Anthropology & Materialism, Special Issue
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Vitalism and the Scientific Image: an Introduction
Vitalism and the scientific image: an introduction Sebastian Normandin and Charles T. Wolfe Vitalism and the scientific image in post-Enlightenment life science, 1800-2010 Edited by Sebastian Normandin and Charles T. Wolfe Springer, forthcoming 2013 To undertake a history of vitalism at this stage in the development of the ‘biosciences’, theoretical and other, is a stimulating prospect. We have entered the age of ‘synthetic’ life, and our newfound capacities prompt us to consider new levels of analysis and understanding. At the same time, it is possible to detect a growing level of interest in vitalistic and organismic themes, understood in a broadly naturalistic context and approached, not so much from broader cultural concerns as in the early twentieth century, as from scientific interests – or interests lying at the boundaries or liminal spaces of what counts as ‘science’.1 The challenge of understanding or theorizing vitalism in the era of the synthetic is not unlike that posed by early nineteenth-century successes in chemistry allowing for the synthesis of organic compounds (Wöhler), except that now, whether the motivation is molecular-chemical, embryological or physiological,2 we find ourselves asking fundamental questions anew. What is life? How does it differ from non-living matter? What are the fundamental processes that characterize the living? What philosophical and epistemological considerations are raised by our new understandings?3 We are driven to consider, for example, what metaphors we use to describe living processes as our knowledge of them changes, not least since some of the opprobrium surrounding the term ‘vitalism’ is also a matter of language: of which terms one 1 Gilbert and Sarkar 2000, Laublichler 2000. -
Collisions with Hegel in Bertolt Brecht's Early Materialism DISSERTATIO
“Und das Geistige, das sehen Sie, das ist nichts.” Collisions with Hegel in Bertolt Brecht’s Early Materialism DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jesse C. Wood, B.A., M.A. Graduate Program in Germanic Languages and Literatures The Ohio State University 2012 Committee Members: John Davidson, Advisor Bernd Fischer Bernhard Malkmus Copyright by Jesse C. Wood 2012 Abstract Bertolt Brecht began an intense engagement with Marxism in 1928 that would permanently shape his own thought and creative production. Brecht himself maintained that important aspects resonating with Marxist theory had been central, if unwittingly so, to his earlier, pre-1928 works. A careful analysis of his early plays, poetry, prose, essays, and journal entries indeed reveals a unique form of materialism that entails essential components of the dialectical materialism he would later develop through his understanding of Marx; it also invites a similar retroactive application of other ideas that Brecht would only encounter in later readings, namely those of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Initially a direct result of and component of his discovery of Marx, Brecht’s study of Hegel would last throughout the rest of his career, and the influence of Hegel has been explicitly traced in a number Brecht’s post-1928 works. While scholars have discovered proto-Marxist traces in his early work, the possibilities of the young Brecht’s affinities with the idealist philosopher have not been explored. Although ultimately an opposition between the idealist Hegel and the young Bürgerschreck Brecht is to be expected, one finds a surprising number of instances where the two men share an unlikely commonality of imagery. -
Jay Bernstein 167 Vi Contents
The new aestheticism The new aestheticism edited by John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © Manchester University Press 2003 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC- ND) licence, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data applied for Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6138 5 hardback 0 7190 6139 3 paperback First published 2003 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10987654321 Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn Contents List of contributors page vii The new aestheticism: an introduction John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas 1 Part I Positions 1Aesthetic education and the demise of experience Thomas Docherty 23 2Art in time of war: towards a contemporary aesthetic Jonathan Dollimore 36 3Mimesis in black and white: feminist aesthetics, negativity and semblance Ewa Plonowska Ziarek 51 4 What comes after art? Andrew Bowie 68 5Touching art: aesthetics, fragmentation and community Simon Malpas 83 Part II Readings 6 The Alexandrian aesthetic Howard Caygill 99 7Defending poetry, or, is there an early modern aesthetic? Mark Robson 119 8Shakespeare’s genius: Hamlet, adaptation and the work of following John J. -
Conversation Volume 81
