"Brower explores the way philosophers were inspired by entomological social systems and communication to reflect on human psyche, social behavior, community organization, communication, and inter-individual relationships. His essay rehearses the swarms of insects embedded in contemporary philosophy and literary theory, not only showing how many of the major concepts (or philosophemes) in continental philosophy – sexuality, politics, thinking, time, interdependence, and language – draw lessons from the world of insects, but also illustrating again how the insect world spurred human reflection.".

This article exploits a core defect in the phenomenology of sensation and self. Although phenomenology has made great strides in redeeming the body from cognitive solipisisms that often follow short-sighted readings of Descartes and Kant, it has not grappled with the specific kind of self-reflexivity that emerges in the sense of taste with the thoroughness it deserves. This path is illuminated by the works of Martin Luther, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida as they attempt to think through the specific phenomena (...) accessible through the lips, tongue, and mouth. Their attempts are, in turn, supplemented with detours through Walter Benjamin, Hélène Cixous, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The paper draws attention to the German distinction between Geschmack and Kosten as well as the role taste may play in relation to faith, the call to love, justice, and messianism. The messiah of love and justice will have been that one who proclaims: taste the flesh. (shrink)

This thesis explores how the novels of Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys – To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Wide Sargasso Sea – despite being set in times of wars and social change that influence personal lives, maintain an attachment to and love for life. This thesis proposes that Woolf and Rhys ‘locate’ this attachment to life in the moments and atmospheres of ‘strange intimacy’ – in sensual, affective, and oddly intimate moments and settings where (...) characters realise their bodily connection to the world of others, things, and places. This work suggests that this love for life is cultivated when life is seen as ‘a life’ and selves as ‘haecceities’ in the Deleuzian sense, and when we consider modern life as enchanted, not disenchanted. To examine the love for life and strange intimacies further, this thesis rethinks the works of Hélène Cixous in the light of contemporary theories of affect and new materialism that are inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophies. This theoretical framework allows the examination of the complex ways in which intimacy, selfhood, and desire are portrayed in Woolf’s and Rhys’s modernist fiction. This thesis also demonstrates how post-structural feminism’s focus on radical alterity and its emphasis on and turn to materiality, the non-human, bodies, and affects, which are drawn together in the notion of écriture féminine, pre-figures the concerns of affect studies and new materialisms. The reading of Cixous’s, Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Bennett’s works performed in this thesis demonstrates how their theories of affect and the non-human help us to further our understanding of intimacy in the works of Woolf and Rhys and to reconsider the life-affirming, affective, and anti-Oedipal qualities of their modernism. Such an approach allows not only the discovery of a new understanding of Woolf’s and Rhys’s writings, but it contributes significantly to how we understand these theories and modernism in general. (shrink)

Following one of Jacques Derrida’s early questions — namely, How is writing involved in speech? — this essay reconsiders the role of the tongue and the sense of taste in the oral phenomena of speaking and saying. The contact the tongue makes with the mouth or teeth is just as much a materialization of language as what is commonly called “writing.” The tongue acts as a pen and the mouth, as a blank page (or palimpsest). Mouthed writing is accompanied by (...) sense experiences. There are various selftastes to the tastes of speaking, the tastes of words, or, even, the tastes of thoughts. Freud’s notes on speaking in one’s sleep, telepathy, the mystic writing-pad, and memory are revisited and supplemented with the writings of Hélène Cixous on the taste of words, telephoning, saying-to-oneself, and forgetting. The auto-affection of tasting-oneself-speakwriting is offered as an alternative to the metaphysical presumptions Derrida implicates in Husserl’s understanding of speech based on the auto-affection of hearing-oneself-speak. As such, writing (haunted by the trace of death) and speech (invested with living presence) is now confronted with the selftastes of speakwriting with one’s stylangue in and on the mouth as the scene of writing (ever accompanied by tastes of life-death). (shrink)