The goal of this review is to consider how culture impacts the socialization of emotion development in infancy, and infants’ and young children’s subsequent outcomes. First, we argue that parents’ socialization decisions are embedded within cultural structures, beliefs, and practices. Second, we identify five broad cultural frames (collectivism/individualism; power distance; children’s place in family and culture; ways children learn; and value of emotional experience and expression) that help to organize current and future research. For each frame, we discuss the impact (...) on parents’ socialization practices and infants’ subsequent outcomes relating to emotion-related experience, expression, and understanding. We also generate testable hypotheses to further our understanding of the relationships between the five frames and emotion development in infancy. (shrink)

The nature of fantasy has been little discussed, despite its importance in the arts. Its significance is brought out here in relation to the long‐standing debate on the alleged paradox of fiction—that we respond emotionally to characters and events known to be unreal. Examination of the paradox shows it to be ill founded once the nature of fantasy is appreciated. Moreover, a detailed consideration of fantasy shows that it can itself provide a plausible account of our emotional (...) reactions to creative literature, an account that, after a review of some possible objections, is then contrasted with the leading contemporary theories. (shrink)

Many people have sexual fantasies about being forced to have sex, or forcing someone to have sex. Several authors have argued that it is wrong to enjoy such fantasies: They lead to harm, or reinforce oppressive social structures, are liable to corrupt our character, or, mostly interestingly, are wrong in themselves, because they involve the eroticization of things that are wrong. I argue here that all such arguments fail properly to distinguish between fantasy and desire (despite authors' acknowledgement of (...) that distinction), and between objects of desire and sources of arousal. The broader significance of this point is also discussed. -/- This paper is intended, in part, as a defense of claims about sexual fantasy made at the end of "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?". (shrink)

Because actual social experience is often damaging to conceptions of self, individuals in all societies engage in identity work beyond ordinary social interaction. For people in religious groups, identity work may involve the subjective experience of interactions with spirit beings as in altered states of consciousness such as dreams, reverie, or trance. In memories, anticipations, and fantasies, secular Americans, too, may experience gratifying imaginary social interactions when they gain recognition and acclaim from imagined others. Unlike spirit relations these fantasies are (...) not culturally defined as “real.” However, like spirit relations, they may have very real effects on self‐maintenance. (shrink)

Fantasies of Flight invigorates the field of personality psychology by challenging the contemporary academic view that individuals are best studied as carriers of traits. Daniel Ogilvie exchanges a heart-to-heart, case study approach to understanding human behavior for the current strategies of categorizing and comparing individuals according to their manifest traits. Ogilvie asks and endeavors to answer questions like "What were the psychological conditions that led Sir James Barrie to create a character named Peter Pan?" and "What were the dynamics behind (...) the Marshall Herff Applewhite's conviction that a space ship, hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet, would rescue him and his Heaven's Gate followers after they enacted a mass suicide pact in 1997?" Answering these questions requires him to resurrect "old" ways to think about personality and "old" strategies for studying individuals one by one. Early in the book, Ogilvie reviews the history of why intensive case studies were discredited in psychology and describes how Sigmund Freud's psychobiographical account of Leonardo da Vinci's fascination with flight inadvertently abetted critics of psychoanalytic psychology. He then performs a partial psychobiography of James Barrie and the origins of Peter Pan, followed by an investigation of Carl Jung, who fashioned the collective unconscious to serve as humankind's link to eternity. Arguing that personality psychology needs to become less insular, Ogilvie integrates information from the disciplines of developmental psychology and neuroscience into a theory regarding the latent needs that both Barrie and Jung sought to satisfy. The theory, including its emphasis on the onset of self and consciousness, is then applied to an array of well-known and obscure individuals with ascensionistic inclinations. Well written and accessible, but complex and scholarly, this volume will restore interest in the investigation of people's inner lives. (shrink)

