The Words, as its name suggests, interweaves with the fictionalized account of Sartre's childhood the story of his discovery of reading and writing. To be able to say something about those Words other than what Sartre has said himself, we must have in mind a precise goal, a clear question which we must not lose sight of. Ours is: how does Sartre explain to himself his entry into the world of written signs, into what we will call, with Lacan, the (...) symbolic? And following from that, what might Sartre's theory of the symbolic be? How, without full knowledge of it, does this account of a childhood (and a masterful one it is) connect together reading, writing and psychic structure? By his psychological explanations Sartre in fact helps us to imagine this complex adventure which "the entry into reading" represents for the human subject. We have here chosen the particular moment of the child's discovery of his grandfather's Library. We shall see how this scene sheds light on the fantasm which structures the subject's choice of writing as his symptom. We should add that in our own research we are interested not so much in a psychoanalysis of Sartre, as in an attentive reading of what the author of The Words and Nausea tells us indirectly about the function of the symbolic in the life of a human subject. Sartre helps us to understand Lacan. (shrink)

This essay discusses the implications of Irigaray's readings of the Antigone in the construction of a feminist ethics. By focusing on the gaps and intersections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology as formulative of Irigaray's eventual call for an ethics of sexual difference, 1 emphasize the inevitability of rethinking the functions of historicity, femininity, and maternity in the formation of new models of intersubjectivity.

This essay attempts to examine the difficult question of sex scandals both in public school settings and in the academy. It raises issues over the way authority in the classroom is unequally exercised by both male and female teachers in terms of power and seduction. However, the Law remains explicit when it comes to judging who is at fault within a-student relationship that collapses into the bedroom. The ethics that surround such sexual affairs is raised through the psychoanalytic and philosophical (...) writings of Jacques Lacan. The essay ends by offering a surprised perspective over the question whether an ethics of diabolical evil is possible, given that such affairs are differentiated as post-Oedipal relationships where age differentiations have become blurred. (shrink)

We should not always expect parents to put their children first.

This book examines, through a multi-disciplinary lens, the possibilities offered by relationships and family forms that challenge the nuclear family ideal, and some of the arguments that recommend or disqualify these as legitimate units in our societies. That children should be conceived naturally, born to and raised by their two young, heterosexual, married to each other, genetic parents; that this relationship between parents is also the ideal relationship between romantic or sexual partners; and that romance and sexual (...) intimacy ought to be at the core of our closest personal relationships - all these elements converge towards the ideal of the nuclear family. The authors consider a range of relationship and family structures that depart from this ideal: polyamory and polygamy, single and polyparenting, parenting by gay and lesbian couples, as well as families created through current and prospective modes of assisted human reproduction such as surrogate motherhood, donor insemination, and reproductive cloning. (shrink)

Jane Campion’s work regularly revolves around women’s often complex relationship with socio-cultural discourses and their articulation in language, whether in familial and institutional structures or in cultural and creative practice. In this sense, Campion’s filmmaking continues a feminist tradition of exploration regarding female subjectivity, identity and desire as it is represented in language (cinematic or otherwise). In the Cut (2003), adapted from Susanna Moore’s novel of the same name, again places language and the (dis)articulation of the female voice at its (...) heart: the renewal of which is positioned within the film as crucial to women’s survival. In taking its cue from Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976) and later writings such as ‘Castration or Decapitation?' (1981) and ‘Coming to Writing' (1991), this article frames its discussion of Campion’s interrogation of ‘Woman’s’ attempts at the articulation of the self as an exemplar (in both theme and form) of Cixousian strategies. The article will argue that techniques such as a cinematic écriture feminine, and the appropriation and adaptation of the language of Hollywood genre film, form part of Campion’s feminist inquiry into the discourses and legacies of a phallogocentric patriarchal culture which traditionally delimit Woman as a ‘speaking’ subject. In this way, In the Cut exposes the tensions between what Cixous calls the ‘Absolute Woman’ of culture (the aphonic hysteric) and attempts towards agency, thus challenging phallogocentric representations of women. In using these strategies, Campion’s adaptation creates a polyphonic artefact which not only revises Moore’s novel but also re-visits (in order to reclaim) female articulation; re-writing phallogocentric claims to agency and subjectivity, imagining women's ‘survival’ through language. In this sense, then, adaptation itself can be thought of as a feminist act of subversion. (shrink)

The study to follow is concerned with the structure of romance in the ancient and Renaissance periods from the perspective of nostalgia, to be defined here as one of the most deeply engrained features of the human psyche. The argument in brief is that of all the literary genres of the early modern era, romance tells the story of homecoming with the greatest sense of imperative, constituting a tropism in the form of a literary motif that originates in (...) the evolutionary engineering of the species. But first to the genre itself. Invariably, these are tales not only of outbound adventure, whether by choice or destiny, but of the return to a place or community that constitutes refuge, family, origins, reunion .. (shrink)

Tonti-Fillipini, Nicholas We all have friends or family who are gay or lesbians. These are people we know and love and are a part of our families. The Rudd government's removal of laws that discriminated against them was most significant in ending inequality in the law. Now though we face something very different: the redefinition of marriage to exclude the words "a man and a woman" from what marriage means.

How has feminism failed lesbianism? What issues belong at the top of a lesbian and gay political agenda? This book answers both questions by examining what lesbian and gay subordination really amounts to. Calhoun argues that lesbians and gays aren't just socially and politically disadvantaged. The closet displaces lesbians and gays from visible citizenship, and both law and cultural norms deny lesbians and gay men a private sphere of romance, marriage, and the family.

A philosopher and a lawyer-economist examine the challenges of the last third of life. They write about friendship, sex, retirement communities, inheritance, poverty, and the depiction of aging women in films. These essays, or conversations, will help readers of all ages think about how to age well, or at least thoughtfully, and how to interact with older family members and friends.

The classical form of the romance (courtly romance or chivalrous romance, the epic, romance tale) was created in the 11th-13th centuries in different countries by an entire series of great poets and authors, among whom Thomas, Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried of Strasbourg, Nezâmi, Rustaveli and Murasaki Shikibu had considerable influence on the development of their respective families of literature.

Japan is the world’s largest producer of love simulation games, revealing a curious feature: these games, in theory, assign female players to the unique task of seducing a male character, but, in reality, they promote the establishment of a network of friendship between women. Love cannot be achieved if this network is not carefully woven both in play and in real life. Based on the analysis of this double dynamics, outwardly contradictory, I would like to advance the following hypothesis: that (...) such games enable their users to ‘outsmart’ gender expectations. These games, called otome games, became popular in the context of a national panic related to the declining birthrate: they target the market of women who – living alone or with their parents – are held responsible for the future shortfall of the system. These new generations of women don’t start a family. They have no children. How do they manage to ward off exclusion and stigma? The study will focus on the strategies collectively devised to turn otome games into an identity-building tool, promoting friendship between players as a means of resistance against social norms. (shrink)

Armed with a theory of representation, or with answers to the two questions, What is a representation? and What is it to represent?, we might imagine ourselves approaching a putative representation and asking of it, Is it a representation?, and then, on the assumption that the answer is yes, going on to ask of it, What does it represent? Now, the answers that such questions receive might be called the applied answers of the theory that we are armed with. It (...) is in terms of this notion—that of the applied answers of a theory—that we may introduce the second way of classifying theories of representation. Theories of representation might be classified according to the degree of dependence or independence between the applied answers they provide in the case of any given representation. Richard Wollheim is Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic in the University of London and the author of F. H. Bradley, Socialism and Culture, Art and its Objects, Sigmund Freud, On Art and the Mind, and the novel, A Family Romance. He is currently working on a book dealing with pictorial style. In somewhat different form this paper was originally presented at the Annual Conference of the Developmental Section of the British Psychological Society, Surrey, 1976. The proceedings of that conference are published as The Child's Representation of the World, Plenum Press, 1977. (shrink)

