced from any engagement with actual literary texts. Glancing references to Tristram Shandy and Finnegans Wake, a slightly longer mention of Beckett’s Imaginary Dead Imagine: these serve as the springboards from which Iser makes sweeping transhistorical, crosscultural pronouncements about “the” text.The Fictive and the Imaginary makes heavy demands on its readers. Although Iser lashes out against “unwieldy structuralist terminology” (p. x), his own style is dense and abstract, and his basic terminology is muddled. For instance, he insists on the term “imaginary,” in contrast to such familiar terms as “imagination,” because it is “comparatively neutral” and “has not yet been permeated by [End Page 188] traditional associations” (p. 305)—yet his analysis often depends pivotally on treating “the imaginary” and “the imagination” as equivalents. Matters are made more difficult yet by Iser’s tendency to conflate two different tasks: elucidating the history of the discourse around the terms and finding the “true” nature of the fictive and the imaginary themselves.Then, too, as the summary above may suggest, the book has organizational quirks. Iser begins by insisting vigorously on a triad, replacing the distinction between fiction and reality with the three-pronged distinction of “the real, the fictive, and... the imaginary” (p. 1). But the definition of the real, oddly exiled to a footnote, is internally inconsistent (it refers simultaneously to “the empirical world” and to “the variety of discourses relevant to the author’s approach to the world”) (p. 305), and in any case, it is soon demoted to a minor character in the argument. Indeed, in the “Epilogue”—on mimesis and literary staging—the notions of the fictive and imaginary have vanished as well. One is left, then, with a clump of chapters that do not cohere into a single book, much less a unified argument. For all its scattered insights, The Fictive and the Imaginary does not meet the high standards set by... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Alan Collett LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND FACTUAL REPORTING Novels frequently deal with real events. How is it that some theorists have been able to argue that, regarded as literature, such novels are always fictional? The answer is that it is usually possible to show that a work which we are prepared to call "literary" creates an imaginary world possessing its own properties. Itcan then be maintained that this (...) class='Hi'>imaginary world constitutes the aesthetic object of the work and that only those properties internal to it are relevant to aesthetic judgment. It then follows that the meaning ofthe literary work is this imaginary world and that criticism is properly concerned with its elucidation. Or, to say the same thing in a different idiom: we should distinguish in the things said by critics between those sorts of remarks which help to establish a text's meaning solely by reference to internal features of the text and those sorts of remarks which, if they are aimed at establishing meaning, do so by reference to external evidence. In the case of novels dealing with real events, those sentences which describe particular events, situations, characters, and places (reports)1 play a role in the creation of the imaginary world of the work. The real events described will, of course, often be known to the reader, and indeed the effectiveness of a work may depend to a large extent upon the fact that it deals with known historical events. But in order to avoid treating such texts as factual works rather than as works of literature we should, the theory goes, stress plausibility and coherence above truth to the world. Aristode's rule that "a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility" sums up the way in which critical assessment can guard against confusing literary 282 Alan Collett283 works with informative works. Literary criticism concerns itselfwith the plausibility and coherence of accounts of real events at the expense of their truth. A literary artist will, therefore, be judged to be better the more his descriptions seem true in contrast with the historian whose descriptions must actually be true. The literary artist, on this traditional view, endows the events he describes with meaning. When those events are real events their meaning will be intelligible to the extent to which they reflect a convincingly possible reality. The accurate reporting of real events is perfecdy permissible always provided the events chosen make an artistic point by functioning in the narrative in a way which is probable or convincing. Accuracy, as such, is never a criterion of literary worth. The fictionality of literary works dealing with real events, then, is connected with the skill the author exhibits in usingthe events he chooses to describe in such a way that a meaningful imaginary world is created. This fictional world will mirror the real world via its internal coherence which excludes the contingendy true in order to make a plausible artistic whole, and one function of literary criticism proper is the fixing of the correct interpretation of the meaning of this fictional world. A recent reformulation ofthis traditional view, offered by S. H. Olsen in TL· Structure ofLiterary Understanding? contains some suggestions as to how it is possible to interpret literary practice so that report sentences can be understood to function other than as the bearers of truth. On this view, a literary work, as a peculiar kind of utterance, cannot be interpreted without reference to some context. And although a literary work may be pardy distinguished by its textual or structural features, the mere possession of such features is not in itself sufficient to make a text a literary work. Textual or structural features, Olsen argues, will serve an aesthetic function only when the decision is already taken that the text to which they belong is a literary work. Since the function of sentences cannot be determined simply on the basis of their linguistic features, they will need to be interpreted in order to be correctly understood. Interpretation will involve making assumptions about the purpose of the utterances in question and the assumed purpose will then determine how their linguistic and structural features are to be understood. Thus, in one of... (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