Fantasies have the power in the very midst of political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, to suppress internal antagonisms in times of crises. More specifically, they help to blur aporias of a community’s ideological structures by invoking a common sense that reconstitutes the community, similar to an act of religious conversion. Their impact on the “space of reasons” is analyzed in this article because fantasies, and specifically excessive and radical fantasies, suspend the game of giving and asking for reasons. They (...) do so in order to ground premises of contestation in the background of communal reason via an emotional and secret “code” of what it means to be a “we.” Totalitarian, monarchical, and democratic societies need this “code” to purge society of the pure formalities of political reason, or, in other words: to get rid of fantasy fatigue. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fantasy in that it offers a certain ‘fullness to come’, the promise of jouissance that can never be attained and is thus constantly re-envisioned and reinvoked. Drawing on (...) discourse-analytical and psychoanalytical tools I explain the logic of fantasy before analysing Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, as I show how he critiques and fragments the old model of the state and how his reading of the nation is fantasmatic, a continuous project towards impossible congruency. (shrink)

This text suggests that imagination is a powerful tool that can be used creatively or destructively, and argues that by becoming more conscious of how we use fantasy and are affected by it, we can learn to apply imagination more constructively.

Behind our computer screens we are all cyborgs: through fantasy we can understand our involvement in virtual worlds.

This series celebrates the Bodleian Library's acquisition of Tom Phillips's archive of over 50,000 photographic postcards dating from the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, 'ordinary' people could afford to own their portraits. Each title in this series is thematically assembled and designed by the artist, the covers featuring a linked painting specially created for each title from Tom Phillips's signature work, A Humument.Fantasy Travel shows people sitting (...) proudly and playfully in studio mock-ups of aeroplanes, cars, speedboats and hot air balloons. Such modes of transport were beyond the dreams of the average person in the early twentieth century but the photographic studios allowed them to indulge wild flights of fancy and take away the resulting postcards. (shrink)

Positive thinking is often assumed to foster effort and success. Research has shown, however, that positive thinking in the form of fantasies about achieving an idealised future predicts less (not...

Philosophical and popular ethics tend to focus on the question "What ought I to do?" Is there, in addition to the ethics of action, an ethics of fantasy? Are there fantasies one ought not to have? Of course there are fantasies with horrific content. Does it follow that there is something wrong with a person who has such fantasies or that they ought to make efforts to suppress them or to otherwise change themselves? Do the problems such fantasies raise (...) depend on their links to desire and action? Masturbation fantasies are considered as well as fantasies that may emerge during sex with others, fantasies that include actual others, and fantasies that get embodied in pornography. Psychoanalytic and legal aspects of the issues are emphasized. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination analyzes theological, religious, and philosophical themes in classical Christian fantasy, contemporary “post-Christian” fantasy, and fantasy at play in table top games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: the Gathering.

Embodied Fantasies: From Awe to Artifice is a compilation of twenty-one essays on the subject of fantasy as it relates to art history, philosophy and the visual arts.

Slavoj Žižek proposed an ethic of respect for the fantasy space of another. Under "fantasy" Jacques Lacan borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss the notion of a "private myth." But this fantasy is, Žižek says, illusionary, fragile, and helpless. Fantasy is the way everyone, each in a particular way, conceals the impasse of his desire. Psychoanalytic practice can be criticized as a radical destitution of the fundamental fantasy of the patient. The author argues that what Žižek analyzes (...) as fantasy is a misfire of vision, and could only be recognized in a subject where visions are possible. But visions-the visions of visionaries and seers, and the visions of youth-have to be envisioned dynamically in their activity of formulating, shaping, and intensifying one's insights and one's feelings. Žižek assumes that the forces mobilized by drive, which takes hold of an organ and compulsively makes it repeat the same failed gesture, aim at the excessive and monstrous paroxysm of pleasure in pain, which is jouissance. The author argues that that jouissance can never appear as something possible in the organism, not because it would be a death drive for a finite and temporal organism, but because it is a by-product and not a goal. (shrink)

This article interprets Michael Kang's independent feature The Motel as a critique of the Asian American fantasy of post- 1965 incorporation into the multicultural US polity. The film discloses that this Asian American Dream is normatively constituted by heteronormative, middle-class, intra-racial kinship. The protagonist Ernest Chin's longing for this kind of normative Asian American family is symptomatic of his identification with the exclusionary norms of the incorporative fantasy. In a moment of disidentification, though, Ernest is able to release (...) his grip on the dream and its reciprocal grip on him. Disidentification, in my usage, is a kind of political action that both disrupts and reworks processes of social formation from within. As a contribution to the critical philosophy of race, my rendition of disidentification draws on recent developments in cultural studies and political theory to address the critical theoretical question of the psychic life of domination. (shrink)