Teachers and critics have much to learn from [Harold] Bloom's work, and in this paper I want to try to show what it is we can learn from him and how we might go about it. In doing so, I also mean to analyze his attack upon formal criticism and to consider the merits of that attack. In the end, I propose an assessment of what in my view is the crucial weakness of both formal and dialectical criticism alike. This (...) will involve an explication of the meaning of critical care and an enlargement of our customary understanding of critical method and procedure. . . . In The Anxiety of Influence Bloom presents theory based frankly upon Freudian models, or what Bloom calls Family Romance. Every new poet is caught up in a struggle with his forebears, or precursors. Being Freudian forebears, they naturally both teach the poet and threaten him as teachers. The problem for the poet is to learn from his forebearing family without losing his integral self. If he succeeds he becomes what Bloom calls a "strong poet," and, hence, again quite naturally, he lives to present much trouble to coming generations, who have their own paths to go. Jerome McGann, professor of English at John Hopkins University, has written books on Byron and Swinburne and is presently working on the Oxford English Text edition of Byron's Complete Poetical Works, Don Juan in Context, and a collection of poetry, Air Heart Sermons. See also: "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression" by Harold Boom in Vol. 2, No. 2; "The Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a Critical Paradigm" by David D. Cooper in Vol. 6, No. 1. (shrink)

Introduction: The quickened and the dead -- Ontology for philologists : Nietzsche, body, subject -- "Be your self!" : Nietzsche as educator -- The life of thought : Nietzsche's truth perspectivism and the will to power -- Of slaves and masters : the birth of good and evil -- Moments of excess : the making and unmaking of the subject -- Lacan, desire, and the originating function of loss -- The word that sees me : the nexus of image and (...) sign -- The nothing as the reverse side of Lacan's mirror -- Nietzsche is dead, long live Nietzsche : in memory of paternal ghosts -- The "insiders" : Nietzsche's secret teaching and the invention of "the philosopher of the future" -- Finding one's home in the nothingness of Nietzsche's text -- Nietzsche's excessive demand and the question of the adulterous queen's desire -- High and low : the hierarchical structure of Nietzsche's texts -- Inside and outside : Nietzsche "incorporated"; or, Who incorporates whom in the act of reading Nietzsche? -- The father's indulgence of the prodigal son : ambiguity and the limits of "the position" -- The contagion of affect in Netzsche : Klein, Krell, Bataille -- Doing time with Melanie Klein : renouncing "the bad breast," mourning the loss of "the good breast" -- "Motivating this writingéis a fear of going crazy" : how Klein might read Georges Bataille sur Nietzsche -- David Farrell Krell's "novel" approach to reading Nietzsche -- Family romances and textual encounters : Sarah Kofman reading Nietzsche -- Reading Nietzsche I : explosions -- Autobiography or autothanography : killing with words in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat -- Reading Nietzsche II : le pris des juifs; Nietzsche, les juifs, l'anti-semitisme -- The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle : Pierre Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche's sick body -- On the continuity and disjunction between the body and language -- Exquisite delirium : the thought of eternal return -- The conspiracy of philosopher/villains : Nietzsche/Klossowski/Sade -- From cannibalism to voodoo : the creation and control of the subject of Nietzsche's writing. (shrink)

_Hyperdream_ is a major new novel by celebrated French author Hélène Cixous. It is a literary tour de force, returning anew to challenge necessity itself, the most implacable of human certainties: you die in the end – and that’s the end. For you, for me. But what if? What if death did not inevitably spell the end of life? _Hyperdream_ invests this fragile, tentative suspension of disbelief with the sheer force of its poetic audacity, inventing a sort of magic telephone: (...) a wireless lifeline against all the odds to the dearly departed. It is a book about time, age, love and the greatest loss. A book which turns on death: on the question or the moment of death, depending on it, expecting it, living off it, taking place at once before and after, but at the same time turning against it, contesting it, outwriting it hopefully, desperately, performatively, as an interruptible interruption. _Hyperdream_ is a book of mourning, but also of morning, a tragedy-with-comedy and a universal family romance in which it transpires that the narrator is the veritable offspring of a “treasure of literature” in the form of a bed, purchased by her mother from a certain W. Benjamin in 1934, slept on for 40 years by her brother and dreamt of by her friend “J.D.”. (shrink)

Feminist utopian novels reconstruct citizenship by interrogating ideological assumptions at the root of civil rights theory, particularly its reliance on the sexual contract and the family romance narrative. While many feminist citizenships still depend on such assumptions, utopian fictions deconstruct the logic of natural rights and replace traditional governments and nation-states with social structures based on community and global-ecological awareness. They thereby underscore the importance of narrative for feminist philosophy and political theory.

The article challenges conventional assumptions regarding the question of incest survival within contemporary discourses. A textual analysis of Kathryn Harrison's autobiographical novel tracing her consensual sexual relationship with her father is used to address the issue of failed or unresolved mourning as a prototypically ‘modern’ cultural phenomenon. Psychoanalytically informed feminist literary criticism is used to explore the parallels between the cultural construction of femininity and failed or postponed mourning in western historical and philosophical traditions. Following the work of Juliana Schiesari (...) and Kathleen Woodward, the article contends that melancholia is a gendered discourse that has historically privileged male theorists and film-makers, such as Barthes and Fassbinder. The article suggests that contemporary women writers, such as Harrison, are engaged in a revisionary approach to the construction of loss within their writing. By situating themselves at the heart of the contemporary family narrative, instead of the ‘melancholic’ margins, they are able to produce a counter-discourse that dispels the conventional dynamics of the traditional family romance. By using the ‘writing cure’ to overcome ideological loss, the desiring daughter is able to challenge misogynist constructions of femininity within contemporary literature. (shrink)

The classic guide to tapping the practical benefits of an age-old book of wisdom--revised to captivate today's spiritual seekersBased on the revered Chinese philosophy with a 5,000-year-old tradition, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, is rich in revelations. An eminent expert on the powers of the subconscious, Dr. Joseph Murphy opens the guiding force of this ancient text to anyone with an appreciation of the possibilities. With the help of three coins--ordinary pennies will do-- readers will learn to apply (...) their intuitive abilities to receive the I Ching's answers. With a practical outlook, this hands-on guide presents simple techniques for enlisting the I Ching's aid in everyday problem-solving and decision-making. Murphy explains the I Ching hexagram system, revealing its roots in human psychology and the principle of constant change. Demystifying obscure terms and symbols, the author leads the way to consulting the I Ching for clarity and guidance in times of confusion and crisis. By combining basic mathematical formulas with spiritual awareness, readers will realize the miracle-working potential of their own mind and connect with the I Ching's truths. As a result, they'll gain vital insights into questions about career, family, romance, financial security, and life goals. And they'll discover the wonder of genuine peace of mind. SECRETS OF THE I CHING, does not claim to predict the future. But it does provide the tools to mark any future with the promise of greater personal and spiritual fulfillment. (shrink)

A definition of [George] Eliot as renunciatory culture-mother may seem an odd preface to a discussion of Silas Marner since, of all her novels, this richly constructed work is the one in which the empty pack of daughterhood appears fullest, the honey of femininity most unpunished. I want to argue, however, that this “legendary tale,” whose status as a schoolroom classic makes it almost as much a textbook as a novel, examines the relationship between woman’s fate and the structure of (...) society in order to explicate the meaning of the empty pack of daughterhood. More specifically, this story of an adoptive father, an orphan daughter, and a dead mother broods on events that are actually or symbolically situated on the margins or boundaries of society, where culture must enter into a dialectical struggle with nature, in order to show how the young female human animal is converted into the human daughter, wife, and mother. Finally, then, this fictionalized “daughteronomy” becomes a female myth of origin narrated by a severe literary mother uses the vehicle of a half-allegorical family romance to urge acquiescence in the law of the Father.If Silas Marner is not obviously a story about the empty pack of daughterhood, it is plainly, of course, a “legendary tale” about a wanderer with a heavy yet empty pack. In fact, it is through the image of the packman that the story, in Eliot’s own words, “came across my other plans by a sudden inspiration”—and, clearly, her vision of this burdened outsider is a re-vision of the Romantic wanderer who haunts the borders of society, seeking a local habitation and a name.11 I would argue further, though, that Eliot’s depiction of Silas Marner’s alienation begins to explain Ruby Redinger’s sense that the author of this “fluid and metaphoric” story “is” both Eppie, the redemptive daughter, and Silas, the redeemed father. For in examining the outcast weaver’s marginality, this novelist of the “hidden life” examines also her own female disinheritance and marginality.12 11. Eliot to Blackwood, 12 Jan. 1861, quoted in Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self , p. 436. As Susan Garber has suggested to me, the resonant image of the “packman” may be associated with the figure of Bob Jakin in The Mill on the Floss , the itinerant pack-bearing peddler who brings Maggie Tulliver a number of books, the most crucial of which is Tomas à Kempis’ treatise on Christian renunciation .12. Rediner, George Eliot, p. 439; Eliot, “Finale,” Middlemarch, p. 896. Sandra M. Gilbert, now professor of English at the University of California, Davis, will join the Department of English at Princeton University in fall 1985. Her most recent works include a collection of poems, Emily’s Bread , and, coedited with Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English . In addition, she is at work on Mother Rites: Studies in Literature and Maternity, a project from which “Life’s Empty Pack” is drawn, and, with Susan Gubar, on No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, a sequel to their collaborative Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . “Costumes of the Mind: Transvestitism as Metaphor in Modern Literature” appeared in the Winter 1980 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Perhaps the best way to understand Harold Bloom's enigmatic theory of "poetic misprision" is to avoid the immanent critique altogether. It is best described, rather , as a synthesis. Bloom seems to have taken Aristotle's mimesis and linked it to Freud's concept of sublimation,1 with particular emphasis on the role that sublimation plays in "the family romance." Even if one were to hedge a bit and take into account the fact that neo-Freudian re-evaluations of orthodox psychoanalysis have succeeded (...) in extracting the purely sexual component out of the psychodynamics of sublimation, one is still left with the notion of sublimation as anxiety producing. Thus it is that, according to Bloom, the modern poet, in particular, sublimates his imitation of a strong precursor poet. Since the emphasis today is on desexualizing libido, Freud's original sexual vocabulary seems to have survived for its metaphorical value alone; the "unconscious fear of castration," for example, is simply a metaphor for "the poet's fear of ceasing to be a poet," a man's fear of ceasing to be a man. No matter how much we "modernize" Freud, the fact will always remain that the psychoanalytic context is the context of psychopathology: "a variety of the uncanny." · 1. See Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill , pp. 625-26. David D. Cooper is an associate in the department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Using the critical paradigm developed in the present essay, he has written a book on Thomas Merton's poetry. See also: "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression" by Harold Boom in Vol. 2, No. 2; "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again" by Jerome J. McGann in Vol. 2, No. 3. (shrink)

