Idipsum est une locution qu'Augustin utilise pour désigner Dieu. Elle signifie littéralement "cela même". Ce minimalisme sémantique ne laisse pas de la rendre mystérieuse. Faut-il y voir un emprunt à certains textes bibliques qui déjà en font usage? Dans ce cas, idipsum, tel un nom propre vide de toute signification, se bornerait à indiquer Dieu en tant qu'il échappe à toute définition rationnelle. Ou bien faut-il rattacher idipsum à la tradition platonicienne qui recourt à des locutions grecques similaires pour désigner (...) la réalité intelligible qui est " elle-même en elle-même "? Idipsum serait alors la trace d'un héritage philosophique conduisant Augustin à une définition métaphysique de Dieu comme Etre absolu. Cependant, cette alternative entre origine biblique et tradition platonicienne néglige la diversité des usages philosophiques des locutions formées sur auto puis ipsum: elles expriment d'abord l'identité et le fait d'être soi, puis la réflexivité, au croisement des champs dialectique, pratique et ontologique. Cet ouvrage explore la façon dont ces aspects de l'identité se sont construits, du autos grec à l'idipsum latin, à travers des études portant sur Homère, Platon, Aristote, le stoïcisme, le néoplatonisme grec puis latin, Augustin. (shrink)

From the beginning, Augustine's "Confessions" presents itself as a dialogue with God. Taking a cue from Ludwig Feuerbach’s "The Essence of Christianity [Das Wesen des Christentums]," this dialogue can easily be dismissed as a projection of the self. This would imply that the divine otherness is nothing more than a mirror of one’s own fears and preferences. “Does this critique,” I asked myself in this piece, “really do justice to a position like that of Augustine?” For a long time, I (...) did not know how to approach what I had — provisionally — called Augustine’s dialogue with God. It appeared to me that Augustine, in an accidental and indirect way, had re-invented the Platonic dialogue and had turned it into a new Christian genre. “It is true,” I told myself, “that the genre of the Confessions shows family resemblances with the hagiography and the autobiography. But most certainly it cannot be reduced to these genres.” The Greek words ‘hagios’ (holy) and ‘autos’ (self) are in flagrant contradiction with the intention of the Confessions. Augustine tries to stay clear of any claim of holiness and only highlights his own ‘self’ to immediately question it. “Is the Platonic dialogue,” I asked myself, “not a far more appropriate predecessor for Augustine’s dialogue with God?” Both types of dialogues can be seen as true dia logoi in which at least two different voices emerge. However, contrary to what one would expect, it is not the dialogue form itself that frames these two voices. Instead the two voices emerge within the discourse of a single speaker, incorporating true otherness within the discourse of the self. Building on these reflections, I explore how Augustine's dialogue with God succeeds in eluding Feuerbach's charge of self-projection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy by Mario TelòSean LambertTelò, Mario. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy. Ohio State University Press, 2020. 344pp.In Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, Mario Telò takes aim at one of the most canonical (if also one of the most contested) features of Greek tragedy: its potential to deliver catharsis (12).1 Through careful close readings of (...) Greek tragedies informed by psychoanalytic theory and deconstruction, Telò makes a persuasive case that tragedy is anti-cathartic. “The Freudian take on catharsis is complicated, or even undercut,” he writes in the introduction, “by its own anti-cathartic latencies… We can accordingly look at tragedy as a form of dramatic poetry that finds its affective raison d’être… in these anti-cathartic feelings” (34).Telò states that the intent of Archive Feelings is mainly to intervene in the age-old debate, asking: “why do human beings enjoy tragedy?” (14). He suggests that the pleasure of tragedy is, in fact, a masochistic one: a denial of release or pleasure (such as would come from catharsis) that an audience or reader enjoys in its specifically joyless jouissance. At stake is “feeling material,” a “fantasy” of “merging into the impersonal, anorganic, universal matter of elemental life” (44) evoked in tragedy’s death-driven withdrawal from action. With this concept in mind, Telò goes beyond even his own ambitions for his project. More than merely intervening in debates about the pleasures of tragedy, he argues powerfully for the continuing relevance of Greek tragedy for critical theory today, particularly in light of the so-called “affective” and “material” turns in the humanities. Archive Feelings is thus a useful book for classicists conducting interdisciplinary and/or trans-historical research, but even more so for any scholar working within the constellation of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, queer theory, affect theory or critical race theory. Telò makes a persuasive case for tragedy as a lodestar within this firmament–a vital tool for thinking through problems within and across disciplines.In striking contradistinction to previous theorists of Greek tragedy, including Aristotle and Nietzsche, Telò locates the engine of Greek tragedy in the death drive. In so doing, he reads in ancient narratives a number of experiences such as “acceleration, hoarding, vertiginous suspension, [End Page 113] breathless looping, affective bulimia or binge-eating, serial cutting, trying to enter or fold in upon oneself, auto-immune inflammation” (14), and finds in “the orgasm as an unfinished, non-teleological pleasure,” a desire to return to a state of “inert matter” (13).2 Noting that the original meaning of the Greek word archê is “origin,” Telò connects this impulse to once again become “inert” with the desire to create archives. Thus, Telò sees Greek tragedies as both a model for projects of archival reconstruction as well as archival projects themselves: they are “anxious and debilitating” attempts to “re-create the past as it was” (13).3Telò’s study is divided into three parts: Archival Time, Archival Space, and Archival Endings, which attempt to “structurally reproduce the psychological temporalities of the archive” (49). In each of his five chapters, Telò elaborates the diverse narrative masochisms of Greek tragedy, exploring the various stakes and species of tragic anti-catharsis. In Chapter 1, Telò reads the “archive fever” of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus against the “archive fatigue” of Euripides’ Phoenissae, finding in both of these plays—near the end of the epoch of ancient tragedy—an impulse toward “textual hoarding” (76) that both undermines the possibility of catharsis and “exhausts” (106) the possibilities of the genre (107). In both the “synchronic gathering of disparate fragments of experience” into the body of Oedipus before his death and the aesthetics of boredom, fatigue, and inertia that suffuse the Phoenissae, Telò locates a desire to store up, rather than purge, emotions such as pity and fear, in a flouting of the normal formula for catharsis (73).In Chapter 2, Telò looks at the figures of Heracles and Medea in their original myths and tragic incarnations, seeing in both the compulsion to recircle around scenes of their respective “primordial traumas” (145). In Euripides’s Medea, this move manifests in repeated references... (shrink)