Anna Vaninskaya's Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien brings together three major writers of fantasy and studies their treatment of temporality and mortality. This book is about our ongoing conversation regarding time and death and the unique ability for fantasy to tackle these biggest of subjects. If writers have long envisioned time as a river and death as the sea, for instance, what Vaninskaya's new book discusses is how fantasy allows us, through the use of (...) impossible creations and new metaphors, to imagine new ways of understanding our ontological trap. The genre attempts to try to see the world as one of the gods creating it, or to understand time as the eternal burden of the elves; we may... (shrink)

This article offers a critique of Ronald Dworkin’s article “A New Philosophy for International Law”, (Philos Public Aff 41: 1–30, 2013). It begins by showing that Dworkin’s moralised theory of law is built on two highly questionable background assumptions. On the one hand, a descriptively implausible characterisation of a positivist-voluntarist view of international law as the reigning “orthodoxy”. On the other hand, the methodologically questionable assumption that a theory of international law must discharge the dual function of explaining the validity (...) of international law in a manner that underwrites its presumptive legitimacy. In its core part, the article then offers a sustained criticism of Dworkin’s moralised account of the validity and legitimacy of international law. Various problems are identified with the “principle of salience” that Dworkin offers in place of consent as a ground for international law. A key concern is the difficulties that stem from Dworkin’s willingness to proceed on the “fantasy” assumption that his theory needs to get off the ground, i.e. that there is an international court with compulsory jurisdiction and reliable mechanisms for enforcing its judgements. Finally, the article concludes with some thoughts on how Dworkin’s “fantasy-based” approach led him to over-estimate the degree to which international law can be a vehicle for the global spread of liberal democratic values. More minimalist ambitions for international legal order, along the lines suggested by John Rawls inThe Law of Peoples, seem more realistic. (shrink)

Extending a strategy previously used by Clancy, Schacter, McNally, and Pitman , we administered a neutral and a trauma-related version of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm to a sample of women reporting recovered or repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse , women reporting having always remembered their abuse , and women reporting no history of abuse . We found that individuals reporting recovered memories of CSA are more prone than other participants to falsely recalling and recognizing neutral words that were never presented. (...) Moreover, our study is the first to show that this finding even held when trauma-related material was involved. Correlational analyses revealed that fantasy proneness, but not self-reported traumatic experiences and dissociative symptoms were related to false recall and false recognition. (shrink)

The experiences of 90 individuals who self-identify as “excessive” or “maladaptive” fantasizers are summarized in this report. Our sample consisted of 75 female and 15 male participants, ranging in age from 18 to 63 who responded to online announcements. Participants completed a 14-question emailed survey requesting descriptions of their fantasy habits and causes of potential distress regarding fantasy. Results demonstrated that participants shared a number of remarkably specific behaviors and concerns regarding their engagement in extensive periods of highly-structured, (...) immersive imaginative experiences, including the use of kinesthetic activity which accompanies the fantasies of 79% of participants. Participants reported distress stemming from three factors: difficulty in controlling the need or desire to engage in fantasizing; concern that the quantity of fantasizing interfered with actual relationships and endeavors; and intense shame and exhaustive efforts to keep this behavior hidden from others. It is hoped that this report will encourage interest in this elusive syndrome. (shrink)

(2009). Fantasies and Fetishes: The Erotic Imagination and the Problem of Embodiment. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 40, Tradition, Art & Sexuality, pp. 66-82.

Throughout his lectures and published writings on anthropology, Kant describes a form of unintentional, unstructured, obscure, and pleasurable imaginative mental activity, which he calls fantasy (Phantasie), where we ‘take pleasure in letting our mind wander about in obscurity.’ In the context of his pragmatic anthropology, Kant was concerned not only to describe this form of mental activity as a fact of human psychology, but more importantly, to criticize and discourage it. But must we share Kant’s negative evaluation? Could (...) class='Hi'>fantasy play a positive role in some kinds of experience? In this paper I first reconstruct Kant’s conception of fantasy, and then consider what role fantasy might play in aesthetic experience. Precisely because of his anxieties about fantasy, Kant is careful to distinguish between the lawless freedom of the imagination in fantasy and the ‘free lawfulness’ of the imagination in aesthetic judgment. Departing from Kant, and with help from Susan Sontag, I argue that certain aesthetic objects, especially certain works of modernist art, positively invite fantasy, making fantasy part of proper aesthetic appreciation. I conclude by suggesting that while fantasy can indeed play a positive role in aesthetic appreciation, there is still reason to regard fantasy as ‘normatively ambiguous.’. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that many violent sexual fantasies are not vicious. In the first part of this article, I sketch out the nature of violent sexual fantasies and note that many people regularly have them. I then argue many violent sexual fantasies are not vicious. My argument strategy is to explore what makes an attitude vicious and then to note that the vice-making feature need not be present in such fantasies and is in fact probably not present in (...) many of them. I then explore some of the implications of this finding for the nature of virtue and pornography policy. (shrink)