The dispersal of the Romance language family by the Roman Empire is an attractive model for examining the spread of Quechua. Wari and Tiwanaku are often considered the first Andean empires, during the Middle Horizon. Despite being contemporaries sharing the same religious iconography, they were unlikely to have spoken and dispersed the same language. Tiwanaku material culture rather implies ethnic and linguistic diversity, not least in its best-documented colonization in Moquegua. Wari, meanwhile, appears culturally and administratively unified, colonizing (...) and controlling a territory across southern Peru, from Cuzco to Nasca. If Wari was responsible for a language dispersal, then this should represent its core territory; and it is indeed the heart of Southern Quechua. In northern Peru, Wari presence seems less intense, its rule more complex and indirect. The Moche region remained essentially beyond Wari influence, while for the central coast and distant Aguada culture more research is needed. (shrink)

No longer is pregnancy a repulsive or shameful condition in Hollywood films, but an attractive attribute, often enhancing the romantic or comedic storyline of a female character. Kelly Oliver investigates this curious shift and its reflection of changing attitudes toward women's roles in reproduction and the family. Not all representations signify progress. Oliver finds that in many pregnancy films, our anxieties over modern reproductive practices and technologies are made manifest, and in some cases perpetuate conventions curtailing women's freedom. Reading (...) such films as _Where the Heart Is_ (2000), _Riding in Cars with Boys_ (2001), _Palindromes_ (2004), _Saved!_ (2004), _Quinceañera_ (2006), _Children of Men_ (2006), _Knocked Up_ (2007), _Juno_ (2007), _Baby Mama_ (2008), _Away We Go_ (2009), _Precious_ (2009), _The Back-up Plan_ (2010), _Due Date_ (2010), and _Twilight: Breaking Dawn_ (2011), Oliver investigates pregnancy as a vehicle for romance, a political issue of "choice," a representation of the hosting of "others," a prism for fears of miscegenation, and a screen for modern technological anxieties. (shrink)

