It is shown that the facts of behavior which Freud sought to encompass by his distinction of Primary and Secondary Process can be formulated in terms of Skinner's system of behavior. This is illustrated by considering the 'primary process' behavior in dreaming, some of whose characteristics according to Freud are: it is illogical and random; visual images predominate in primary process thinking; it is highly charged with affect compared to 'secondary process' thinking; it shows 'condensation' — the fusing together of (...) two or more images into a single image. It is shown that all of these properties can be derived from Skinner's account of behavior. It is then pointed out that both Freud and Skinner have pointed to similar controlling variables of behavior, utilized mainly similar processes, and drawn many of the same distinctions. Implications for contemporary criticisms of Skinner's account of 'thinking' are pointed out. The above is preceded by a preliminary argument that since both Freud and Skinner performed functional analyses of behavior, it should be possible to compare the two accounts if the 'superfluous' middle term — the intrapsychic apparatus — in Freud's account is ignored. It is pointed out that in extrapolating his system to human behavior, Skinner has described in terms of his own system some of the characteristically 'Freudian' facts of behavior, and his formulations on the phenomena of 'repression' are summarized. The Skinnerian formulation of the primary and secondary process distinction is then presented in support of the argument that other facts of behavior which have not been discussed by Skinner can nevertheless be represented within his system of behavior. (shrink)

This paper analyses the contagious nature of the paradox as the functioning principle of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing machines, aiming to emphasize the semiotic and socio-political contributions of any linguistic enterprise structurally based in paradoxes. Beckett’s texts are discussed here, as they are in Deleuze and Guattari’s works, as component abstract machines apt to couple themselves to other abstract machines in order to generate increasingly sophisticated and far-reaching liberatory procedures. As the paper shows, paradox-based discourses of the highest degree of (...) sophistication can bypass traditional models of “understanding,” replacing traditional requirements of textual interpretation with always-fruitful and immediate affective models of contact and “work” with the text. Consequently, repeated exposure to paradox-based discourses is apt to generate sophisticated affects, delineating powerful procedures to obstruct repression mechanisms and articulating a model of empowerment based on contagion rather than hierarchical distribution. (shrink)

The transformations that have occurred at the state economic level, the change in the trends of opinion that animate postmodern societies, the increase in population have strongly affected the crime rate in the last 10-20 years in all the states of the world. The trends in the matter of sanctions vary greatly, whether it is the frequency of custodial sentences, the harshness - in general - of criminal sentences, the preference for punishments whose special maximums are higher or lower or (...) the adoption of some alternative measures to imprisonment or even criminal justice in general. Many of the new criminal policies are justifiable in the context of the national law of states, but few have a real chance of globalization. Penal reform was or is on the working table of all states of the world. The details vary from case to case, but the trend is general. The Scandinavian countries modified their sanctioning system and created new punishments, the Western European countries created systems for sanctioning and re-educating delinquents in an extra-criminal regime, in the U.S. one can note, paradoxically, the generalized tightening of punishments, a model followed by Great Britain and Australia, but at a lower level. There is a continuous debate at the level of legal doctrine on the appropriateness of adopting an authoritarian system of repression in criminal matters. This article aims to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the liberal model of criminal repression in the European space, in the context of the phenomenon of globalization. (shrink)

Everyday life is a central theme of Hong Kong poetry. Many Hong Kong poets use the quotidian as a starting point for the exploration of history and alternative imaginings. This mundane focus, unlike the colonial dreamscape of Hong Kong as an economic miracle, allows writers to reflect upon Hong Kong as a post-colonial and global space. The Hong Kong writer Natalia Chan examines the complex nature of everyday life within the space of the global and post-colonial city. Chan’s poems deal (...) with the essence of everydayness and use commodities to conjure up the vivacity of the urbanscape of Hong Kong. Unlike the political and economic discourse that is usually used to define Hong Kong, Chan’s work portrays Hong Kong as a city that offers the possibility of daily re-creation against the background of history. In this article, we will examine Chan’s use of the circulation of commodities in the global world and explore the way fashion becomes a point where high and popular culture, private and public domains, and local and global interests clash, negotiate, and fertilize each other. Chan’s works do not conform to the economic and prosperity discourse that has repressed Hong Kong; rather, she guides her readers to re-experience the everydayness of routines, to celebrate alternate ways of understanding the urbanscape, and to open themselves to the potentialities of art and the everyday. (shrink)

Recent empirical work indicates that reduced autobiographical memory specificity can act as an avoidant processing style. By truncating the memory search before specific elements of traumatic memories are accessed, one can ward off the affective impact of negative reminiscences. This avoidant processing style can be viewed as an instance of what Erdelyi describes as the “subtractive” class of repressive processes.

This book looks at the affective-cognitive roots of how the human mind inquires into the workings of nature and, more generally, how the mind confronts reality. Reality is an infinitely complex system, in virtue of which the mind can comprehend it only in bits and pieces, by making up interpretations of the myriads of signals received from the world by way of integrating those with information stored from the past. This constitutes a piecemeal interpretation by which we assemble our (...) phenomenal reality. In perceiving the complex world and responding to it, the mind invokes the logic of affect and the logic of reason, the former mostly innate and implicit, and the latter generated consciously in explicit terms with reference to mind-independent relations between entities in nature. It is a strange combination of affect and reason that enables us to make decisions and inferences, --- the latter mostly of the inductive type --- thereby making possible the development of theories. Theories are our tool-kits for explaining and predicting phenomena, guiding us along in our journey in life. Theories, however, are defeasible, and need to be constantly updated, at times even radically. In this, the self and the soul are of enormous relevance. The former is the affect-based psychological engine driving all our mental processes, while the latter is the capacity of the conscious mind to examine and reconstruct the self by modulating repressed conflicts. If the soul remains inoperative, all our theories become misdirected and a rot spreads inexorably all around us. (shrink)

The problem of the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness has proved to be not only a neuralgic point in the interdisciplinary debates throughout the 20th century, but one which maintains its notable place in the present day. Taking the long and complex history of the encounters between Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and Edmund Husserl's mature phenomenology as a theoretical background, the present paper offers a novel approach towards the consciousness/unconsciousness problem, situated within the peculiar sphere shaped by the dialogue between Freudian (...) and Husserlian notions. What we offer is a preliminary sketch for an analytics of affectability that opens a path toward reexamining some key psychoanalytical concepts such as unconscious, repression and memory which can be a valuable contribution to the development of phenomenological conceptualizations of different forms of traumatic experience. (shrink)