Abstract:As new digital technologies, consumer demand, and social issues such as COVID-19 render workplaces increasingly data-centric, employers will require culturally and technologically adept workers who can utilize creativity in every stage of the production process. To prepare students for this demand, institutions of higher education must establish flexible programs that provide professional or technical curricula combined with a liberal arts education that fosters students’ abilities to build imaginations beyond conventionally accepted norms. The capacity for creative fantasy intersects with cognitive (...) maturity and higher-order thinking and thus can be measured using models of adult development. Schools should develop knowledge platforms that can first assess a student’s maturity stage and then design a personalized liberal and professional education plan that maximizes their creative abilities. This article therefore engages adult development theory to map possible trajectories toward students’ constructive use of innovative fantasy and to address ways educational institutions can reorient their approaches. (shrink)

Beginning with the question of the usefulness of Rousseau's Émile for contemporary education, this article explores the fantasy held by educational thinkers and practitioners regarding Rousseau's concept of Natural Education. Using French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's theory of fantasy, which is based on a relationship between the subject and the object of their desire, Nicholas Stock breaks down Natural Education in a number of ways. Initially, he explores the signifier of nature as an object of desire for both Rousseau (...) and the contemporary educationalist. Next, he examines how Rousseau deploys the signifier in Émile and how this creates an ontology of the child that claims to understand their nature while designating them as Other. This point opens up discussion of desires in light of Lacan's examination of Marquis de Sade and sadism. Equally, in exploring Rousseau's dialectical relationship with Sade, Stock goes on to discuss how the fantasy of nature in Rousseau opens up possibilities of sadistic desire. Finally, he concludes the article by deconstructing the binary upheld between nature and culture through an exploration of pastoral literature. It is this pastoralism that gives a desirable quality to nature, thus sustaining its fantasy in educational circles. (shrink)

Is religion necessarily a form of fantasy, a superstitious childishness we should have put aside by now? If so, what takes the place of empty heaven? May idle dreams threaten secular moralities as much as they threaten religion ? If so, are there authentic forms of religion as well as authentic forms of morality which transcend these threats? He takes us on a journey from religion conceived as a 'somewhere over the rainbow, ' to possibilities of living under a (...) sacramental sky. (shrink)

There’s a certain pleasure in fantasizing about possessing knowledge, especially possessing secret knowledge to which outsiders don’t have access. Such fantasies are typically a source of innocent entertainment. However, under the right conditions, fantasies of knowledge can become epistemically dangerous, because they can generate illusions of genuine knowledge. I argue that this phenomenon helps to explain why some people join and eventually adopt the beliefs of epistemic communities who endorse seemingly bizarre, outlandish claims, such as extreme cults and online conspiracy (...) theory groups. It can be difficult to grasp how members of such groups come to believe the theories they endorse. I argue that one route to such beliefs is via deep absorption in fantasies of knowledge, which can lead entire groups to become collectively detached from reality. (shrink)

The Situationist International have become a canonical reference point when discussing artists’ participation in political action or activism. This article attempts to decentre the SI from this position, by tracing their theories and representations of political agency and labour. I argue that their notion of agency is deeply conflicted, epitomized by the dual invocations ‘never work/all power to the workers’ councils. I examine how the SI’s representations of agency betray an attraction to and fascination with 1960s reactionary fantasies around brainwashing, (...) conditioning, control and torture. Their practical descriptions of a constructed situation, which ‘makes people live’ are, in fact, closer to torturous state control than total liberation. The notions of agency they mobilise draw on colonial and classist sources, which actually deny the agency of radical movements. As a result, the SI produce a series of weak fantasies of participation, in which agency is denied and ‘demanding the impossible’ is actually a demand to constitute and police the impossible. Artistic-political agency was both guarded centre and constituent other. The SI’s policing of their identity, tied in name to the agency of ‘situations’, involved the ongoing exclusion and repression of other artists’ more practically-engaged labour within social movements. (shrink)