Dushu carried a most interesting article in its eleventh issue: "Starlight in the Dark of the Night" . In this article the author, Wu Zengding, introduced to the reader the autobiography of Vera, an aristocratic Russian woman of the nineteenth century who planned the assassination of a Russian tsar. The most engaging part of this article is the analysis—or rather, description—of the "enormous fascination" exerted by revolution. I have said many times that there is nothing more fascinating for young people (...) than revolution and love; and, under certain circumstances, the fascination of revolution is more powerful than that of love. Simply put, at least one of the factors that led Vera to take the extreme road of revolution was her fear and rejection of the shi su existence of married women in old Russia. I am reminded of the heroine, Lin Daojing, in Yang Mo's novel Song of Youth, who is rescued by Yu Shuize from a state of hopelessness after fleeing from marriage, and subsequently cohabits with him. She later ruptures with Yu Shuize , not only because of political conflicts, but also because of conflicts in their outlook on life. Had she stayed with Yu, she would inevitably have gone down the road of worldliness—having children, looking after the home, doing the family budget, dealing with birth, old age, illness, and death; she would have become garrulous and overly talkative, and so forth. There would be no more romance, no more drama—and readers would have objected to that. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * Australia, Summer, 2012. …. essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How shall we state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is abidingness.” 1 On return to birthplace I write. Caught between jetlag and surprise, a relentless sun cracks my skin. Upright words fall under cockatoo roars. The attempt to settle, to be attentive, is shaken. Some kind of Dreaming surrounds and elements intrude without consent. Homeless at home. Exhausted, I fight sleep’s hard currents. Their victory would confuse the body clock, so the in-between wins. Half-there — half-awake — here in this place — I am driftwood. Driftwood: wood floating in or washed ashore by a body of water. A severed limb set adrift from the birthing body. Tossed from home it’s cast into processes of wind, water, sand, bacteria, decay and movement. Driftwood is orphaned members at the mercy and agency of weather, currents, submersion, and being thrown into dry world. Driftwood — singular plural. White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different Him got road belong himself. 2 photo: Bronwyn Lay The old man comes from the northern rivers. A while ago, he could no longer pay attention to wage slavery, so retreated north to be with dead redgum that lay abandoned in dry riverbeds. Derived from driftwood peoples tossed here by the sea, he followed the fragile river veins of his birth. He walked along water bodies and through country’s lungs. Some kind of displaced ancestral song compelled his leathered hands to pick up centuries old driftwood from flood plains. It emerged from under muddy creeks, was flung up by salt soaked coves, pushed underground by cracks in the claypan and lay embedded in mud and salinized soil. Smoothed and grooved in equal measure, the branches were marked by an organic alphabet that preceded him. As he held the wood, he touched decomposing circles that started with a blast and never ceased writing into abandoned flesh. When the ute was full the old man returned home having been away with the stuff that ‘growed him up’. His shed filled with red sawdust and the sound of tools at labour. His hands sculptured driftwood. History carved into itinerant skin. I sit opposite the old man. His body no longer holds the repetition of carpentry. He can no longer gift driftwood its detail. Outside redgum bits lie scattered around the fence line and beside the dam. He crouches over an unreliable computer researching the massacres of indigenous peoples that occurred along the same river veins that ‘growed him up’ long ago. Staring into the remnants of frontier resistance that he and I inherit, his eyes nurture fire. He discovers severed limbs and the slicing of tribes. In the ashes of sentences he sifts the lies that smoulder into our histories. In the 30’s the anthropologist Stanner said that due to certain factors — lack of change and isolation — the ideal and real come very close together in indigenous Dreaming. They are a people who were able to defeat history. 3 “If the Ideal and the Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the middle ages and seem increasingly to do this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in-between.” 4 Stanner says Indigenous Dreaming is blackfella thinking. 5 Dreamtime is not ethereal, not utopic, or otherworldly. It’s fused with the real and it’s not mine. I might never understand, but it’s the substance of my home. This here place ‘growed me up’. Is driftwood the unhappy in-between? Is it a radical itinerant written upon by currents? Where are we? The settler restless? photo: Alison Pouliot I return to the bush late one night, tired from high talk in city cafes, to find the old man at his computer. He’s either researching his white farming ancestors, or tracing unrecorded massacres of blackfellas. I laugh, “You know Dad, if you were indigenous you might go out by the dam and sing up your ancestors rather than try find them on a screen.” He peers over his glasses. His stare delivers an ancestral scold. He’s white man. Of course he archives. This is our way. One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysician goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood or spirit of assent, neither despair nor resignation, optimism not pessimism, quietism nor indifference. The mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism and science challenge their own hopes, indeed their beginnings.” 6 The clinamen sometimes comes abstract — the rarefied swerve of possibility. But in the place we gather &mdash where this text has landed — in the heart of settler colony denial — the clinamen reminds of familiar violence and goes maximum. The earth’s swerve. Topography’s tip. Physics gone violent. Here, drift is initiated by the tear of flesh, scurvy voyages, frontier blood and the deracination from belonging. Here, war precedes drift. We all got tossed. Here. Pay attention. The country has its own gaze. ‘Lest we forget’. The seasonal turn on aborescent substances starts with a fall, an upwards rupture, a drop, a cut, a storm, a violence, a loss, forced migration, refugees, agricultural imperialism, settler wheat and poisoned rations. Pay attention to aftermath debris. Don’t drift too far from the real. History hasn’t settled into the water. It still tosses limbs back and forth. Surrounded by the backdrop of Dreaming country the old man archives and dreams. Both ways of settling into the real. But lest we forget, time, in this place, has no textual tick — tock. Our bodies know this, even though we persist with shipwreck illusions. It’s difficult being here. Here. Pay inattention. I walk through eucalyptus, over dried out clay pans and under kookaburras. It’s been two years in-between. This time country speaks strong underfoot. Forget books, forget texts, forget other lands and times, beginning and end. Be here. All falls raw. Leaves drop and refuse to compost. Bark untethers quick. Light denudes worlds. The heated horizon melts monoliths. It’s enough to make Cartesians shiver. Awake. Refuse the temptation to run. Have enough courage to drift into here. Love with a gum tree. Stand with her whole and dissolving. She moves light between our limbs, tossing them to wind. She — the original romance — is the dream that dares touch flesh and reaches over nightmares with elemental desire. I gaze and lose me. There’s no distance. The land that ‘growed me up’ speaks with symbiotic breath. There’s no division, no separation, no other. The gum is plastic arborescence. You be my body for me, always were. …..but I wake to driftwood histories and recall slaughters. Drifted, wicked fellow citizen — the other is someone else’s blind sleep. Betrayal maintains the other as mine. Archives reveal this place doesn’t belong to me. Body articulates that it became here. Gumtree cares not………her arms take me in anyway. “Like all men he is a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his metier, and in some sense — his fate is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, making sense out of social relations among men living together.” 7 The old man excavates seven generations of settler ancestors. They’re an ordinary lot with written-upon skin. He records genocides that occurred alongside his peoples fertility. Bodies rise from riverbeds like sovereign sacrifices. It hurts. It disrupts. He labours at the past with gestures that might go unnoticed in a country suffocated by rich amnesia. Inside walls, he seems attentive to historical details. Outside he seems inattentive to time, lost to us and embedded in a family of active matter — the bush. His driftwood skin appears around my eyes - grooves of experience, the rush of cruel sun, the push of blind winds, and the love of everything. The sovereign’s reluctant children are thrown here by, with and through blood, but country gets in and sculpts us here. photo: Chris Corrigan “But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself.” 8 The kangaroo family appears at dusk. When the sun is soft I follow the old man into the back paddock. Children skip behind us. In-between generations, I step into the old man’s driftwood leanings. My feet find traces of his understanding – the archivist that reads trees. Here, on home dirt, inattention and attention collapse as we wander into where we are. The roo family gaze at us. Through the grass the old man’s wooden finger articulates kin’s details. He points to the head male, the mother holding a joey in pouch and the young warriors side by side. My children, quieter than ever, meet the laser - eyed silence of another family. In half-light Dad, me, and the kids mirror the kangaroo constellation and stand gentle together. At the bushblock’s limit we encounter ancestral desires. White peoples are subject to driftwood histories. We’re severed limbs attempting to fuse here now, with what was, only to discover our skin becomes racked and embedded with the weather. Into the shelter and fissures of this difficult and ambiguous inheritance, I fall into dream light until balance saturates. Light breaks when the kangaroos move. They bounce someplace else without effort or impact. We turn and tread through the dark towards home. It’s time to sleep. Driftwood skin covers the country. Dreaming is still. photo: Bronwyn Lay NOTES W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays , (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 72. Ibid., 56. Stanner is recalling one intelligent old man who said to him, “with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking in verse.” Ibid., 60. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 59.  . 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A life without liberty and material resources is not a good life. Equally, a life devoid of meaningful social relationships—such as friendships, family attachments, and romances—is not a good life. From this it is tempting to conclude that just as individuals have rights to liberty and material resources, they also have rights to access meaningful social relationships. I argue that this conclusion can be defended only in a narrow set of cases. ‘Pure’ social relationship deprivation—that is, deprivation that is (...) not caused, or accompanied, by deficits in liberties and material resources— mostly generates demands of private beneficence. I suggest that social relationship deprivation is unjust, hence a rights violation, only when it is due to factors—such as one’s race—that are irrelevant to one’s being a good participant in social relationships. I thus conclude that access to meaningful social relationships is not a fundamental concern for theories of justice. (shrink)

