Ce numéro porte sur le dénudement public et la façon dont il peut renforcer ou subvertir les normes et les rôles de genre. En dialogue avec les travaux d’histoire de l’art et la théorie féministe du regard, il n’adopte cependant pas comme principale focale les représentations du nu. Reprenant plusieurs chantiers ouverts par Clio HFS sur le genre des pratiques vestimentaires (« Femmes travesties », 1999, n° 10 ; « Costumes », 2012, n° 36), le fil conducteur du dossier est (...) plutôt l’acte lui-mêm... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seeing without Recognizing? More on Denuding Perceptual ContentArindam ChakrabartiTo be in the presence of something is not necessarily to see it. Everyone knows that. Even if an onlooker looks at me and sees me 'looking at' a particular wall with eyes wide open, she cannot be sure that I am seeing that wall. Apart from the possibility that I am distracted or inattentive, I may be focusing on the (...) color of the wall or some particular graffiti on it so attentively that I may not be noticing that it is the color of a wall or that the graffiti is on a wall. Even if the wall causes my perception, it need not be the object of my perception, just as my retina or sunlight is not.Thus, I must have some say on what it is that I am seeing. That does not mean that I may not be mistaken about my own current perceptual content. Neither does it mean that to have a say is to be able to 'say' in descriptive words what one is seeing. All it means is that I cannot be clueless about it. I cannot be, to use Sydney Shoemaker's phrase, strongly "self-blind" (which is worse than being self-oblivious). Now, the myth of immaculate perception, in both of its (radically unlike) Nyāya and Buddhist versions, requires us to admit some such perceptual states that are so radically un-self-ascribable, or—to use Phillips' terminology—unapperceivable, that the subject is "never able to say anything" (in Siderits' words) concerning what she is perceiving during these states. This comes dangerously close to self-blindness. To admit, for other systemic reasons, that one is acquainted directly and pre-predicatively with either a bare featureless fleeting particular (the Sautrāntika Buddhist claim) or a pure universal feature as yet cognitively un-pasted to a particular (the Nyāya claim) is to consign a nook of our own minds to such self-blindness, and also to acknowledge that an awareness can take something as its object without recognizing it as anything whatsoever.Even to see a particular as a unique uncategorizable something is to see it as something, even to see a man as 'that man whom I can't recognize' is to bring him under the general concept of an unknown stranger currently in front of me, a negative demonstrative covering concept. That is why I think seeing is not possible without recognizing. (Seeing cannot even be caused by a bare particular since there aren't any in the world. That is what my realism tells me.) If it were, then we would have to be partially self-blind. But we are not.Recently two parallel controversies have erupted on the pages of this journal: one between myself and Stephen Phillips regarding the necessity of Indeterminate Perception within Nyāya epistemology, and the other between Monima Chadha and Mark Siderits on the issue of whether a realist needs perception of particulars without deployment of concepts. The first controversy is muddied with technical Nyāya assumptions—for example, about how many moments a perceptual cognitive state [End Page 365] lasts or what can be called the instrumental cause of a perception with full-fledged qualificative content. The latter controversy is muddied with the turbid understanding one has of what Kant meant by concepts or the use of concepts in the shaping of an experience.Now, I have for a long time felt that not just Kant's but just about every Western philosopher's concept of a concept (except Frege's, which is an odd notion) is regrettably unclear. Notwithstanding his book A Study of Concepts (MIT Press, 1992), even Peacocke's notion of a concept (which is different from Fodor's notion of a concept) does not yield obvious answers to such simple queries as: "Can two people possess the same concept?" or "When I use a concept that I possess to process a perceived content, do I make the concept itself an object of my perception?"Siderits' bringing in Externalism versus Internalism, the hotly debated issue in current philosophy of content, has also complicated matters. Chadha's initial mistaken... (shrink)

Les dénudations dans les images médiévales sont souvent associées au régime de la preuve dans un cadre juridique. Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles, recueil rédigé en Bourgogne dans les années 1450, présente un cas singulier de dénudation (nouvelle 45) dont il existe une image dans un manuscrit conservé à Glasgow. Une lavandière transgenre, Mme Marguerite, est accusée de relations sexuelles avec une jeune fille et exposée semi-dénudée sur la place du marché de Rome pour dévoiler son pénis. L’article compare ce (...) cas à d’autres occurrences de procès de personnes transgenres ayant trait à des questions de sexualité. Il compare également ce cas à un fabliau et à une nouvelle de Boccace dans lesquels se posent des questions de transition de genre et de sexualité illégitime. Le cas de Mme Marguerite apparaît comme l’un des jalons d’une histoire longue de la dénudation forcée des personnes transgenres. (shrink)

Du début du xxe siècle aux années 1950, en Égypte, le geste de se dénuder se politise. Cet article s’intéresse à la façon dont des militantes et artistes mobilisent le dénudement dans leurs répertoires d’actions et dans leurs stratégies rhétoriques à des fins nationalistes ou féministes. Cette recherche propose ainsi un panorama chrono-thématique des questions relatives à la corporalité féminine, mises au-devant de la scène par ces femmes engagées. Des années 1900 aux années 1920, l’étude se focalise sur les corps (...) féminins dans la rue, visibles, mobilisés et révélés au nom du « bien-être de l’humanité ». Puis, pour évoquer le tournant des années 1920 et 1930, l’analyse porte sur les corps dans les sports ou à la plage, exposés et « bons » pour la nation. Enfin, la réflexion se déploie sur les « beaux » dénudements et la patrie dans les arts, la mode et les concours de beauté, du milieu des années 1930 aux années 1950. (shrink)

One reason to think that names have a predicate-type semantic value is that they naturally occur in count-noun positions: ‘The Michaels in my building both lost their keys’; ‘I know one incredibly sharp Cecil and one that's incredibly dull’. Predicativism is the view that names uniformly occur as predicates. Predicativism flies in the face of the widely accepted view that names in argument position are referential, whether that be Millian Referentialism, direct-reference theories, or even Fregean Descriptivism. But names are predicates (...) in all of their occurrences; they are predicates that are true of their bearers. When a name appears as a bare singular in argument position, it really occupies the predicate position of what in this essay is called a denuded definite description: a definite description with an unpronounced definite article. Sloat provided good evidence for this. The definite article is sometimes pronounced with names in the singular: ‘The Ivan we all love doesn't feel well’. Sloat proposed a disjunctive generalization of when the definite article must be pronounced with a singular name. This essay shows that by slightly revising Sloat's generalization, we arrive at a simple, nondisjunctive, syntactic rule that governs the overt appearance of the definite article with singular names. But Ivan does not necessarily bear the name ‘Ivan’, so one might worry that the sentence “Ivan might not have had ‘Ivan’ as a name” would incorrectly be predicted false. This essay shows that Predicativism does not have this consequence by showing that incomplete definite descriptions in general and incomplete denuded descriptions, such as ‘Øthe Ivan’, in particular are rigid designators. (shrink)

Context: Neurophenomenology, as formulated by Varela, offers an approach to the science of consciousness that seeks to get beyond the hard problem of consciousness. There is much to admire in the practical approach to the science of consciousness that neurophenomenology advocates. Problem: Even so, this article argues, the metaphysical commitments of the enterprise require a firmer foundation. The root problem is that neurophenomenology, as classically formulated by Varela, endorses a form of non-reductionism that, despite its ambitions, assumes rather than dissolves (...) the hard problem of consciousness. We expose that neurophenomenology is not a natural solution to that problem. We defend the view that whatever else neurophenomenology might achieve, it cannot close the gap between the phenomenal and the physical if there is no such gap to close. Method: Building on radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science that deny that the phenomenal and the physical are metaphysically distinct, this article shows that the only way to deal properly with the hard problem is by denying the metaphysical distinction between the physical and the phenomenal that gives the hard problem life. Results: This article concludes by discussing how neurophenomenology might be reformulated under the auspices of a radically enactive and embodied account of cognition. That is, only by denying that there are two distinct phenomena - the physical and the phenomenal - can the neurophenomenological project get on with addressing its pragmatic problems of showing how neuroscientists may be guided by first-person data in their analysis of third-person experimental data, and vice versa. Implications: The topic addressed in this article is of direct value to consciousness studies in general and specifically for the project of neurophenomenology. If the neurophenomenological project is to deal with the hard problem, it must denude itself of its non-reductionist background assumption and embrace a strict identity thesis. Constructivist content: Radical enactive and embodied approaches to mind and consciousness adopt a view of consciousness as a dynamic activity - something an organism enacts in ongoing engagement with its environment. These approaches therefore share with constructivist approaches an action-based view of mind. (shrink)

