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The Problem of Disembodiment: an Approach

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The Problem of Disembodiment: an Approach THE PROBLEM OF DISEMBODIMENT: AN APPROACH FROM CONTINENTAL FEMINIST-REALIST PHILOSOPHY By Stanimir Panayotov Submitted to Central European University Department of Gender Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Gender Studies Principal supervisor: Eszter Timár Associate Supervisor: István Perczel CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2019 CEU eTD Collection i For my mother, the container of the uncontainable, who gave me birth twice. CEU eTD Collection ii CEU eTD Collection iii Copyright Statement I hereby declare that the dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions, nor does it contain any materials previously written and/or published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgment is made in the form of bibliographical reference. Stanimir Panayotov, July 16, 2019 CEU eTD Collection iv CEU eTD Collection v Acknowledgements To acknowledge is to cut. That is, to isolate and credit, to the best of your capabilities, those persons who have attended the articulation of one’s thoughts which would otherwise have some sense, but no real meaning. In the case of this dissertation, the individuals I am thankful to and who I list below have all contributed in multifarious ways to bound my often boundless and formless thinking around the problems of boundlessness and disembodiment. I am grateful to my principal supervisor Eszter Timár for the lasting stubbornness and critical stability with which she upended my thought notwithstanding the evolutionary digressions this project underwent. These qualities of hers helped me transform my writing from, at times, a turgid moral opera into a critical opus whose judgements and risks are now less of an intuitive pronouncement than a factual diagnosis. Her excellence in always providing surgically close readings contributed enormously to anatomizing both my own subject matter and my writing flaws. My associate supervisor István Perczel saved me from tendencies in inflationary analyses and conclusions: he taught me how to better work with and respect both primary and secondary sources in a manner that would support rather than subvert my discursive intuitions. His insightful curiosity embraced my analytical skepticism in a manner that would made any Platonist envious of intellectual comradery. Two more thinkers have been with me in pursuing this project. Most salient was the presence and importance of Katerina Kolozova, who has a special place in this dissertation, not the least because my interest in Platonic cosmology first originated from an encounter with her non-philosophical work on chōra. I would like to thank her for the consistent intellectual CEU eTD Collection exchange we have had throughout the years and for making it possible to work with her at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje in Summer 2016. Her support and patience with my experimental approach is a model to follow. The influence of Marianne Sághy in the vi early stages of my work was enormous and indelible: she introduced me to the study of gender and sexuality in Late Antiquity, which was one of the most important aspects in the philosophical development of my problematic. “Thanks” is not a sufficient word to credit them both, so I would be content with “open ended gratitude.” A series of significant thinkers have provided help along the way. I would like to warmly thank Stella Sandford for agreeing to work with me and for hosting me as a visiting researcher at Kingston University in Winter 2017. She gave me the chance to benefit and learn from her balanced and engaged readings. Heartfelt gratitude is also due to Nina Lykke and Jamie Weinstein who have read and commented drafts while I was a visiting researcher at Linköping University in Winter 2016. Many thanks to my colleagues at the American Research Center in Sofia, where I was a fellow in Winter 2016/17, and especially to Agata Chmiel and John Gorczyk for helping me understand the importance of material culture for my research, and to Emil Nankov for organizing our seminars, where I learned a lot from historians and archeologists. I am also grateful to Rick Dolphjin for giving me the chance to learn from his lore during a related project on bridging new realism and new materialism in Winter 2018 at Utrecht University. In the early stages of its development, this dissertation has gained a better form thanks to the feedback I have received in the Third Year Writing Seminar at CEU, and I would like to thank Francisca de Haan, Petra Bakos, Heather Tucker, Edit Jeges and Elena Panican for reading and commenting the drafts I presented there. The same goes to Mariana Bodnaruk, Sana E. Karhu and Bogna M. Konior who provided feedback on different occasions. Very constructive criticism was provided during a Faculty Seminar by Jasmina Lukić and Hyaesin CEU eTD Collection Yoon, which had real consequences for my writing. Additionally, Andrea Kirchknopf skillfully guided me several times through the dungeons of thesis writing. Elisabeth von