This article analyzes selected short stories in Cecelia Ahern’s thirty-narrative collection Roar to see how the perspectives of posthuman and postfeminist critique can be incorporated via the common dystopic umbrella into the mainstream female readership of romance literature. The dystopic worlds created by Ahern in Roar portray inequality and power imbalances with regard to gender and sex. The protagonists are mostly middle-aged women whose family and personal lives are either regulated by dystopic realities or acquire a “dystopic” dimension, (...) the solutions to which are provided by, among other tropes, “posthuman” transformations. Roar introduces other-than-human elements, mostly corporeal alterations, in which the female bodies of Ahern’s characters become de-formed and re-formed beyond androcentric systems of value. The article raises the question of whether feminist and, to some extent, “posthuman” approaches, need to be popularized in such an abridged way as Ahern does in her volume. The answer depends upon the identification of the target audience and their expectations. Ahern’s Roar represents popular literature intended to be sold to as many readers as possible, regardless of their education, state of knowledge, etc. Viewed from that perspective, what some critics could perceive as the collection’s structural weaknesses constitutes its utmost marketing asset. The essay argues that despite not being a structurally innovative work of art, Ahern’s book fulfils the basic requirements of the popular fiction genre, intermittently providing some extra, literary gratification and popularizing rudimentary elements of the posthuman and postfeminist thought. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet , 1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none of us (...) in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. But Garcia was not just the subject of rumor, being already well known to the French public as a writer of fiction. His debut novel, La meilleure part des hommes , 2 was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore 3 and has already appeared in English as Hate: A Romance . 4 His follow-up novel, Mémoires de la jungle , 5 made clever use of a chimpanzee narrator. Nor was Garcia only published as a novelist before last November: his philosophical study L’Image 6 had already appeared when the author was just twenty-six, a year before he was crowned by the muses at the historic Café de Flore. And then in 2011, just months before the appearance of Forme et objet , Garcia published a widely distributed work entitled Nous, animaux et humains , 7 with its focus on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about animals. Given this prolific and versatile track record, an optimistic scenario might envisage the young Garcia as one of those combined literary/philosophical talents who appear intermittently in France across the centuries: Jean-Paul Sartre is merely the most famous recent case. While more time is needed to see how Garcia will channel his impressive mental energies, Forme et objet displays such breadth of insight that its author has a good chance to emerge as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. If we accept Aristotle’s dictum that the peak mental age is fifty-one, then to read Garcia’s massive book is to gain some idea of what European philosophy might look like in the futuristic-sounding 2030’s. The present article is confined to Forme et objet . At 486 pages, the work is obviously daunting in size. Indeed, it is even longer than it sounds, given that many of its early sections are printed in a smaller typeface to designate them as supplemental commentary to the main flow of the argument. But while the length of the book reportedly led to delays in French publication, and will probably slow the inevitable appearance of an English translation, the length of the book should not deter interested readers– much of it results from Garcia’s teacherly writing style. Whereas Quentin Meillassoux’s prose displays an arctic economy of means, Garcia’s style is reminiscent of the repeated lessons of oral classroom proceedings. Rarely is the reader given fewer than three or four chances to master an idea before the author moves on to the next. In practice, the style feels welcoming rather than long-winded. Otherwise, the structure of Forme et objet is surprisingly simple. There is a useful Introduction of less than twenty pages. Then comes Book I: Formally , running to approximately 135 pages. Here Garcia outlines the most basic features of a thing “no matter what it is,” or n’importe quoi , an everyday phrase that Garcia shapes into a technical term. This part of the book feels at times like a more amiable version of Hegel’s Science of Logic , a parallel emphasized further by the threefold articulation of its theme: 1. Thing; 2. Thing and World; 3. Being and Understanding. This is followed by the much longer Book II: Objectively , totaling more than 300 pages. It contains sixteen essay-like meditations on specific kinds of objects—including time, animals, humans, history, gender, and death. Here each chapter rolls smoothly into the next, making this second part of the book feel more like a different work of Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit . But these are merely analogies. Garcia is no Hegelian, even if the book contains a few dialectical flourishes that seem to reflect his early enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School. Forme et objet ends with a six-page Coda, followed by the usual page of acknowledgments. In what follows, I will briefly summarize each of these four parts of the book before ending with some more general remarks. Before doing so, it will be useful to situate Garcia biographically (as much as I am able) and philosophically. Though Toulouse is his native city, his formative years were spent largely in Algeria, where his family has deep roots. During our sole private conversation, Garcia mentioned that his parents are professors of literature. 8 As a student of philosopher Garcia flourished so early that many of his current ideas date to his teenaged years: “There are sentences in Forme et objet that I wrote when I was seventeen,” he said in response to a question on that cold night on the Canal St.-Martin. I recalled that remark when reading his brilliant account, late in the book, of the central role of adolescence in contemporary culture. While many prodigies blow through their formal academic training without serious obstruction, Garcia’s student memories are rich in tales of isolation and struggle, though equally rich in gratitude for a half-dozen or so exceptional teachers who provided the intellectual space he needed: Meillassoux and Alain Badiou are simply two of the most prominent figures on that list. Though there are many points of agreement between Garcia’s philosophical position and my own, he not only reached his position years before reading my work, 9 he arrived along a rather different path: not through phenomenology, but via the Frankfurt School, which may be one of the reasons for his profound fascination with aesthetics. Garcia’s cultural background is as broad as one could wish: he is no less informed about punk rock and European football leagues than about the spiritualist roots of Bergson’s philosophy. Curious about everything and contemptuous towards nothing, Garcia can be expected to write insightfully on dozens of topics in the years to come. Given that his philosophy is so personally tantalizing in its agreements and disagreements with my own, and given the great internal richness of Forme et objet itself, the present review is no better than a first effort at coming to terms with the challenges posed by this minstrel from the rising generation. This is especially intriguing for older Generation X’ers like me, since confrontation with the younger generation is one of the many themes treated insightfully in Garcia’s book. 1. Introduction Garcia begins in defense of a so-called “flat ontology,” in which all things are equally things. While Roy Bhaskar 10 used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda 11 (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, 12 the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, 13 and my own critique 14 of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects 15 and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.” 16 But for Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. Even so, he always remains an advocate of a flat ontology. Insofar as everything is equally something, no matter what it is ( n’importe qui ), everything is equally a thing, equally solitary in its relation with world. This is why his book abounds in those long lists of random, ontologically equivalent entities that Ian Bogost has playfully termed “Latour Litanies.” 17 The first litany in Garcia’s book runs as follows: “We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things.” (7) Yet Garcia is frankly dualistic; his flat ontology only lasts until page 159 and the end of Book I (entitled “Formally”), which deals entirely with things that are equally things. Thereafter Garcia turns his attention from things to objects, which are not flat in the least, but engage in hierarchical relations with one another. In agreement with both DeLanda and the speculative realists, Garcia proclaims that his book “proposes to put to the test a thought about things rather than a thought about our thought about things .” (8) Just as ducklings are “imprinted” (9) after hatching and treat the first creature they see as their mother, philosophers are imprinted by the idea with which they begin. Hence, philosophies that begin with human access will never truly find their way back to things. This makes Garcia rather suspicious of twentieth century philosophy, since “the twentieth century—to which in some way this work proposes to bid adieu—has been a period of theorizing modes of access to things rather than things...” (9) Among other possible benefits of the philosophy of things that Garcia proposes, it is fully able to account for thought as a special variant of things, while the reverse is not possible.(10) In Book I of Forme et objet , Garcia’s “things” are so flat, so de-determined, that he is forced to renounce some of the most basic features ascribed to things by most realists. As he tells us in his foreboding third footnote: “We will maintain that the solitude [of things] is less than unity, less than identity, and that it does not imply acceptance (any more than refusal) of the principle of non-contradiction.” (11) In a contemporary world cluttered with too many things, Garcia’s flat and formal plane provides us with some breathing room: “The formal plan of thought enables or re-enables us to cut short all accumulation—whether of knowing, experience, or action—by a simplicity, an impoverished surface...” (13) As Garcia says elsewhere in responding to a Deleuzian critic of the book, his starting point in flat ontology is designed to obstruct the claims of both analytic philosophy and Hegelianism: “Hence, this work seeks to protect each thing—real, imaginary, inconsistent, contradictory—both against Ockham’s Razor and against the Aufhebung or dialectical process.” 18 Yet contrary to the equalizing spirit of many flat ontologies, “we will add to our formal ontology of the equal, an objective ontology of the unequal.” (13) But initially, Garcia joins all flat ontologists in holding that everything is irreducible: “this irreducibility, which we will term the ‘chance’ of each thing... also marks the refusal of a positive thought that reduces things exclusively to natural things, or social things, or historical things, etc.” (15) This irreducible “chance” of a thing emerges as an important technical term in the book, always paired with its inverted brother, the “price to pay” ( prix à payer ). On pages 17-19, we find the only diagrams in the book. What they illustrate is that Garcia wishes to avoid two equally dangerous extremes. The first is the philosophy of substance, featuring the thing-in-itself as a mighty river fed by attributes as if by subordinate tributary streams. This model can be found in many of the classic thinkers of West and East alike. In it, “there is obviously a hierarchization between that which is dragged towards something other than itself, and this other which serves it as an ontological support while supporting its proper being.” (16) For Garcia, the second extreme worth avoiding is the philosophy of events: “One thus conceives trajectories of being, identified as events, facts, powers, intensities, or intentionality. These vectors of being come first, bearing and supporting being, displacing it, but without ever finding a stopping point, a buffer, an objective consistency.” (17) The first model gives us a thing too wrapped up in itself, too compact . This word “compact” (the French and the English are the same) is another technical term for Garcia. But if the “compact” model of things leads us to something more than things, the philosophy of events gives us less than things, by dissolving them into a play of vectors. Garcia’s alternative lies midway between these two extremes: Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. And a thing is nothing other than the difference between the enters and the being that comes out. Thus, the circuit of being is never halted. In the thing, there is never the thing-in-itself. And the thing is never in-itself, but outside of itself. Nonetheless, being is not eventally “pollinated” by vectors: it possesses an objecting halting-point... (19) This single idea is the key to Garcia’s book: the thing is neither a self-contained durable lump nor some sort of evental flux. Instead, the thing is the difference between its various components and its relations with its environment. Or stated differently: “the price to pay for this disposition is a circulation of being that systematically distinguishes two senses of things: that which is in the thing , and that in which the thing is , or that which encompasses it and that which it encompasses,” (19) translating comprendre here as “encompass.” 19 In a beautiful description of a piece of black slate, Garcia sums up the various minerals, qualities, and shapes that compose [ comprend ] it, and calls them “that which is in the thing,” (20) noting that this tells us nothing about “that in which [the slate] is”—namely, all the various situations in which the black slate can be found. Instead, the slate is the difference between these two: the most characteristic principle of Garcia’s philosophy. 2. Formally Book One of Forme et objet , “Formally,” is concerned with the formal equality of all things in a flat world. “Two questions mark the boundaries of reflection: of what is everything composed [ composé ], and: what do all things compose?” (27) Looking downward, we wish to know what everything is made of; looking upward, we want to know the ultimate result of the combination of all things. Here we must turn our attention to the thing n’importe quoi— no matter what it is. (30) Anything with finite qualities is obviously too specific to be relevant to global ontological questions. To an equal degree, something possessing all qualities (think of Whitehead’s God) 20 would not be n’importe quoi either, since it would still be too definite, even if incredibly vast. The same holds for contradictions, since these all differ from each other. The square circle, the non-white black white, and the non-city city are all too distinct to count as the thing no matter what it is. The n’importe quoi must be devoid of all specific qualities, including contradictory ones. In one of the more intriguing points in his book, so reminiscent of Meinong, Garcia proclaims that “the ‘no matter what it is’ is neither a reality nor an abstract construction, nor both of these at once; the ‘no matter what it is’ is simply the plane of equality of that which is real, that which is possible, that which is inexistent, that which is past, that which is impossible, that which is true, that which is false, that which is bad.”(39-40) Since everything has two faces, it would be a grievous mistake to focus on just one of them at the expense of the other, as physicalism or materialism do when reducing the world to minuscule physical underpinnings. For scientistic materialism, “it is either atoms, particles, or fields of force... which are the things.” (47-48) Moreover, “these more-than-things are accompanied by less-than-things: for example, ideas or facts of consciousness are determined by the state of matter and are not autonomous things, but manifestations reduced to secondary effects of material processes...” (48) On this point, Garcia’s position is in complete accord with my own critique of undermining and overmining. 21 Where we disagree is that Garcia is more deeply suspicious of the notion of substance, which I view as salvageable with a few needed changes, while Garcia sees this operation as hopeless: “A substance, in the history of philosophy, is the more-than-thing par excellence.” (51) Another agreement between our positions is visible when Garcia claims (correctly, in my opinion) “that it is vain to distinguish between things which are material and those which are not.” (52) Yet we also find an even more important disagreement, since for Garcia withdrawal cannot be the quality of a thing. Instead, the absence of a thing is simultaneous with it, embodied in all that is not it– the absence of the sculpture of a woman is to be found in the mold that appears at the same time as it, and thus withdrawal must be viewed as an “event” rather than as something pertaining to an object. For Garcia, nothing withdraws beyond access. Since we must distinguish between “that which is something” and “that which something is,” and since the former is identified with “no matter what it is is” and the latter with “ not no matter what it is,” we can say that “everything is thus a milieu, a fragile link between ‘no matter what it is’ and ‘ not no matter what it is.’” (62) And here we find Garcia’s critique of the thing-in-itself: “A thing is never defined en bloc . We can affirm that a thing is this or that, but that does not suffice. It is still necessary to state precisely that which is this thing .” (62) Stated differently, “something is not in itself : for that which is in the thing is not the thing, and that in which the thing is is not the thing.” (62) And here Garcia and I, facing the same evidence, draw opposite conclusions. For me, the fact that nothing can be identified with either its components or its concrete location means that the thing must be something in-itself distinct from both of these. Yet for Garcia, to be in-itself would mean to be identified with just one of these two extreme terms, and hence the thing can only be the difference between them. Garcia is equally suspicious of the classical tendency to view “unity” as a property of the thing, since in his eyes unity is too relational a property to belong to things. (65) While specific things are situated determinately with respect to other things, we are still speaking here about the thing no matter what it is, and this can be viewed only in terms of solitude, which all things share: a human being, a hand, or a chair or all equally things insofar as they are on their own , not insofar as they are one . (64) A thing is alone, and relates only to the one thing that is not another thing: world. In a striking parallel to my own argument for a partial revival of occasionalism, Garcia tells us that “the things communicate only by their solitude: it is because everything is equally on its own in the world that things can be together, enmeshed in one another.” (67) Alone in their solitude, things all relate to world, which serves as a mediator allowing them to become mixed up in one another. As we have seen, one reason that nothing can be in itself is because everything is in something else. For Garcia, “to be in something and to be something are equivalent.” (69) Stated more broadly, “being is thus the difference between the two aspects of each thing: that which is it, and that which it is.” (70) And even more vividly: “a thing is almost like a sack: there is that which one puts in the sack and that which remains outside the sack.” (70) But not quite like a sack, “since a thing is not a thin skin or film. Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between that which is this thing and that which thing is, between content and container.” (71) Nothing can be in-itself because everything is two selves at once. For example, we cannot say that our self is defined by our consciousness: “Everything has a self because nothing is in itself. The self is not the quality of that which is related to itself (which is conscious, for example) or which thinks itself related to itself. Nonetheless, for an entity called ‘conscious’ to be related to itself, it is necessary that this very relation should be another thing than the self to which it is related.” (71) Consciousness cannot be the self, precisely because it is other than that of which it is conscious. Nothing is able to grasp itself. The self is “the function by which being and composition [ compréhension ] are mutually excluded...” (72) The self is “the point of shadow of everything that projects some light...” (72) The in-itself faces two opposite dangers: “For something to be in-itself is to be a self. Something which is a self flies out through one of its two sides... Stated differently, being in-itself is simply the possibility of a double failure.” (73) The in-itself can be termed compact : “There remains to us a means of thinking that which does not fully enter into the world, though without exiting from it. This means is what we call the compact.” (76) In a sense, the compact is the opposite of the world. For in the case of the world, everything enters it and it enters nothing; as for the compact, it enters the world (since it is something, after all) while nothing enters it. (77) The compact marks the presence of the impossible in the world. (78) It is not impossible, but possible only on the condition that it fails. (78) The time has come to speak of where a thing is located. “The sole condition of a thing is that of being in another thing than itself, and thus in another thing than something.” (78) A condition is “that which determines something, that which forms something, that in which something is.” (78) As for humans, “the condition of someone is his situation; my social condition is that which socially determines me, my place and my function...” (79) More generally, “to be conditioned is to find oneself reduced to that in which one is.” (79) Everything is conditioned, but nothing is reducible to this condition. To determine the condition of something is to determine in what it is. A thing is located in that which contradicts it, just as a statue exists in its mold, which is precisely that which it is not. Since the thing is finite and definite, its condition or form must be infinite and indefinite. That in which all things are is the world, which Garcia also terms “the whole.” (81) “To try to be in-itself is to attempt to remain outside the world. And indeed, to try to be in-itself is only a path of entry into the world.” (83) For Garcia, “the world is not the pre-existent container of the things it contains, a priori , nor the construction by the mind of a fictional ensemble of all things, a posteriori .” (85) Instead, the world is simultaneous with all things; the two always go together. The world cannot be a determinate world, such as the physical universe or mathematical space, since these are already too specific and limited. “Every determinate world, which is in fact a universe , is a ‘big thing’ [ grosse chose ]: it is a set, however vast, of composite things which itself embodies a thing.” (85) Every determinate world is really just a “big thing.” Stated differently, “it is nothing other than a balanced milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes.” (85) We generally picture the world as a physical univer. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for the distinctness of the 2013 Gezi uprisings from other anti-austerity protests. With a materialist feminist eye on the third-term AKP government's conservative authoritarianism, I explore the causal links among patriarchal, racist biopolitics, heteronormative family values and increasing austerity measures. My broader analytical goal is to demonstrate the centrality of moral politics to uneven, security-based neoliberal regulations across markets, public spaces, and civic expression in and beyond Turkey. Second, I zoom in on the mothers’ (...) rallies and gendered, ethnic acts of mourning to analyse the performative constitution of multiple publics during the protests. What exclusions have the participants produced in the name of inclusion? How can a performance paradigm help us understand the contradictory uses of space among and against the protestors, and more broadly, the relevance of embodied dissent to different visions of social justice? To deepen our intersectional feminist analysis, I suggest taking performances seriously, from human chains to soundscapes of resistance, stillness, and brutality; and from eclectic dance forms to architectural disruptions. Attending to the uprisings’ fault-lines and radical contributions, I also caution against ‘romancing resistance’. Hope with qualms is what remains. (shrink)