Parmi les scènes de dénudations médiévales dramatiques, les plus frappantes sont celles dans lesquelles un personnage transgenre est mise à nu publiquement de vivo ou post-mortem. Cet événement, qui apparaît dans les images et les textes durant toute la période médiévale, entraîne une réassignation de la personne à son genre de naissance. On en trouve dans les vies de saints comme dans la littérature chevaleresque ; cette dénudation a longtemps été lue comme le topos de la révélation d’un sec...

The influence of film's compelling images, characters and storylines has polarized perspectives on cinema and the moral imagination. Does film stimulate the audience's imagination and foster imitation in morally dangerous ways, or elicit ethical insight and empathy? Might the presentation of images on screen denude the capacity to conjure images in the mind's eye, or cultivate the imaginative capacity for moral vision as spectators attend to the plight of protagonists? Using Imitation of Life to interrogate paradoxical perspectives on the cinematic (...) imagination, this article develops an account of the moral imagination focusing on sensory, emotional and empathic aspects of the audience's imaginative relationship with screen characters and their innermost thoughts and feelings. (shrink)

« “Je pense comme une fille enlève sa robe.” (Bataille.) La pensée est une mise à nu et la nudité est inachevable : elle n’est pas un état, elle est un mouvement incessant pour se porter à l’extrémité à laquelle n’atteint que ce qui se dérobe encore en atteignant l’extrémité. Mais le dénudement touche aussi au dénuement : aujourd’hui, la pensée doit répondre d’une détresse du monde et d’un souci de l’histoire qui défient toutes nos philosophies, nos religions, nos représentations. (...) Comment penser, comment recommencer à penser dans la nudité : à partir de rien de donné, en vue de rien de capitalisable? Pas de “salut”, pas de “fin”, mais à chaque instant, au contraire, une ouverture singulière du sens d’être sans fin. Cela définit d’abord la pensée – le dénudement – comme une conduite, une tenue et une allure : un ethos autant qu’une techné. ». (shrink)

A translation of Kant's early paper, ‘Die Frage, ob die Erde veralte, physikalisch erwogen’ is presented, and the main features of his position on this question in 1754 are summarized. In that year, Kant believed that the Earth was ageing, and that it was about 6000 years old. The paper allows us to understand the approximate outline of Kant's general ‘theory of the Earth’, and the relation of this theory to the cosmogony that he propounded in 1755. His ideas on (...) the processes of erosion, and the formation of rivers, deltas and sandbanks, are noteworthy, and provide a contribution to the eighteenth-century literature on the denudation dilemma. Kant's general theory of erosion and deposition was, it seems, based to a significant extent on his knowledge of the geographical features of the Königsberg district. The general teleological position underpinning his philosophy may be discerned in this early paper, and he may be thought of as having been trying to orientate himself in space and time, so to speak, before undertaking his major reconstructions in philosophy. (shrink)

When I was five, a pond and thicket area down the street from my house was filled in and leveled while I was away. I remember coming home and finding my beloved ecosystem denuded of all greenery, and completely empty of the beavers and their dam, the minnows, the birds, and the countless rabbits and squirrels that had been a comforting and valued presence. I was devastated. Consumed and overcome by grief and loss. I did not want to eat, or (...) play, or go to school. I felt as though I had lost something deeply important, and intimately a part of the fabric of my life. It was the first time in my short life that I became aware of the fragility of life—mine and others—and from that moment, I found myself in a different .. (shrink)

Retributivism so dominates criminal theory that lawyers, legal scholars and law students assert with complete confidence that criminal law is justified only in light of violations of another person’s rights. Yet the core tenet of retributivism views criminal law fundamentally through the lens of individual actors, rendering both offender and victim unrecognizably denuded from their social and civic context. Doing so means that retributivism is unable to explain even our most basic criminal law practices, such as why we punish recidivists (...) more than first time offenders or why “hate crimes” are of special concern. A republican view of criminal law brings our most natural intuitions back into focus by insisting that the core of criminal responsibility lies in the offender’s attack on the civic bonds that make living in a society as equals possible. By grounding our punishment practices in an Aristotelian republicanism that for so long was the unquestioned basis of mutual responsibility, we understand that hostility, as expressed in the offender’s “civic character,” matters to us all while still seeing our obligations to reintegrate both victim and offender into our shared civic project. (shrink)

This contribution aims at discussing the presentation of the philosophical idea of book in Jacques Derrida, the opposition that Derrida draws between the philosophical idea of book on the one hand and writing on the other, and, above all, the ambiguous placing of Hegel in this opposition. Hegelian philosophical writing is for Derrida (and not only for him) a threshold beyond which the philosophy of the Book in its ‘total’ form is no longer possible. The aim, however, is to suggest (...) that what is “now underway in all domains”can’t be, as Derrida claims, the pure and simple “destruction of the book”, and it is doubtful that this will happen or could happen in favour of the denudation of the “surface of a text”. (shrink)

Des médecins, à l'Age classique, observent le visage humain, et tentent d'y deviner les passions de l'âme ; des savants, dans les premières décennies du XIXe siècle, déchiffrent le corps du monstre, et y perçoivent un semblable. Des curieux se pressent, au siècle des Lumières, au spectacle d'un homme sans bras ni jambes, vêtues à la Turque, qui tourbillonne, le sabre au clair, sur le pavé parisien ; les foules de la Belle Epoque, à la Foire du Trône, se massent (...) sur le seuil des musées de cires anatomiques, qu'elles déserteront bientôt. Des soldats américains, durant la Guerre d'Irak, posent devant des prisonniers dénudés... Ce sont là quelques-uns des regards qui les scrutent et qu'interroge le travail de Jean-Jacques Courtine, dans un parcours qui traverse l'histoire du visage, celle du corps, celle de la virilité. On y sent à chaque pas la présence de la pensée de Michel Foucault, entendue, discutée ; ses concepts - énoncés, formation discursive, dispositif - questionnés. Le livre partage avec le travail foucaldien un paradoxe fondateur : lorsqu'on y interroge l'énigme de la chair, ce sont tout autant l'épaisseur sédimentée du langage et les incessants déplacements du regard qui répondent. Pas d'histoire du corps qui ne soit une archéologie des discours et une généalogie des regards. (shrink)

