PhilosophyPosted by jonatan Friday, December 19 2008 12:02:31Transgressive diction
By Jonatan Habib Engqvist
In the Preface to Transgression Foucault writes that: ”[we] have not in the least liberated sexuality, though we, to be exact, carried it to its limits” [PaT, p 69] According to Foucault, we have taken sexuality to the limits of consciousness since it dictates the conditions for the only possible reading of the unconscious. He suggests that we have taken sexuality to the limits of the law, because it is the only universal manifestation for the constitution of taboos. Above all he claims that we have taken sexuality to the limits of language because it reveals the marks language can leave in domains beyond its own limitations or, as he so elegantly puts it: ”how far speech can advance on the sands of silence.” In other words the question that is being explored is not concerned with a normative limit of what is acceptable. And even if it is about human sexuality and limits, it is not a question about the difference between human sexuality and say, the sexuality of other animals or machines. Human sexuality is about humans (especially if it encompasses other species or machines). Human sexuality is perhaps even something that marks an inner human boundary, or limitation. It binds and limits us – as humans. Or rather, it is through the limits and limitations of our sexuality that we discover ourselves as limit and perhaps also as limited.
Our modern interest in sexuality and its limits is a prismatic event with many different aspects. It is an interest deeply connected to the death of God and to the ontological void that God’s death imposes on the thinking of our time. This interest is also connected to a form of - let us call it ”affirmative” - thinking that investigates our limits instead of trying to find totalizing, universal and all-encompassing answers. In short one might describe it as a kind of thinking where transgression indeed replaces contradictions and dichotomies. If sexuality now has become the only means of distinction, in a world where things and places no longer are religiously charged, is impossible to pass judgment over. However, Foucault suggests - as Giorgio Agamben has suggested recently - that sexuality today can be understood as a form of profanation in a world that can not see any or very little positive meaning in the sacred. In other words modern sexuality can be understood as intimately connected to what I here call transgression. Foucault proposes that after Gods death, sexuality has become one of mankind’s few possibilities to transgression. One might claim that he lets sexuality and more specifically the language surrounding it become synonymous to ecstasy. Through Bataille, he then claims that sexuality is the only possibility for transgression for modern man. In this context one might add that many drug related ecstasies and other forms of contemporary trance, could be understood in a similar fashion given that they in the modern context are not taken in direct connection to religious rites. Not the least if we look at the similarities of language used to describe these empty ecstatic or shall we call them superlative states and compare them to the vocabulary of sexuality.
Foucault writes; ”In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating” [PaT, p70]
This is not suggesting that the language surrounding sexuality expresses any truths about the essence of human nature, at least not for Foucault. It does not imply that this language holds any enigmatic clues or codes regarding our psychology or pathology. There is no passolinian truth that will be revealed here. In fact he stresses that eroticism and sexuality must be interpreted as something detached from ethics and, at least for a moment, liberated from scandal and subversion. It does however tell us something - something profane perhaps. It tells us that modern Man exists without God. It tells us this through silence. Through what is not being said, through what Foucault calls ”empty form”. It is, to use Bataille, expressed through absence. An absence that points toward emptiness.
The language we have created to speak of sexuality is also contemporaranious to the language that announced the death of God. This modern language that points towards nothingness is per definition the language of nihil-ism. Perhaps this language expresses the sexuality of nihilism or perhaps it could even be a form of sexuality with potential to escape nihilism. Either way, Foucault shows us that the link between modern sexuality and the death of God implicates deep existential consequences.
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PhenomenologyPosted by jonatan Friday, November 28 2008 11:34:41Towards a phenomenology of pain and suffering: a reflection on Max Scheler’s phenomenology of pain and suffering
By Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback
Nothing seems to be more difficult to conceptualise than pain and suffering. In pain and suffering, one discovers oneself in one's grieving solitude, loneliness, and speechlesness. The wordless solitude of pain and suffering confirms that while pain cannot be thought, pain obliges us to think. The celebrated verse of Aisquilos' Agamemnon
Ton pathei mathos thenta kurios ekei
Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled
sees pain and suffering as the tragical source of knowledge. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, pain and experience, pathei-mathei, has expressed what we can call the paradox of pain: what cannot be thought obliges us to think.
