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Testing Anthropocentrism: Lacan and the Animal Imago
Full text linkIn an effort to complicate the human subject, this article considers the critical insights of psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan, focusing in particular on his essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I As Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949). ‘The Mirror Stage’ explains how we break from nature, differentiate ourselves from the animal and graduate from primordial subsistence as psychically folded into the first lightning strike of recognition that arrives with/as self-reflection. Curiously however, in sustaining his argument about the human specificity of the mirror stage phenomenon, Lacan relies upon ethological research on nonhuman self-recognition. This reliance of his argument on the figure of the animal has largely been interpreted in two ways: as an inconsequential detail, undeserving of theoretical exploration, or, as confirmation of Lacan’s self-evident anthropocentrism. For instance, Buse (2017) and Ziser (2007) have noted the significant discrepancies within ‘The Mirror Stage’ between Lacan’s understanding of primate self-recognition, and that of his main source, Wolfgang Köhler. Although, both thinkers hold the position that Lacan’s treatment of the animal in ‘The Mirror Stage’ provides sufficient textual evidence for a reading that endorses human exceptionalism. Departing from this prior research, I focus on these same textual irregularities within ‘The Mirror Stage,’ yet see something quite different taking place in these moments. In order to preserve the complexity of Lacanian material, in a detailed examination utilising close reading, I pick apart long passages of both Lacan and his sources and conclude that Lacan’s position on the animal is both ambivalent and ambiguous in character. This culminates in a lack of clarity regarding how to understand Lacan’s position on both the animal, and correlatively the human. In turn, acknowledging this uncertainty provides a novel way to approach this seminal text, and a justification to revise accusations of anthropocentrism, alongside dominant interpretations more broadly
A Merleau-Pontian Critique of Sartrean Philosophy of Negation
Full text linkThe phenomenological ontologies of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have often been discussed in comparison to one another. Often, a Merleau-Pontian critique of Sartre, based on subjectivity, has been given. In doing so, both Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s views on freedom, facticity, the body, and the Other has been discussed in great detail. Despite all of this, however, not much emphasis has been given to their understanding of negativity in its relation to the construction of Self as the Being-in-the-world of human-reality. Accordingly, this article will focus on the relationship between subjectivity and negativity in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty with a specific emphasis on Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre’s philosophy of negation. First, the article will expand on Sartre’s philosophy of negation and explain how he conceives the experience of nothingness as the foundation of subjectivity. Later, it will develop a Merleau-Pontian critique of Sartrean philosophy of negation (a) by claiming that Sartrean negativity degenerates into pure and absolute positive of the Cartesian duality, and most importantly, (b) by showing how Merleau-Ponty constructs a new dialectical ontology of Self, based on the world-as-me; a being that is seen as flesh
A Modern Form of the Sacred: Glissant’s Poetics of Relation
Full text linkÉdouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation is unlikely to strike most readers as a sacred text. True, the design of the 1997 English paperback edition hints at something mysterious within. The seventeenth century map on the cover, glowing green and only partially visible from the front, disrupts the geographic orientation a map might be expected to provide. The seeming clarity of the title, author, and translator, is likewise unsettled by their placement, suspended above the surrounding white expanse. Yet this trace of eeriness is easily dispelled by the physical book’s assertion of scholarly credentials. “Michigan,” the name of the university press publisher, prominent on the spine and back, also announces itself on the front cover, and the text on the back declares the book an aesthetic and political—but not sacred—project, with three blurbs praising the translator’s achievement and the author’s brilliance. The Library of Congress cataloguing information on the copyright page tells us that Poetics of Relation, Glissant’s third monograph, is first and foremost about his birthplace (Martinique--civilization, language, culture, nationalism, and literature of). Secondarily, according to the cataloguers, it is a book about the French connection (“6. Martinique—Dependency on France. 7. West Indies, French—Relations—France. 8. France—Relations—West Indies.”). Scholarly interpretations of Poetics of Relation are of course more expansive and exploratory than cataloguing’s brevity allows. Still, most who write about this strange and beautiful text focus on poetics and politics, with very few lingering over Glissant’s own claims about the importance of the sacred
To Grasp Praxis Subjectively: Simone Weil and Michel Henry on Marx\u27s Living Labor