Drawing on 75 semi-structured qualitative interviews with Arab, South Asian, and Black Muslim women social justice activists, ages 18–30 years, organizing in the United States and the United Kingdom, I theorize their experiences as the basis of the matrix of gendered Islamophobia. Building upon Jasmine Zine’s concept of gendered Islamophobia, I synthesize this concept with Patricia Hill Collins’s theory of the matrix of domination to give a more in-depth and nuanced structure of how gendered Islamophobia operates and is resisted by (...) Muslim women activists. This article identifies the overlapping configurations of power that affect Muslim women’s lives through structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains, countering reductionist accounts of Islamophobia as a universalized, unvariegated social force impacting all Muslims in similar ways. Instead, the matrix of gendered Islamophobia locates Islamophobia within shifting axes of oppression that are simultaneously structured along the lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship. The findings of this research reveal a dialectical relationship between Muslim women’s oppression and simultaneous contestation of gendered Islamophobia via their collective remaking of alternative ideas, politics, discourses, and organizing practices. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to problematise and complexify scholarly accounts of contemporary emotional repression in Western contexts by presenting counterevidence in the form of two examples of post-secular collective affectivity and their ritual expressions. It argues that both narratives of emotional repression and expression fail to capture the non-linear complexity of processes of cultural transformation, which have resulted in the simultaneous expression and repression of ritualistic affects that are products of our evolutionary embodied history. Drawing on insights from (...) affect theory, this paper seeks to illustrate how contingent yet nonetheless residual ritualistic affects have become repressed in the nominally secular public sphere in modernity. This has presented certain obstacles to the open communal display of religious ritual, and, as a corollary, the expression of certain religious affects, which have subsequently re-emerged in post-secular ritual spaces that are both publically private and pr... (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the genealogy of the numeral transformation of emotions from its earliest beginnings in the late nineteenth century. My main thesis is that the historical encounter between emotion and number should not be viewed solely as a particular instantiation of more general trends in the development of objectifying, quantifying, or trust-building technologies. Rather, emotion-as-number provided an alternative medium for the circulation and expression of emotions in a culture that emphasized restraint. It also empowered the experimenter to (...) produce forbidden emotions inside the modern laboratory; it participated in the construction of a uniquely scientific - in contradistinction to a poetic or feminized - emotion; and it attenuated the tensions that arose when "sublime" emotion was animalized in a Darwinian universe. In making this argument, I wish, among other things, to challenge recent claims concerning the repression of emotion in modern public culture. Emotion, I argue, was not restraint in post-Victorian culture, but rather communicated through a new medium - the number. (shrink)

Notwithstanding the fact that already in his early essay “The Logical Time” Lacan suggested that the “ontological form of anxiety” is the constitutive element in the process of the constitution of subjectivity, thus far there have only been rare attempts at inquiring into the relation between the affect of anxiety and Lacan’s critique of classical ontology, which this article will try to explore. Specifically, my argument will be that Lacanian anxiety, unlike, for instance, its Heideggerian variation, is inextricably connected with (...) the third dimension of being, which amounts to what Lacan in Seminar XI labelled “the unrealized,” i.e. to the peculiar structure of the unconscious, which distorts the classical ontological opposition between being and non-being. For Lacan, the unconscious, rather than referring simply to repressed unconscious content, is instead structured around a “pre-ontological” gap or “ontological negativity”. While anxiety notoriously “does not deceive,” it does not deceive only regarding the subject’s encounter with the real, but also – and most importantly – regarding the specific ontological structure of the unconscious, which includes the negativity as its own “material cause”. In this respect, anxiety might be regarded as an “ontological” or even objective material affect – yet not in a posthumanist sense of the affect of being/matter, but rather as the affective correlate or material signal for the fracture of being itself. In short, without this specific ontological gap/negativity, there would only be fear and frustration, not anxiety, which brings anxiety into the domain of metapsychology. (shrink)

This essay begins by considering Samuel Fuller's 1963 film Shock Corridor as a model of schizo-violence – a disorganised violence that eludes the Oedipal, moralising binary of action and reaction, and instead opens up the violent action to multiple becomings outside Oedipal and nationalistic framings. Through the de-Oedipalisation of the violent events punctuating American history, Shock Corridor performs a schizoanalytic model of desire capable of giving free rein to the force of traumatic affections. The latter part of the discussion situates (...) Fuller's film and the contemporary US military machine as diametrically opposed in their approaches to what we might call ‘the affective politics of war’. Several contemporary scenarios revolving around both actual war violence and Kathryn Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker (2008) serve to show how the schizophrenising operations of the brain itself constitute the greatest obstacle in the military's efforts to contain or repress the traumatic affections generated by violence and war. (shrink)

In a candid autobiographical chapter (Hirst 2010), which numbers among his last writings, Paul Hirst subjects his upbringing within a fundamentalist Christian sect to searching moral appraisal. He concludes that his parents wronged him by religiously indoctrinating him, stifling his emotional development, and arbitrarily restricting his range of valuable morally permissible experiences. This upbringing undermined his autonomy and—more fundamentally, on his account—kept him from living the life he had most reason to live. Surprisingly, however, Hirst suggests that his parents had (...) a right to initiate him into this conservative religious life, though the wider community owed him a more non-directive form of religious education to temper it. This is a striking concession to the scope of parental rights, especially in view of Hirst’s complaint that the emotional repression required by his parents was to ‘distort [his] experience and understanding of [himself] and others in ways that persisted well into [his] adult life’. Engaging with Hirst's evaluation of his upbringing, I argue for a narrower range of parental rights than Hirst–one which excludes a parental moral right to religious initiation–and provide an account of the kind of emotional experiences to which children plausibly have a right. (shrink)

In 2015 students in South Africa mobilized to decolonize universities and to struggle for free higher education. This article discusses these developments in the context of contemporary theories of remembrance, repression and denial and current debates around decolonization and “talking race” in post-apartheid South Africa. The current South African student movement challenge apartheid legacies and white colonial culture, contending that campuses are still dominated by racist symbolic and economic orders. They argue, “As we learn we need to unlearn and (...) develop new epistemologies.” This article analyses this process as it unfolds and looks at the unfolding intergenerational tensions and discusses how a lack of affirmative labor of remembrance on the side of the white South African population complicates notions of decolonization in relation to a gendered black nationalism. A point of conceptual reference is the 1968 student protest movement in West Germany, which forcefully broke the silence surrounding fascist continuities within the newly democratized institutions that was “unable to mourn” and remember. (shrink)

In the article the features of the state policy on repatriation of the Crimean Tatars to their historical homeland in 1956-2014. The process of repatriation and attempt to create conditions for life in their historic homeland of the Crimean Tatars - a long and complicated process, the result of a long struggle of the Crimean Tatar people for their rights in the face of fierce discrimination on the part of the party and the Soviet leadership. Economic problems and inconsistent government (...) policies have a negative impact on many aspects of resolving the repatriation after the Soviet collapse in independent Ukraine. Repatriation of deported peoples of Crimea was made possible by the liberalization of political life in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death and condemnation in 1956 deportations policy at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. However, the legal framework that was established in 1956, included the release of Crimean Tatars from special settlements residence without the right to return to Crimea, without the return of seized property. Active political actions in 1967 Crimean Tatars have provided them political rehabilitation. However, the discriminatory restrictions on returning to their historic homeland were not removed. The contents of the official of government policy towards Crimean Tatars changing only in the late 1980s. It was considered illegal and criminal repression of the peoples affected by forced deportation. To compensate for their loss of property during deportation have developed special state programs. However, spontaneous and massive return of Crimean Tatars in the early 1990s created serious social and economic difficulties. The failed coup in August 1991 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union led to the denunciation of state and inter-republican agreements on implementation of joint programs of repatriation. Ukraine and Crimea were left alone with this problem. In the 1991-2014 years authorities of Ukraine are trying to solve problems of socio-economic, ethnic and humanitarian plan for the improvement and integration into Ukrainian society of the Crimean Tatars. Official conceptual approach regarding the status of the Crimean Tatars as to the object of national policy in Ukraine in 1991-2013 years was based on the recognition of ethnic group that has the same rights as other ethnic groups of Ukraine, but because of the "special reason" require additional support of the government as a guarantee of preservation and development of ethnic group. Ukraine had changed its position on this issue after the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014: Crimean Tatars received the status of "indigenous people" who have the right to political self-determination in their ethnic territory as part of Ukraine. (shrink)