The nature and value of autonomy has long been debated in diverse philosophical traditions, including moral and political philosophy. Although the notion dates back to ancient Greek philosophy, it was during the Age of Enlightenment that autonomy drew much attention. Thus, as may be known, moral philosophers tended to emphasize self-regulation, particularly one’s own will to abide by universal moral laws, as the term “autonomy” originates from the Greek words “self” (auto) and “rule” (nomos). In parallel, modern epistemologists (...) supposedly espoused the idea of intellectual autonomy as self-reliance. In this classical view, an intellectually autonomous explorer of knowledge must not depend on a belief that is obtained from another’s testimony, until one can justify it to oneself. However, accompanying the growing focus on the importance of social dimensions of acquiring knowledge and understanding, recent epistemologists have doubted the classical view and have since reconsidered intellectual autonomy from distinct approaches such as social and virtue epistemology. This paper propounds an interpersonal-epistemic approach to intellectual autonomy. First, it is argued that thinking through questioning both individually and with other epistemic peers is an interpersonal-epistemic practice. Second, it is demonstrated that with particular cognitive features inherent within us, an intellectually autonomous person must think through questioning in necessary situations. This interpersonal account of intellectual autonomy can conceptually enrich intellectual autonomy by considering its relationship with not only responsibility but also with vulnerability. Specifically, regarding responsibility, an intellectually autonomous person must be responsible for his or her own actions throughout questioning processes. Regarding vulnerability, our intellectual autonomy lies in retaining autonomy with vulnerability in the plastic control of the questioning processes. (shrink)

A t first glance you might not noorder, which afflicts about 0.5 percent of tice anything odd on meeting a American children. Neither researcher young boy with autism. But if had any knowledge of the other’s work, you try to talk to him, it will and yet by an uncanny coincidence each quickly become obvious that gave the syndrome the same name: autism, something is seriously wrong. He may not which derives from the Greek word autos, make (...) eye contact with you; instead he may meaning “self.” The name is apt, because avoid your gaze and fidget, rock his body the most conspicuous feature of the disorto and fro, or bang his head against the der is a withdrawal from social interacwall. More disconcerting, he may not be tion. More recently, doctors have adopted able to conduct anything remotely resemthe term “autism spectrum disorder” to bling a normal conversation. Even though make it clear that the illness has many rehe can experience emotions such as fear, lated variants that range widely in severity rage and pleasure, he may lack genuine but share some characteristic symptoms. empathy for other people and be oblivious Ever since autism was identified, reto subtle social cues that most children searchers have struggled to determine would pick up effortlessly. what causes it. Scientists know that sus- In the 1940s two physicians—Americeptibility to autism is inherited, although.. (shrink)