Unlike science fiction, which assumes a baseline of ordinary experience and sense of the nature of reality that are marked white, Black speculative literature's baseline is a parallel tradition responding to Black origins in slavery, racism, and colonialism; it imagines a future that critiques and is not bound up with science fiction's white origins in the onset of modernity. Its cosmologies and anthropologies are completely different. The Dark Delight of Being Strange is a work of but not about (...) Black speculative fiction. It explores the inherent meaning of speculative production for thinking, writing, living, and enacting concepts of Black freedom and why it is so critical for understanding Black sociality and politics. It combines memoir, storytelling, and philosophical prose with the Black imaginary to capture the idea that Black life is surreal, extraordinary--but not (or not only) in the sense of speculative fiction. It leaves us squarely in our world and time to reveal these aspects within the mundane or everyday. James Haile challenges us to rethink contemporary and historical Black life and approaches to freedom outside of Euromodernity in order to demonstrate the avant-garde aesthetic expressions critical to Black political thinking. It offers a rereading of enslavement through an innovative account of Henry Box Brown's famed escape, posits a parallel Black lifeworld as the destination of H. G. Wells' Journey to the Center of the Earth, thematizes time in Henry Dumas as an embodied phenomenological reality, imagines the survival skills of the octopus as an emblem for how to negotiate Black existence, theorizes memory as subject to metaphysical and ontological lack as a result of social alienation, questions whether there can be an outside--a place where Black people can be free--given the condition of death we call democracy as related in James Baldwin's letter to his nephew, and concludes by depicting Frederick Douglass as exemplar of the aesthetic, political, and philosophical Blackness that can be free. Each narrative is accompanied by a critical introduction and endnotes that provide philosophical context; together they argue that Blackness is a fundamental entanglement and not a limit--of the human or of freedom--rather somewhere beyond. Dark Delight invites us to reimagine time, space, place, history, and memory and how to understand the past. (shrink)

This article examines Russian engineers’ social imagination about the future through the professional discussions held at the electrotechnical congresses in the nineteenth century. Formulating the prospective future of the industry, the state and society was a collective endeavor, a process in which the identity and mission of engineers were crystallized. Through envisioning the future of technology and its role in the society, engineers revealed their cultural role as mediators between technological innovation, and both the wider public and the state. In (...) order to better understand the manifestations of the shared cultural understandings of a desirable future and social order, the article resorts to Sheila Jasanoff’s concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. The engineering community’s sociotechnical imagination about electricity was shaped around the transformative possibilities of this technology. It was believed that electrical engineering was able not only to accelerate industrial production, but also to solve social, medical and cultural problems, thereby uniting the Russian Empire. Descriptions of the rational, comfortable and beautiful world of the electrified future overlapped in engineering discussions, journalism and science fiction. Positive scenarios emphasized the advantages of electrical engineering and bypassed the problems associated with electrification, constructing an idea of its inevitability. The electrical engineer became a kind of a new cultural hero, who knew how to make a working device or system, and also filled the task of linking the development of technology to the development of society. (shrink)

By coincidence, it seems, the critical vocabulary and concerns that came to be known as postcolonial theory and methodology rose to be a dominant school of inquiry in the Anglo-American academy in the same years that the Soviet Union collapsed (notwithstanding that key theoretical texts by Frantz Fanon and others predated this moment by decades). Yet, oddly, postcolonialist terms were seldom applied to postsocialist and post-Soviet cases until the 2000s, and they have become more broadly utilized in these territories only (...) in the past decade. Further, it must be admitted that few results of these applications of postcolonial tools to postsocialist cases have made much of a mark among broader circles of postcolonial scholars and thinkers. Djagalov's book may help to correct this situation. Rather than work in the mode of “application”—applying a postcolonial framework to yet one more case—Djagalov reconstructs the history of a century of socialist anti-imperialism, as it was expressed in global cultural institutions and networks, and in so doing discovers the ignored or forgotten genealogy that links contemporary postcolonial thought to writers, activists, and theoreticians of the socialist world.Djagalov's book toggles between, on the one hand, chapters of institutional history that chronicle the global cultural institutions (such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association, the Tashkent Film Festival, and the Lotus Prize) that connected the Soviet Union with decolonizing countries and, on the other hand, chapters of synthetic cultural criticism that articulate typological analyses of common narrative forms that circulated in the fiction and film of the socialist world—recurring varieties of “solidarity narratives,” as Djagalov calls them. His work reveals how central the state-socialist political imaginary was for writers and filmmakers ranging from Nâzım Hikmet to Ngūgī wa Thiong'o, and how prominent their itineraries through Soviet institutions and networks were in their biographies. Ngūgī, for instance, finished his 1977 novel Petals of Blood during a residency in the Soviet Writers House in Yalta.In recovering the lost continent of anti-imperial socialist globality that bridged the “second” and “third worlds,” Djagalov has demonstrated not how postcolonial terms can be applied to postsocialist cases but how postcolonial theory and method are themselves postsocialist phenomena. Djagalov does not attempt to rectify the state-socialist prehistory of postcolonial thought with a critique of Soviet imperial habits or of the postcolonial contexts of contemporary Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. At least, though, the challenges of thinking “postcolonial” and “postsocialist” together have now become clearer. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism leaves us with new research problems: what, for example, does it mean to be a postcolony of an anti-imperial empire? (shrink)

The question of fiction is omnipresent within the work of Paul Ricoeur throughout his prolific career. However, Ricoeur raises the questions of fiction in relation to other issues such the symbol, metaphor and narrative. This article sets out to foreground a traditional problem of fiction and logic, which is termed the existence of non-existent objects, in relation to the Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative. Ricoeur’s understanding of fiction takes place within his overall philosophical anthropology where the (...) fictions and histories make up the very nature of identity both personal and collective. The existence of non-existent objects demonstrates a dichotomy between fiction and history, non-existent objects can exist as fictional objects. The very possibility of the existence of fictional objects entails ontological status considerations. What ontological status do fictional objects have? Ricoeur develops a concept of narrative configuration which is akin to the Kantian productive imagination and configuration frames the question historical narrative and fictional narrative. It is demonstrated that the ontological status of fictional objects can be best understood in a model of possible worlds. (shrink)

We received several commentaries both challenging and supporting our hypothesis. We thank the commentators for their thoughtful contributions, bringing together alternative hypotheses, complementary explanations, and appropriate corrections to our model. Here, we explain further our hypothesis, using more explicitly the framework of evolutionary social sciences. We first explain what we believe is the ultimate function of fiction in general (i.e., entertainment) and how this hypothesis differs from other evolutionary hypotheses put forward by several commentators. We then turn to the (...) proximate features that make imaginary worlds entertaining and, therefore, culturally successful. We finally explore how these insights may explain the distribution of imaginary worlds across time, space, age, and social classes. (shrink)