Samsonow, Vera Mlechevska and Dimitrina Sevova trusted my work to an extent where they provided vii platform for me to present and popularize the problematic at hand and organized invited seminars and lectures. I am grateful for their time and creative engagement, as well as for the time spent and thoughts exchanged during meetings with Alexander R. Galloway, Emanuela Bianchi, Edward P. Butler, Svilen Tutekov, and Gregg Lambert. Mladen Alexiev and Marko Bratuš were strikingly patient with my theorizing during our collective artistic work in early 2016 at Glej Theater in Ljubljana. I cannot thank enough Jelena Petrović, who opened the world of Anica Savić-Rebac’s work for me, and Giuseppe Armogida, who was kind enough to share with me his very recent work on Plotinus and Laruelle. This dissertation would probably be altogether something else were it not also for inspiring conversations and meetings in various stages of the work with Alenka Zupančič, Ray Brassier, Boyan Manchev, Iris van der Tuin, Felicity Colman, Jeremy R. Smith, Joevenn Neo, Michael Saunders, Yvette Granata, Slavcho Dimitrov, Nikola Lazovski, Artan Sadiku, and Krassimir Terziev. A special thanks is due to my colleagues from the Medieval Studies Department at CEU with whom we co-organized in June 2019 the memorial conference “Dis/embodiment and Im/materiality: Uncovering the Body, Gender and Sexuality in Late Antiquity,” dedicated to our professor Marianne Sághy, who left us all too early: Andra Jugănaru, Anastasia Theologou, Dunja Milenković, and Mariana Bodnaruk. István Perczel, Gábor Kendeffy and Jasmina Lukić deserve the gratitude for trusting us to organize this very special intersectional event, and to all of them I in turn thank for trusting me to conceptualize a whole conference delving into issues around my subject matter. Finally, endless and ineffable gratitude to my mother and my brother and to my friend Svetlozar Anev who have supported me in surviving difficult moments and experiencing CEU eTD Collection survival as also a shared joy. Without their sacrifice I would not have had the strength and energy needed to realize this project. viii CEU eTD Collection ix Abstract The argument of this dissertation is that despite the intellectual gendered burden of the problem of disembodiment I define, it can be employed from within the limitations of a gendered account in feminist philosophy of the continental-realist type. I formulate the problem of disembodiment as rooted in the notion of the boundless (apeiron) associated with femininity. Both boundlessness and disembodiment are subject to radicalization in Plato (chōra) and Plotinus (to hen). Read as a dyad, they culminate in a tendency towards gendered disembodiment, mediated by Plato’s soul-body dualism. The dissertation seeks to compare the gendered dimension of disembodiment in the work of Plato and Plotinus and that of the non- philosophers François Laruelle and Katerina Kolozova. “Part I. The Problem of Boundlessness: Radicalizing Disembodiment” is divided in three chapters, which present an intellectual history of the problem of boundlessness as femininity. I survey the problem of boundlessness as drafting relations between elements and principles and femininity in Greek mythology (Chapter 1), Plato’s cosmology (Chapter 2), and Plotinus’ metaphysics (Chapter 3). I argue that the relation between death and the female was ambivalent by the time of the Anaximandrean apeiron and that it became a subject of radicalization via Plato’s chōra and Plotinus’ One, mediated by the notion of the Indefinite Dyad and the doctrine of divided matter. The problem of boundlessness was subject to conceptual radicalization that led to hierarchical metaphysics and deepened the division between body and soul via the association of femininity, reproductivity and matter. “Part II. The Problem of Disembodiment: Revising Boundlessness” is divided in two CEU eTD Collection chapters focusing on the contemporary relevance and importance of the problem of disembodiment as a way of revising boundlessness. I present and explain the legacy of the Platonic chōra and the Plotinian One and what they as a dyad entail for contemporary x continental philosophy. I offer (Chapter 4) a trajectory for a continental feminist philosophy interpretation of disembodiment by combining continental feminist philosophy, non- philosophy and new realism. With the aid of Laruelle’s non-philosophy, I explain how and why chōra and the One can be used for/from continental feminist philosophy, followed by a presentation of how chōra and the One are revised in continental philosophy from non- philosophical and new realist perspectives. I then develop (Chapter 5) a continental feminist philosophical interpretation of and approach to the problem of disembodiment from a realist perspective by problematizing continental and feminist philosophical anti-realism. The approach presented is itself an argument in defence of a feminist engagement with disembodiment and the dissertation’s contribution: a non-philosophical contribution to the problem of disembodiment via a continental feminist-realist philosophical approach.
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