The word used by Sophocles for pain and suffering is pathei, an aorist form of the verb to suffer. The Latin word passio, passion in English, also derives from this verb. Passion can be regarded as the main Western term for pain and suffering. In the great majority of Indo-European languages, we can observe a semantic ambiguity in the use of the word passion. Passion expresses, on the one hand, passivity for instance when one is affected by something. On the other hand, passion is also understood as displeasure, pain and grief for instance when we talk about the passion of Christ. Passion means both the opposite of activity and the opposite of pleasure. Passion is, therefore, conveyed by negativities and negations. Because every feeling exposes affection, in the sense of being affected or being touched, feeling is determined in the light of the passive voice. That is why pain and suffering are the main semantic axes of all passion.
The semantic ambiguity of the word "passion" has influenced the different philosophical attempts to define the philosophical problem of pain and suffering. These different approaches are indecisive about whether pain should be distinguished from suffering; whether pain should be understood from the point of view of suffering or suffering from the point of view of pain; or whether the moral sense of pain should be based on the physiology of pain or vice-verse. In relation to these questions, the text of Max Scheler, Vom Sinn des Leides, About the Sense of Pain, is an important contribution to the phenomenology of pain and passion. The fundamental position of Scheler, in his own words, is that "the origin and the foundation of increasing pain is the resistance to evil" (Scheler, 1963, 401). To understand what is meant by resisting evil it is important not only to understand Scheler’s philosophical position but also to attempt to develop a phenomenology of pain and suffering. In this sense, the paradox of pain - what cannot be thought obliges us to think - becomes a starting point for pursuing the philosophical question of evil. My aim is to reflect on some of the structures discussed by Scheler in his attempts to formulate a phenomenology of pain and suffering.
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PhilosophyPosted by jonatan Friday, November 14 2008 16:55:36by Artemy Magun
The work of leisure
The figure of empty time in the poetics of F. Hölderlin and O. Mandelstam.
The Modern notion of history was definitively formulated in the 18th century, when Rousseau and Kant restricted the access of humans to their own supersensible, substantial nature (essence). The man appeared as a historical being, whose definition lies in its development (or, in the case of Rousseau, fall), in its negativity. Immediately as this vision of human nature was made public, a question arose, which will have been dominating the subsequent tradition of the philosophy of history up to our days. Namely, the question of the access of humans to the historicity as such – to the pure historicity or pure temporality, apart from this or that particular historical development. Such access would permit humans the knowledge of themselves and the spontaneity of action. Even blocked from the transcendent, God-like, absolute freedom, humans may still be free historical actors if they can deliver themselves from the determination of past and future, which force them into the alienated labor of development, or into the labor of mourning. They would still act and produce, but do so as free subjects, out of nothing.
If the human essence lies in the human history, then why does history move forward, what is the principle of its movement? Without such principle, history would not be different from space, it would have already been over. And such principle, for human history, may only be the human freedom, the human spontaneity and negativity, the capacity to abstract oneself from the past and to create the new out of nothing.
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PhilosophyPosted by jonatan Wednesday, September 10 2008 14:49:05Motherhood According to Kristeva: On Time and Matter in Kristeva and Plato
By Fanny Söderbäck, The New School for Social Research
The state of the maternal has been much disputed among feminists for quite some time. Julia Kristeva—whose work will be my focus of attention here—has been largely criticized for her consistent emphasis on the maternal, particularly with regards to her alleged equation of maternity with femininity. Critics have suggested that such equation risks reducing woman to the biological function of maternity. Butler, to give one example to which I will return at length, speaks of a “compulsory obligation on women’s bodies to reproduce.” Kristeva herself has noted that “it seems […] difficult to speak today of maternity without being accused of normativism, read: of regression.”