Hobbes and Butler both conjure images of an abandoned infant in their respective discussions of vulnerability. Leviathan uses this image to discuss original dominion, or natural maternal right over the child, while for Butler rights discourse produces fantasies of invulnerability that derealize other lives. However, Hobbes’s infant in nature has no rights and can only consent to being nourished. Only when able to nourish itself can it claim rights to transfer through the covenant producing a fantasy of individual invulnerability. (...) Vulnerability in the state of nature and the com- monwealth’s fantasy of invulnerability are together a counter-fantasy to the fantasies of invulnerability of Hobbes’s time, through heaven or eternal glory. In question is whether Butler, in her reimagining of community, is, like Hobbes, producing a fantasy, but a meta-fantasy that community can be taken as fantasy without derealizing the fantastic or that fantasizes an honesty about its being fantasy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Fantasy Matters Too MuchJack Zipes (bio)In September 1997 a fairy-tale princess and a holy saint, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, died within a few days of each other. Millions of people openly and dramatically expressed their grief and mourning. Their pictures along with many different images of Diana and Mother Teresa were beamed all over the world through television and the Internet. The mass media carried all (...) sorts of stories and acclaimed the two of them as the fairy-tale princess and the saint, so that little was left to the imagination. Fantastic spectacle was all that mattered.We speculate with the fantastic. Fantasy is a celebrity and money-making machine. As a module in our brains, it has the capacity to transform plain junk into gold that glitters. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrate spectacles that exist and have always existed—illusions of social relations of exploitation based on power. Spectacles violate and drain our imaginations by glorifying social relations of power that are made spectacular and involve the magic of fetishism. Generally, the results bring about delusion and acclamation of particular sets of social relations that are commodified, sold, and consumed. We acclaim commodities that we don’t know, products that are not of our own making and that we consume mentally and physically. We reproduce images consciously and unconsciously that are not of our own making. The media and the corporate world occupy our psyches and manipulate our fantasies even when we [End Page 77] dream. Our relations are mediated through fantastic spectacle and through fetish abetted by the latest technology that connects us to each other while also disconnecting us from our minds and feelings. Simultaneously, we seek to project our desires in the form of fantasies onto reality and endeavor to occupy a space in which our most profound wishes and desires can be realized. We seek cognition and recognition. In each instance—in the tension between corporate determination of the fantastic and individual projection of desire—we seem to anchor our understanding of reality in artworks dependent on the fantastic, such as the Bible and fairy tales. Hence, Mother Teresa the saint. Diana the fairy-tale princess.It is through fantasy that we have always sought to make sense of the world, not through reason. Reason matters, but fantasy matters more. Perhaps it has mattered too much, and our reliance on fantasy may wear thin and betray us even while it nourishes us and gives us hope that the world can be a better place. We have imagined gods, the kingdom of a single god, the miraculous feats of divine and semidivine characters, and the commandments that have been established to lead us to the good life, if not paradise. It is through the fictive projections of our imaginations based on personal experience that we have sought to grasp, explain, alter, and comment on reality. This is again why such staples as the Bible and the Grimms fairy tales have become canonical texts: unlike reality, they allegedly open the mysteries of life and reveal ways in which we can maintain ourselves and our integrity in a conflict-ridden world. They compensate for the constant violation of nature and life itself and for the everyday violation of our lives engendered through spectacle. They contest reality and also become conflated with reality.But our fantasy and the fantasies that we conceive have become desperate because they are outstripped by real existing conditions that instrumentalize them at every waking second of our day, and even when we slumber. It is a commonplace today that fiction, especially science fiction and what we label fantasy in the world of art, cannot keep pace with the devastating and disturbing fantastic of real occurrences, or what I call the incredible credibility of the real. When the normal is so fantastically abnormal, what role can fantastic artworks play in our lives? Is the violence that we encounter in our everyday lives so much more fantastic than in literature, film, and the arts that we seek to consume the fantastic like harmless junk food as quick fixes and consolation? Can our joys really and realistically... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fantasy: How It Works by Brian AtteberyAna Tejero-MarínBrian Attebery. Fantasy: How It Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 208 pp., hardcover, $29.99. ISBN 9780192856234.Fantasy is a literary genre often associated with the unreal. As it deals with imaginary worlds or magical feats, its tools and strategies for making meaning differ from those of realist literature. In the past, this has sometimes led to misunderstandings about (...) the merits of fantasy and to its dismissal as escapist literature. Fantasy has also been seen as the reactionary reverse of science fiction, as a genre that looks into a mythical past with reverence and longing and that perpetuates unjust systems of oppression. [End Page 260]Brian Attebery sets out to respond to these old conceptions of fantasy in Fantasy: How It Works. As a scholar who has devoted most of his long career to advocate for the value of fantasy literature, most notably in his 1992 study Strategies of Fantasy, Attebery has witnessed the transformation of the genre from an academic outcast into a subject that is considered worthy of systematic research. He further acknowledges that the current vitality of the conversations concerning fantasy literature cannot be solely attributed to academia but also derives from the pervasiveness of fantasy in contemporary culture, which extends the discourse from "classrooms to coffee shops to basements where a lively game of Dungeons and Dragons has been going on for years" (7). Fantasy is a genre that attracts devoted fans and practitioners, and their passion is the driving force behind Attebery's work: "When I write about fantasy, I know I am making claims about something people care about and something about which my listeners might have exhaustive knowledge. If those people matter, then fantasy matters" (7).Contrary to earlier theorists in the field, like Tzvetan Todorov, Kathryn Hume or Rosemary Jackson, Attebery does not intend to provide a definition or a classification of fantasy, since genres are mutable and constantly evolving, he asserts. His main objective is to explore two questions instead: "how does fantasy mean?" and "what does fantasy do?" (1). Each chapter engages with these questions by examining a distinct facet of fantastic storytelling or worldbuilding. According to Attebery, storytelling and worldbuilding cannot be separated when it comes to fantasy, for "fantasy creates story-worlds: narrated spaces in which causality and character and consequence are inextricably entwined" (1). The introduction then explains the method that Attebery follows in the subsequent chapters: "I'll notice a loose thread in the fabric of literature, start tugging at it, see where the seams come apart, and ask what that tells us about the original garment. If I'm lucky, some sort of thesis emerges along the way" (4–5). As he himself admits, this method implies that many thoughts arise and circulate in each of the chapters and, usually, no central thesis follows, which "doesn't make it easy to extract the core ideas for application elsewhere" (5). However, he believes that this process of uncovering latent meanings of fantasy, instead of arriving at a solid conclusion, is the most interesting part of his work. The analyses of contemporary fantasy novels complement the ideas that he brings forward, and in many cases they become the backbone that sustains his theses.Chapter 1, "How Fantasy Means: The Shape of Truth," delineates the development of the first half of the book. Attebery asserts that "fantasy is the lie that speaks truth" (9), and it does so in three different ways: mythically, metaphorically, [End Page 261] and structurally. Although the chapter mainly focuses on this last dimension, all three of them are connected. Attebery claims that, structurally, fantasy "represents the shape of the world" (12); fantasy can reflect the underlying structures of society because it is able to ignore mimesis. Fantasy worlds can be read as models of how the world functions, filtered and reorganized through the fantastical. To be sure, the spaces that realist literature presents are also constructed, ordering the world in ways that render the story legible to its readers; the difference lies in how the two genres are conceived and understood. This relationship between fantasy and realism is further... (shrink)