Theory and History of Literature Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse Volume 82. Maurice Blanchot The Infinite Conversation Volume 81. Gregory Jusdanis Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing Na tional Literature Volume 80. D. Emily Hicks Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text Volume 79. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht Making Sense in Life and Literature Conversation Volume 78. Giorgio Agamben Language and Death: The Place of Negativity Volume 77. Hélène Cixous Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva Volume 76. Jean-Luc Nancy The Inoperative Community Volume 75. Rey Chow Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading be tween West and East Volume 74. Paul J. Thibault Social Semiotics as Praxis: Text, Social Meaning Mak ing, and Nabokov’s Ada Maurice Blanchot Volume 73. Hélène Cixous Reading with Clarice Lispector Volume 72. N. S. Trubetzkoy Writings on Literature Volume 71. Neil Larsen Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aes Translation and Foreword by Susan Hanson thetic Agencies Volume 70. Paul Zumthor Oral Poetry: An Introduction Volume 69. Giorgio Agamben Stanzas: Word and Phantom in Western Culture Volume 68. Hans Robert Jauss Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding Volume 66. Paul de Man Critical Writings, 1953-1978 Theory and History of Literature, Volume 82 Volume 64. Didier Coste Narrative as Communication Volume 63. Renato Barilli Rhetoric Volume 62. Daniel Cottom Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation Volume 61. Theodor W. Adorno Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic Volume 60. Kristin Ross The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune Volume 59. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich Reading de Man Reading Volume 58. -
The Memory of Things: Walter Benjamin's Modernity
The Memory of Things: Walter Benjamin's Modernity by Melanie M. Brannagan A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Manitoba in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Depratment of English, Film, and Theatre University of Manitoba Winnipeg Copyright 2013 by Melanie M. Brannagan The Memory of Things ii Abstract In The Memory of Things, I begin by posing the question, what if memory were not merely a human characteristic but also a thingly one. I aproach this thought through the work of Walter Benjamin, for whom things and memories are often juxtaposed, and whose writing of modernity is concerned particularly with the intersection of material traces and memory. I access these questions by means of various theories, among which are psychoanalysis, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, and phenomenology, and, more briefly, through the history of geological science. At their cores, the questions of modernity, of things and people, of trauma and politics, of aura and its decay, of memory and forgetting, of weight are questions of ethics. I demonstrate in the dissertation to follow, objects bear the weight of human memory and ethics. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Benjamin's eclectic writings, most especially his writings on aura, provide the tools we need to re-think objects and our relations to them. The Memory of Things iii Acknowledgements This project would have been unfathomable without many sources of encouragement, support, and inspiration. I want, first, to thank Dr. Mark Libin for his patience and guidance through the years I was researching and writing this thesis. -
Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot
Writing and the Other: Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Faculty of Humanities 2011 Hossein Moradi School of Arts, Histories and Cultures 1 Content Abstract 3 Declaration and Copyright Statement 4 Acknowledgment 5 Introduction: Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot: The Space for the Other in Writing 6 Chapter 1: Literature in Blanchot: Worklessness as Spacing between Word and Its Referent 30 Chapter 2: What is Worklessness in Kafka? 50 Chapter 3: The Act of Writing Part I: The Disappearance of Self 67 Chapter 4: The Act of Writing Part II: Self and the Impossibility of Death 86 Chapter 5: Memory and Récit in Blanchot 111 Chapter 6: The Primal Scene and Récit in Blanchot 132 Chapter 7: Kafka's Fictions and the Impossibility of Narration as Récit 155 Conclusion 176 General Bibliography 191 Final word count, including footnotes: 77095 words 2 Abstract The University of Manchester Hossein Moradi Doctor of Philosophy May 2011 Writing and the Other: Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot This thesis attempts to explore what occurs in the act of writing; arguing that the act of writing opens a space for 'the other.' For this argument, I bring Franz Kafka who has remained unthought in terms of the act of writing in the deconstructive thinking close to Maurice Blanchot who writes both theoretical discussion and fiction specifically on the act of writing. Blanchot has written extensively on Kafka; his récits also are influenced by Kafka. In the introduction, I argue through Borges and Benjamin that Kafka and Blanchot create their past and future, so that we understand any text in the past or the future differently if we know them. -
In a Letter to Gershom Scholem Dated 12 June 1938, Walter Benjamin Refines His Position on Franz Kafka in Anticipation of Writi