I will argue that Kristeva by no means reduces woman to the function of motherhood but that, rather, she returns to the maternal body partially to free women from this very reduction. By bringing the mother out of the shadows she provides women with a past (a genealogy of their own, a community of women, a history hitherto repressed) and, simultaneously, with a future (in the sense of liberating them from pre-defined roles and positions—from motherhood as the only form of subjectivity available to them). In my mind, it is exactly the future that is at stake when Kristeva speaks of the maternal, and more specifically it is the possibility of temporal change that depends upon a return to the maternal. The maternal body to which Kristeva urges us to return, again and again, must in my mind be understood qua temporalization: That to which we return is temporal, moving, displacing, renewing. The return then, as I see it, is neither nostalgic nor aimed at preserving some essential notion of motherhood—it is one that makes possible new beginnings, allowing for a future pregnant with change and transformation. Or, to quote Butler, who ends her harsh critique of Kristeva with a suggestion that I, contra Butler, think in fact captures Kristeva’s own project: “The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.”
The implications of this return to and retrieval of the maternal is twofold: It situates Kristeva within a materialist tradition and allows her to articulate and inscribe a morphological-phenomenological legacy of embodiment contra merely constructionist narratives. But simultaneously, it gives her ground to re-articulate time as inseparable from space and thus to challenge and overcome the deep-rooted tradition that divides time and space alongside a mind-body-dualism (from Augustine to Kant). Surprisingly, perhaps, she establishes this ground by returning to a thinker who for many feminist critics is the example par excellence of the very dualism that is put into question, that is, Plato. This essay aims at carefully tracing Kristeva’s engagement with Plato, and through a close reading of Plato I will argue that the breakdown of the distinction between time and space is to be found at the core of his writing. If, as I will argue here, the maternal body to which Kristeva returns must be understood not only as corporeal but also as a temporal principle, then we are forced to think through the intimate relation (perhaps even the equation?) between temporality and materiality in ways that will come to challenge and renew the very materialist tradition that Kristeva herself most often is understood to represent.
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PhenomenologyPosted by jonatan Monday, June 02 2008 21:47:13Tropes of Nostalgia
Winckelmann, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Quest for Origins
By Sven-Olov Wallenstein
As the 18th century progressed, nostalgia, a word that was first used to describe the kind of homesickness that would befall soldiers far away from home, turned into a widespread diagnosis of a certain cultural malaise. Perhaps it is not coincidental that this expansion of the concept occurred in conjunction with a certain philosophical development that opened up a new sensibility for the question of origins, and allowed the present to be interpreted as a new kind of straying from the truth, i.e., no longer just as the expulsion from a paradise, but as a positive falling off that opens history as production of the new and unprecedented.
It would be easy to assemble such indications from 18th century philosophical literature, although this is not my proposal here. Instead I would like to try to define nostalgia as a form of a more general historico-philosophical trope, where the origin is that which must disappear for there to be time and history, and for historicity to become thinkable as such. This trope probably originates in the writings of Rousseau, and it has served for a long time as a substructure for a certain way of thinking history. Here, I will consider three paradigmatic cases of this figure: Winckelmann, who for the first time introduced it into a reflection on art history; Hegel, who attempted to think it through and comprehend it within the structure of reason as progress and modernity; and finally Heidegger, who once more, in the wake of Hegel, wanted to think it through and comprehend it, although on the basis of a more complex understanding of the Greek origin and of the future as an indeterminate openness. In Heidegger all the facets of this trope are assembled, brought to their highest force, and maybe dismantled, and in this sense his reflections constitute the limit of nostalgia.
For us today this figure or trope is located at one remove, as it were, and many would say that this nostalgic philosophical trope is wholly out of touch with the present. Our globalized and postmodernized world could in fact be defined precisely as the overcoming and dismantling of this figure, maybe as the outcome of a successful “working-through” in the Freudian sense, whereas those who pursue the nostalgic trope would be caught up in a kind of pathological melancholia that forever preserves the memory of a memory in the crypt of introjection. For us, today, the question of nostalgia would inevitably have to be caught up in a kind of self-reflection: can we, should we, feel nostalgia for nostalgia, or should we remember the project of remembrance, all those highly complex modes of thinking time and temporality that we find in the trope of the origin, as it has been developed from German Romanticism and up to Heidegger, even beyond him? Could, or should, we prolong these forms of questioning, or should they be relegated to the dustbins of a certain, all-too Eurocentric mode of thinking, where the trajectory of philosophy seems to be inscribed in an occidental orbit?
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På SvenskaPosted by jonatan Wednesday, April 30 2008 15:50:42Husserls tidiga filosofi. Prolegomena – idéen om en ren logik och kritiken av psykologism.
av Nicholas Smith
Efter en kort skiss över Husserls liv och filosofiska bakgrund under perioden som leder fram till publicerandet av de Logiska Undersökningarna, vill jag lyfta fram några bärande teman ur själva Prolegomena: för det första kritiken av den s. k. logiska psykologismen, och för det andra idéen om den rena logiken. Dessa båda problemfält avtecknar sig tydligt först mot den gemensamma bakgrund som utgörs av den uppfattning om subjektivitet som kommer till uttryck i de Logiska Undersökningarna, och jag kommer därför även att redogöra för några aspekter som hör dit.
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AestheticsPosted by jonatan Saturday, March 29 2008 22:19:15by Sinziana Ravini
We live in a time where resistance to the global market economy is as effective as a painkiller for a dead body. The utopian rebellion of modernist times, even in its most alienated manifestations of art for art’s sake, was based on an ideological ground that no longer seems to exist. Some artists are still trying to negate the market, suffering from the ideological imperative of the leftist movement of the ’60s. While others have taken a more ambivalent position, trying to negate and embrace it at the same time. This love-hate relationship with the enemy has been fundamental to artists of periods, whether the enemy has been the church, the state, or the market. But enemies are good to have. As Cioran said, you can be sure that you are getting old when you stop choosing your enemies, and settle down with the ones you have. We have to find and confront our enemies in order to find new effective strategies in our fight for survival within the neo-colonial culture industry.
Artists of today still have a lot to learn from the avant-garde artists who succeeded in bringing about a real symbolic revolution. They profoundly changed our world view, that is: our categories of perception and evaluation of the world, the definition of what is important and what isn’t, of what deserves to be represented and what doesn’t. Symbolic revolutions overturn mental structures and deeply upset people’s minds. The artists of the ’90s have, on the other hand, tried to work as social workers, with the aim of changing the community. The idea of community is a political fantasy that asserts a monolithic collectivity that negates difference. Only fascists and communistic leaders have had effects on the masses and the communities. Why should art co-opt their methods? Joyce and Kafka were no social activists. But still they changed the world through their art. They moved and still move people. Artists shouldn’t try to change the community, but the individual.
The fetischization of ideologies oriented around Marxism has transformed the field of political action into a playground of staged revolutions. What is there to be done? Has revolution as such become impossible within the society of the spectacle? Can the enactment of a revolution lead to a real one or are these endeavors only the vain struggles of a slave mentality that needs to break its chains? I would like to suggest that the only possible revolution is within the realm of aesthetics, since all political revolutions follow aesthetic principles and all aesthetics can become revolutionary when set in the right context.
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AestheticsPosted by jonatan Monday, March 10 2008 10:19:52By Sven-Olov Wallenstein
What is the origin of public space, why does it exert such a hold on our political imagination, and why do we so often perceive it as threatened to the point of being virtually extinct? Throughout its history, the concept of public space seems fraught with insecurities, it is at once the promise of a more transparent social world where a non-distorted intellectual exchange will be possible, and something to which we are exposed, a space in which we are subjected to the gaze or the voice of another that draws us out of ourselves. Here I will tell three stories; the first one could be called the rise and decline of public space, and it is the most common one; the second one will be about public space as something that is always and structurally constituted by a conflict that will make it into a battle zone, and where all dreams of undistorted communication is but a sweet lie that covers over the reality of power; and finally a third one, that will not overcome the conflict, but attempts to unearth something like the common root of the first two. This will hardly be a solution, but a genealogical account of the problem, and hopefully allow us to see it a bit clearer.
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