Philosophy has long been fascinated by miracles, and with good reason. Where, however, the problem of the miracle once offered unparalleled insight into the inner workings of natural laws and of human knowledge, today, the attention commanded by it is essentially political. The sovereign’s miraculous suspension is the most well studied of these political dimensions, but this formulation is, in fact, ill-suited to the complexities inherent in the concept of the miracle. Political theology understands the miracle poorly, for it captures (...) only the inaugural movement of exception; it knows nothing of the social and political conditions it inspires. A key claim defended in this article is that the miracle possesses continuing interest for philosophy precisely because it lies in the heart of contemporary political formations, instituting a bond that tethers a collective to its present. It is thus more interesting as a figure of inception than of exception. The miraculous is uniformly distinguished as the unengendered, the neutral point of equilibrium against which any distribution of beings is measured. This is the meaning given the miraculous in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and this article frames the political aspect of that theme by developing their concept of miraculation, which foregrounds the movement of inception. The article works out a conceptual genealogy, tracing the descent of the miracle back from Deleuze and Guattari to Baruch Spinoza and David Hume. Each contributes an element essential for the constitution of miraculation. It is argued that the miracle has always bound ‘desire and the social’, though in diverse ways. (shrink)

Fantasy sports have become a major sector of our sport industry. With millions of participants worldwide and billions of dollars generated, fantasy sports have become a fixed part of our sport spectatorship. However, this prevalence has come without much intellectual investigation. Therefore, in this paper I discuss the metaphysics and ethics of fantasy sports. After providing arguments for the consistency of fantasy sports with prominent descriptions of play and games, I compare fantasy sports to other (...) genres of play and games ? sports, card games, ?cybersports?, and spectatorship. After this juxtaposition, I delineate how fantasy sports are different from their real sport correlates. Fantasy sports are second-order games that are parasites of their real-sport counterparts. The differences between fantasy and real sports change our collective cultural views of the correlating real sports. While much good comes from the popular participation in fantasy sports, there are also drawbacks. That is, while fantasy sports participants tend to be more engaged spectators of sports, they also tend to only focus on particular, sensationalized aspects of the sports to which their fantasy ownership correlates. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the appeal of the psychoanalytic category of fantasy for critical political theory, by which I mean a theory grounded in a political ontology that offers a rationale for both normative and ideological critique. I draw on the work of William Connolly, Susan Faludi, Jacqueline Rose, and Judith Butler, among others, to consider the explanatory and critical implications of the concept of fantasy for questions of identity, and political identity in particular. I argue that (...) fantasy is a useful device with which to explore and probe the political and ideological aspects of a practice or narrative because it foregrounds the combined significance of the symbolic and affective dimensions of life. Moreover, a psychoanalytic perspective can facilitate a move away from an epistemological or moralizing understanding of fantasy and political identity, shifting the emphasis instead toward a more ontological and ethical understanding. (shrink)

The progressive language of growth and development that informs our shared ideal of the educated subject also informs the curricular structure of schooling, in which new learning builds upon established knowledge and students' development depends upon their desire to take on those identities associated with various achievements of knowledge. Each re-creation of the student's identity requires a new production of the student's former identity as an uneducated self — a negative statement of the self-overcome, fashioned in the language of the (...) curriculum. But what of those objects of attachment or aspects of the child's identity that can neither be integrated in the student's educated identity nor accounted for as a recognizable lost object of childhood? In this essay James Stillwaggon argues that considering the student subject in terms of its melancholic attachments offers some alternatives to thinking of student identity primarily in terms of its progressive learning function. Julia Kristeva's treatment of melancholia as “asymbolia,” or against the representational function of language, is especially significant to this discussion, as it highlights the melancholic's resistance to the most basic educational purpose, namely the further engagement of the subject in language. (shrink)

This article examines why and how workers adhere and contribute to the perpetuation of the freedom fantasy induced by neoliberal ideology. We turn to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the human condition, which offers invaluable insights into the mechanisms that foster the erosion of human freedom in the workplace. Embracing an Arendtian lens, we demonstrate that individuals become entrapped in a libertarian fantasy—a condition enacted by the replacement of the freedom to act by the freedom to perform. The latter (...) embodies the survivalist modus operandi of animal laborans who renounces singularity, by focusing on the function of supervised labor, who renounces solidarity, by focusing on individualist and competitive labor, and who is deprived of spontaneity, by focusing on the measured productivity of labor. Therefore, we propose a new corporate governance perspective based on the rehabilitation of political action in organizations as the best way to preserve human capacity for singularity, solidarity, and spontaneity. (shrink)