Full text linkThis work argues that Simone Weil and Michel Henry appropriate two key insights from Marx—the critique of abstraction and the possibility of living labor—in order to philosophize subjectivity more actively. I place the two philosophers together because there is an uncanny similarity in their interpretations of Marx and specifically, in their use of his notion of praxis. The work begins with Weil’s and Henry’s criticism of philosophy for ignoring what is most human—praxis, or subjectivity. Following Marx’s First Thesis on Feuerbach, both argue that philosophy problematically abstracts subjectivity by objectifying it. In other words, philosophy too often identifies the subject as a thing that can be described, analyzed, and examined. Both assert that just as Capital deadens workers and their living laboring capacity, western philosophy is limited by various objectifications that function to deaden the individual, most notably a knowledge of consciousness. The two reject these objectifications and argue that Marx’s praxis offers another, more active, modality for considering subjectivity. The second half of this work focuses on what is unique to Weil and Henry: the suggestion that Marx’s living has not been adequately understood. Both suggest that Marx attends to praxis philosophically by creating a new method: one that emphasizes what Weil calls experiencing and Henry designates knowledge of life. Attending to this method provides the operative distinction in my work: the difference between a philosophy that objectifies by relying on a knowledge of consciousness and a philosophy that attends to experiencing and depends upon a knowledge of life. The key for Weil and Henry is that Marx attends to the active dimension of subjectivity: real, lived, existence. For both, praxis and living labor point to a singular dimension of subjectivity that is irreducible to objectification, generalization or even to theorizing. In the concluding section I discuss how both thinkers’ interpretations of Marx provide a different modality for philosophy: the possibility of considering subjectivity subjectively by focusing on cultures that foster knowledge of life and promote the singular dimension that is living labor
“Le dépassement réalisé d’une différence”: : Tentation informatique et pensée poétique chez Glissant
Full text link“De l’information du poème” qui clôt la partie “Éléments” dans Poétique de la Relation, représente pour le lectorat habitué à l\u27écriture glissantienne un chapitre assez surprenant voire confondant tant au niveau de l’approche du sujet traité que de sa mise en forme rhétorique, car c’est autour de l’opposition entre poésie et informatique que démarre son propos.
Tout d’abord, on a l’impression que Glissant s\u27écarte des riches lieux- communs qui rythment et structurent sa pensée puisque, après quelques pages consacrées au baroque, son attention se tourne ici de manière apparemment aléatoire vers l\u27antagonisme entre les nouvelles technologies et le parangon de la création littéraire. L\u27intérêt de Glissant pour la science et les nouvelles technologies n’est certes pas une anomalie lorsque l’on considère l’ensemble de son œuvre puisque cette dernière est en effet bâtie sur un éclectisme quasi programmatique qui se manifeste à travers la pensée du rhizome et le droit à l\u27opacité. Cependant, la dichotomie entre “ces deux ordres de la connaissance, le poétique et le scientifique” sur laquelle repose l\u27hypothèse de ce court chapitre semble trancher avec la rhétorique relationnelle qui caractérise son approche. Le penseur semble même souscrire aux poncifs d’un discours d\u27époque réduisant la complexité des nouvelles technologies et la magnitude de leurs effets sur la société contemporaine à une simple série d’oppositions entre, d’une part, une culture humaniste qui rassemblerait une communauté en présence autour de la parole poétique menacée, et, d’autre part, le pouvoir aliénant de l’information transmise à travers des circuits non-relationnels, impersonnels, sans voix et sans visage.“De l’information du poème” qui clôt la partie “Éléments” dans Poétique de la Relation, représente pour le lectorat habitué à l\u27écriture glissantienne un chapitre assez surprenant voire confondant tant au niveau de l’approche du sujet traité que de sa mise en forme rhétorique, car c’est autour de l’opposition entre poésie et informatique que démarre son propos.
Tout d’abord, on a l’impression que Glissant s\u27écarte des riches lieux-communs qui rythment et structurent sa pensée puisque, après quelques pages consacrées au baroque, son attention se tourne ici de manière apparemment aléatoire vers l\u27antagonisme entre les nouvelles technologies et le parangon de la création littéraire. L\u27intérêt de Glissant pour la science et les nouvelles technologies n’est certes pas une anomalie lorsque l’on considère l’ensemble de son œuvre puisque cette dernière est en effet bâtie sur un éclectisme quasi programmatique qui se manifeste à travers la pensée du rhizome et le droit à l\u27opacité. Cependant, la dichotomie entre “ces deux ordres de la connaissance, le poétique et le scientifique” sur laquelle repose l\u27hypothèse de ce court chapitre semble trancher avec la rhétorique relationnelle qui caractérise son approche. Le penseur semble même souscrire aux poncifs d’un discours d\u27époque réduisant la complexité des nouvelles technologies et la magnitude de leurs effets sur la société contemporaine à une simple série d’oppositions entre, d’une part, une culture humaniste qui rassemblerait une communauté en présence autour de la parole poétique menacée, et, d’autre part, le pouvoir aliénant de l’information transmise à travers des circuits non-relationnels, impersonnels, sans voix et sans visage
On the Limitations of Michel Foucault’s Genealogy of Neoliberalism
Full text linkMichel Foucault\u27s genealogy of neoliberalism in Naissance de la biopolitique is surprisingly lacking in critical acumen vis-à-vis neoliberal rationality. Several interpretations explain Foucault\u27s appreciative tone by hypothesising about Foucault\u27s supposed conversion to neoliberalism. In this article, I argue that the problem lies not in Foucault\u27s personal politics but in a disappointing application of the genealogical method. Compared to previous works, Foucault\u27s lectures on neoliberalism focus exclusively on neoliberalism\u27s self-presentation by the likes of Hayek, Becker, and Friedman. It does not explore the subjective effects of neoliberalism on the governed, which would have been impossible for Foucault in 1979. I argue that, by taking into consideration the negative effects of actually-existing neoliberalism, one reveals an immanent critique of neoliberalism at the heart of genealogy. Neoliberalism promises a post-disciplinary order conducive to subjective freedom, but actually requires subjects to adapt to the discipline of free market competition