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Directory of Open Access Journals An art history of means: Arendt-Benjamin Jae Emerling I. Notre heritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament. —René Char Is it possible to conceive anew the relation between art history and philosophy, disciplines with indelibly German birthrights, without abandoning the ruins of its aftermath? After philosophy, after art history: this is more than a temporality, it is an orientation, a movement towards and after that which has been forfeited. And yet, only in the aftermath of each, between art history and philosophy, are we granted our inheritance. What has been given is a tradition that, while irreparable, induces a recollection of what remains. What remains, what returns, is neither art history nor philosophy. To read and study this relation between generations and disciplines we must confront two unfinished projects that sought to step beyond the demarcations of philosophy and art history, two projects by forebears who rejected the names ‘philosopher’ and ‘art historian’: Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin.1 What comes next is unimaginable if we do not return to this pair of German-Jewish émigrés, who succeeded and failed in crossing borders both physical and conceptual. These proper names have long been bound to one another, and each offers art history and philosophy a lesson that has been difficult to receive. The difficulty arises not only from the incompleteness of their respective projects, but also from a certain reluctance to read Benjamin alongside Arendt, Arendt alongside Benjamin.2 This alongside or neben is at once a preposition of location (beside, next to) and one of exception (against, aside from). -
Blanchot Reader
inchol is one ol the most profound and influential investigators and analysts of the contemporary literary and philosophical tradition is acknowledged by such eminent thinkers as Derrida, Levinas, Nancy and The Lacoue-Labarthe. His impact on French thinking and culture over the last fifty years has been enormous, yet he still remains a writer whose work, though often cited, is little known to the English-speaking reader. BLANCHOT In The Blanchot Reader Michael Holland fulfils an urgent need and does so in a way that provides a coherent perspective on what by any standard is an extraordinary personal and intellectual career. We see how Blanchot in the 1940s anticipated later post-Sartrean trends, as followed by, among others, Samuel Beckett and the practitioners of the nouvcau roman. We discover how the READER linguistic turn of the 1950s took place for Blanchot in a political climate, while also occurring within literature and philosophy, and we trace the emergence of the enlrelien, a dialogue format used by Blanchot to interrogate the writing of his contemporaries, and beyond this to entertain a real dialogue with the 'Other' and so to broach the question of ultimate responsibility . The volume concludes with a consideration of Blanchot's development of the 'fragment' in his philosophical and his political writings, as well as in those devoted to literature. A final subsection focuses on his recent commentary on Moses and Aaron, dedicated to Jacques Derrida. A chronology of Blanchot's career and a succinct primary and secondary bibliography are also included, together with a list of English translations of Blanchot's work. -
Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer by Nicholas Davey
Crosscurrents Exploring the development of European thought through engagements with the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences Series Editor Christopher Watkin, Monash University Editorial Advisory Board Andrew Benjamin Martin Crowley Simon Critchley Frederiek Depoortere Oliver Feltham Patrick ffrench Christopher Fynsk Kevin Hart Emma Wilson Titles available in the series: Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux by Christopher Watkin Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism by Gerald Moore The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology by Mathew Abbott Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer by Nicholas Davey Forthcoming Titles: Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future by Stephen Zepke Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences by Wahida Khandker The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French By Amaleena Damlé Visit the Crosscurrents website at www.euppublishing.com/series/cross UNFINISHED WORLDS Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer Nicholas Davey for Barbara © Nicholas Davey, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8622 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8623 0 (webready PDF) The right of Nicholas Davey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Contents Acknowledgements vi Series Editor’s Preface vii Introduction: Images of Movement 1 1. -
Painting Philosophically in 20Th Century Vienna: a Comparison of Gustav Klimt and Friedrich Nietzsche