Clinicians at quaternary centers see part of their mission as providing hope when others cannot. They tend to see sicker patients with more complex disease processes. Part of this mission is offering longshot treatment modalities that are unlikely to achieve their stated goal, but conceivably could. When patients embark on such a treatment plan, it may fail. Often treatment toward an initial goal continues beyond the point at which such a goal is feasible. We explore the progression of care from (...) longshot to fantasy using two pediatric cases. This progression may be differentiated into four distinct stages of care related to the potential of achieving the initial goals of care. Physicians are often ill prepared for the progression of treatments from a longshot hope to an unfeasible and, therefore, typically unjustified intervention. We present a structured approach to guide clinicians at referral institutions where these situations may be common. The transition of care from “longshot” to “fantasy” is an inherent part of quaternary care for the sickest of patients that has been underexplored. Physicians are often poorly equipped to approach that transition. We advocate this approach to the shift from longshot to fantasy with the belief that such a structured method will have multiple benefits, including: reduced suffering for the patient; decreased emotional burden on patient and family; decreased provider moral distress; increased likelihood of seeking high quality palliative care earlier; and provision of honest and straightforward information to patients and their families. (shrink)

A week ago, I heard James Conant give a talk at Tufts, entitled “Two Varieties of Skepticism” in which he distinguished two oft-confounded questions.

An unauthorized look behind one of the greatest video game franchises of all time, Final Fantasy The Final Fantasy universe is packed with compelling characters and incredible storylines. In this book, you'll take a fascinating look at the deeper issues that Final Fantasy forces players to think about while trying to battle their way to the next level, such as: Does Cloud really exist? Is Kefka really insane? Are Moogles part of a socialist conspiracy? Does the end (...) of the game justify the means? As Mages, Moogles, fiends, and Kefka are mashed together with the likes of Machiavelli, Marx, Foucault, and Kafka, you'll delve into crucial topics such as madness, nihilism, environmental ethics, Shintoism, the purpose of life, and much more. Examines the philosophical issues behind one of the world's oldest and most popular video-game series Offers new perspectives on Final Fantasy characters and themes Gives you a psychological advantage--or at least a philosophical one--against your Final Fantasy enemies Allows you to apply the wisdom of centuries of philosophy to any game in the series, including Final Fantasy XIII Guaranteed to add a new dimension to your understanding of the Final Fantasy universe, this book is the ultimate companion to the ultimate video-game series. (shrink)

I argue that Martha Nussbaum presents us with an invaluable stance toward nonmoral goods—especially those of fantasy—relative to 1) the anti-perfectionist view regarding moral goods taken in Susan Wolf's "Moral Saints" 2) theperfectionist stance taken by Iris Murdoch. I show how Nussbaum critiques Murdoch not by taking issue with her perfectionist agenda, but by suggesting an alternative to Murdoch's regret-less “coolness” in applying this agenda to the ubiquitously tragic situations that humans encounter.

In this paper, I present two puzzles arising from J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, a fiction which is closely connected to analytic philosophy.

Although World of Warcraft utilizes ethnic and gender stereotypes in the construction of its playable characters, the structure of the gaming environment provides a modest utopian vision that is structurally just, maximizing both liberty and equality among participants in a way consistent with John Rawls's Theory of Justice. As a result, class, race, and gender are much more a matter of human (humanoid) variety, rather than a tool for hierarchically differentiation. Nevertheless, in players' engagement with the game, class, race, and (...) gender differences take on meaning well beyond the strucuture of the Warcraft universe demonstrating how real world values infect our imagination. (shrink)

Time and Fantasy in Narratives of Jihad: The Case of the Islami Jamiat-I-Tuleba in Karachi This article proposes an analytical framework for thinking about violence in the Islami Jamiat-i-Tuleba (IJT), the student organization of Jamaat e Islami (JI), Pakistan's longstanding Islamist party. It prioritises the intersection of the psychic and the social, and the role of politics, history and biography in mediating the modalities, narration and praxis of violence in the city of Karachi. The dominant explanations tend to emphasise (...) political instrumentalism, and structural and ideological factors, and to "Islamicise" the violence, collapsing Islamic rhetoric into an extemporization of conditions, ignoring the deep affective appeal of violence to individuals, and leaving unelaborated the role of intersecting national, local and individual contexts and temporalities in structuring political subjectivity and violent action. (shrink)

A recent surge of work on prediction-driven processing models--based on Bayesian inference and representation-heavy models--suggests that the material basis of conscious experience is inferentially secluded and neurocentrically brain bound. This paper develops an alternative account based on the free energy principle. It is argued that the free energy principle provides the right basic tools for understanding the anticipatory dynamics of the brain within a larger brain-body-environment dynamic, viewing the material basis of some conscious experiences as extensive--relational and thoroughly world-involving.