The first look at the philosophy behind Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight series Bella and Edward, and their family and friends, have faced countless dangers and philosophical dilemmas in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels. This book is the first to explore them, drawing on the wisdom of philosophical heavyweights to answer essential questions such as: What do the struggles of "vegetarian" vampires who control their biological urge for human blood say about free will? Are vampires morally absolved if they kill only (...) animals and not people? From a feminist perspective, is Edward a romantic hero or is he just a stalker? Is Jacob "better" for Bella than Edward? As absorbing as the Meyer novels themselves, Twilight and Philosophy: Gives you a new perspective on Twilight characters, storylines, and themes Helps you gain fresh insights into the Twilight novels and movies Features an irresistible combination of vampires, romance, and philosophy Twilight and Philosophy is a must-have companion for every Twilight fan, whether you're new to the series or have followed it since the beginning. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophycollects 39 original chapters from prominent philosophers on the nature, meaning, value, and predicaments of love, presented in a unique framework that highlights the rich variety of methods and traditions used to engage with these subjects. This volume is structured around important realms of human life and activity, each of which receives its own section: I. Family and Friendship II. Romance and Sex III. Politics and Society IV. Animals, Nature, and the Environment (...) V. Art, Faith, and Meaning VI. Rationality and Morality VII. Traditions: Historical and Contemporary. This last section includes chapters treating love as a subject in both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions. The contributions, all appearing in print here for the first time, are written to be accessible and compelling to non-philosophers and philosophers alike; and the volume as a whole encourages professional philosophers, teachers, students, and lay readers to rethink standard constructions of philosophical canons. (shrink)

Introduction: how John the Baptist kept his head, or my life in film philosophy -- A philosophical perspective. Why not realize your world? -- Silence and stasis -- Film and modernity -- André Bazin as Cavellian realist -- On Stanley Cavell's band wagon -- What becomes of the camera in the world on film? -- Studies in criticism. "I never thought I would sink so low as to become an actor": John Barrymore in Twentieth century -- James Stewart in Vertigo (...) -- Hats off to George Cukor! -- Woody Allen's New York -- Blood is thicker than water: the family in Hitchcock -- Space and speech in the films of Yasujiro Ozu -- Romance, eroticism and the camera's gaze in Jean Genet's Un chant d'amour -- Face to face with Chantal Akerman -- Precious memories in philosophy and film -- Seeing the light in The tree of life -- A film that is also a handshake: philosophy in the films of the Dardenne Brothers -- Justifying justified -- Documentary film in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s -- Sometimes daddies don't talk about things like that -- Jean Rouch as film artist -- Dancing with Gardner: Robert Gardner's films on art -- Dead birds re-encountered: a journey of return -- Notes on the essays. (shrink)

The subject of sexuality among elderly patients with dementia was examined, focusing on two main aspects: the sexual behaviour of institutionalized elderly people with dementia; and the reactions of other patients, staff and family members to this behaviour. The behaviour was found to be mostly heterosexual and ranged from love and caring to romance and outright eroticism. Reactions varied, being accepting of love and care but often objecting to erotic behaviour. Understanding of the sexual needs of elderly people (...) should become an integral part of the training and continued education of health care staff, thus helping to resolve conflicts and clarify common misconceptions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Benjamin I. Schwartz (1916-1999)Hoyt Cleveland TillmanBenjamin Sadie Schwartz was born on December 12, 1916,1 to Hyman and Jennie Weinberg Schwartz. In the wake of the Depression, this struggling family moved from the immigrant section of East Boston (near what became Logan Airport) to Orchestra, a working-class section of the city. Ben's intelligence and dedication to learning earned him the opportunity to study at Boston Latin, the city's premier (...) high school for talented youths, and he won a scholarship to attend Harvard College in 1934. Because the collegiate life of Harvard's house system was inaccessible to him, Ben commuted daily from home and ate his sack lunches with the other "townies" on the steps outside the buildings in Harvard Yard. The nationalizing experiences of being Jewish and poor surely enhanced his sensitivity to tensions within cultures and sharpened the critical edge of his reflections on elites and their ideologies. Moreover, his own experiences enabled an empathy with economically and culturally disadvantaged students, for he generously extended himself especially to such students during his long teaching career at Harvard, from 1950 through 1987. Indeed, his office door was always open to students, and no one needed an appointment to come to discuss ideas with him. Furthermore, his critical concerns about contemporary trends in society and polity continued to be central to his life as an engaged intellectual even after he had retired from formal teaching duties.After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1938 with a major in Romance Languages and Literatures, he went on to earn a master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1940. Unable to find a regular teaching position, he worked as a substitute teacher. Blessed with an enduring and profound spirituality, he considered becoming a rabbi. World War II intervened to change his life. Serving as a cryptanalyst from 1942 to 1946 in the Signal Corps, he decoded Japanese military cables; and he worked in 1946-1947 as a censor of the Japanese press during the beginning phase of the American Occupation. He rose to the rank of captain. With the educational benefits extended to veterans, he returned to Harvard, where he initially sought to focus on Buddhism, but his professors discouraged him on the grounds that the field required too many Asian languages for someone to begin in his thirties. He was admonished to focus on modern China, for that field required only that he supplement the Japanese language, which he had gained during his military service, with a reading knowledge of Chinese. He threw himself enthusiastically into reading both modern Chinese and what he referred to as "outbidding classical Chinese" because he loved to read texts to explore cultures and encounter peoples. Within less than three years, he not only earned a master's [End Page 183] in East Asian Studies and a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern Languages but also became, in 1950, a Harvard instructor in history and government. Rising quickly through the ranks, he was promoted to assistant professor in 1951, associate professor in 1956, and professor in 1960. Moreover, he became widely regarded as "the scholar's scholar" at Harvard's East Asian Research Center.His first book, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Harvard University Press, 1951), was a revised version of his doctoral dissertation. Modern China scholars have in later years hailed this pioneering work for going against the tide of American political assumptions about Soviet Russian control of the communist movement in China. He demonstrated that Mao had defied Soviet orders and deviated from Soviet plans in struggling to gain power in China; furthermore, Ben also suggested that communism was devolving through expansion. Establishing an intellectual orientation that informed his later work, Ben was also using texts from a movement to explore the conscious life of leading figures and their personalities in the context of concrete historical circumstances and contingencies in order to determine how ideas related to actions. Providing translated texts for others to join the exploration of the interaction between ideology and behavior, he was one of three compilers of A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (Harvard, 1952). He... (shrink)

Even in scientific usage there are terms that we believe we understand and when we try to pinpoint what they refer to we notice that these terms do not have a precise meaning. This applies, in linguistics, to the term Indo-European. Mostly, when used as an adjective, it seems to apply to those languages that derive, hypothetically, from a disappeared idiom which some scholars for nearly two hundred years have been trying to reconstruct. Thus, it is said that Sanskrit, Greek (...) and Latin are Indo-European languages. When this epithet is applied to French it causes surprise. From a comparative viewpoint, French is usually seen as a Romance language and only Romance languages taken together or, better said, Latin from which they derive, seem to merit the epithet. When used as a noun, “Indo-European” may designate the disappeared language itself. But serious scholars give it a precision in this case like commun in French, proto in English or Ur- in German. Does this imply that we may designate as Indo-European the sum of the individual languages of this family, whether they still exist or have disappeared? One may indeed take a chance and do it, but not without startling or even shocking one's public. (shrink)

It is a truism that affectivity has been by and large neglected in Western philosophy in recent centuries, while analyses of knowledge, especially rational thought, abound. Classical American thought, which frequently takes community as a main theme, is something of an exception. But the fact remains that books with titles like this one's and Solomon's earlier The Passions raise hopes that a neglected and important philosophical topic is to receive some of the attention that it deserves. Solomon's Love: Emotion, Myth (...) and Metaphor, following a reverse order of the topics mentioned in its title, examines the metaphors and myths common to views of love in our culture, with a view to a philosophical reconstruction of the concept of romance. The main thesis continues that of his earlier book, viz., that emotions in general are actions. In Solomon's view, romantic love is not something that happens to us, that we undergo or "fall into," but something that we actively do. It is a free and conscious decision to give meaning to our experience by constructing, with a beloved, a "loveworld" in which we strive for a definable shared self. Choice, says Solomon, a feature of all emotions, is the most striking characteristic of love. Love has, like any choice, its reasons and conditions. It is a choice that our culture values highly because it enables us to achieve, in a society marked by public role-playing, individuality, and mobility, the stable identity of selves that would otherwise be impossible. Earlier societies provided these through stable family life and social order. (shrink)

Like many sociocultural phenomena in Brazil, popular music, as everyone knows, is the result of a meeting of influences. It could almost be said that it is born a cross-breed, given the half-European, half-African origins of its best-known first genres, lundu, choro and maxixe. As a result of its history it comes under the sign of the Cannibalism, the metaphor invented by modernist writers in the 1920s to refer to the ‘ritual devouring’ by which Brazil assimilated foreign values and made (...) them its own.Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil readily used the concept of Cannibalism at the end of the 1960s, when they founded Tropicalismo, which claimed a mixture of genres, styles and arts as its basis, and married international pop music and Brazilian traditions, electric guitars and berimbau. Tropicalismo as such only lasted for a few months, but the ideas which it promoted profoundly marked contemporary Brazilian culture. Caetano Veloso returned to the history of this movement in Verdade Tropical, an autobiographical work in which he reveals his thoughts on a number of subjects close to his heart: music, the cinema, masters/teachers, friends, family, love, sexuality freedom, prison, exile, books, language, etc. For this author, composer, performer, actor, director, poet and prose writer, inveterate and voracious reader and incorrigible chatterbox, anything to do with human beings is fair game. For Caetano loves words, and loves to talk about words. As early as the acknowledgements page he praises Unamuno, the author, according to him, of comments which are “the most moving that a foreigner has ever written about the Portuguese language”. And in a chapter entitled ‘Língua’ he mentions not only the songs he has written in English and his interest in the Anglo-Saxon language, but also his attachment to Romance languages in general and Portuguese in particular. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 80-98 [Access article in PDF] Musical Spirituality:Reflections on Identity and the Ethics of Embodied Aesthetic Experience in/and the Academy Deanne Bogdan Music in/and My Life Several years ago, I attended a Pontifical High Mass at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. It was the feast of the Epiphany, a public holiday in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of Austria. 1 A "lapsed" Catholic (...) myself, my intention as part of the congregation that day was not primarily one of worship as it was to listen to a performance of the Pauckenmesse of Joseph Haydn, complete with soloists, full choir, and orchestra (in overcoats), including, of course, timpani.As I stepped from the brilliant winter morning into the narthex of that gothic splendor, the pungency of the incense propelled me into Proustian recollections of growing up female, Catholic, and Italian-Canadian in the cathedral parish in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada's steel town. My mother and father, first generation Italian-Canadians, whose own parents had emigrated as teen-agers, had been partners in a corner grocery located in another part of the city that was largely professional and white-Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Eager to assimilate (they never spoke Italian to my sister or me, and we never learned the language), my parents realized early on that their most valuable legacy to their two daughters would be the advantages of a solid education, religious and secular. For them that meant enrolling us in the local co-educational Catholic elementary school. Later we attended a convent secondary school as day students, and were the only members of our extended family, male or female, to attend university.It was memories of those elementary school years that were conjured up for me that crisp January morning at St. Stephen's. (In hindsight, I am struck by the synchronicity 2 of the fact that my original surname is Di Stefano, or rather "Distefan," as it had become in its anglicized form). 3 For a [End Page 80] whole complex of reasons, I identified strongly with my parochial school and the church that sheltered/shadowed it — a soaring pseudo-gothic structure reputed to have been replicated, stone by stone, wood carving by hand wood carving, from some European cathedral. The romance of that basilica — The Cathedral of Christ the King — its "daughter" school, and the priests and nuns who were our guides and teachers became my second family for the whole of my grade school education. For me, being at school was like a recognition scene. As Italian-American literary theorist Marianna de Marco Torgovnick writes: When I was a child, school was...a light-filled, wide awake world in which fear did not erupt except on rare occasions. I saw school as a place where I was valued for my intelligence, even though I was female — and this probably had something to do with my absence of fear there. I quite naturally chose to stay in school through college and into graduate school. It's in these relatively late years that I first became fully conscious of how even within the world of school I was and always would be female. 4My identification with my church/school centered around my musical development, which began at age four when the piano I grew up on arrived like a beacon in our home. Coterminous with my eager entry into first grade, piano lessons were begun with Sister Cecile, a somewhat nervous, gentle nun predisposed to mystical experience, who shepherded me through exams and recitals until high school. Because I could sight-read fairly well, I was regularly pulled out of class to accompany soloists and dancing groups rehearsing for annual Christmas and St. Patrick's Day concerts. Something about this made me feel special; I both reveled in and felt isolated by my difference from my classmates. I had found a sense of community through my music, and enjoyed a feeling of security in the knowledge that my schoolwork was strong enough... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cervantes in Italy:Christian Humanism and the Visual Impact of Renaissance RomeFernando CervantesToward the end of 1569, shortly after his twenty-second birthday, Miguel de Cervantes arrived in Rome to serve as chamberlain to the young monsignor Giulio de Acquaviva, soon to be made a cardinal by Pope Pius V.1 The event marked the beginning of a six-year sojourn about which surprisingly little is known with certainty. From scattered semiautobiographical references (...) we can infer that Cervantes traveled widely and that he developed a particular fondness for Italy. We know for sure that he fought bravely against the Turks at the battle of Lepanto in 1571, where he received wounds that rendered his left arm useless for the rest of his life, and that he remained in service as a soldier, based in Italy, until his ill-fated attempt to return to Spain in 1575. Ten years later, in the dedication of his pastoral romance La Galatea to Ascanio Colonna, he reminded his dedicatee that the reverence he had for him did not only stem from having served under his illustrious father, the famous general Marco Antonio Colonna, but also from the many things that he had heard Cardinal Acquaviva say, "like prophesies," about him in Rome. There follows a brief encomium about the "noble virtues," "magnificence," "goodness," and "Christianity" that sustain the "clear and generous line" of the Colonnas, known to all for the "virtuous and heroic deeds" that have been their mark since time immemorial.2 Some of Cervantes's best lyric poetry dates from these years. In it, as in the rest of his work, the unmistakable mark of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Sannazaro, Ariosto, and Bembo, to name but the most explicit ones, leaves us in little doubt about his genuine love of Italian literature.For good reasons, modern biographers have been loath to take these scattered [End Page 325] references too candidly. Can we, for example, assume that Cervantes had more than a very superficial acquaintance with the Colonnas and the Acquavivas? Could a writer still widely regarded as a self-taught, untutored mind realistically have attracted the favors of some of the most illustrious Roman and Neapolitan noble families? More pointedly, is it safe to take the varied and abundant observations about Italy scattered throughout his works as reliable reflections of his own personal experiences? After all, between the latter and the written page there is a time lag often approaching forty years. Add to this the weight of subsequent intellectual influences and of literary conventions, of novelistic invention and of the viewpoints of the characters themselves, and we are left on rather shaky ground. As Jean Canavaggio has remarked, it is not Cervantes the keen visual observer, but rather Cervantes the devoted reader of Boccaccio and the novellieri who brings Italy and Italian themes into his fiction. Even the memorable descriptions of Italian cities to be found in some of his novelas are rather formulaic passages, perfectly in tune with the rhetorical canons of the time.3Our topic, however, is not biography but intellectual history; and here we can afford to be more candid. There can be no doubt that many of Cervantes's descriptions have the unmistakable ring of genuine experience. Take Tomás Rodaja's arrival, "soaked, sleep-deprived and with bags under the eyes," in Genoa's "sheltered Mandraccio,"4 where he becomes acquainted withthe smoothness of the Trebbiano, the fullness of the Montefiascone, the strength of the Asperino, the generosity of the Greeks Candia and Soma, the grandeur of the one from the Five Vineyards, the sweetness and mellowness of the lady Vernaccia, the rustic touch of the Centola, while the lowly one from Rome dared not appear in the presence of such illustrious gentlemen.5Charmed by the gallantry of the Genoese, Rodaja leaves by land for Rome, "the queen of cities and mistress of the world." "Just as the size and ferocity of a lion can be gauged by its claws," Cervantes observed,so Rome's greatness became manifest by its broken marbles, its statues..., its fallen arches and ruined baths, its magnificent porticoes and large amphitheatres, its famous and sacred river whose waters... (shrink)

The novel On the rocks o f Calvados is the first and the greatest achievement of Antoni Sygietyński’s art. The author of this article considered the work worthy of a special attention with regard to the way of presenting the problem of adultery. The writer gives the social explanation of infidelity not concentrating on the psychological side of this phenomenon. He emphasizes the decisive role of such social factors as: the origin, the model of education and the social milieu. From (...) his point of view they exert a great influence on the main heroine’s behaviour. The subject of the novel centres around the moral dilemmas of an individual more cultured than her fellow-citizens, who is forced to live in a primitive world. Sygietyński’s heroine, Berta – educated in a monastic school in Caen – experiences a painful disappointment after coming back to her family village. Her imagination, excited by the lecture of sentimental romances, lets her dream of an ideal, romantic love. She has high expectations of life. Unfortunately, the reality by no means resembles the literary world of stormy feelings and passions. Berta feels alienated in her own society as the lifestyle of its members conflicts definitely with her beliefs. It is worth noting that the writer shows a very striking picture of Grandcamp’s community. Its primitive and monotonous existence overwhelms the novel’s heroine. The marriage with a brutal, devoid of sensibility fisherman – Gabriel Orange – deepens much her loneliness. Small wonder then that the arrival of the French engineer to the sea-town arouses hope in Berta’s heart again. Armand de Coux seems to be an embodiment of all her yearnings. Berta Boudard commits adultery trusting that the lover will soon free her from such common and boring inhabitants of the fishermen’s village. On the Rocks o f Calvados is not the only work that points out the sociological aspect of a marital betrayal. Thus, this opinion encourages the reader to make further literary research. (shrink)