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Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis, and the Occult Zone
Get PDFIn 2011, Achille Mbembe asserted that “the human has consistently taken on the form of waste within the peculiar trajectory race and capitalism espoused in South Africa.” He added that the end of apartheid had shifted rather than undone the lines of exclusion and dispute. Since the massacre on the platinum mines in 2012 it has become widely accepted that the state is resorting to repressive measures to enforce these lines and contain the dispute that they occasion. With notable exceptions academic philosophy, and theory more broadly, has offered remarkably little illumination of the widening distance between the promise of national liberation and democracy and the often bitter realities of contemporary South Africa. [i] Achille Mbembe ‘Democracy as Community Life’ Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism, 2011 http://jwtc.org.za/volume_4/achille_mbembe.ht
Mysticism and War: Reflections on Bergson and his Reception During World War I
Get PDFOnce we grasp Bergson’s new conception of an intuitive metaphysics premised on a distance from action, it seems unlikely that a connection could be found between this metaphysics and an activist philosophy of war. In this essay I shall revisit Bergson’s metaphysics to see how they could have been understood to provide support for war. I discuss how Bergson’s metaphysics by way of its number theoretical understanding of oneness was thought to mirror or express the limit experience of war that attracted many intellectuals hungry for a shattering of conventional limits on what held up as reality. Finally I suggest that Bergson subtly changed his understanding of the élan vital in the course of the Great War, compromising in the process its initially non-teleological character in order to ensure that his doctrines would only be implicated in international peace, not jingoistic war propaganda
The Affect of Dissident Language and Aesthetic Emancipation at the Margins: A Possible Dialogue between Theodor W. Adorno and Julia Kristeva
Get PDFIn this paper I focus on the interaction between affect and language as articulated in the works of Theodor W. Adorno and Julia Kristeva, sometimes in inchoate and non-explicit ways. Language is always in transit, exile, and dispossession. All language is the language of another, or the other, and precisely because of this, it is the site of dissenting and conflicting affect. In this context, my paper traces a missed but necessary dialogue between Adorno and Kristeva. Adorno’s diagnosis of failed subjective inwardness, first presented in his book on Kierkegaard, was sustained throughout Adorno’s entire oeuvre, to the very end, in his posthumous 1969 Aesthetic Theory. I will explicate Adorno’s forced collapsing of subjective interiority into a negative space that opens up aesthetic emancipatory potential. In what follows I place Adorno’s negativity of subjective inwardness and the aesthetic potential after the fact of its destruction in dialogue with the writings of Kristeva, who has likewise diagnosed a subjective interiority of negativity but framed the latter in terms of the female, abjection and maternity. I conclude by placing Kristeva’s work in conversation with Adorno’s philosophy of the language of music, as one example of their shared framework for aesthetic emancipatory experience
Active Viewership and Ethical Representation: Responsible Spectatorship in Alfredo Jaar’s “Real Pictures” and Gil Courtemanche’s Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali
Get PDFIn its discussion of Gil Courtemanche’s Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali and Alfredo Jaar’s installation of “Real Pictures,” both of which are representations of the Rwandan Genocide, this analysis contributes to a larger discussion on ethical representations of violence. Generally the discussion of the ethics of representation analyzes the ways in which the author or artist portrays the violent events. It focuses on the importance of the historical and political context when describing the events, as well as on the ways in which the author or artist avoids the potential objectifying or dehumanizing effects of representations on the victims, as well as, the perpetrators. This article highlights another important element to be considered in the study of ethical representations- that of how the reader is engaged in the representation and as a result may or may not contribute to stereotypes, objectification, and other negative consequences possible when representing violence. Those who represent violence must not only consider ethical implications with their own interactions with the event and text or image, but also how they encourage their audience to interact with them.
Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of Information: An Interview with Jean-Hugues Barthélémy
Get PDFInterview with Jean-Hugues Barthélém
From Narcissus to Genius through the Work of Pleshette DeArmitt
Get PDFThrough my reading of the section of Pleshette Dearmitt’s book The Right to Narcissism, entitled “Kristeva: the Rebirth of Narcissus,” I illustrate the way in which DeArmitt’s reading of Narcissus is reflected in Julia Kristeva’s conception of genius. DeArmitt describes narcissism as a structure through which subjectivity, language, self-love, and love for the other come about. Narcissism develops through a metaphorical relation of identification with a “loving third” in which the subject-in-formation is transferred to the site of the other, to the place from which he or she is seen and heard through the words of the mother directed at an other. The emerging subject catches the words of others and repeats them. The speech of the other, then, is a model or pattern with which the subject-in-formation identifies repeatedly, and it is through identifying with the third that the forming subject becomes like the other, a speaking subject herself. All love comes from narcissism because it is a repetition of this identification and transference. I connect this account to Kristeva’s Female Genius Trilogy by claiming that these works are love stories since they are based on a repetition of the narcissistic structure on a cultural level in their content and in their form, though for each genius it manifests through a different register. For Hannah Arendt the relation is between the actor and the spectator; for Melanie Klein it is between the analyst and the analysand; and for Colette it is between the writer and the reader.
De Copia: On Narcissism, Echo, and the Im-Possible Female Friendship
Get PDFThere are two interrelated questions that I would like to explore in the context of Pleshette DeArmitt’s work. The first one pertains to the intellectual stakes in the eloquent style of her writing, its elegance and playfulness, which accompanies the philosophical order of argumentation. And the second one refers to the issue of female friendship. How can one discuss such friendship without resorting to merely biographical, historical, or autobiographical terms? Yet what kind of philosophical theories of female friendship could I possibly refer to? Perhaps to none. DeArmitt, whose life has created so many friendships, did not live long enough to write about friendship, at least not directly. And yet I would like to suggest that her captivating—the adjective that I use here deliberately—book, The Right to Narcissism: A Case for Im-possible Self-Love, leaves us traces of female friendship in her philosophical argument that narcissistic self-love is inseparable from the love of another.
Echoes of Beauty: In Memory of Pleshette DeArmitt
Get PDFThere is a special poignancy to the fact that Pleshette DeArmitt\u27s essay "Sarah Kofman\u27s Art of Affirmation" foregrounds Freud\u27s essay "On Transience," in which he muses on the fact that beauty seems to be inextricably linked to a fleeting existence. As DeArmitt writes, "beauty, even in full flowering, foreshadows its own demise, causing what Freud describes as \u27a foretaste of mourning.\u27" Such a transience, in Freud\u27s mind, increases rather than decreases the worth of all that is beautiful. In her essay, DeArmitt argues that Kofman\u27s 1985 text Mélancolie de l\u27Artreinscribes Freud\u27s text, but brings it into the present by pointing to contemporary art as the occasion for the opening up of a new space, one capable of "dislocat[ing] the space of representation and meaning" and "invent[ing] a space of indetermination and play.” Through dislocation of a fixed reference or meaning and opening up a place for indeterminacy and play, contemporary art acknowledges and celebrates, rather than regrets, the transience of beauty.
Book Review - J. Aaron Simmons and Bruce Ellis Benson, The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013)
Get PDFA Book Review of J. Aaron Simmons and Bruce Ellis Benson\u27s The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013
Language as Symbolic Action: A Burkean Analysis of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
Get PDFThis paper sets out to put Kenneth Burke’s thought on language as representative of symbolic action into conversation with Aimé Césaire’s epic poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. The paper is divided into three main sections that set the stage for Burke and Césaire’s work to converse. The first section lays out an overview of Kenneth Burke’s thought on language paying particular attention to his definition of man, understanding of symbolism and symbolic action, and thoughts on poetry and poetics. The second section provides a working history of African philosophy, the Négritude movement, Césaire as a philosopher, politician, and poet, and provides an overview of main themes and intentions present in Cahier. The third section works to put Burke and Césaire into conversation by using Burke’s understanding of symbolic action and his notion of order and identification to examine key passages from Césaire’s Cahier. The paper works to present an informative and textured engagement between the work of Kenneth Burke and Aimé Césaire