RésuméPar la science, le sujet dénude son objet, le dévore, résolvant la réalité en actes dont tout aspect plastique n'est que l'apparence subjective; par l'art, le sujet se retire devant l'objet, conférant l'objectivitéà l'aspect plastique qui résume une infinité d'actes. Cependant art et science comportent les deux tendances, ne sont caractérisés que par la prédominance de l'une ou de l'autre. Plus les deux tendances sont accentuées, pures et pourtant liées, c'est‐à‐dire plus la tension est forte, plus intense est l'existence et (...) plus complète la conscience. Dans l'une et l'autre activité, l'activité complémentaire devrait être plus consciente, plus travaillée, mieux liée, et sans doute assisterions‐nous à un épanouissement imprévisible de la pensée. Dès maintenant, quelques conséquences paraîtraient probables: une conception nouvelle du progrès, plus fidèle aux conditions naturelles; un freinage de la course desespérée à la puissance par le sentiment de la possession; une valorisation de la nature s'opposant à la tendance rationalisante. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 145-147. Here I accoutred myself in my new habiliments; and, having em- ployed the same precautions as before, retired from my lodging at a time least exposed to observation. It is unnecessary to des- cribe the particulars of my new equipage; suffice it to say, that one of my cares was to discolour my complexion, and give it the dun and sallow hue which is in most instances characteristic of the tribe to which I assumed to belong; (...) and that when my metamorphosis was finished, I could not, upon the strictest ex- amination, conceive that any one could have traced out the per- son of Caleb Williams in this new disguise. William Godwin Caleb Williams (352). Giorgio Agamben. Nudities . Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 144 pp. | 10 illustrations. | ISBN: 9780804769501 | $16.95 A. The Protective Overcoat. The most pervasive, resilient, robust, sneaky, and significant concept in all of Giorgio Agamben’s essays is that of separation. This is not the same as alienation. Separation is more nostalgic, for Agamben valorizes an ancient world in which human society and its beings were not subject to such separation. He implies that these separations are damaging to human beings, crippling them at the very level of their identities. $4.99 B. The Handsome Gloves. Giorgio Agamben’s Nudities , like Profanations before it, employs a wide range of subjects in order to establish separation as a metaphor, in much the same way that interdisciplinary scholars have adopted Michel Foucault’s concepts in order to rethink societies and texts. The longest essay from Profanations, entitled “In Praise of Profanation,” laments humankind’s inability to profane as the result of what Walter Benjamin has called “the capitalist religion.” Likewise, “Nudity” adopts a pessimistic stance on the Christian theological tradition’s perverse asphyxiation of the unclothed body. $2.50 C. The Hoop Earrings. Religion separates humans from things by procuring for itself items as “sacred,” thus taking them out of common use. In this state, human beings are unable to play with them, unable to change their use-value. They become off-limits, museified. $1,499.00 D. The Uncomfortable Shoes. Biometrics polices identity, replacing meaningful metrics of identity. It is a deplorable situation that leaves human beings in danger of, and indeed already victims of, mass persecution. $111.75 E. The Prince Albert. One could characterize Giorgio Agamben’s desire to catalogue a history of ignorance as a recognition that human beings are separated from knowledge by language. Where then is the prophet, and how shall we be saved? $49.50 + tip F. The Corset. Franz Kafka’s character of Joseph K. has put himself on trial, as in Roman trials when the Kalumniator was marked with the letter K. The torture he undergoes is meant to elicit a confession of the truth. It is possible that Giorgio Agamben perceives his role as a philosopher to be confined to self-trial, and that with every passage he flays the unclothed page with prophetic intent. $27.00 G. The Derby. Giorgio Agamben himself tries to bridge various separations through exploratory play. He is not a performative writer semantically, but his exploratory style is rooted in the play spirit. His strategy of numbering points is almost comical, yet it is not misleading. It is play, after all, not ruse. He denudes with pecks, like carrion on a tattered corpse. $11.00 H. The Trousers. Although Giorgio Agamben is elsewhere concerned with the profanation of religion’s apparatuses, in essay nine he would like to consider what is consumed during days of inoperativity, how religion governs these, and how to account for our binges and purges. Inoperativity is inextricably bound to feasting, to the festival. $24.50 I. The Stylish Belt. The only essay in Nudities to contain photographs is the essay entitled, “Nudity.” All of these photographs project human bodies. $.01 I The aim here is not to tap into an original state prior to the separation but to comprehend and neutralize the apparatus that produced this separation. (66) II The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light but rather its darkness. (13) III We can therefore only experience nudity as a denudation and a baring, never as a form and a stable possession. (65) IV Just as genius and talent originally distinct and even opposite—are nevertheless united in the work of the poet, so the work of creation and the work of salvation, inasmuch as they represent the two powers of a single God, remain in some way secretly conjoined. (6) V In our culture, the face-body relationship is marked by a fundamental asymmetry, in that our faces remain for the most part naked, while our bodies are normally covered. (88) VI Every man initiates a slanderous trial against himself. (21) VII The glorious body is not some other body, more agile and beautiful, more luminous and spiritual; it is the body itself, at the moment when inoperativity removes the spell from it and opens it up to a new possible common use. (103) VIII As Kleist understood so well, the relationship with a zone of nonknowledge is a dance. (114) IX The deactivation of this apparatus retroactively operates, therefore, as much on nature as on grace, as much on nudity as on clothing, liberating them from their theological signature. (90) X At any rate, whether festive inoperativity precedes religion or results from the profanation of its apparatuses, what is essential here is a dimension of praxis in which simple, quotidian human activities are neither negated nor abolished but suspended and rendered inoperative in order to be exhibited, as such, in a festive manner. (112) XI This is just how much [of] the land [the] surveyor is allowed to catch a glimpse. (36). (shrink)

Une île dans océan? C'est l'humanité, à présent qu'elle s'est débarrassée de tout grand Autre. Comme si ne suffisaient pas la mort de Dieu, ainsi que l'effondrement des grandes espérances sociales et de la confiance aveugle en le progrès, l'humanité a cessé de percevoir la présence naturelle et cosmique. Gigantesques amputation et dénudation d'où résultent affaiblissement de la vitalité créatrice, exténuation des valeurs, désarroi, errance, règne du saccage et de la dérision, confusion. L'autisme de l'espèce a pour conséquences l'autodestruction (...) de la culture et une décivilisation que l'on voit à l'oeuvre. Paradoxalement, l'acosmidrne est moins que jamais justifié : à présent, nous savons que l'univers a une histoire prodigieuse au point qu'elle devrait être au centre de notre culture, celle d'un long, persévérant accroissement du complexe et du divers, ascension qui ne fut rien d'autre qu'une montée vers la conscience. De cet univers génial, qui est tout à la fois la merveille et l énigme, nous sommes partie prenante. Nous et lui sommes complices. Le réenchantement ne tient qu'à nous. (shrink)

The mind cannot be an object. An object can be conceived only as that which may possibly become an object to something else. Now what can the mind become an object to? Not to me for I am it and not to something else. Not to something else without again being denuded of consciousness.And how could we descend into the depths of our nervous system to ascertain what is the nature of the psychical correlative of the physiological bottom? If we (...) could, we could only describe that correlative psychical in terms of object-consciousness, which would be a pseudo description of it.John Hughlings-Jackson.If Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952) was the most philosophically aware neurophysiologist of the late 19th to early 20th .. (shrink)

This paper assesses the extent to which the category of hope assists in preserving and redefining the vestiges of utopian thought in critical social theory. Hope has never had a systematic position among the categories of critical social theory, although it has sometimes acquired considerable prominence. It will be argued that the current philosophical and everyday interest in social hope can be traced to the limited capacity of liberal conceptions of freedom to articulate a vision of social transformation apposite to (...) contemporary suffering and indignity. The background to these experiences is the structural changes associated with the injustices of globalisation, the mobilisation of the capitalist imaginary and the uncertainties of the risk society. The category of hope could assist in sustaining the utopianism of critical theory through conjoining normative principles with a temporal orientation. Yet, the paradoxes of the current phase of capitalist modernisation have further denuded notions of progress. Since the theological background to the category of hope constitutes a major limitation, the utopian orientation of critique is clarified in relation to the antinomies of the turn to social hope and the potential of Habermas' discourse theory of democracy, law and morality. Despite Castoriadis' profound critique of the category of hope, its present usage in social analyses will be seen to have affinities with Honneth's conception of the struggle for recognition. (shrink)