From Antillanité to the Archipelagic: Édouard Glissant’s Linked Insularities of Non-Continental Thought
Full text linkThe pervasive patterns of neocolonialism long at work in the Francophone Caribbean, whereby the islands have been overseas departments of France for over seventy-five years, operate through a strategic metropolitan praxis of prohibition and exclusion that has long undermined a functional framework that enables and valorizes local sociocultural self-affirmation. While France has effectively sought to efface Guadeloupean and Martinican discourses of nationalism by integrating them into an overarching metropolitan framework of domination of the Other and the disavowal of difference, carried out as part and parcel of a universalizing French policy of ethnopolitical homogeneity, the articulation of nationalist counterdiscourses and cartographies of resistance aimed at asserting the vibrancy and independence of a Franco-Caribbean identity have strategically shifted over time from the purely political to the domains of cultural identity and its corollaries of philosophy and performance
Caribbean Confederations as Relationalities: The Erotics of Archipelagic Thinking
Full text linkIn this essay, I connect my work on Archipelago studies with Édouard Glissant’s notions of relationality and Caribbean confederations to formulate what I denominate as the erotics of archipelagic thinking. My main goal is to share my process of thinking with and through Glissant’s work to focus on a series of theoretical gestures that have allowed me to propose modes of reading literary depictions of Caribbean con/federations that go beyond the binary opposition between colonialism and nationalism. I am performing an exercise that I assign to my students when I teach the “Introduction to Critical Theory” course at the University of Miami. Instead of writing an essay with a short theoretical introduction followed by a detailed close reading of literary and cultural texts that illustrate a keyword or a theoretical insight, I conduct a methodological meditation in which I theorize the archipelagic as a form of relationality that configures an erotic imaginary beyond the nuclear family and towards affective networks. To think about the Caribbean as an archipelagic formation, I use my comparative work on the Antillean Confederation in the Hispanic Caribbean (1860-1898) and the West Indies Federation in the English Caribbean (1958-1962) as a historical context in which the region congealed as a network of locations “act[ing] in concert.
Conflict of Interpretations on Ricoeur’s Contributions to the Philosophy of Technology
No full textRecent literature regarding how Ricoeur’s work relates to the philosophy of technology appears prima facie to be contradictory. In one established interpretation, Ricoeur’s contributions are merely indirect as he did not engage with the empirical turn of the discipline in the 1980s and maintained a suspicious view of technology based on a profound concern with the distinction between persons and things. In this view, Ricoeur’s work does not add anything new to the discipline but is still valuable to the philosophy of technology through other features of his corpus, such as his critical hermeneutics and narrative theory. In another interpretative approach, some argue Ricoeur adds to the field by directly thematizing technology when studying ethics and human capability–he cannot be thought of as merely ignoring the complex relationship between the social sphere and technology. The present paper offers a dialectical analysis of these interpretative approaches and argues that these positions are not mutually exclusive, but rather capture complementary aspects about the nature of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic and political projects. At one level, Ricoeur engages with core themes of philosophy of technology by exploring the ambiguity of specific technologies and techniques and their implications to social, cultural, and political spheres; in doing so, Ricoeur contributes directly to the field by avoiding the reduction of meaning into merely technical questions. On the other hand, it is also true that Ricoeur, particularly in the main thematic areas of his great works since the 1970s, has not been directly involved with specific questions of how different recent technologies are intertwined with social, political, and ethical aspects, and his emphasis against a reductionist type of technical mentality distanced him from a closer engagement with specific technological issues. In this sense, most of his contributions to the philosophy of technology are indirect. Nevertheless, this paper wants to emphasize that this dialectic analysis invites us to recognize the richness and potential of Ricoeur’s thought to understand how technologies are shaping our experiences in the world. The recently published volume Interpreting Technology, edited by Wessel Reijers, Alberto Romele, and Mark Coeckelbergh, is a powerful example of such potential
The Gift of Mourning
Full text linkThis paper explores the relationship of mourning and the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that mourning is not a Derridean gift, but mourning does open us to the gift. Reading the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Kierkegaard on friendship and love to the dead in the wake of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship makes this relation among mourning and the gift apparent for he presents mourning as the opening to a democracy to-come whose logic is the gift. Through these accounts, I maintain that in preparing us for the gift, mourning the dead other can help us to relate better with the living other in ethical, political, and ontological terms