In recent work, Walton has abandoned his very influential account of the fictionality of p in a fictional work in terms of prescriptions to imagine emanating from it. He offers examples allegedly showing that a prescription to imagine p in a given work of fiction is not sufficient for the fictionality of p in that work. In this paper, both in support and further elaboration of a constitutive-norms speech-act variation on Walton’s account that I have defended previously, I critically (...) discuss his objections. In addition to answering his concerns and developing the account further, I provide additional abductive support for its explanatory virtues vis-à- institutional accounts like Walton’s, and Gricean speech-act proposals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments WEISKEL'S SUBLIME AND THE IMPASSE OF KNOWLEDGE by Laura Quinney Since the publication of Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime in 1976, scholars of the sublime, in America at any rate, have taken their cue from the demystifying character ofWeiskel's analysis.1 Before Weiskel the most ambitious twentieth-century account of the sublime was Samuel Monk's largely descriptive work The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories inEighteenth-CenturyEngland.2 With the (...) advent ofsemiotic and psychoanalytic approaches in the late sixties and early seventies, studies of the sublime shifted into a more critical mode. Neil Hertz had taken a skeptical tack in his early essay "A Reading of Longinus," but it was with Weiskel's book that the possibilities of demystifying die sublime were first explored fully.3 Weiskel's treatment is comprehensive, covering all the English Romantic poets as well as Burke and Kant. His thinking is sophisticated, incisive, and often inspired; though The Romantic Sublime was published nearly twenty years ago, it remains an admirable and influential work. In some respects it has never been superseded. Most major American scholars of the sublime—de Man, Knapp, and de Bolla, among others—have adopted the skeptical mode of Weiskel and Hertz.4 But die demystifying approach Weiskel's book helped to pioneer, while it has led to powerful argument, has certain limitations. Weiskel's precocious effort to "desublimate" the sublime shows diese limitations clearly, and it is die purpose of this essay to explore them. In die course of exposing the sublime as a mystified notion, and separating the naive believers from the canny skeptics, Weiskel also Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 309-319 310Philosophy and Literature separates intellectual insight from aesthetic capacity, and thus he uncritically reiterates die old Romantic dialectic of knowledge and power. The figure of Wordsworth plays a central role in establishing these oppositions. Weiskel portrays Wordsworth as the most successful poet of the sublime—the most successful, and tiierefore the most beguiled. In his remarkable concluding chapter, Weiskel locates the source of Wordsworth's powerful "liminal sublime" in a kind of intellectual regression. Wordswortii refuses the whole Symbolic order, the ghastly product of the Oedipus complex, for that order spells die deatii or disappearance of the signified, and die end of an imaginatively fruitful narcissism. Wordswortii retreats from the Symbolic to the Imaginary radier than endure tiiis threat to poetic life. And he is well rewarded for his dodge, since as a consequence the images of his memory thrill with the fascination of the ineffable. The Prelude gains its momentum from the project of memory; but the rich opacity and mysterious beckoning of memory's images are in a sense contrived. They spring out of a sublimation, the images colored widi the intensity of the signification Wordswortii has repudiated. Wordswortii sacrifices insight and intellectual progress for imaginative power. This is a strictly ambivalent exchange, as Weiskel makes clear in his conclusion; Wordsworth's rejection of the Oedipus complex and of the descent into the Symbolic Order, is "purely illusory, a fiction," but "the fiction is a necessary and saving one; it founds die self and secures the possibility—the chance for a self-conviction—of originality" (p. 203). Wordswortii's poetic success arises from his acceptance of an illusion, a "saving fiction" both enviable and degraded. This selfdelusion is essential to the poetic flourishing of the sublime, and only Wordsworth had the odd insensitivity to maintain it. Weiskel contrasts faith in the efficacy and excellence of sublimation with skeptical insight into its origin and end—its origin in mystification, and its end in alienation from the phenomenal world. The faith of Wordswortii's egotistical sublime is that imaginative perception provides die highest and paradoxically truest form of perception. It is easy enough to see how such a faith could provide hope and energy, and tiius could be compromised by wish-fulfillment in its generation, and direatened by extinction in its analysis. But what lies behind Weiskel's opposition of faith and insight is the old dichotomy—or series of interrelated dichotomies—that date back at least to Romanticism. Weiskel admits that his opposition of fruitful illusion and dessicating realism... (shrink)

Works of fiction are alleged to differ from works of nonfiction in instructing their audience to imagine their content. Indeed, works of fiction have been defined in terms of this feature: they are works that mandate us to imagine their content. This paper examines this definition of works of fiction, focusing on the nature of the activity that ensues in response to reading or watching fiction. Investigating how imaginings function in other (...) contexts, I show, first, that they presuppose a cognitive infrastructure encompassing at least one additional kind of mental state, whose role is to determine, to some degree, truth in an imaginary world. I then discuss the implications for the definition of fiction, showing that the definition should be refined to accommodate the structure that imagining presupposes: a work counts as fiction just in case it mandates us, not only to imagine, but to engage in a more complex mental activity, an activity that in addition to imagining, involves positing a backdrop for our imaginings. (shrink)

A team of leading contributors from both philosophical and literary backgrounds have been brought together in this impressive book to examine how works of literary fiction can be a source of knowledge. Together, they analyze the important trends in this current popular debate. The innovative feature of this volume is that it mixes work by literary theorists and scholars with work of analytic philosophers that combined together provide a comprehensive statement of the variety of ways in which (...) class='Hi'>works of fiction can engage questions of worldly interest. It uses the problem of cognitive value to explore: literature’s contribution to ethical life literature’s ability to engage in social and political critique the role narrative plays in opening up possibilities of moral, aesthetic, experience and selfhood This remarkable volume will attract the attention of both literature and philosophy scholars with its statement of the various ways that literature and life take an interest in one another. (shrink)

This article deals with a phenomenological standpoint on paradoxicality of image-consciousness, i.e., an analogical representation in which an image possesses material support. Contrary to tradition, E. Husserl thought of imagination as being both an intuitive and a mediate act. Husserl’s opinion results from paradoxical nature of an image itself: an image appears but it doesn’t exist, while the exhibited thing does exist but doesn’t appear in proper sense. The paradoxicality of an image results in its double conflict — with actual (...) present and with Bildsujet. Initially, Husserl considered that the more analogous features an image possesses the less conflict exists between it and Bildsujet, but then his own experience made him change his mind. Examining a wax figure example, he came to the conclusion that this perfectly human-like object is rather a fiction than an image for it is constituted in a position-taking intention, not in a neutralized one. However, despite we’ve got knowledge of illusory nature of such an object our consciousness keeps on fluctuating between an imaging intention and a perceptual one. Unlike Husserl neither J.-P. Sartre nor M. Richir draws a distinction between an image and an illusion. Sartre considers the imaginary in its radical form to be a world of schizophrenic. As for Richir, he supposes the imaginary to be a mass-consumption product being used for ideological manipulations. He follows Plato’s intellectual strategy and characterizes an image as εἴδωλον which represents the reality instead of reaching it. Being saturated by visible an image lacks any gap that would give an impulse to a work of imagination. At the same time, Richir admits that simulacre does relate to art, whereas an artefact doesn’t. An artefact is made by technical device which imitates not reality but consciousness. Thus, an artefact in its turn is not a reality illusion but an illusion of a reality illusion. Its hallucinatory effect makes us believe that we look into a mirror of reality as if a technical agent had better access to it than a human eye does. (shrink)

Imaginary worlds recur across hunter-gatherer narrative, suggesting that they are an ancient part of human life: to understand their popularity, we must examine their origins. Hunter-gatherer fictional narratives use various devices to encode factual information. Thus, participation in these invented worlds, born of our evolved ability to engage in pretense, may provide adaptations with information inputs that scaffold their development.

I first ask what it is to make up a story. In order to answer that question, I give existence and identity conditions for stories. I argue that a story exists whenever there is some narrative content that has intentionally been made accessible. I argue that stories are abstract types, individuated by the conditions that must be met by something in order to be a properly formed token of the type. However, I also argue that the truth of our story (...) identity attributions---sentences like, "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is the same story as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings''---are relative to their context of use, so that the same attribution of identity might be true in one context or false in another because of a change in what's being said about the works in the differing contexts. From those existence and identity conditions, I draw the conclusions that story is best understood to be a phase sortal of some abstract types, and that what it is to make up a story is to identify a type of narrative representation and its content, such that the content is neither based on actual events nor on the content of other stories to an objectionable degree. In chapter 2, I ask what it is for a story to be complete. I argue for the general meta-thesis I call "Completion Pluralism", viz. that there are many kinds of artwork completeness, many corresponding senses of 'complete', and no kind of artwork completeness is objectively more important than any other. I give a pair of arguments against those who would deny Completion Pluralism, endorsing Completion Monism instead. First, I show how Monistic analyses of the one (or one most important) kind of artwork completeness fail. I also show that each Monistic theory's failure is contingent on the assumption of Completion Monism: the denial of Completion Monism dissolves each argument against the extensional adequacy of extant theories of artwork completeness. I argue that this is all best explained by the idea that Completion Pluralism is true. Second, I argue that Completion Pluralism fits best with the variety of interests that we bring to questions about artwork completeness: there is no single or overriding concern we have when we want to know whether an artwork is complete. We shouldn't expect completeness to be a single sort of thing, then. I show how to put Completion Pluralism to work by identifying different kinds of artwork completeness in artworks. Finally, I introduce a new kind of completeness particular to stories, what I call "narrative completion", and show how it's distinct from other kinds of completeness discussed. In chapter 3, I argue that the distinction between fictional and non-fictional stories is the degree to which stories are made-up. In short, a fictional story is a made-up story. I first provide a couple desiderata for thinking about theories of fiction, then show how the two most popular extant theories of fiction---the prop theory and the genre theory---fall short in meeting one or more of those desiderata to some extent. I then show how the theory that fictions are made-up stories better meets the desiderata, using my account of what it is to make up a story from chapter 1. I turn to explicitly ontological matters in chapter 4. Addressing the question of what stories are, I show that both the theses that they are eternal and immutable and that they are created and historical seem plausible for independent reasons. I discuss a schema of an argument some philosophers who hold to the latter view (those I call "Creationists") attempt to give for their view. However, I show how those who hold to the view that stories are eternal and immutable ("Platonists") can account for all the same appearances as the Creationists, usually at least as well and sometimes with a better accounting. Similar, deductive arguments for Platonism will give rise to similar responses from the Creationist, however. In the end, then, the style of argument in particular is unlikely to advance the discussion much. Finally, I attempt to advance the discussion by building an abductive case for Platonism. First, I vindicate a particular metaontological methodology for the debate at hand, a methodology that allows for "revisionary" outcomes in our ontologies of art objects. Second, I build a case for Platonism by arguing that it best explains a number of features of stories discussed in the previous chapters. Moreover, I argue that Creationism is committed to an implausible account of how some abstract objects come into existence. Given the combination of those facts, I argue that we should prefer Platonism to Creationism. (shrink)

At the heart of our experience of literature is the idea that fiction can show us new possibilities for the world in which we live. I open up fictional worlds’ hermeneutic dimension by investigating the intersection of Roman Ingarden’s analytic phenomenology of the literary work with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Reading Ingarden together with Gadamer, I understand a fictional world as an orientation towards a fictional environment whose foundation is our capacity for language, showing how the reciprocal relationship (...) in which we discover its fictional objects and states of affairs is of the same kind that exists between language and world, so that fiction can be understood to orient us towards the happening of language. By thinking on the relationship between language and experience, I suggest that Ingarden and Gadamer propose to understand a fictional world as an orientation towards our very capacity to be otherwise and to exceed ourselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 216-223 [Access article in PDF] Notes and Fragments Genre Fiction and "The Origin of the Work of Art" Nancy J. Holland I FIRST, A CONFESSION. Like, I suspect, many of my readers, I am an unpublished fiction writer. Unlike most of the closet fiction writers in academia, however, I write genre fiction. The question that immediately follows is how that (...) writing is related to the intellectual work I do in philosophy.This question, of course, is open to a broad range of answers, from the possibility that the two aren't related at all, to potential Freudian answers it might take years of therapy to unearth. Teaching informs one's life, however, as much as the reverse, and in teaching Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" to my Metaphysics class last year, I began to understand at least one dimension of the appeal that writing genre fiction has for me as a philosopher.But first, let me explain what I mean by genre fiction. In what follows, I will be referring primarily to four forms of genre fiction that have clear roots in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America: two gender-segregated genres, the western and the romance, and two gender-marked genres, science fiction and detective novels. I will be comparing these to two other forms of "popular culture" that also developed in the nineteenth century and have, I would argue, similar relationships to the older, more "legitimate," more elite art forms which they closely resemble: photography 1 and popular music, [End Page 216] especially those forms of popular music such as ragtime, blues, jazz, and rock that are informed by the African-American experience in the United States. 2These "low brow" art forms all appear to have arisen out of the growth of the middle class in developing parts of the world during the nineteenth century and the correlative confluence of greater leisure, greater aggregate prosperity, and higher levels of education across a broader spectrum of society. Further, these art forms all combine the surface appearance of their respective "high brow" correlate arts with the reassurance of repetition that is the cornerstone of the folk arts with which they are also correlated. Each of these forms of popular culture balances itself, then, between a demand for more and more "works of art" (and/or class aspirations based on the appearance of such) and a demand for the familiar in a rapidly changing, materially challenging world.Thus, photography gives us a frozen and thereby purified visual reality, an icon of memory to which we can return at will. The truth it reveals is most often starker than that of folk painting and portraiture, but also gives the appearance of being free from the subjectivity of the artist. Great iconic photographs such as the kiss on V-E day, I have heard it said, become more real than the reality they encapsulated.Popular music similarly combines often amazing musical complexity (which is not unknown, although rarer, in western folk music) with the reassurance of a form that not only repeats itself within a song, but also between songs of the same genre. Thus, blues can be recognized by both the minor chords in its melodies and the characteristic rhyme pattern of its lyrics. Moreover, most western popular music, even to some extent free-form jazz, has a familiar and reassuring beginning-middle-end structure, both melodically and dynamically, that locates a listener immediately within the song's "story-arc." 3This same beginning-middle-end structure is one clear hallmark of genre fiction. Another is repetition. We all immediately know the plot of a detective novel or science fiction adventure: where it will begin, what the key stages of the story will be, and how it will end—not just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity's ability to survive even the most alien (and so most familiar) of threats. At... (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the workings of "human reality" or "the human condition"? Can mere words illuminate something that we call "reality"? Bernard Harrison answers these questions in this profoundly original work that seeks to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and discourse. In an ambitious account of the relationship between literature and cognition, he seeks to show how literary fiction, by (...) deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances, allows us to focus on the roots, in social practice, of the meanings by which we represent our world and ourselves. Engaging with philosophers and theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and Stanley Fish, and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift, Woolf, Appelfeld, and Dickens, among others, this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies, and of the study of the Humanities more generally, by a distinguished scholar. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.1 (2004) 152-155 [Access article in PDF] Victoria Rimell. Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. x + 239 pp. Cloth, $60. The jacket illustration of this book shows a detail from Dali's Autumnal Cannibalism(1936), now in the Tate Modern, London. This bleak picture shows the upper parts of two fluid bodies, one wearing a cream shirt and having an (...) apple on its head, the other clad in a red garment (a striking touch amongst the predominant dark-green colors); both hold cutlery and, set against the background of rocky mountains, cut pieces from each other while locked in a tender embrace. Critics have often seen this painting as an allusion to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, or as a representation of Dali (a latter-day William Tell) and his wife Gala, who did not meet with the approval of Dali's father. The choice of this disturbing illustration cannot have been accidental, for the horror of (the Roman) Civil War, the act of cannibalism, the concept of corporeal fluidity, and the implications of eating habits and eating hierarchies (we are ultimately eaten by what we eat) are central issues to Rimell's sophisticated Petronian study, which is sometimes as difficult to follow as Dali's painting.Influenced by Froma Zeitlin's "RomanusPetronius: A Study of the Troiae halosisand the Bellum civile" (Latomus30 (1971), 56-82) and Catherine Connors' Petronius the Poet(Cambridge University Press, 1998), Rimell views the Satyriconas a theatrical and highly metaphorical work in which the characters' role-playing corresponds to a disruptive process of metamorphosis, and literature is "imaged as a live body, a flesh or food ingested in the process of learning and spewed out from bodies in performance" (9). Petronius' metaphors, involving bodies presented as texts and texts as bodies, complicate our reading experience of this novel and create unifying patterns of images that evoke a chaotic world where borders melt and hierarchies (eater-eaten, text-context, author-narrator, book-reader) are confused. Even the narrative modes of prose and poetry, far from being fixed and rigidly defined, are seen to devour one another through the repeated image of recitation as a penetration of solid physical boundaries. Exteriors are deceitful (the dishes served by Trimalchio lend themselves easily to this view) and interiors menacing (what lies inside the belly of the Trojan horse, the devious creature of Eumolpus' Troiae Halosis?). The food Petronian characters eat (and hence the literature they read) affects and potentially threatens their [End Page 152] bodies (and hence their inner selves), because what they consume may gnaw them away from within (there seems to be no place in Rimell's argumentation for pleasure in the mere act of eating, which, according to her, equals penetration of physical boundaries and hence feminization of the consumer). Yet, poets and scholars in Petronius' world must stuff themselves, Rimell argues, with food (= literature) before they start ejecting it (= writing), for, once literature is consumed, it cannot stay trapped inside the human body for long. A complete list of the uses of fundereand cognates in the Satyricon(in Appendix I) is brought in to support Rimell's claim. The literature that comes out of the body has been transformed during its digestion: "as the consumed alters the consumer, as we become what we eat, so too Petronius' 'sources,' be they solid, liquid, or vaporous, are rewritten in the process of their incorporation" (47); and "Vomiting is always imaginable as recitation, an often violent ejection of contained knowledge" (170). I am not sure I follow Rimell here: this is not how human bodies process their food; are there any examples of defecation imaged as composing literature? Pursuing this line of enquiry, Rimell strongly argues against scholars who make clear-cut distinctions between the low and the high, the material and the spiritual, the physical and the intellectual worlds of the Satyriconand challenges interpretations of Petronius' novel as theatrical entertainment for its own sake.Rimell's views are articulated in detail in the... (shrink)

This paper is an enquiry into some commonalities between fiction and atheism. It suggests that ‘disbelief’ may be a state of mind shared by both and asks how a meaningful semantics might be derived from the mental stance of disbelief. Albert Camus’ The Plague, published in 1947 post the trauma of two successive world wars, is a key ‘existentialist’ text that focuses on this dilemma. Not only is this work of fiction especially relevant to our current times of (...) natural, political, economic and psychological distress gone ‘viral’, it is also one in which a blunt question is posed to the atheist hero of the novel, Doctor Rieux, in Oran, a small French Algerian town fighting a terrible pandemic: ‘Do you believe in God, doctor?’. Rieux’s answer is telling: ‘No, but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out.’ It is this human ‘struggle’ to discern the contours of the invisible ‘in the dark’ that could animate the thought worlds of fiction as well as of atheism. The paper seeks to draw out some of these putative similarities through the lens of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ and J.L, Austin and John Searle’s classification of basic speech-acts. It also considers the evolutionary, affective and cross-cultural appeal of the parallel narratives of science and religion. Oran’s most remarkable aspect, Camus insists, is its ‘ordinariness’; yet, it is here that the ‘extraordinariness’ of the plague strikes. Quotidian local circumstances thus paradoxically set in motion the sorts of ‘universal’ inquiries into ‘what it means to be human’ that, my paper argues, alike motivate the fiction of atheism and the atheism of fiction. (shrink)

This article explores how Paul Féval’s work integrates and transforms Breton legends and popular beliefs to shape a distinctive imaginary novel. Féval, born in Rennes in 1816, was influenced by the oral traditions of his native region. He drew on this rich cultural heritage to create works combining fantasy, the marvellous and romanticism, such as La Femme blanche des marais, Les Belles-de-nuit and La Fée des Grèves. These stories illustrate a hybrid between elements of authentic folklore and literary (...) reinterpretations influenced by European Romanticism. Féval is particularly interested in legendary female figures linked to water and the Other World, such as the White Woman of the Marshes, a spectre protecting the Malestroit family, and the Belles-de-nuit, ghosts mourning their tragic fate. These characters do more than simply enrich the poetic background: they play an active part in the plot and crystallise the introduction of the modern marvellous, where the supernatural emerges in a realistic setting, provoking fascination and turmoil. The novelist also explores the figure of the fairy, as in La Fée des Grèves, where this romantic aquatic creature, both protective and ambiguous, crosses symbolic thresholds between life and death, land and sea. The fairy, often associated with natural forces and sometimes Christianised, reflects the Breton imagination in constant transformation. This article also highlights the way in which Féval uses legends to meet the expectations of a wider audience, eager for a marvellous story that is accessible and rooted in geographical and historical reality. This process includes adapting traditional stories to make them compatible with the serial novel, a genre that values intrigue and mystery. Finally, this article highlights the ideological function of these stories: to re-enchant a modern world perceived as disenchanted by industrialisation and the rise of materialism. The reworked legends thus become a narrative and poetic tool enabling Féval to celebrate a past imbued with spirituality and mystery, while at the same time criticising a society in the throes of change. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between belief-like imaginings and the establishment of imaginary worlds (often called fictional worlds). After outlining the various assumptions my argument is premised on, I argue that belief-like imaginings, in themselves, do not render their content true in the imaginary world to which they pertain. I show that this claim applies not only to imaginative projects in which we are instructed or intend to imagine certain propositions, but also to spontaneous imaginative projects. (...) After arguing that, like guided imaginative projects, spontaneous projects involve specific imaginary truths, I conclude that imaginative projects, whether spontaneous or deliberate, comprise not only imaginings, but also mental acts of determining such truths. (shrink)

This book explores what science fiction can tell us about the human condition in a technological world, with the ethical dilemmas and consequences that this entails. This book is the result of the joint efforts of scholars and scientists from various disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach sets an example for those who, like us, have been busy assessing the ways in which fictional attempts to fathom the possibilities of science and technology speak to central concerns about what it means to (...) be human in a contemporary world of technology and which ethical dilemmas it brings along. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate what can be achieved in approaching science fiction as a kind of imaginary laboratory for experimentation, where visions of human (or even post-human) life under various scientific, technological or natural conditions that differ from our own situation can be thought through and commented upon. Although a scholarly work, this book is also designed to be accessible to a general audience that has an interest in science fiction, as well as to a broader academic audience interested in ethical questions. (shrink)