If a person has lost all or most of her capacities for agency, how can she be harmed? This paper begins by describing several ways in which a person loses, or never develops, significant capacities of agency. In contrast with other work in this area, the central analyses are not of fetuses, small children, or the cognitively disabled. The central analyses are of victims of mistreatment or oppressive social circumstances. These victims are denuded of their agential capacities, becoming, in an (...) important sense, objects or pseudo-agents. In light of this, the concern of this paper is how further harm to ersatz agents should be understood. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of ethics in addressing aspects of ecological restoration in culturally-saturated landscapes. Do we have the ethical tools to respond to the complex questions that restoration poses? We can see valued landscapes, such as the English Lake District, as culturally rich or as ecologically denuded. This paper will juxtapose the demands of retaining rich cultural narratives and those of rewilding (which would allow for greater self-sustaining biological diversity and space for unrestrained nature). Using the ethical theory (...) of responsive cohesion, this paper will explore the cultural narrative vs wildness question in the context of the English Lake District. (shrink)

According to Hector-Neri Castañeda, indexical reference is our most basic means of identifying the objects and events we experience and think about. Its tokens reveal our own part in the process by denoting what are "referred to as items present in experience" (Castañeda 1981, 285-6). If you hear me say, "Take that box over there and set it next to this box here," you learn something about my orientation towards the referents in a way that is not conveyed by, "Take (...) the red box and set it next to the blue box." My indexical tokens express what they do not only because they issue from a unique spatio-temporal perspective that I happen to occupy, but also because they reflect my encounter with referents that are differently situated in that perspective. From your perspective, my here might be your there, my you your she, and within my own, a this differs from a that and one this diverges from another. Encounter and orientation within a perspective are the essential ingredients in indexical identification without which particular 'this's, 'that's, 'then's, 'here's, and 'beyond's would be denuded of individuating powess.1 There are several consequences of this description. First, indexical reference is ephemeral because perspective is constantly changing, rendering the indexical status of an entity relative to a given perspective temporary: 1 A this quickly turns into a that, and soon enough it is lost to experience and is not even a remote that; a you goes away and is replaced by another . . . Nothing is really an enduring you -- except God perhaps for the abiding mystic. (Castañeda 1989a, 69) Second, indexical reference is irreducible since non-indexical mechanisms of reference fail to express the subject's involvement or encounter with the referents that indexicals convey. Nor can the various indexicals be reduced to each other.2 Third, because each perspective is unique, indexical reference is essentially subjective.. (shrink)

This chapter explores the early phenomenological accounts of Ressentiment provided by Else Voigtländer, Max Scheler, and Adolf Reinach. In particular, it examines the self-deceptive processes that lead to the “inversion of values” inherent to Ressentiment, i.e., how an object previously felt as valuable is denuded of its worth when the subject realizes that she cannot achieve it. For the comparative analysis of the three accounts, attention is paid to three crucial issues: 1) the origins of Ressentiment (etiology); 2) its place (...) in the taxonomy of the affective mind (ontology); and 3) the psychological mechanisms responsible for the inversion of value (psychology). The early phenomenological accounts are then analyzed in the light of recent accounts of Ressentiment elaborated by authors close to the phenomenological tradition. It is argued that the early phenomenological accounts provide central insights on the interrelation between affectivity and value. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to show Karl Marx from the humanistic perspective in order to prove that it is unauthorized to blame him for all the evil of totalitarianism. The semantic content of the presented material includes three key areas. The first figure refers to Karl Marx, his personal characteristics and activity. Secondly, a question of philosophical foundations on which the thought of Marx is set. The third aspect of the problem concerns his economic theory. All these planes are (...) explored through the prism of Marx’s humanism. The article is summarised by a short reflection which denudes errors in Marx is dogmatism and reflect son the pertinence of setting Marx in a series of dictator criminals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading Bataille: The Invention of the FootLucette Finas (bio)Translated by Nelly Furman (bio)§ 1. Certainly, I wrote Le mort before the spring of 1944. This text must have been composed probably in 1943, not before. I do not know where I wrote it, in Normandy (end of 1942), in Paris in December 1942, or during the first three months of 1943; at Vézelay, from March to October 1943? Or (...) in Paris from November ‘43 to the spring of ‘44? Perhaps even at Samois from April to June. Or even perhaps in Paris on Cour de Rohan during the winter of ‘43–‘44. I can no longer remember. I am certain only of having recopied Le mort so as to sell a small number of manuscripts before June 1944 (as I am certain that I wrote this text after the spring of 1942, a time at which I fell ill; and even at the earliest during my stay in Normandy from September to November ‘42).§ 2. In any case, there is the closest relationship between Le mort and the stay in Normandy of the tubercular patient that I was; in Normandy, not far from the village of Tilly (which I name Quilly in Le mort). The inn of Quilly is in fact the inn of Tilly; 1 the woman innkeeper, the one from Tilly. I invented the other details, with the exception of the rain that wouldn’t stop in October or November ‘42. With the exception also of the very dark night when Julie knocked at the door of the inn? I can no longer even remember if I slept in this inn? It seems to me that yes. I believe furthermore that in the room there were two or three farmhands in gummed rubber boots and even a player piano. Whatever it was, it was sinister, and beyond measure. Finally, it is certain that the atmosphere of Tilly’s inn suggested to me the one of the inn of Le mort. I am also almost certain—in the end—that I slept—alone—in this place that terrified me.§ 3. The rest is linked to the frenzied sexual arousal in which I was during November’s extravagance; in my almost total solitude, I lived then not far from Tilly, but we lived apart, a kilometer from one another, a beautiful girl, my mistress, and I; I was ill, in an obscure state of depression, of horror, and of arousal. It is difficult to imagine the mud of the rough small roads where I traveled, without the right footwear, on a bicycle. Then, I ate most of my meals, but alone, with farmers.§ 4. I remember in particular having heard one day a plane whose engine sputtered [avait des ratés]. The noise of the engine was followed by a violent shock. I took my bicycle. I ended up finding the place where this German plane had fallen. It was burning in the middle of an immense orchard (apple trees); several trees were calcinated, and three or four dead, thrown around the plane, were spread out on the grass. At some distance, in the valley of the Seine, an Englishman had probably just shot down this enemy plane that could only crash at some distance. The foot of one of the Germans was bared [dénudé], the sole of the shoe having been torn away. The heads of the dead, it seems to me, were shapeless. The flames must have touched them; this foot alone was intact. It was [End Page 97] the only human thing belonging to a body, and its nakedness, having become earthen, was inhuman: the heat of the blaze had transfigured it; this thing was neither baked nor calcinated: in the upper [l’empeigne] with no sole of the shoe, it was diabolical: but no, it was unreal, stripped naked [dénudée], indecent to the highest degree. I remained motionless for a long time that day, for this naked foot was looking at me.§ 5. [The truth, I believe, has only one face: that of a violent denial. Truth has nothing in common with allegorical figures, with figures of naked women: but... (shrink)

Containing the spread of pandemic transmission tends to go hand in hand with a surveillance regime that tracks movement, transmission and those who contract the virus or disease. An enduring legacy of the COVID-19 crisis will be the incremental development of surveillance technologies, ostensibly purposed to identify the threat and spread of a pandemic, giving birth to what amounts to the pandemic surveillance state. Whether this is seen as an undesirable outcome depends very much on the field of expertise and (...) the relevant slant. Health professionals and epidemiologists favor more surveillance; privacy and data security advocates fear a further denuding of protections. This paper examines the dangers of such technologies and efforts to seek a middle ground on app technologies designed to protect privacy. Such designs may, in time, seem more hopeful than actual. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:196 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in 1943, was to write an Epilogue to Julian Marias' History o] Philosophy. In early 1944, the Epilogue was conceived as a volume of 400 pages, and later of 700. In 1945 a part of the Epilogue was to be detached and given the title The Origin ol Philosophy. Then one completed part of that was published in 1953 as an essay in a Festschrift (...) for Karl Jaspers. That, and other sections, have been put together here. The first part of the book treats philosophy as a cumulative enterprise in which each man rethinks and thinks further what other men have thought. Even when past thought has reached an end, or taken a direction we will not follow, it is only for the reason that it has already happened that we do not have to do it ourselves. This is not because history is rational but because thought is historical, rooted in ideas we did not ourselves create and based on methods we have acquired and sometimes altered. The second part of the book deals with the origin of philosophy--and the origin of "philosophy" for Ortega is concerned throughout with language and etymology. The word "philosophy" is not one Ortega likes; he prefers the word "aletheia," which was used by Parmenides and his contemporaries. In popular language, aletheia meant discovery, exposure, denudation, revelation. For the thinker, "aletheia" is "truth" as a verb, the activity of uncovering reality, which is concealed under the robes of appearance or falsehood. Philosophy, for Ortega, begins with Parmenides and Heraclitus; "proto-philosophers" he calls them. The Ionians had been scientists; their attempts at natural explanation upset religion and tradition, and prepared the way for philosophy. In a remarkably subtle and complex analysis for so short a space, Ortega argues that skepticism, atheism, wealth, and knowledge of nature created a freedom based on a need to create or choose one's own beliefs in a world in which relative abundance demands choice, since in poverty "an individual is never in the position of being able to choose; for choice assumes that the circle of one's possibilities is notably greater than that of one's needs" (p. 98). The social need to define the thinker and so grant him professional status that might minimize the hostility of the tradition-ridden and reactionary populace, especially in Athens, led to the name "sophist," which became disreputable to a hostile citizenry, and then to "philosopher." Socrates was, unfortunately, the only philosopher, the man who liked, had a taste for, or loved wisdom, but made no pretense that he had any, saying only he sought it. But the name persisted, and helped institutionalize the new profession. I haven't even intimated the delight of Ortega's incidental insights. He was probably justified in believing that his stature as a thinker was much greater than his reputation. A first-rate, full-scale study of Ortega in English would help, but what we need most is a collection and translation of his complete works. RSLPH ROSS ~cripps College Discourse on Thinking. By Martin Heidegger. Translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Pp. 93. $3.50.) This is a translation of a speech and conversation originally published under the thematic title Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Giinther Neske, 1959). Heidegger uses this unusual German word to remind us that there is another way of thinking than the calculative and dialectical modes made prominent by the mathematical sciences and modem cultural philosophy respectively. We have forgotten a less busy mode of thinking, a thinking released from all desire to control reality. Gelassenheit is rendered throughout as "releasement" in this translation. But Gelassenheit does not just mean letting go, or freedom from, as "releasement" may suggest. It also has the more positive sense of composure and a patient letting things be. In the context of Heidegger's attempts to define a mode of thinking not concerned with dominating reality, Gelassenheit comes to mean the freedom to be open to reality. BOOK REVIEWS 197 Heidegger stresses the ability to wait for insight, which is not, however, a mere passive waiting for something fixed. It would be... (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is widely supposed by both its proponents and critics that communitarianism is committed to the defence of lies of nationhood: the nation forms a surviving communal attachment in a world in which the individual is otherwise denuded of ties of community. I argue in this paper that this assumption is mistaken. It depends on a romantic image of the nation which was constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That image hides the recent historical origins of the nation (...) and its foundation in the suppression of older allegiances or their later privatisation; it continues to disguise the illusory nature of the national community. The nation is not a surviving pre‐modern community to which individuals are attached as a bulwark against the impersonality of public life in modern society. Rather the nation is one of the main vehicles for the construction of the modern unencumbered self. Communitarians need not be committed to the defence of the specifically modem forms of public irrationality and immorality that nationalism embodies. (shrink)

_In the light of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, this paper looks into some of the problems of contemporary man as an individual, a member of society, a citizen of his country, a component of this world, and of nature itself. Concepts like Science; Nature,;Matter; Mental Being; Mana-purusa; Prana-purusa; Citta-purusa; Nation-ego and Nation-soul; True and False Subjectivism; World-state and World-union; Religion of Humanism are the focus of this paper. Nature: Beneath the diversity and uniqueness of the different elements in Nature there is (...) an essential unity that not only allows for this diversity but even supports it. Nature is both a benefactor and a force: a benefactor, because it acts to carry out the evolution of mankind; a force, because it also supplies the necessary energy and momentum to achieve it. Natural calamities: If mankind can quieten the tsunamis and cyclones and droughts and earthquakes that rage within, and behave with care and compassion towards Nature, not exploiting, denuding, or denigrating it, there is a strong possibility that Nature too will behave with equal care and compassion towards man and spare him the natural calamities than rend him asunder. Science: The limitation of science become obvious, according to Sri Aurobindo, when we realize that it has mastered knowledge of processes and helped in the creation of machinery but is ignorant of the foundations of being and, therefore, cannot perfect our nature or our life. Science and philosophy: The insights of philosophy could become heuristic and algorithmic models for scientific experimentation. Matter: An interesting aspect of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy is his acceptance of the reality of matter even while highlighting its inadequacies; the ultimate goal, according to him, is the divination of matter itself. Purusa: If the mana-purusa (mental being) were to log on to the genuine citta-purusa (psychic formation), without necessarily logging off from the prana-purusa (frontal formation), it may help quieten the turbulences within, which may be a prelude to the quietening of the disturbances without, whether it be physical maladies, cravings (for food, fame, fortune, etc.), destructive competitiveness; or wars, terrorism, ethnic conflicts, communal riots, and the other such social maladies that afflict mankind today. Nation-ego (false subjectivism) and Nation-soul (true subjectivism): Sri Aurobindo considers Nation-ego an example of false subjectivism, in which national identity and pride are stressed to prove one's superiority and suppress or exploit the rest. The Nation-soul, as an example of true subjectivism, attempts to capture one's traditional heritage and values in its pristine form, not as a reaction to hurts and angers or as compensation for real or imagined injuries or indignities of the past. World-state (false subjectivism) and World-union (true subjectivism): Similarly, a World-state founded upon the principle of centralization and uniformity, a mechanical and formal unity, is an example of false subjectivism, while a World-union founded upon the principle of liberty and variation in a free and intelligent unity is an example of true subjectivism Human actualization: Even if two human beings are similar, in so far as they are human beings, there is so much diversity between them. Part of the movement towards human self-actualization lies in the fact that this diversity should not be forcibly curbed, as also the realization that beneath all that appears disparate there is an essential unity. Also, man is not the end product of evolution but an intermediate stage between the animal and the divine. Moreover, he is endowed with consciousness that enables him to cooperate with the forces of evolution and speed up and telescope the next stage of evolution._. (shrink)

If truth were a matter of correspondence with the facts, then S could justify her empirical beliefs only by directly comparing them with a denuded and unconceptualized reality and confirming that the relation of correspondence obtains.

In his contribution to the Journal of Medical Ethics, Joseph Mazor1 makes a logical case, based on the premises underlying his reasoning, for his article's primary thesis: he concludes that parents have the prerogative to determine the ‘best interests’ of their infant son in a circumcision decision. If the facts of the matter were ultimately no different from what he adduces, one could admit the soundness of his argument. But the paper is flawed by some questionable assumptions and grievous incompleteness.First, (...) the author insufficiently explores the profound implications of a serious equivocation in the term ‘circumcision’ that is common throughout the literature. He does superficially reference the article on ‘Circumcision’ in The Jewish Encyclopedia, which describes in detail the actual steps involved in brit milah versus brit periah.2 Despite this general allusion, though, he hardly discusses the matter further, as though the distinction were practically irrelevant. It does have fundamental import, however. Milah is merely a token clip of the very tip of the prepuce, which leaves most of the organ system intact. This was evidently the version practiced in biblical times under the old Abrahamic–Mosaic covenant, before the Talmudic guardians of Judaic ethnic and religious identity proposed a means to prevent Hellinising Jewish men from attempting foreskin restoration by stretching their remaining preputial tissue forward. The rabbis mandated the replacement of milah with the more drastic procedure of periah, a radical surgery that cuts and tears from the penis its entire covering, leaving the glans irreversibly denuded. Unlike traditional milah, the innovation of periah necessarily has significant adverse consequences .Second, Mazor concedes that circumcision might cause a ‘moderate’ reduction of sexual pleasure in the lad's …. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is widely supposed by both its proponents and critics that communitarianism is committed to the defence of lies of nationhood: the nation forms a surviving communal attachment in a world in which the individual is otherwise denuded of ties of community. I argue in this paper that this assumption is mistaken. It depends on a romantic image of the nation which was constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That image hides the recent historical origins of the nation (...) and its foundation in the suppression of older allegiances or their later privatisation; it continues to disguise the illusory nature of the national community. The nation is not a surviving pre‐modern community to which individuals are attached as a bulwark against the impersonality of public life in modern society. Rather the nation is one of the main vehicles for the construction of the modern unencumbered self. Communitarians need not be committed to the defence of the specifically modem forms of public irrationality and immorality that nationalism embodies. (shrink)

This paper explores the question of embodiment/disembodiment discussed by Hwa Yol Jung mainly in his recent work, Rethinking Political Theory (1993a) in tandem with an examination of some recent developments in Korean scholarship on the same subject. To sum up, the following three points are emphasized. First, this living body does not exist except in specific modalities. In this sense, Gabriel Marcel''s paradigmatic affirmation that I am my body requires an elaboration of the specific modalities of the living body as (...) a being in the world. Second, the way a living body exists is not exclusively mental or physical, but both. In short, it is phenomenal. Third, the point of the whole argument can be summed up as follows: to conceal one''s own body is natural, but to forget it is dangerous. The primary task of phenomenology is not to denude human beings, but to reawaken ourselves to the idea that we are beings who live with and through bodies. (shrink)

A major preoccupation of that novel [Zola’s Nana] is the undressing of the courtesan Nana. One could even say that a major dynamic of the novel is stripping Nana, and stripping away at her, making per progressively expose the secrets of this golden body that has Paris in thrall. The first chapter of the novel provides, quite literally, a mise-en-scène for Nana’s body, in the operetta La Blonde Vénus. When she comes on stage in the third act, a shiver passes (...) over the audience, for, we are told, she is nude. Yet, we quickly discover, not quite nude: she is covered by a filmy shift under which her splendid body lets itself be glimpsed: se devinait. “It was Venus born from the waves, having only her hair as a veil.”2 The denuding of nana progresses in chapter 5 when Comte Muffat and the Prince make their way backstage to her dressing room . They surprise her naked to the waist, and she then covers herself with a bodice, which only half hides her breasts. Despite the repeated references to nana as nude, it is only in chapter 7, at the very midpoint of the novel, that Nana is finally completely naked. In this scene, she undresses before her mirror while Comte Muffat watches, especially looking at her looking at herself. Thus she is fully unveiled, frontally in the mirror, and from the backside in Muffat’s direct view. And yet, as we shall see in a moment, even the completely naked woman’s body bears a troubling veil. 2. Émile Zola, Nana , p. 47; hereafter abbreviated N. I wish to thank Helen Chillman, Librarian of the Slides and Photography Collection, Art and Architecture Library, Yale University, for her help in assembling the illustrations accompanying this essay.Peter Brooks is Tripp Professor of Humanities and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. The author of The Melodramatic Imagination and Reading for the Plot , he is currently working on a study of narrative and the body, tentatively called “Storied Bodies.”. (shrink)

This paper accesses continental philosophy to explore an analogy between the destruction caused by lack of resistance to National Socialism and the destruction caused by climate change denial. Husserl, Levinas, et alia identified a spirit of abstraction and ideology as elements of a catastrophic cultural crisis. Just as human beings were denuded of personhood, the natural world is denuded of inherent meaning. Social communication degenerates into anti-rational propaganda. Together these undermine response to climate change. Invigorating a genuine desire for truth (...) and appreciation of the non-utilitarian good of beauty may provide some resource for undoing denial. (shrink)

The present book explores a variety of fundamental questions that all of us secretly share. Its twenty-one chapters, written by some of the world’s leading Melville and Conrad scholars, indicate possible directions of comparativist insight into the continuity and transformations of western existentialist thought between the 19th and 20th centuries. The existential philosophy of participation—so mistrustful of analytical categories—is epitomized by the lives and oeuvres of Melville and Conrad. Born in the immediacy of experience, this philosophy finds its expression in (...) uncertain tropes and faith-based actions; rather than muffle the horror vacui with words, it plunges head first into liminality, where logos dissolves into a “positive nothing.” Unlike analytical philosophers, both Melville and Conrad refrain from talking about reality: they expose those who would listen to a first-hand experience of participation in an interpretive act. Employing literary tropes to denude the essence of the human condition, they allow their readers to transgress the limitations of language. Mistrustful of language, they accept the necessity of discourse which, to make sense, must be actively reshaped, endlessly questioned, and constantly revised. And if uncertainty is the only certainty available to us, our lowly human condition also necessitates compassion: an existential cure against the liquid, capricious reality we are afforded. (shrink)

Le monde occidental s'interroge aujourd'hui sur la passion de la mort qui pousse de jeunes terroristes au suicide et au crime. Le présent essai traite d'une autre fascination, non moins troublante : celle qui travaille sourdement les grands textes de notre modernité. Après Alexandre Kojève, l'écriture de Georges Bataille, de Maurice Blanchot, de Jacques Derrida ou de Jacques Lacan, laisse transparaître un lyrisme de la destruction, un engouement pour l'abîme, qu'il faut savoir reconnaître sous la rigueur de la pensée. D'où (...) vient cette esthétique du malheur? Quels enjeux recouvre-t-elle? Au fil d'une minutieuse lecture, l'auteur s'attache à dénuder un complexe de valeurs et d'affects qui remontent aux origines symboliques de notre civilisation. On entrevoit peu à peu que cette revendication de la mort pourrait bien n'être que le signe inversé de la grande protestation humaine, de sa soif d'infini et de son désir d'être. Betty Rojtman, née à Paris, a dirigé le département de littérature française à l'université hébraïque de Jérusalem. Elle situe sa recherche au carrefour de la pensée contemporaine et de l'exégèse juive traditionnelle. Parmi ses publications : Feu noir sur feu blanc. Essai sur l'herméneutique juive (1986); Une grave distraction (préface de Paul Ricoeur, 1991) ; Une rencontre improbable (2002) et Moïse, prophète des nostalgies (2007). (shrink)

This chapter explores the early phenomenological accounts of Ressentiment provided by Else Voigtländer, Max Scheler, and Adolf Reinach. In particular, it examines the self-deceptive processes that lead to the “inversion of values” inherent to Ressentiment, i.e., how an object previously felt as valuable is denuded of its worth when the subject realizes that she cannot achieve it. For the comparative analysis of the three accounts, attention is paid to three crucial issues: 1) the origins of Ressentiment (etiology); 2) its place (...) in the taxonomy of the affective mind (ontology); and 3) the psychological mechanisms responsible for the inversion of value (psychology). The early phenomenological accounts are then analyzed in the light of recent accounts of Ressentiment elaborated by authors close to the phenomenological tradition. It is argued that the early phenomenological accounts provide central insights on the interrelation between affectivity and value. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Interpreting from the IntersticesThe Role of Justice in a Liberal Democracy—Lessons from Michael Walzer and Emmanuel LevinasNicholas R. Brown (bio)1As anyone who is familiar with more recent theological debate can attest, the appraisal of the liberal democratic tradition has undergone a radical reevaluation in the wake of Stanley Hauerwas’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s scathing critiques. As a result of their blistering assault, religious ethicists and philosophers now find themselves operating (...) within a discursive milieu that is almost the photo negative of the one they previously inhabited. For what has followed After Virtue and After Christendom is a situation in which compliance with liberal democratic norms is now perceived as actively inveighing against justice rather than as an integral prerequisite to its pursuit.There are cracks, however, beginning to emerge in the MacIntyre/Hauerwas edifice. For what is becoming disputed and increasingly so among a growing chorus of religious ethicists and philosophers is whether their critical reading of liberal democracy offers the most [End Page 155] helpful or even the most biblical way to think through its own moral dimensions as well as those undergirding its relationship with justice.It is the emergence of these criticisms that forms the basis for this essay. For the thesis that I wish to advance below is that liberal democracy offers religious ethicists and philosophers alike a moral framework and vocabulary from which it is possible to comprehend and enact the normative precepts encapsulated within a biblical understanding of justice. Accordingly, some aspects of my argument will build upon the rhetorical trajectories that have been already charted by the ethicists and philosophers I mention above.What distinguishes my approach, however, is that I will proceed from a more focused examination of some of the ethical and political undercurrents found within contemporary Jewish thought. More specifically, I want to probe the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the political philosophy of Michael Walzer, for I believe the juxtapositional methodology of interpretation which informs each of their perspectives is illustrative of an interstitial hermeneutic that helps further illuminate the moral compatibility between biblical and democratic accounts of justice.2By now, MacIntyre’s and Hauerwas’s critiques of the liberal democratic tradition have been so thoroughly documented, discussed, and dissected that a review of their perspectives cannot help but have a certain pleonastic quality.Probably the most significant and disturbing problem that MacIntyre and Hauerwas see belying the liberal democratic tradition stems from its conception of time and space, or more precisely, its lack thereof. For what they discover upon a more careful probing of its moral and epistemological underpinnings is a pursuit of transcendence not dissimilar to Gnostic metaphysics. In the case of liberalism, however, the existential encumbrances to be excised are not corporeal and carnal in nature, but historical and social. [End Page 156]Such conditionalities, surmise liberal theorists, are so shot through with conceptual prejudices that they comprise an interpretative straight-jacket that vitiates against the kind of objectivity necessary to engage in a nonparochial process of moral and political discernment. For it is precisely this ability “to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity” which MacIntyre sees as constituting “the essence of moral agency” of modern liberalism (AV 31–32). Therefore, “liberalism is successful,” maintains Hauerwas, “exactly because... [it] provide[s] that philosophical account of society designed to deal with” the moral and political implications such a social and historical denuding portends, namely “a system of rules that will constitute procedures for resolving disputes as they pursue their various interests.”1However, what liberalism defines as success MacIntyre and Hauerwas see as anything but. Instead, both judge its “system of rules” to be an insidious prescription for a particularly virulent form of moral nihilism and political bankruptcy. For by stripping moral and political discourse of their historical and social referents, liberalism, ironically and tragically, eviscerates itself of the very heuristic and discursive practices necessary to make those... (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * Australia, Summer, 2012. …. essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How shall we state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is abidingness.” 1 On return to birthplace I write. Caught between jetlag and surprise, a relentless sun cracks my skin. Upright words fall under cockatoo roars. The attempt to settle, to be attentive, is shaken. Some kind of Dreaming surrounds and elements intrude without consent. Homeless at home. Exhausted, I fight sleep’s hard currents. Their victory would confuse the body clock, so the in-between wins. Half-there — half-awake — here in this place — I am driftwood. Driftwood: wood floating in or washed ashore by a body of water. A severed limb set adrift from the birthing body. Tossed from home it’s cast into processes of wind, water, sand, bacteria, decay and movement. Driftwood is orphaned members at the mercy and agency of weather, currents, submersion, and being thrown into dry world. Driftwood — singular plural. White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different Him got road belong himself. 2 photo: Bronwyn Lay The old man comes from the northern rivers. A while ago, he could no longer pay attention to wage slavery, so retreated north to be with dead redgum that lay abandoned in dry riverbeds. Derived from driftwood peoples tossed here by the sea, he followed the fragile river veins of his birth. He walked along water bodies and through country’s lungs. Some kind of displaced ancestral song compelled his leathered hands to pick up centuries old driftwood from flood plains. It emerged from under muddy creeks, was flung up by salt soaked coves, pushed underground by cracks in the claypan and lay embedded in mud and salinized soil. Smoothed and grooved in equal measure, the branches were marked by an organic alphabet that preceded him. As he held the wood, he touched decomposing circles that started with a blast and never ceased writing into abandoned flesh. When the ute was full the old man returned home having been away with the stuff that ‘growed him up’. His shed filled with red sawdust and the sound of tools at labour. His hands sculptured driftwood. History carved into itinerant skin. I sit opposite the old man. His body no longer holds the repetition of carpentry. He can no longer gift driftwood its detail. Outside redgum bits lie scattered around the fence line and beside the dam. He crouches over an unreliable computer researching the massacres of indigenous peoples that occurred along the same river veins that ‘growed him up’ long ago. Staring into the remnants of frontier resistance that he and I inherit, his eyes nurture fire. He discovers severed limbs and the slicing of tribes. In the ashes of sentences he sifts the lies that smoulder into our histories. In the 30’s the anthropologist Stanner said that due to certain factors — lack of change and isolation — the ideal and real come very close together in indigenous Dreaming. They are a people who were able to defeat history. 3 “If the Ideal and the Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the middle ages and seem increasingly to do this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in-between.” 4 Stanner says Indigenous Dreaming is blackfella thinking. 5 Dreamtime is not ethereal, not utopic, or otherworldly. It’s fused with the real and it’s not mine. I might never understand, but it’s the substance of my home. This here place ‘growed me up’. Is driftwood the unhappy in-between? Is it a radical itinerant written upon by currents? Where are we? The settler restless? photo: Alison Pouliot I return to the bush late one night, tired from high talk in city cafes, to find the old man at his computer. He’s either researching his white farming ancestors, or tracing unrecorded massacres of blackfellas. I laugh, “You know Dad, if you were indigenous you might go out by the dam and sing up your ancestors rather than try find them on a screen.” He peers over his glasses. His stare delivers an ancestral scold. He’s white man. Of course he archives. This is our way. One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysician goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood or spirit of assent, neither despair nor resignation, optimism not pessimism, quietism nor indifference. The mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism and science challenge their own hopes, indeed their beginnings.” 6 The clinamen sometimes comes abstract — the rarefied swerve of possibility. But in the place we gather &mdash where this text has landed — in the heart of settler colony denial — the clinamen reminds of familiar violence and goes maximum. The earth’s swerve. Topography’s tip. Physics gone violent. Here, drift is initiated by the tear of flesh, scurvy voyages, frontier blood and the deracination from belonging. Here, war precedes drift. We all got tossed. Here. Pay attention. The country has its own gaze. ‘Lest we forget’. The seasonal turn on aborescent substances starts with a fall, an upwards rupture, a drop, a cut, a storm, a violence, a loss, forced migration, refugees, agricultural imperialism, settler wheat and poisoned rations. Pay attention to aftermath debris. Don’t drift too far from the real. History hasn’t settled into the water. It still tosses limbs back and forth. Surrounded by the backdrop of Dreaming country the old man archives and dreams. Both ways of settling into the real. But lest we forget, time, in this place, has no textual tick — tock. Our bodies know this, even though we persist with shipwreck illusions. It’s difficult being here. Here. Pay inattention. I walk through eucalyptus, over dried out clay pans and under kookaburras. It’s been two years in-between. This time country speaks strong underfoot. Forget books, forget texts, forget other lands and times, beginning and end. Be here. All falls raw. Leaves drop and refuse to compost. Bark untethers quick. Light denudes worlds. The heated horizon melts monoliths. It’s enough to make Cartesians shiver. Awake. Refuse the temptation to run. Have enough courage to drift into here. Love with a gum tree. Stand with her whole and dissolving. She moves light between our limbs, tossing them to wind. She — the original romance — is the dream that dares touch flesh and reaches over nightmares with elemental desire. I gaze and lose me. There’s no distance. The land that ‘growed me up’ speaks with symbiotic breath. There’s no division, no separation, no other. The gum is plastic arborescence. You be my body for me, always were. …..but I wake to driftwood histories and recall slaughters. Drifted, wicked fellow citizen — the other is someone else’s blind sleep. Betrayal maintains the other as mine. Archives reveal this place doesn’t belong to me. Body articulates that it became here. Gumtree cares not………her arms take me in anyway. “Like all men he is a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his metier, and in some sense — his fate is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, making sense out of social relations among men living together.” 7 The old man excavates seven generations of settler ancestors. They’re an ordinary lot with written-upon skin. He records genocides that occurred alongside his peoples fertility. Bodies rise from riverbeds like sovereign sacrifices. It hurts. It disrupts. He labours at the past with gestures that might go unnoticed in a country suffocated by rich amnesia. Inside walls, he seems attentive to historical details. Outside he seems inattentive to time, lost to us and embedded in a family of active matter — the bush. His driftwood skin appears around my eyes - grooves of experience, the rush of cruel sun, the push of blind winds, and the love of everything. The sovereign’s reluctant children are thrown here by, with and through blood, but country gets in and sculpts us here. photo: Chris Corrigan “But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself.” 8 The kangaroo family appears at dusk. When the sun is soft I follow the old man into the back paddock. Children skip behind us. In-between generations, I step into the old man’s driftwood leanings. My feet find traces of his understanding – the archivist that reads trees. Here, on home dirt, inattention and attention collapse as we wander into where we are. The roo family gaze at us. Through the grass the old man’s wooden finger articulates kin’s details. He points to the head male, the mother holding a joey in pouch and the young warriors side by side. My children, quieter than ever, meet the laser - eyed silence of another family. In half-light Dad, me, and the kids mirror the kangaroo constellation and stand gentle together. At the bushblock’s limit we encounter ancestral desires. White peoples are subject to driftwood histories. We’re severed limbs attempting to fuse here now, with what was, only to discover our skin becomes racked and embedded with the weather. Into the shelter and fissures of this difficult and ambiguous inheritance, I fall into dream light until balance saturates. Light breaks when the kangaroos move. They bounce someplace else without effort or impact. We turn and tread through the dark towards home. It’s time to sleep. Driftwood skin covers the country. Dreaming is still. photo: Bronwyn Lay NOTES W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays , (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 72. Ibid., 56. Stanner is recalling one intelligent old man who said to him, “with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking in verse.” Ibid., 60. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 59.  . (shrink)

I write, as Robert Graves put it in his Oxford poetry lectures, both matador and judge, both as a novelist and as philosopher and literary theorist. Considering the present aggressive stance of literary theorists, detonating, denuding, and deconstructing the humble scrivener's offerings as if works of fiction were the shoulders of midgets on which the giants of critical theory may grind their jackboots, you will think me rash to confess to the jejune offense of novel writing, but I mean not (...) only to confess but also to explain and justify--even, indeed, to revel--in the inversion of fiction and life that is our lot, revel, that is, in an inversion both more enduring and more significant than that between fiction and literary theory. (shrink)

Ce bilan historiographique repose sur une vaste enquête menée à travers les différents champs historiographiques susceptibles d’informer l’évolution des pratiques et représentations de la nudité. L’objectif est d’éclairer les rapports dialectiques que le corps dénudé entretient avec les normes et les relations de genre en France au cours du second xixe siècle. Au cœur de la fabrique des archétypes du féminin et du masculin, les représentations différenciées du dénudement constituent un maillon essentiel dans la perpétuation de la domination masculine tout (...) au long de la période. Cependant, au tournant du siècle, le dénudement représente paradoxalement un instrument de libération individuelle pour une série de pionnières, artistes et sportives qui, en s’emparant de nouvelles représentations du corps, ont pu subvertir les normes de genre propres à la culture bourgeoise et conquérir ainsi une marge d’autonomie et de liberté sans précédent. (shrink)

Cet article aborde le rôle de la nudité sur scène dans l’émergence des modernités en danse, en se penchant plus particulièrement sur le contexte peu étudié de la Russie après la révolution d’Octobre 1917. À travers l’étude des discours et de la réception de l’œuvre de deux protagonistes de la « nouvelle danse » russe des années 1920, Kassian Goleïzovski et Lev Loukine, cette contribution interroge le sens que ces chorégraphes cherchaient à construire autour du dénudement de couple et de (...) groupe sur scène. On montre que ce dénudement reflétait une rupture non seulement avec l’héritage impérial de la danse classique et ses relations genrées entre partenaires, mais aussi avec la « danse libre » introduite auparavant par Isadora Duncan lors de ses tournées dans le pays. (shrink)

Les militantes du mouvement féministe Femen, né en Ukraine en 2008, manifestent seins nus. Se dénuder pour des raisons politiques ne fait pas l’unanimité parmi les féministes. À partir d’entretiens avec des militantes, cet article porte sur le sens de la nudité politique pour les militantes elles-mêmes et les effets de ce mode d’action sur le genre. L’analyse de la mobilisation seins nus éclaire de quelle manière les militantes parviennent à dépasser les interdits de la nudité et les raisons qui (...) poussent ces activistes à persévérer dans un militantisme qui demeure perçu comme déviant. (shrink)

Cet article interroge les aspects sociaux et symboliques du dénudement des artistes féminines sur les scènes des cafés-concerts parisiens à la fin du xixe siècle. L’étude de ce geste scénique prend appui sur l’exemple du Coucher d’Yvette, un spectacle dont le succès renouvelé par de nombreuses imitations préfigure la postérité du genre de l’effeuillage dans la programmation des spectacles parisiens au xxe siècle. L’analyse des manuscrits de spectacle d’effeuillage conservés dans les archives de la censure dramatique, l’exploration de sources iconographiques, (...) ainsi que l’appui de plusieurs discours de réception sur la pratique féminine du déshabillage sur scène permettent de saisir l’engouement suscité par l’érotisation de ce geste et l’impact de cette réception sur l’histoire du corps et du genre à cette période. (shrink)

Caught in a dilemma-namely, the decontextualization and negation of its early interpretive schematism which served as the sole ground for a free society--modernity is presently losing its legitimacy, its fidelity to individual freedom, the "core of nondialectical humanism," which Cahoone attempts to isolate. In part 1, he argues that the "self-negating strain" of modern philosophical activity is a "methodological or systematic dualism" endemic to "subjectivism," viz., the belief that the distinction between the non-subjective and the subjective is fundamental for any (...) investigation. The claim that the individual thinking subject is the nucleus of all value within the parameters of the finite world could only be viable in combination with "transcendental" claims which were articulated largely in the "theological firmament" of seventeenth-century methodology, epistemology, and metaphysics, and were impeached in the nineteenth century. "Non-transcendental subjectivism" differs from early modern objectivity and subjectivity, for when the self becomes entirely "worldless," devoid of mediation of the transcendent, it is no longer possible to think of objectivity and subjectivity as independent and yet interrelated, and there begins the movement toward "philosophical narcissism". Denuding the subject of all capacities except its "natural" inclinations toward consciousness of material objectivity and its instrumental rational mastery, philosophical narcissism rejects any notion of "transcendental vehicles of relatedness" which are beyond the division into objective and subjective spheres, so that either the non-subjective must absorb the subjective or vice versa. (shrink)