The phenomenological reading of psychoanalysis undertook by Michel Henry is surprising in several ways. By inscribing Freud in the philosophical lineage and by affirming that his theses on the unconscious take over (resume), ignoring it, two opposite movements of western metaphysics, Henry intends to show that psychoanalysis has to overcome the primacy of representation in order to get rid of the contradictions that traverse it and that make it a prisoner of a philosophy of consciousness. Without fully rejecting the Freudian (...) theory, the author of the Genealogy of Psychoanalysis reformulates the meaning of the meta-psychological notions according to his theses on the cogito, subjectivity and the auto-affection of the living. In this article we retraced the stakes of this redefinition of drives, affect and the unconscious considering his reflexions on repression. (shrink)

In this work, it is made clear: -/- (1) What it is to rationalize and how rationalization is possible; (2) What it is to repress and how repression is possible; (3) How internal conflict is possible, how it is related to anxiety and other affective states, and how internal conflict causes blindness; (4) Why it is that conceptualized self-awareness is repression-resistant (though not repression-proof) and non-conceptualized self-awareness is not repression-resistant; (5) How rationalization is necessary for (...) repression and vice versa; (6) Why rationalization is not in and of itself pathological and why, in addition, rationalization is within limits a biological necessity; (7) Where exactly the cut-off line is between morbid and healthy rationalization; (8) How compartmentalization and repression depend on each other, how they are similar, and how they are different; (9) Why even though mental events are presumably mediated by physical (physiological, neural) events, psychology is not low-resolution physiology; (10) Why, by virtue of being the one discipline whose data are themselves data, the logical structure of the discipline of psychology is unique; (11) Why notwithstanding the last point two points, Dilthey's 'empathy-based' approach to psychology is wrong and why Hempel's narrowly positivistic analysis of psychological explanation is no less wrong, (12) What is involved in reducing one discipline to another; (13) What the differences are between 'access-conscious' (Freud's 'topographical' unconscious) and 'access-unconscious' (Freud's 'dynamic', i.e. repression-based, unconscious); (14) How rationalization is involved in character-remodeling and character-degradation; (15) What it is to sociopathize; (16) What the differences are between the psychopath, the sociopath, and criminal; (17) How criminosis may safeguard (while, it is true, causing some degradation of) one's personality-architecture against forces that would otherwise lead to sociopathogenesis; (18) How Nietzsche's ethical egoism is an oblique way of saying, correctly, that unless one is true to oneself, one's morality is sham-morality and how this prima facie ethical claim is a demonstrably (and demonstrably correct) non-normative, psychological claim; (19) What the relationship is between psychological integrity and moral integrity; (20) Why those lacking psychological integrity can be anything more than 'reflex machines', to use Checkley’s term; (21) What intentions are, why intentions are not identical with desires; (22) Why Davidson's 'interpretivism' is spurious and why the same is true of all forms of functionalism; (23) Why the Computational Theory of Mind is spurious; (24) Why many a psychopath is regarded as a person of merit; (25) Why some alleged solutions to the mind-body problem are non-solutions and what the merits and demerits are of Descartes' conceivability-argument for mind-body dualism. (shrink)

La production désirante se trouve informée par le fait que le sujet affectif est inscrit dans une époque, une culture, un milieu social et tributaire de différentes formes de socialisation qui le disposent ou l’inclinent à désirer telle ou telle chose. Les trois théories que nous proposons de confronter font valoir l’origine principalement sociale des défenses suscitées par la vie pulsionnelle. Cette transformation affective est nommée par Freud refusement culturel ( Kulturversagung ), par Adorno et Horkheimer intégration totale ou (...) répression ( Repression ) et par Elias également répression et refoulement des pulsions ( Dämfung der Triebe ) mais au sens d’une capacité accrue d’autocontrôle ( Selbstkontrolle ) ou d’autocontrainte ( Selbstzwänge ). Qu’est-ce qui spécifie et distingue chacune de ces trois formes d’intégration de la norme sociale à la personne, pour reprendre une expression d’Elias dans La Société de cour? (shrink)

The purpose aimed at this article is to demonstrate how the selective repression during General Pinochet's dictatorship affected the Mirist militant women in a sharper way as a result of the breaking-up nature this organization had in Chile. We are trying to sef up a contextualization on the situation that women of this county were living, in addition to their incorporation to political parties and social movements. The contents of this essay and the main thesis dealt are rooted in (...) the analysis on the Rettig Report´s data about the detained and the disappeared. Wifhin it we muy realize clearly how the victim account of Mirist women goes beyond in a broad way in comparison to the one of other women militant belonging to other political parties. (shrink)

미셸 앙리는 1985년 출간한 『정신분석의 계보-잃어버린 기원』에서 프로이트가 데카르트의 계승자라는 놀라운 진술을 펼친다. 그를 따르면 무의식 개념은 의식 개념으로부터, 좀 더 정확히 말해 그 ‘일탈’로부터 나왔다. 의식 개념의 일탈에서 보면 그것은 무의식이지만, 데카르트가 확립한 최초의 의식 개념으로 회귀해 보면 그것은 의식과 다르지 않다. 이 같은 독해를 이해하려면 먼저 후설의 ‘순수 환원’에 반대하여 미셸 앙리가 요구한 ‘근본적 환원’의 의미를 파악해야 한다. 이 근본적 환원의 수행 속에서만 데카르트가 발견하고 후설이 놓친 코기토의 현상학적 의미가 모습을 드러낸다. 코기토에 대한 앙리의 독창적 해석은 하이데거식 해석에 (...) 반대하여 의식 개념이 내포하는 ‘자기성’의 의미를 새로운 관점에서 드러낸다. 그것은 표상의 자기성이 아니라 촉발의 자기성이다. 최초의 의식은 자기의 자기촉발(auto-affection de soi)이다. 여기서 표상은 철저히 배제된다. 표상의 저편에서, 좀 더 정확히 말해 표상작용 이전에 그 가능 조건으로서 도래하는 의식이 프로이트의 무의식이다. 무의식은 최초로 도래하는 것, 삶, 그와 같은 것으로 정서 이외 다른 아무것도 아니다. 이로써 무의식은 존재론적 해명을 얻고 무의식이기를 멈춘다. 정신분석에 대한 앙리의 이 같은 독해는 앙리 이후에도 계속 요구돼야 한다. 그 독해의 의의를 드러내기를 멈출 수 없는 이유이며, 이 논문이 작성된 이유이기도 하다. 무의식이 무엇인지 묻기 전에 먼저 의식이 무엇인지를 묻고자. 그런 다음에서야 무의식 개념이 왜 비결정적 개념으로 있을 수밖에 없었는지를 이해하게 된다. 이 논문은 앙리 독해를 중심으로 프로이트의 무의식이 어떻게 데카르트의 코기토를 만나게 되는지를 보여주고자 한다. (shrink)

People with a repressive coping style are highly motivated to defend themselves against self-concept threats. But what kinds of unfavourable personal characteristics are they most focused on avoiding? Weinberger (Citation1990) suggested that repressors are primarily concerned with seeing themselves (and having others see them) as calm, unemotional people who are not prone to experiencing negative affect. A content analysis of the actual (self-ascribed) and undesired attributes of 349 male and female college students, however, provided no support for that hypothesis. Instead, (...) relative to other participants, repressors’ undesired selves consisted more of traits exemplifying disagreeableness (as defined by the five-factor model). Repressors might not engage in affective self-regulation for its own sake, but because it allows them to control expression of traits with which they are more directly concerned. (shrink)

This article examines verbal humour in routine interactions within professional workplaces, using material recorded in four New Zealand government departments. The problem of defining humour is discussed, followed by a brief outline of the theoretical models which underpin the analysis of the various functions which humour serves in professional organizations. Humour can express positive affect in interaction. It can also facilitate or `licence' more negative interpersonal communicative intent. While politeness theory can account for the former, as a means of expressing (...) collegiality at work, or de-emphasizing power imbalances, in its standard form politeness theory does not explain barbed, competitive or confrontational humour. For this it is necessary to look to `the dark side of politeness'. An alternative perspective thus examines the extent to which humour functions, especially in unequal encounters, as an acceptable strategy to help superiors maintain a position of power but also as a strategy used by subordinates to licence challenges to the power structures within which they operate, and as a legitimizing strategy in attempts at subverting the repressive or coercive discourse of superiors. (shrink)

이 논문은 ‘무의식의 현상학적 독해’를 제안한다. 이 독해의 시작은 앙리가 밝힌 ‘현상학적 기본 전제’이다. 이 전제가 ‘하나’가 아니라 ‘둘’이라는 사실을 밝힘으로써 앙리의 현상학은 ‘삶의 현상학’으로서 현상학의 역사를 새롭게써 내려간다. 그가 가능케 한 이 ‘삶의 현상학’으로부터 ‘무의식의 새로운 해석’ 또한 가능해진다. 프로이트 무의식의 진술 속에서 앙리는 현상학적 삶을 읽는다. 이 독해의 결과 그는 선언할 것이다. “무의식은 존재하지 않는다.” 또는 “무의식은 삶의 이름이다.” 나는 이 글에서 이 같은 해석의 의의를 되새기고자 한다. 이는 아직도 사상적 면에서 적지 않은 영향력을 발휘하는 정신분석이 앞으로 어떻게 (...) 재조명되어야 하는지를 알려주는 첫걸음이 될 것이다. 이런 목적에서 이 글은 크게 두 부분으로 나눠 있다. 첫 번째 부분에서는 ‘현상학적 기본 전제’로부터 ‘삶의 현상학’을 이해하는 데 초점을 맞췄으며, 두 번째 부분에서는 이 새로운 현상학으로부터 ‘무의식 개념의 존재론적 해명’이 어떻게 이뤄지는지를 살펴보고자 했다. 이 같은 논의 과정을 통해 무의식 개념에 대한 앙리 독해의 의의가 어디에 있는지를 밝혀 보이도록 하겠다. (shrink)

Contrary to the popular assumption that linguistically mediated social practices constitute the normativity of action (Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2015; Rietveld, 2008a,b; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014), I argue that it is affective care for oneself and others that primarily constitutes this kind of normativity. I argue for my claim in two steps. First, using the method of cases I demonstrate that care accounts for the normativity of action, whereas social practices do not. Second, I show that a social practice account (...) of the normativity of action has unwillingly authoritarian consequences in the sense that humans act only normatively if they follow social rules. I suggest that these authoritarian consequences are the result of an uncritical phenomenology of action and the fuzzy use of “normative”. Accounting for the normativity of action with care entails a realistic picture of the struggle between what one cares for and often repressive social rules. (shrink)

The United States has recently made significant and positive civil rights gains for LGB people, including expanded recognition of marriages between people of the same sex. Among the central tropes that have emerged in the struggle for the rights of LGB people are that they are “born that way,” that sexual orientations cannot change, and that one's sexual orientation is not affected by choice. Writer Andrew Sullivan put it this way: “[H]omosexuality is an essentially involuntary condition that can neither be (...) denied nor permanently repressed.… [S]o long as homosexual adults as citizens insist on the involuntary nature of their condition, it becomes politically impossible to deny or ignore the fact of homosexuality.… [The strategy for obtaining LGB rights is to] seek full public equality for those who, through no fault of their own, happen to be homosexual.”This idea of linking LGB rights to empirical claims about sexual orientations has become so central that casting doubt on these claims is, in many circles, tantamount to opposing LGB rights. Nonetheless, claims about innateness, immutability, and lack of choice about sexual orientation should not be the primary basis for LGB rights. (shrink)

Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct albeit contested relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic, somatic concept, prompting a re-evaluation of the distinction between experience and abstraction. We trace its ongoing repression (...) from Plato through ‘western’ theories of formal Aesthetics. Drawing on a relational interpretation of Protagoras’ aesthesis, we argue that modern pragmatists and radical empiricists, as well as more contemporary critics of the ‘colonization’ of aesthesis (Mignolo and Vasquez) by formal Aesthetics recognize and develop the relational and ethical aspects of aesthesis. We consider the role of the body, affect, and of the intangible or virtual qualities of aesthesis. The ethics of obligations (Weil) in the polis (Arendt) shows how aesthesis informs politics despite its repression in favour of moral and legal norms. We argue this is relevant to contemporary crises such as xenophobia and ecocidal climate warming. (shrink)

This article offers a perspective on the critical theory of justice by presenting a structural and processual reconstruction of Rainer Forst’s intriguing yet somewhatopaque concept of a basic structure of justification which is central to his proposed critique of justificatory relations. It shows from a cognitive-sociological perspective what a cooperative relation between a philosophical theory of justice and a social scientific approach could mean for critical theory. A basic structure of justification is revealed to be a cognitively available reflexive order (...) above the order of substantive social and political relations that allows the identifi cation, explanation and transformative critique of reflexivity deficits induced by hegemonic, ideological, repressive or obfuscating means. Far from being exclusively a theoretical and methodological tool, however, it is in principle accessible to those involved and affected on whose experience, suffering and critique critical theory vitally depends. (shrink)

In this article, we build on the stakeholder-politics literature to investigate how corporate scandals transform political contexts and give impetus to the contentious movements of fringe stakeholders against multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on Adut’s scandal theory, we flesh out three scandal-related processes that directly affect political-opportunity structures (POSs) and the generation of social movements against MNCs: convergence of contention toward a single target, publicization of deviant practices, and contagion to other organizations. These processes reduce the obstacles to collective actions by (...) fringe stakeholders by pushing corporate elites to be more sensitive to their claims, by decreasing MNCs’ capability to repress contentious movements, by forcing the targeted MNCs to formalize a policy to monitor and eradicate the controversial practices, and by helping fringe stakeholders find internal and external allies to support their claims. This conceptual model of scandals as catalysts of contentious actions contributes to a better understanding of stakeholder politics by unveiling the role of the political context in the coordination of fringe stakeholders. (shrink)

n Part I of this essay I take a canonical case of political theology, Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty (1985; 1922), and show how Agamben derives his account of sovereignty from an interpretation of Schmitt that relies on the interesting theological premise of an atemporal act or decision, one that is traditionally attributed to god’s act of creation, and that is only ambiguously secularized in the transcendental moment of German Idealism. In Part II I show how this reading of Schmitt can (...) be used to avoid a certain kind of negative political theology associated with deconstruction because Agamben’s reading of Schmitt explains the emergence of certain specific temporal structures associated with the sovereign political decision: the sovereign political decision cannot be represented as having a beginning, and hence recedes phenomenologically into a kind of a priori past; and the sovereign decision cannot be represented as completed, and hence it is experienced as a ‘perpetual expenditure of energy’ that lacks comprehensible relation to a goal. In Part III I defend Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty as a transcendental act from Negri’s objection that Agamben simply equates without argument Negri’s radically democratic conception of revolutionary constituent power with Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty (1999, p. 13). My defense relies on identifying Agamben’s ‘paradox of sovereignty’ (Agamben 1998, pp. 15ff.) with a ‘paradox of democracy.’ (Mouffe 2000; Whelan 1983) In Part IV I realize a corollary of the identification of the two paradoxes, of sovereignty and democracy: that political borders are the spatial site of the application of the act of political sovereignty, and possess a kind of transcendental spatiality akin to the special temporality associated with sovereignty. I apply this understanding to the privileged special case of the US-Mexico border: the structures implicit in Agamben’s analysis explain some crucial features of this case of walling: its manifest failure to achieve, even in principle, the purpose for which it is allegedly intended; the failure of democratic polity to address those affected by the wall; the appeal to sovereign powers in the legal legitimation of border policy. I defend Agamben’s analysis against other apparently competing views, especially those of Wendy Brown (2010) and argue that the transcendental act of sovereignty comprises a kind of primary political repression that opens up the space for ideological understandings of the wall, but does not itself comprise one. In Part V I address the question whether Agamben’s derived category of ‘bare life’ can also be used in the context of the border, arguing that it can. I conclude with some critical remarks about the limits of Agamben’s view. (shrink)

Although overarching if not foundational conceptualizations of digital governance in the field of critical data studies aptly account for and explain subjection, calculated resistance is left conceptually unattended despite case studies that document instances of resistance. I ask at the outset why conceptualizations of digital governance are so bleak, and I argue that all are underscored implicitly by a Deleuzian theory of desire that overlooks agency, defined here in Foucauldian terms. I subsequently conceptualize digital governance as encompassing subjection as well (...) as resistance, and I cast the two in relational perspective by making use of the concepts “affordance” and “assemblage” in conjunction with multiple subjectivities and Foucault's view of power as productive as well as his view of resistance as an “antagonism of strategies” in his late scholarship on resistance, ethics, and subjectivity. I offer examples of salient modes of what I call “productive” resistance, and from a Foucauldian perspective I explain how each mode targets and subverts technologies of repressive power to produce new elements of the digital environment and construct new truths. I conclude by recognizing the agency embodied in resistance as an end in itself, but I also consider that modes of productive resistance can have extrinsic value as they affect the fluid interaction among elements of the digital environment, potentially disrupting the presumed structure of dominance and dependence, and opening our conceptualization of algorithmic life to hopeful possibilities for change. (shrink)

This landmark volume brings together the work of the world's leading researchers in sublimated perception. This compilation marks a fundamental shift in the current study of subliminal effects: No longer in question is the notion that perception without awareness occurs. Now, the emphasis is on elucidating the parameters of subliminal effects and understanding the conditions under which stimuli perceived without awareness significantly influence affect, cognition, and behavior. PERCEPTION WITHOUT AWARENESS firmly establishes subliminal perception within the mainstream of psychological science. Well (...) represented here are the two main research branches that have emerged: One directly investigates the nature of subliminal effects; the other uses subliminal techniques as tools for investigating psychological phenomena such as hypnosis, dreaming, repression, social judgment and inference, psychopathology, and symptom formation. Broadly grouped into three main sections, the contributed chapters explore * The cognitive perspective--including implicit memory and implicit perception, the measurement of unconscious perceptual processes, and methods for revealing unconscious processes * The clinical perspective--exploring the cognitive and dynamic aspects of subliminal perception, memory, and consciousness; direct recovery of subliminal stimuli; and validation of subliminal psychodynamic activation * The social perspective--discussing subliminal mere-exposure effects, affect and social perception, and the role of subliminality in social psychology Timely and thought-provoking, PERCEPTION WITHOUT AWARENESS is sure to be of enormous interest to all psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars, as well as cognitive, clinical, and social psychologists whose work touches upon issues relating to psychopathology, perception, cognition, and memory. (shrink)

This article uses a feminist lens to examine Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and former United States President Donald Trump’s responses to COVID-19. It argues that both populist leaders mobilised masculinity as a resource in statecraft. Both initially responded to the pandemic with dismissiveness and denialism. For the rest of his term, Trump diminished the harms of COVID and emphasised ‘protecting the economy’. Duterte, however, eventually embraced the fear of COVID, imposed a strict lockdown, and secured emergency powers. This article first (...) analyses differences in the masculinities the two politicians performed. It then explores how this performance of masculinity contributed to structuring public discourses in relation to the pandemic and situates it in neoliberal governance more broadly. For example, the performance of invincibility constructed others’ vulnerability and illness as an individual weakness rather than socially and relationally produced. Trump’s co-optation of the language of freedom encouraged protests against health measures and positioned medical experts as the ‘real threat’. In contrast, Duterte’s securitised approach made it difficult for citizens to protest repressive laws enacted by his government. Duterte’s ‘war on COVID’ was marked by his demand for obedience and discipline, thereby constituting anyone who questioned the harmful effects of a police-led lockdown as a threat to national security. Finally, the article reflects on the ways China’s growing role in global politics affects notions and practices of populist masculinities. Both leaders flexed diplomatic masculinity differently in relation to China: Duterte touted his personal closeness to China as a path to securing resources for the Philippines, while Trump’s vilification of China constructed COVID as a ‘foreign enemy’ as opposed to a crisis he was responsible for. Ultimately, these masculine responses undermined dissent and centred muscularity, either in the form of individual resilience or securitisation and policing, as the solution to the pandemic. (shrink)

The science fiction films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1973) and Stalker (1979), are complex responses to the repressive atmosphere of Brezhnev’s rule, after the 7-year delay in seeing Andrei Rublev (1971) released publicly. By using science fiction—a genre that Tarkovsky openly maligned—he was able to fly beneath the radar of State censorship, and develop a nuanced response to the application of Marxist theory of religion in the Soviet experience. Arguing in these films (and in others in his oeuvre) that humans (...) still need the affective dimension of religion (though not the hierarchical, institutional elements of it that Marx had identified with sedation), Tarkovsky hid within his science fiction films a thoroughgoing critique of the Soviet application of Marx. This article uses the concept of “war machine” from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to analyze how Tarkovsky did this, and demonstrates that Tarkovsky’s engagement with Marx’s philosophy in these two films shares much in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s way of understanding human meaning making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.3 (2004) 73-90 [Access article in PDF] Intellectual Friendship in Architectural Education Yonca Hurol Introduction Limits are causes of repression, and it is usually accepted that repression affects creativity. There are two different approaches to the effects of limits on creativity. According to the first approach, creativity increases parallel to the increase of limits and repression. According to the second approach, (...) any artificial increase of limits produces passionate "locked in" mechanisms. A decrease of limits is necessary for an increase in creativity. Since it is never possible to eliminate some "natural" limits, it is not necessary to create some other "artificial" ones by introducing authoritarian attitudes. Creativity should be directed only toward the natural problems and limits.The aim of this essay is to develop a theoretical base for the following philosophical statement: "Decreasing authoritarian limits causes an increase in creativity in architectural design education." The concepts in such a philosophical statement must be operationalized in order to be applied to the practice of architectural education. The concepts of "limits" and "creativity" should be replaced with some other concepts (variables) which are observable so that they can be applied to the cases in practice.The essay is based on the poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically their understanding of the relation betweenthe body and the mind;1 even though other thinkers have related emotion and rationality, for example, Fredrich Nietzsche's nomadic thought, Gaston Bachelard's "childhood dreams," and Antonin Artaud's "theatre of cruelty."2 In this essay, Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is used more intensively over that of others, because of the clarity of the concepts it contains.The concept of creativity is operationalized by replacing it with the variable of the "design psychology of the student" which can, in turn, be replaced by the constants of "passionate mechanism" and "desire machine." [End Page 73] These psychological states and the their architectural indications are analyzed in the first section. The concept of limits is replaced by the "limiting role of the studio teacher," instead of the natural limits in architecture such aseconomy and technology. This role has two constants: the "role of the authority figure" and the "role of the intellectual friend."In architectural design courses students design buildings which combine the demands of strength, usefulness, and aesthetics. This process relates rationality (mind) to irrationality (body/feelings). Students learn about the rational aspects of architecture in their own ways, while designing the irrational aspects of their projects. They make contact with the studio teachers whenever they need advice or supportive criticism. This is a one-on-one relationship. The early approaches to design education depend on authoritarian "correction," while the new models propose "objective criticism."However, none of these concepts cover the existing power relations between teachers and students. Some teachers believe in the positive role of authority, while others do not. A conflict arises between the authority figures, and the friendly teachers.The formation of an intellectual friendship between students and teachers of architecture is not new. It has existed since postmodernism was first founded in architecture with the differing viewpoints about architecture. Sinan Omacan, was a student of architecture when he described the changing demands of education as follows: School is not simply a structure that is abstract. It is not only an institution of discipline that programs, deals with quantities, and evaluates. The name of it, the building of it, and the people in it, always give it a certain personality, and the strongest part of this story can only start with the relationship between these personalities. While this medium of personal relationships forms an unpredictable and unavoidable situation for the institution, it becomes exactly the right thing that students are looking for, because the most important aspect for students in a school is the possibility created by unprogrammed time and unplanned space.3This essay provides a theoretical explanation of these existing categories for the first time. The concepts which are analyzed in the first two parts are used as variables for comparative research. The third part contains comparative... (shrink)

During India’s Emergency, anti-state poetry of a decidedly amateurish quality proliferated. Anti-Emergency poetry did little to bring about the restoration of democracy, nor could it have reasonably been mistaken for great art. So what was the purpose of writing resistance poetry if it was not meant to directly influence politics nor to be great art? Poetry as politics has a long history in the Islamicate world, dating back to the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. While until the 19th century Islamicate poetry was (...) tied to the Caliphates who employed poets to extol the virtues of the ruling classes, after the so-called ‘Rise of the West’ Islamicate poetry became associated instead with anti-colonial and anti-state movements across the Islamicate world from Morocco to Indonesia and from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. In this essay, I argue that the utility of resistance poetry in anti-state movements in South Asia has been to build solidarity among social movement participants. The sociology of social movements has long placed emphasis on the role of affective bonds and solidarity building for predicting social movement success, and poetry, in the Islamicate context especially, I argue, does exactly that. By circulating poems, social movement participants inform the reader that resistance and opposition exist, they inspire participants and would-be participants and calm fears that participants might have, especially in moments of political repression. These poems generate emotional and cultural bonds among social movement participants by linking anti-state movements to the centuries-old tradition of Islamicate poetry, thereby fostering solidarity and providing a firm basis for collective action. (shrink)

Bringing sex and philosophy together on a blind date, Anne Dufourmantelle’s provocative study uses this analogy to uncover and examine philosophy’s blind spot. Delightful and startling comparisons spring from the date: both sex and philosophy are dangerous, both are socially subversive, and both are obsessions. Although sex and philosophy have much in common, however, they have scarcely known one another until now. Socrates and Diogenes had little to say about sex, and although it was notoriously explored by the Marquis de (...) Sade, this study explains why philosophy has never been fully sexualized nor sex really philosophized. Blind Date highlights the marked deletion of sexual topics and themes from philosophical works, while also opening doors for their union. Inviting readers to remember that thought does not require repressed desire, Dufourmantelle argues that sex is everywhere, and it affects all kinds of thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rationality, Irrationality, and Depathologizing OCDBrent Kious, MD, PhD (bio)Pablo Hubacher argues that some persons with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) do not, in virtue of OCD itself, exhibit what he calls “epistemic irrationality,” which is a matter of violating rational norms related to belief and inquiry (Hubacher, 2023). The argument is complex and meticulous, but ultimately not persuasive. I outline the argument, show how it is unsound, and articulate its most (...) troubling consequences. I end by inquiring about the goal of projects like this, which, I believe, is to examine the rationality of mental illnesses in order to show that they are or are not illnesses.Hubacher starts by noting that (some) persons with OCD appear “doxastically irrational”: when they exhibit obsessions, they err in how they form beliefs. Specifically, they seem to “jump to conclusions,” inferring that a feared outcome is probable or certain from scant evidence. However, psychological research shows that persons with OCD are not more likely to jump to conclusions than others. Hubacher also observes that jumping to conclusions involves the inference, “possibly P, therefore definitely P.” This inference is irrational but not specific to people with OCD, because many of us do it, and an account of the irrationality of OCD should identify OCD-specific deviations. Hubacher concludes that persons with OCD are not doxastically irrational. He next considers whether they exhibit “zetetic” irrationality, which involves violating epistemic norms of inquiry. This might identify the irrationality of OCD, since compulsions like repeatedly checking the stove are basically ways of getting evidence. But Hubacher introduces the phenomenon of sexually focused OCD, or S-OCD. Persons with S-OCD worry about whether they have sexual desires they regard as inappropriate—for instance, incestuous desires or homosexual desires. Hubacher does not think people with S-OCD are zetetically irrational, however. Their endless doubts are actually reasonable, since it is possible—even common—for people to have repressed sexual desires when those desires are stigmatized. If a person with S-OCD worries about having incestuous desires, the bare fact that he does not feel those desires in the usual way should not be reassuring to him: those desires could simply be repressed. Hubacher adds that [End Page 151] people with OCD have high intolerance of uncertainty, which he takes to mean that they approach inquiries with high standards for confirmation; they are not satisfied with evidence others would see as compelling. He concludes that people with S-OCD are neither zetetically nor doxastically irrational, and so not epistemically irrational.This is a surprising conclusion, but it results from an unsound argument. An initial problem is his assumption that the only way persons with OCD can be doxastically irrational is by jumping to conclusions. This ignores other possible ways of being doxastically irrational. For instance, it would be irrational to retain beliefs that have been disconfirmed by evidence (Hubacher might call this zetetic irrationality, but surely, my beliefs can be disconfirmed without active inquiry). Irrationally retaining disconfirmed beliefs might even capture what happens in OCD: the person with OCD thinks something awful is likely to be true, even though she gets copious disconfirming evidence.A second problem is in Hubacher’s interpretation of the psychological evidence about whether persons with OCD jump to conclusions. He cites two studies involving a very specific psychological test, the bead task, wherein a subject is asked to determine whether a random sequence of colored beads have been drawn from a jar with a preponderance of one color or another. A “jumping to conclusions bias” is taken to be an inclination to guess the jar after no more than two beads are revealed (Huq & Garety et al., 1988). Although a few studies have shown that persons with OCD do not have this jumping to conclusions bias, we cannot conclude that they do not often jump to conclusions in real life. One might imagine, for instance, that people with OCD are still quite likely to jump to conclusions with respect to their obsessions (i.e., things that are highly anxiety-provoking, where the anxiety affects the conclusions drawn). And most people with OCD are not obsessed about the colors of beads.A third... (shrink)

This article proffers a critical reading of multiliteracy pedagogy and a materialism of the multimodal and machinic. A critical stance is taken against the mesmerising modes of representation that run rampant across our ocular territories. The article assesses the dangers of fetishizing technologies. To this end, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) is read through a Guattarian theoretical prism to emphasise four chief points: (1) the role of the unconscious, (2) the role of affect (affectus in the Spinozian sense; contrary to feeling (...) which immobilises, affect moves us), (3) the apparent becoming cyborg of the human race and (4) the desire to desire repression. The author contends that while qualitative multiplicities play a central role for MLT, it is neither inconsistent nor contradictory to consider the role of the machinic in greater detail. It is argued that more research must be directed into the cartographic, ethological and noological mechanisms at work in plastic universes of reference (new technologies and the arts) which transform the virtual and transfigure the dynamic of affect. (shrink)

Tamar Gendler argues that, for those living in a society in which race is a salient sociological feature, it is impossible to be fully rational: members of such a society must either fail to encode relevant information containing race, or suffer epistemic costs by being implicitly racist. However, I argue that, although Gendler calls attention to a pitfall worthy of study, she fails to conclusively demonstrate that there are epistemic (or cognitive) costs of being racist. Gendler offers three supporting phenomena. (...) First, implicit racists expend cognitive energy repressing their implicit biases. I reply, citing Ellen Bialystok’s research, that constant use of executive functioning can be beneficial. Second, Gendler argues that awareness of a negative stereotype of one’s own race with regard to a given task negatively affects one’s performance of that task. This phenomenon, I argue, demonstrates that those against whom the stigma is directed suffer costs, but it fails to demonstrate that the stigmatizers suffer cognitively. Finally, Gendler argues that racists are less competent when recognizing faces of other races than when recognizing faces of their own race because, in the first instance, they encode the race of the face (taking up cognitive space that could have been used to encode fine-grained distinctions), whereas in the second instance they encode no race. I argue that in-group/out-group categorization rather than racism is the cognitive cost. I conclude that Gendler has failed to demonstrate that there are cognitive costs associated with being a racist. (shrink)

This commentary is a review of the findings and ideas reported in the preceding nine articles on the effects of distraction on aspects of cognitive performance. The articles themselves deal with the disruptive effects of distraction on recall of words, objects and events, also on visual processing, category formation and other cognitive tasks. The commentary assesses the part played by “domain-general” suppression of distracting information and the “domain-specific” competition arising when tasks and distraction involve very similar material. Some forms of (...) distraction are meaningfully relevant to the ongoing task, and Treisman’s (1964) model of selective attention is invoked to provide an account of findings in this area. Finally, individual differences to vulnerability to distraction are discussed; older adults are particularly affected by distracting stimuli although the failure to repress distraction can sometimes prove beneficial to later cognitive performance. (shrink)

In her book To be Born, Luce Irigaray offers a novel philosophy of the child. Instead of viewing the child as a bearer of rights and in need of adequate care as is common in contemporary philosophies of childhood, Irigaray presents the child as a metaphor of a new human being which represents natural belonging. The rearticulation of the human has been ongoing in Irigaray’s philosophy from its beginnings with its efforts to give voice to the excluded, silenced, repressed feminine. (...) Irigaray’s phenomenological restructuring of subjectivity in her philosophy of sexuate difference is taken to a new level with her philosophy of the child. Her conception of the child is interpreted here in light of the experiential and affective turn within phenomenology and cognitive sciences about philosophical thinking as embodied and embedded thinking for a new era. Irigaray sheds light on the silencing and repressing of the child within us in an effort to enable us as adult beings to think from and with it. Philosophical thinking needs to be more consciously connected with the embodied sources of thought that are already present in early infancy and continue to be present in adult thinking as neglected or repressed experiential and affective layers of thought. Irigaray’s philosophy of the child is a basis for a methodology of embodied philosophical thinking such as has been developed within Claire Petitmengin’s microphenomenology and within Eugene Gendlin’s methodology of philosophical thinking from the felt sense. (shrink)

Motivationally unconscious (M-unconscious) states are unconscious states that can directly motivate a subject’s behavior and whose unconscious character typically results from a form of repression. The basic argument for M-unconscious states claims that they provide the best explanation to some seemingly non rational behaviors, like akrasia, impulsivity or apparent self-deception. This basic argument has been challenged on theoretical, empirical and conceptual grounds. Drawing on recent works on apparent self-deception and on the ‘cognitive unconscious’ I assess those objections. I argue (...) that (i) even if there is a good theoretical argument for its existence, (ii) most empirical vindications of the M-unconscious miss their target. (iii) As for the conceptual objections, they compel us to modify the classical picture of the M-unconscious. I conclude that M-unconscious states and processes must be affective states and processes that the subject really feels and experiences —and which are in this sense conscious— even though they are not, or not well, cognitively accessible to him. Dual process psychology and the literature on cold-hot empathy gaps partly support the existence of such M-unconscious states. (shrink)

One aspect of Foucault's thought brings him much closer to Freud than many commentators believe. This Freudian “moment” in Foucault is formulated in the following dictum: the soul is the prison of the body. For Foucault, the modern soul is formed when the norms that govern disciplinary training and exercise are internalized. Once internalized, these norms affect our self-understanding and conduct. This paper focuses on Foucault's account of internalization. It shows that this Freudian moment in Foucault mitigates his criticisms of (...) the repressive hypothesis, but it also suggests a conception of interiority that can be interpreted as the modern instantiation of the rapport à soi. (shrink)

In his 2005 French production Hidden, Michael Haneke continues disturbing his audience with poignant and stirring images. When Georges and Anne Laurent keep finding on their doorstep videotapes showing the exterior of their house filmed with a hidden camera, they do not realize that trying to trace the identity of the photographer will lead Georges back to his deeply concealed childhood atrocity and gravely affect their present life. With Hidden, Haneke presents a provocative case of Freudian return of the repressed (...) and probes the uncertain grounding and pretentiousness of French national self-importance. The article attempts an analysis of Hidden from two interconnected perspectives, provided by the use of the Lacanian category of the gaze in relation to film studies and by the application of certain categories derived from post-colonial theory. The discussion ventures to demonstrate that the camera-eye "hidden" in its impossible position can be interpreted as a gaze imagined by Georges in the field of the Other. The voyeuristic act of filming also suggests the question of colonial surveillance, which relates to the racial issue underlying the conflict repressed by Georges. Haneke investigates the way in which the symbolic power bestowed on the authority of the French state facilitates discrimination. Georges, a model representative of the civil/civilized society, is shown as rent by primal fears of imaginary savage "terror," desperately trying to fortify his dominion against Algerian aggressors who are otherwise a necessary part of the structure. (shrink)

Joe L. Kincheloe (1950-2008) was one of North America's leading critical pedagogy scholars. He defined post-formalist thought in terms of deconstruction, affectivity, and non-linearity. His deconstruction focused on the context of ideas, ideologies, and teaching. It was a form of sociological deconstruction, and as such, inspired by Derrida, but different from him as well. In effect, Kincheloe was trying to marry Derrida to Foucault by making deconstruction see power in thought, relationships, and the world. Kincheloe's 'turn to affect' was inspired (...) by feminism and radical pedagogy. It was 'affect' focused on (in)justice and the social practices of repression. His 'self-other' construct was inherently politicized by his identification of 'unfreedom' with capitalism and the assumption that this link determines affect. Kincheloe assumed that linear rationality was inadequate to understanding human needs and hopes. Freedom as dynamism was seen to be inherently non-linear. The prison of rationality (it can only repeat the same, over and over again) was the crux of his critique of Newtonian-Cartesian linearity. Kincheloe attempted to construct a concept of 'place'--such as the classroom. But it was a particular, concrete classroom and not an abstract or theoretical one. Here, the three concepts could come together. 'Place' is context, and to understand it, deconstruction is needed. 'Place' exists as it is felt and requires affectivity; it is eventful, alive, and dynamic. It requires non-linearity to be understood. Post-formalism, Pedagogy Lives (in memory of Kincheloe's contribution) encompasses each of the basic principles of Kincheloe's post-formal thought. (shrink)

This paper argues that Foucault’s The History of Sexuality contains an implicit but important interpretation of Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘ascetic ideal’. It suggests that Foucault undertakes a non-reductive synthesis of seemingly conflicting aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, on the one hand, its valorisation of the ‘Dionysian’ and, on the other hand, its enthusiasm for ‘self-disciplining’. The consequences of a failure to appreciate how Nietzsche’s thought combines these two themes is illustrated through a sketch of what is termed an ‘oppositional’ interpretation (...) of his thought. This erroneously imposes the nature/culture distinction upon Nietzsche’s thought and reads its critique of morality in terms of ‘repression’, the ‘renunciation of instinct’ etc. An alternative, ‘economic’ interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought in which his ‘affirmation of the Dionysian’ and valorisation of self-disciplining are conjoined is outlined and recommended. Foucault’s interpretation of Nietzsche is presented as an example of such an ‘economic’ reading, in that it appreciates Nietzsche’s libidinal interpretation of self-denial. This combination of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s thought is termed ‘noble ascesis’. This is illustrated through a reading of Foucault’s account of Greco-Roman ethics. Attention is drawn to how Foucault’s implicit interpretation of Nietzsche helps to clarify Nietzsche’s conception of the possibility of a ‘healthy’ appropriation of the ‘ascetic ideal’. The paper attempts to show how the ‘non-moral’ ethical practice Foucault retrieves from the classical world, on the basis of Nietzsche’s distinction between different forms of self-denial, emphasises the affective and libidinal investments of asceticism. This, in turn, is related to Foucault’s critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and overcoming of the ‘repression/transgression’ model of the nature of power. However, the paper identifies some tensions between Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s accounts of asceticism and interpretations of the ethical practice of the Greco-Roman world and closes by considering whether or not these tensions can be resolved. (shrink)

This paper argues that today the true source of terror in the economico-biopolitically advanced countries of global capitalism lies in biopower’s own constitution as a normative field (the protection of life) that presupposes its exception (the superfluity of life) as its own precondition. At the two extreme poles of this exception we find “terrorism,” and particularly suicide bombing, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones), as the pair revealing the core of biopower. However, of the two only “terrorism” is discursively (...) constructed in the “West” as a monstrous act that should incite horror. Linking horror to the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and foreclosure, I argue that the biopolitical function of horror lies in rendering unreadable the message of such “monstrous” acts. Furthermore, insofar as horror’s experience is an affective state of being that can, nevertheless, be incited discursively, affect shifts to the center of the political domain. The affect of horror in particular becomes instrumental to politics as it can provide the criterion for determining the bio-racial break between, in Foucault’s words, “what must live and what must die.”. (shrink)

This paper argues that today the true source of terror in the economico-biopolitically advanced countries of global capitalism lies in biopower’s own constitution as a normative field that presupposes its exception as its own precondition. At the two extreme poles of this exception we find “terrorism,” and particularly suicide bombing, and unmanned aerial vehicles, as the pair revealing the core of biopower. However, of the two only “terrorism” is discursively constructed in the “West” as a monstrous act that should incite (...) horror. Linking horror to the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and foreclosure, I argue that the biopolitical function of horror lies in rendering unreadable the message of such “monstrous” acts. Furthermore, insofar as horror’s experience is an affective state of being that can, nevertheless, be incited discursively, affect shifts to the center of the political domain. The affect of horror in particular becomes instrumental to politics as it can provide the criterion for determining the bio-racial break between, in Foucault’s words, “what must live and what must die.”. (shrink)

In Chile, the contemporary form of academic life is irreducible to neoliberalism. There are past experiences and discourses that continue to disrupt the daily routine, dynamics, intensity, and rhythm of academics. They manifest as various epistemological, ethical, institutional, technical, and political mechanisms that produce innumerable images, meanings, and practices. These experiences conflict with the affects and material realities of the neoliberalism. The entanglement of these experiences from the past and present is conflicting, as they attempt to ignore or repress each (...) other. In this respect, this paper addresses the following question: what is the model of academic behaviour that was established during the post-independence period in the Chilean university system? To answer this question, I explore Andres Bello's texts concerning university and academic life. The conclusion is that Bello established a specific model of academic behaviour that, with some later modifications, reconfigurations, and contradictions, returns to the present. Bello's influence today can be seen through spectres that enable and limit new possibilities for expanding academic critique within and across scholarly settings. (shrink)