Painting Philosophically in 20th Century Vienna: A Comparison of Gustav Klimt and Friedrich Nietzsche Research Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with research distinction in Germanic Languages and Literatures in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University by Erin Sankey The Ohio State University May 2017 Project Advisor: May Mergenthaler, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Sankey 2 Introduction The controversy surrounding Gustav Klimt’s University of Vienna Ceiling paintings gives insight into the struggle between tradition and modernism during the secessionist art movement at the turn of the 20th century. The painting also provides new insights in the relationship between art and philosophy at the time. Klimt’s ceiling painting Philosophy of 1900 proved scandalous in its unconventional rendering of philosophy as a view of life rather than an academic discipline as expected by the University faculty who commissioned the painting. In this thesis, I will revisit the debates that surround the painting with the aim of reevaluating the way it depicts philosophy. Expanding on the positive evaluation of the piece at the time published by the Austrian playwright, director and critic Hermann Bahr and Professor of Art History Franz Wickhoff, I argue that we can discover new value in this painting as historically and artistically philosophical. This new value comes to the foreground through a juxtaposition of the painting with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published in 1891. The works of Klimt and Nietzsche have been compared before by scholars such as cultural historian Carl Schorske and art historian Lisa Florman. Lisa Florman focuses on the Apollonian and Dionysian contrast developed by Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy (1872) found in Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901). -
Body-And Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin
Body-and image-space The last decade has seen renewed interest among philosophers and theorists in the writings of Walter Benjamin. In Body-and Image-Space Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading feminist theorists and a renowned commentator on the work of Walter Benjamin, argues that the reception of his work has so far overlooked a crucial aspect of his thought Ðhis use of images. Weigel argues that it is precisely his practice of thinking in images that holds the key to understanding the full complexity and topicality of Benjamin's theory. Bilddenken, or thinking in images, and its relation to the body are central to Benjamin's work. Weigel illuminates points of contact between this approach and psychoanalytical modes of observation and suggests that there also are affinities between Benjamin's thought and contemporary French theory, notably the work of Foucault and Kristeva. Focusing on those parallels, the author demonstrates the productivity of Benjamin's theoretical approach for contemporary gender studies, cultural theory and philosophy. At the same time, her reading reestablishes the buried links between early Critical Theory and post- structuralism, between German high modernism and French post- modernist theory. Body- and Image-Space will be invaluable to anyone interested in gender theory, post-structuralism, cultural anthropology and philosophy. Sigrid Weigel is Professor of German Literature at the University of Zurich. Warwick Studies in European Philosophy Edited by Andrew Benjamin Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Warwick This series presents the best and most original work being done within the European philosophical tradition. The books included in the series seek not merely to reflect what is taking place within European philosophy, rather they will contribute to the growth and development of that plural tradition. -
Late Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and Their Aftermath
Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works Faculty Publications 2010 Late Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and Their Aftermath David Ingram Loyola University Chicago, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/philosophy_facpubs Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, Epistemology Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, History of Philosophy Commons, Philosophy of Language Commons, and the Philosophy of Science Commons Author Manuscript This is a pre-publication author manuscript of the final, published article. Recommended Citation Ingram, David. "Late Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and their Aftermath." In vol. 5 of The History of Continental Philosophy, ed. David Ingram and Alan D. Schrift (London: Acumen Press, 2010), 281-299. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. © 2010 David Ingram 1 Chapter 12 [revised- Dec. 2009] Late Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and Their Aftermath David Ingram Introduction Developments in Anglo-American philosophy during the first half of the 20 th Century closely tracked developments that were occurring in continental philosophy during this period. This should not surprise us. Aside from the fertile communication between these ostensibly separate traditions, both were responding to problems associated with the rise of mass society. Rabid nationalism, corporate statism, and totalitarianism (Left and Right) posed a profound challenge to the idealistic rationalism of neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophies.