Desde hace años, la hermenéutica de Paul Ricoeur ha sido trabajada, estudiada y difundida en México, de manera especial, por la doctora Gloria Prado, lo que se puede constatar en su libro “Creación, recepción y efecto. Una aproximación hermenéutica a la obra literaria“ (1992), así como en su artículo titulado “Neohermenéutica y teoría literaria” (Neohermenéutica. Literatura, filosofía y otras disciplinas, 2009). En ambos escritos, Prado establece cinco niveles hermenéuticos como método de análisis literario que permiten identificar la textura simbólica de (...) un texto. A partir de ello, de la mano de Ricoeur y de Prado, y sin dejar de propiciar el diálogo con otros pensadores como José Ortega y Gasset, Hans George Gadamer y Pierre Klossowski, me propongo llevar a cabo un análisis hermenéutico del cuento “El gato” (publicado en 1972 en Encuentros), del escritor mexicano Juan García Ponce, ubicado dentro de la denominada Generación de Medio Siglo; generación que, en su mayoría, se ve influenciada por la obra de Octavio Paz y Georges Bataille. (shrink)

본 논고는 대한민국 사회를 관통하고 있는 불법촬영물이라는 특정 포획물을 기반으로 분포하고 있는 ‘관음충’에 대한 형태발생학적인(morphogenetic) 고찰이다. 형태발생학적 고찰이란 대한민국의 사회문화적 환경 안에서 디지털 성범죄 시스템을 추동시키는 ‘관음충’이라는 특정 군집구성체(population)가 어떠한 젠더와 조건을 중심으로 발생과 생장, 증식을 거듭하는지를 추적함을 의미한다. 필자는 한남유충-관음충-한남충이라는 용어가 배태하고 있는 곤충 군집체의 형태발생학적 착상(conception, idea)을 적극적으로 활용하여 본 논의의 배경(background)으로 삼고자 한다. 그리하여 한남충을 알-유충-성충의 단계에서 탈피와 성장을 거듭하지만 형태상으로 비슷한 상태를 유지하는 ‘불완전변태(homomorphism)’의 모델로 분석하고자 하는 것이다. 또한 ‘한남유충’에서 ‘한남충’으로의 변태(metamorphosis) 과정의 추이가 ‘관음충’의 지수(factor)를 통해 (...) 구체적으로 어떠한 방식으로 단계적으로 진화 가능한지를 첨예하게 드러내고자 한다. 이를 위해 필자는 미국의 신물질주의(New materialism) 이론의 선두주자이자 들뢰즈의 현대적 계승자인 마뉴엘 데란다(Manuel De Landa)의 이론적 틀을 창의적으로 재해석함으로써 관음충 군집체의 발생과 진화과정, 그것의 잠재적 궤적 방향과 현실적 양태에 대한 비판적 분석을 시도할 것이다. 그러하기에 첫째, 데란다가 제시한 ‘군집구성체적 사고(population thinking)’ 틀을 통해 한국에서 태어난 남아가 어떻게 ‘관음충’으로 집단적으로 생장, 진화하는가를 분석하고자 사회문화적으로 다양한 자가복제 기제들(replicators)을 들여다보도록 하겠다. 둘째, ‘강렬도의 사고(intensive thinking)’ 틀을 통해 관음충의 형태발생학적 변화 과정을 ‘영토화(territorialisation)와 코드화(coding)’라는 두 가지 기준척도를 통해 각각의 변이국면의 주요 특이점들을 파악하고 고찰할 것이다. 셋째, ‘위상학적 사고(Topological thinking)’ 틀을 통해 가부장제 자본주의 사회지평 내 관음충 군집체가 주파할 잠재적 궤도 방향과 메커니즘을 분석, 고찰하고 대한민국 사회가 이 궤도로부터 어떻게 이탈 가능할지를 페미니즘적으로 사유하도록 하겠다. (shrink)

Tout le monde en conviendra : lire n'est pas une activité de tout repos. La vue y est certes sollicitée, et même d'emblée, mais c'est pour aussitôt s'éclipser. S'il était purement vu, le texte (dans son sens étendu d'objet de l'interprétation) ne serait pas encore lu. La lecture proprement dite aura lieu dès l'instant où je cesse de voir ce qui m'est donné à voir pour me faufiler au-delà. J'embrasse à présent une réalité tri-dimensionnelle, je deviens le texte et le (...) texte m'épouse, je flaire et je ressens, j'hallucine et je jubile, bref : je lis. La lecture sera synesthésique ou ne sera pas. Mon voyeurisme n'est plus trivial mais absolu. Or ce don de voyance que je m'accorde pour pallier mon aveuglement du départ n'est pas sans risques : je ne suis à l'abri ni de la méprise ni de la foi aveugle. Et c'est là le côté ironique de toute lecture. On a beau s'investir dans l'oeuvre, tôt ou tard l'enchantement sera rompu. Je me vois en train de lire, donc je ne lis plus.Le texte me renvoie soudain à mes propres limites. Il n'empêche que cet ébranlement du sujet soit souvent déclencheur d'une expérience esthétique, expérience qui porte également un enseignement : la lecture aujourd'hui engage quiconque s'y adonne à être prêt à abdiquer à chaque instant ou, du moins, à respecter l'illisible et l'inappropriable. L'aboutissement de ce travail ce confond avec son présupposé majeur : inutile de vouloir maintenir le clivage entre lecture textuelle et lecture tout court (d'une image, du monde, d'un corps désiré, etc.), ce sont leurs empiètements qui restituent à ce geste ancestral et sans doute universel son souffle et son ampleur. Des scènes de perception entravée, lacunaire ou défectueuse, glanées dans le patrimoine littéraire et plastique contemporain (Proust, Cocteau, Michaux, Calvino, Manganelli, De Chirico, Alechinsky, Fuentes, Biély, Nabokov, Gombrowicz et tant d'autres) et appréhendées comme autant de simulacres de l'expérience de lecture, nous ont permis de cerner l'activité lectorielle au plus proche des textes. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre's account of the Look in Being and Nothingness is not straightforward and many conflicting interpretations have arisen due to apparent contradictions in Sartre's own writing. The Look, for Sartre, demonstrates how the self gains thematic awareness of the body, forming a public and self-conscious sense of how the body appears to others and, furthermore, illustrates affective and social aspects of embodied being. In this article, I will critically explore Sartre's oft-cited voyeur vignette in order to provide a (...) coherent account of the Look and to illustrate the significance of intersubjectivity and self-consciousness in Sartre's work. Through considering Sartre's voyeur vignette and other examples of reflective self-consciousness, this article will examine epistemological, self-evaluative and ontological concerns in the constitution of reflective self-consciousness. It will be contended that Sartre's accounts of the Look and reflective self-consciousness within social relations can provide insight into the intersubjective nature of the shaping of the body and the significance of self-presentation within the social realm. (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between visual culture and the fight for visibility and attention in contemporary society. It draws on a concept of visual culture which not only sees the rising significance of the visual and the proliferation of images as its defining traits, but also the fact that, today, people are—to a much higher degree—both consumers as well as producers of images. Based on this definition, it is argued that in visually oriented communication and media societies, the anthropologically (...) fundamental need for attention manifests itself as a fight for visibility which takes on the form of ever more extreme forms of public self-display. Furthermore, a portrait of two social figures—the star and the voyeur—will serve as further analysis and description of the social trends which can be tied to the emergence of today's visual culture. The article will close by discussing attention and visibility in terms of inclusion and exclusion and by proposing an analytical model for differentiating four modes of existence in a visual culture. (shrink)

The public does not desire horror, yet enjoys it in art and suffers it in life. When we deal with the monstrous marriage of the abject and the sublime, the consequent thrill of enjoyment is never appeased, always problematic, often unresolved and finally borders on physiological if not pathological narcissism. The public is well acquainted with this 'rhetoric of effects'; rhetoric of extreme effects, which transforms the spectator into voyeur or victim, into an apathetic torturer, whenever cruelty is shown (...) without respite. A look of horror greets the enjoyment of extremes and enjoyment to the extreme as well; the Eighteenth Century teaches us that lesson. The century of good taste elaborates a sense of the limits, since representing horror means choosing not so much to domesticate it as to render it more enjoyable. It is a game of limits that are not limits anymore, as we can allude to an infinity that often shows the features of the sublime. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, the reality television phenomenon has transformed the face of television in many countries. In Spain, for instance, the private domain has gradually invaded the public domain in an attempt to increase audience ratings and also reflect patterns of asymmetrical societal organization. Different television formats, which range from docusoaps to the most blatant examples of so-called ‘voyeur television’, have occupied the prime-time hours. In particular, a wide range of reality television shows has taken the place that mini-series, (...) sitcoms and films of the week used to occupy. These reality television programmes show the transformation of the private domain into one which can be manipulated and incorporated as an essential element in the theatricalization of the intimate experiences of anonymous people. By addressing the relationship between mothering and gendered styles, this study adds to the field of research on reality television research by investigating language and gender within the institutional setting of a docusoap and throwing light on the discursive strategies which two different generations of women use to express anger and assertiveness and impose on others. The study reveals that the strategies used by the Spanish female teenagers under scrutiny are associated with hostile laddish verbal behaviour, whereas the mothers’ strategies relate to an instrumental view of aggression. (shrink)

Images of human violence to animals challenge us both psychologically and morally. Sometimes images are so graphic, the treatment they capture so degrading and cruel, that they approach the pornographic. How can we responsibly approach them? Is it more respectful to witness such suffering, or to look away? I explore the notion of bearing witness to animal suffering as a manifestation of respect. I begin by asking why it is important to bear witness to human atrocities such as the Holocaust. (...) Some rationales are forward-looking and consequentialist. We bear witness in the spirit of “never again”: to stir moral motivation and preventive action. But there are also backward-looking and expressive reasons: to show respect for the dead, to express our solidarity and grief, to affirm the moral value of both the lost and the saved. Some might argue that differences between human and nonhuman victims of violence make the latter rationales irrelevant when animal victims are in question. The animal dead did not value being remembered; animal survivors do not share a degrading collective memory of horror and do not care if we acknowledge it. Yet obligations of memory do find a foothold here. Bearing witness to human-animal violence affirms the moral status of animals; it expresses respect and is part of constitutive justice. Bearing witness, however, carries moral risks, so that it matters greatly how one does so. One problem is that witnesses’ “testimony” - usually visual documentation of animal abuse - does not find its way only to compassionate audiences, but also to others who will use it in pernicious ways and some who are simply voyeurs. In this way, the witness can unwillingly become “a pornographer of pain.” Given the motive of paying respect to the animal dead, this is the last outcome a moral witness desires. Yet showing atrocities done to animals in all their horrific detail is among the most powerful ways of gaining allies in the struggle to end animal abuse. In light of such dilemmas, I explore the importance of bearing witness in private and as communal activity, of who attends to animal suffering, and of how and through what media we do so. (shrink)

Inspired by French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s model of a "second, poetic geography" in which the walker—the everyday practitioner—invents the space observed by the voyeur, this book takes the reader on a tour of spaces of ...

After all, ever since the abandonment of the classical curriculum in the mid-nineteenth century, the courses of studies in American colleges have been characterized by ever-increasing diversity, responses to highly particular social and individual demands, spin-offs from traditional disciplines, specializations breeding subspecializations, and the like. Stringent counterrevolutions, such as the one undertaken in the College of the University of Chicago some thirty years ago, have been infrequent and brief. What, then, is so special about the present seductive disarray in literary (...) studies. Chiefly, I think, the importance of this compartmentation lies in the way we are encouraged to think of literary works and to respond to them. If we persuade ourselves that novels and plays and poems are written by members of an identifiable subgroup—whether that group be defined in national, ethnic, sexual, class, or special interest terms—and can be properly understood, and appreciated only by those who know the code of the same subgroup, we should be prepared to accept the implications of the position we are espousing. If, to cite a specific example, what is called the Black Aesthetic points to a mode of artistic apprehension that is not available to non-Blacks, it casts the rest of us, however curious and interested, in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers. Here, as so often, our best writers anticipate and dramatize notions which become solemn critical propositions later on. In Saul Bellow's second novel, The Victim, published thirty years ago, the protagonist, Leventhal, recalls a party at which two of his friends, both Jewish, were singing spirituals and old ballads. They were being needled by a drunken New England WASP named Kirby Albee. "Why do you sing such songs?" he said. "You can't sing them.""Why not, I'd like to know?" said the girl."Oh, you, too," said Albee with his one cornered smile. "it isn't right for you to sing them. You have to be born to them, it's no use trying to sing them." Robert E. Streeter served for many years as Dean of the College and later as Dean of the Humanities at the University of Chicago where he is now Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor. He is one of the editors of Critical Inquiry. "WASPs and Other Endangered Species" was presented as the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago on 5 April 1977. (shrink)

Incorporating a discussion of physical and emotional trauma in medical education can help prepare students for their encounters with trauma survivors in clinical practice. A pedagogical approach begins with an inquiry into the purpose of historical or current representations of torture. Justifications include rationalizing state-sponsored torture, providing an outlet for critique and protest, and organizing representations of the enemy. Discussions of torture must further address the emotional and symbolic effects of clinical work with torture survivors on the caregiver. Introductory workshops (...) using visual representations can trigger pain, fear and anger in the viewer. Images of torture, war, and genocide may also invoke ethical concerns relating to the impact of visual images, where viewing can elicit an ambiguous response, casting the viewer into the role of voyeur. At the same time, learners should recognize that indifference or inattention to the provocations mediated through images has its own liabilities, signaling defensiveness. Discussions about the respective roles of perpetrators, victims and observers offer opportunities for the viewer to engage in self-reflection. Artistic representations also offer opportunities for advocacy on the survivor’s behalf, sometimes facilitated by dissemination of visual representations, but also by involving the survivors themselves in activities that exploit the healing power of art. (shrink)

In 2003 Japanese folk horror game Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly directed by Makoto Shibata, the protagonist bears witness to an ancient tradition of a community linked to the ritual sacrifice of twins, which results in the female victim becoming a malevolent spirit. Gradually the player, as Mio, equipped with the Camera Obscura, transitions from observer to participant in the cycle of events that results in sacrificing their own twin sister. This article focuses on establishing the game within the folk (...) horror subgenre, before examining three female characters: Mio, the protagonist, who shifts from witness/voyeur to participant; Mayu, their twin, who transitions from unwilling to willing sacrifice; and Sae, the victim of the original ritual and antagonist. In Fatal Frame II, the Camera Obscura, which captures the supernatural world, is the lens through which past and present blur as the player is confronted by the twisted beliefs of the village. Through analysis of the game’s narrative, ludic elements, and visual aesthetics, I examine how these roles fit within the context of folk horror, gender and Japanese folklore. (shrink)

"A book well worth reading as its expose of postmoderism has a clarity others would do well to imitate." --Tim Gay in NATFHE Journal Blue Velvet, sex, lies and videotape, Do the Right Thing, and Wall Street are just some of the provocative films that Denzin explores for their portrayal of the postmodern self. He examines the basic thesis that members of the contemporary world are voyeurs who, adrift in a sea of symbols, recognize and anchor themselves through cinema and (...) television. He skillfully weaves this idea back and forth between two kinds of texts: social theory, including poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, and marxism; and cinematic representations of life in modern America. The result is a solid assertion that postmodernism has shaped a dramaturgical society where the image has tragically replaced reality. Denzin offers a powerful reading of postmodern American society and the cinematic selves, however distorted, that inhabit this fantasy world. At the same time, he outlines the main contours of postmodern sociology and a postmodern sociological imagination that is responsive to the current historical moment. Images of Postmodern Society will play a key role in understanding the powerful relationship between postmodernism and the cinema for upper level graduates, gradate students, and contemporary scholars of cultural studies, communications, political science, anthropology, sociology, education, history, literary and cinema studies. "The book could be usefully incorporated into undergraduate sociology courses, particularly those that consider media and society, where it might serve as a basis for further discussion and examination of some important issues." --Journal of Communication "Images of Postmodern Society is a good book on two different levels. First, Denzin advances his own theory of postmodernism and, more specifically, of what he calls the "postmodern self," that is interesting and provocative. Second, this is one of the few books on postmodernity that is truly practical, in the sense that the book would be quite a good text to use in courses on the subject, whether they be in philosophy, sociology, film and media studies, cultural studies, and perhaps even anthropology. . . . I would certainly like to use the book for this purpose myself, and I would recommend the book for that purpose to colleagues in the departments mentioned." --Bill Martin, Philosophy Department, DePaul University "Denzin uncovers a profoundly important tension in postmodern culture . . . His work, then, demonstrates that the 'abundance of meaning' found in these films lies in the collision of modernist and postmodernist depictions of cultural practice." --Contemporary Sociology "Norman Denzin, one of the most interesting theorists and ethnographers in American sociology, has turned his critical eye to postmodern theory and contemporary American culture and society. Revitalizing Mills' sociological imagination, Denzin addresses the relations between Hollywood films of the 1980s, their constructions of self, and the structures of lived experience. He offers a postmodern sociology which addresses the increasingly conservative basis of postmodern ideologies of race, class, and gender. It offers an original postmodern critique of the postmodern. Images of Postmodern Society should be and will be widely read and discussed." --Larry Grossberg, University of Illinois. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse the particular phenomena of COVID-19 pandemic shaming. We examine Sartre’s account of the undifferentiated other in the experience of ‘the look’, and his insistence on shame as a foundational relational affect, in order to give a robust theoretical frame to understand how pandemic shaming circulated both online and offline, in targeted and diffuse manners. We focus on two features of pandemic shaming. First, we draw attention to the structural necessity of an audience in acts of (...) pandemic shaming, where the shamer acts on behalf of a community of others, the audience, to perform and enforce a set of standards, values or norms. We turn to the we-experience and collective emotions literature and discuss how the shamer believes themselves to be ‘speaking’ on behalf of a community who share their outrage along with their values. Second, we discuss how the presumption of a collective emotion was frequently mistaken in acts of pandemic shaming, where shaming frequently led to shame backlashes, where the audience revealed themselves not to share the emotion and values of the shamer, consequently shaming the shamer. We argue that Jean-Paul Sartre’s voyeur example is usefully illustrative of the tripartite structure of (1) shamed, (2) shamer and (3) shamer of the shamer that occurs in iterative processes of pandemic shaming, which are accompanied by shaming backlashes. We conclude by reflecting on the socio-historical context for Sartre’s accounts of shame and ‘the look’, namely the German occupation of Paris and Sartre’s experience of the French Resistance movement, and how these yield a particular socio-historical framing that makes evident how the extraordinary pseudo-wartime conditions of COVID-19 rendered atmospheres of distrust and suspicion prevalent. (shrink)

Privacy is something we all want. We seek privacy to prevent others from securing information about us that is immediately embarrassing, and so causes us pain but not material loss. We also value privacy for strategic reasons in order to prevent others from imposing material and perhaps psychic costs upon us. I use the expression “securing information” so that it covers everything from the immediate sensory data that a voyeur acquires to the financial data a rival may acquire about (...) our businesses. In the degenerate case of the Peeping Tom's invasion of our privacy, suffering is caused just by the voyeur's having acquired the information, even if nothing is ever done with it beyond the voyeur's recalling it from time to time. In all other cases, privacy prevents others from imposing costs or harms on us in ways that require that they secure information about us. (shrink)

The paper argues that the act of looking, as defined between the story of Gyges, Candaules, and the offended queen and the story of Solon's visit to Lydia, functions in the first book of Herodotus, and perhaps also elsewhere throughout the Inquiry, as a metaphor for the relation of the histôr to the object of his investigation. Further, by a careful comparison of the Gyges story in Herodotus with the queen's own narration in the enigmatic "Gyges Tragedy" , we can (...) define a Herodotean psychology of spectation that bears a striking resemblance to the specifically tragic psychology manifest in the fragment. Herodotus positions his readers, the paper argues, in the place of Gyges, forcing them to look-in their imaginations-on what does not belong to them, just as the theatai in the Theater of Dionysus must look in imagination on the scene described by the queen. While the tragic audience is protected from the fate of Candaules and of Gyges' descendant Croesus by the constitutive blindness of tragedy that prevents the spectators from seeing what happens in the mukhos, Herodotus' audience must seek some other reassurance that they will not face the voyeur's penalty. This paper finally argues that Solon's theôria, with its crucial purpose of establishing the nomoi of Athens and its crucial ethic of looking not at the object of desire but at the end, installs in Herodotus' historiê the psychology of tragedy: to look desiringly is to lose, but to look inquiringly is to learn. (shrink)

In any event, I realize fully that the parole, the speech, the "word" of a writer such as myself, has something strange and even contradictory about it, even within its own creator. At the moment when I write, let us say, La Jalousie or Glissements progressifs du plaisir, what I propose is improbable and consequently unacceptable; that is, my parole as a writer or as a cinéaste in my novels or in my films is abrupt, inexplicable, nonrecuperable for any correctly (...) organized discourse. Nevertheless, you have noticed that I speak with the same clarity as any professor, and this constitutes an extremely interesting contradiction because it goes to the very heart of the debate; order and disorder never cease to interact, to contaminate each other, to practice a sort of mutual recuperation. If, having written a novel of disorder, I don't find someone—for example, Bruce Morrissette, about La Jalousie—to prove that it has order, I'll do it myself. The principle of order is so crucial that I wish to prove that the disorder which I've created I can myself transform into order. But, as soon as I have shown that it has its order, from that moment on I've destroyed the interest of my work. I have brought about within an organized discourse, organized according to the normal logic of Cartesianism, the recuperation of something which was in fact a machine of war against order. I often run into people who say to me after a film, "Ah, it's a pity that you didn't come to explain all of that before the film. We didn't understand a thing, and it is such a fine thing that you have explained it." And I reply, "Yes, but don't trust that too much," because what I've said is not at all the film. It is even almost the opposite; it is the way in which I show myself that there is in what I created a part which is in spite of everything, explainable by established order, and a part increasingly large, because order progresses. Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, film maker, and essayist, is the author of Les Gommes , Le Voyeur , La Jalousie , Dans le labyrinthe , La Maison de rendez-vous , Projet pour une révolution à New York , and Topologie d'une cité fantôme . His films include: L'Année dernière à Marienbad , L'Immortelle , Trans-Europ-Express , L'Homme qui ment , L'Eden et après , Glissements progressifs du plaisir , and Le Jeu avec le feu . He has presented his views on contemporary fiction in Pour un Nouveau Roman. Bruce Morrissette, author of books on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Sunny Distinguished Service Professor in the department of Romance languages and literature at the University of Chicago, has translated "Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction." He is the author of "Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film". (shrink)

Marcella Althaus-Reid puts in print a discussion of sex, gender, and politics. For womanist theologian and ethicist, Townes, black women's experiences have been left out of the theoretical and material constructs of both black and feminist theologies in the United States. Townes argues that Althaus-Reid casts the reader in the role of voyeur as she describes the women lemon vendors in Indecent Theology. The reader observes them from the safety of their own cultural, economic, theo-ethical and sociopolitical mud huts (...) in the same way as the Europeans who queued to view the so-called'Hottentot Venus' in the early 1800s. Nevertheless, Althaus-Reid offers an integrated, interstructured analysis that helps pry open the dynamics of oppressions. (shrink)

Who are "we" in the Phenomonology of Spirit? Are we the reader whose education is underway, the purely passive voyeur whose role is to witness the necessity of the account, a dramatic actor engaged in a dialogue with consciousness, the consummate scientist remarking retrospectively upon the experiences of consciousness from the viewpoint of absolute knowing, or even the dramaturge who artfully transfigures the experiences of consciousness in a way that is certainly memorable, but never actually transpired as such, historically (...) speaking? (shrink)