Ben Morgan | University of Oxford (original) (raw)

Books by Ben Morgan

'On Becoming God' offers an innovative approach to writing the history of the modern Western se... more 'On Becoming God' offers an innovative approach to writing the history of the modern Western self by looking at human identity as something people do together rather than on their own. I argue that the shared practices of human identity can be understood as ways of managing and keeping at bay the impulses and experiences associated with the word God. The “self” is a way of doing things, or of not doing things, with “God.”
The book draws on phenomenology (Heidegger), gender studies (Beauvoir, Butler) and contemporary neuroscience to present a new approach to the history of modern identity. It surveys existing approaches to modern selfhood (Foucault, Charles Taylor) and proposes an alternative account by investigating late medieval mysticism, in particular texts written in Germany by Meister Eckhart and others in the same milieu.
Reactions to the condemnation of Meister Eckhart’s teaching for heresy in 1329 offer a microcosm of the circumstances in which something like the modern self arises as people change their behavior toward others, toward themselves, and toward what they call “God.” The book makes Meister Eckhart and his contemporaries appear as our contemporaries by changing the assumptions with which we approach our own identity.
To make this change requires a revision of current vocabularies for approaching ourselves, and in particular the vocabulary and habits inherited from psychoanalysis. The book finishes by exploring the parallel between late medieval confessors and their spiritual charges, and late-nineteenth-century psychoanalysts and their patients. The result is a renewed vision of the Freud’s project of finding a vocabulary for acknowledging and nurturing our everyday commitments to others and to our spiritual longings.

Papers by Ben Morgan

ILS 25 2 06 , 2023

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to notions of the “We” and tests key Arendtian... more This article examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to notions of the “We” and tests key Arendtian concepts through relation and juxtaposition with philosophical and literary texts from different periods, thereby complicating discussions of (1) how individuals participate in, shape, and are shaped by various forms of “We”; (2) how, within collective participation, individuals come to care about being themselves; and (3) to what extent literary texts enable and encourage processes of identity construction and (re)configuration. For Arendt, the “place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (2017, 387–88) is “the result of our common labor, the outcome of the human artifice” (2017, 393)—the shared practices and institutions that Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” (2009, 15). In this article, the authors argue that by exploring and critiquing “forms of life” literature can expand the range of activities we recognize as fostering “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 465). The three literary provocations presented here—Callimachus’s “Hymn to Apollo,” Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace—all interrogate the situated interactions of “I’s” and “We’s” that instantiate the “participatory plurality” of the shared world.

Poetics Today, 2017

The article surveys three major positions in early debates about situated cognition in the 1990s ... more The article surveys three major positions in early debates about situated cognition in the 1990s as they are represented, in particular, in the work of Edwin Hutchins, Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger, Tim van Gelder, Andy Clark, Jerome S. Bruner, and John Haugeland. Rather than arbitrate among the three positions and declare a winner, the article suggests that the very tensions between subpersonal, suprapersonal, and personal levels of analysis evident in the debates are a necessary feature of the study of situated cognition, which can be resolved only by the sort of case by case negotiation of which we find records in the cultural archive. The eight case studies collected in this special issue can be read as explorations of the historical variety of these lived negotiations.

German in the World, 2020

The chapter uses Walter Benjamin’s engagement with Soviet developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky... more The chapter uses Walter Benjamin’s engagement with Soviet developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, and Max Horkheimer’s with the work of American pragmatist John Dewey to suggest a productive path not taken by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s as they considered the empirical study of human beings’ ‘mimetic’, i.e. pre-conscious and visceral interactions with others and with the world. Their analyses suggests positive ways of re-thinking the relation between norms and ‘primary intersubjectivity’ if we abandon their unnecessarily stark distinction between mimetic and goal-oriented forms of behaviour. The result is an understanding of how the basis of primary subjectivity, imitation, is itself necessarily distributed and ethically inflected, adding a 5th E to embedded, embodied, enactive and extended cognition.

Pre-Histories and Afterlives

Oxford German Studies

The article contrasts the versions of Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 60 to be found in two manuscripts.... more The article contrasts the versions of Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 60 to be found in two manuscripts. The sermon replaces the more usual Dominican emphasis on intellect with a privileging of love as the highest power. The differing responses to this unusual line of argument in the two manuscripts give a concrete sense of the puzzlement provoked by Eckhart’s preaching, and of the different strategies by which Eckhart’s texts shaped or were themselves shaped by the spiritual milieu in which they were encountered. Der Beitrag kontrastiert die Fassung der 60. Predigt Meister Eckharts in der Oxforder Handschrift MS. Laud Misc. 479 mit der der Münchner Handschrift Staatsbibliothek cgm 133. Die Textänderungen werden darauf zurückgeführt, dass in dieser Predigt statt der erwartbaren dominikanischen Bevorzugung des Intellekts der Schwerpunkt auf Liebe als höchster Macht liegt. Wie unterschiedlich die beiden Handschriften darauf reagieren, vermittelt einen Einblick in die starken Reaktionen, die Eckharts Predigen hervorriefen, und mit welchen Textverfahren Eckharts Texte vorbildhaft wirkten und selbst durch das geistliche Umfeld geformt wurde, in denen sie auftraten.

Journal of European Studies

today’s era of aggressive renationalization. The centre-piece of the first part of the book is Su... more today’s era of aggressive renationalization. The centre-piece of the first part of the book is Sudhalter’s essay, ‘How to make a Dada anthology’ (referencing Tzara’s ‘pour faire un poème dadaiste’). Informative, based on fastidious detective work in a multitude of archives, and fizzing with new and original ideas, the essay sets out the complex networks of friendship and cross-border artistic exchange that informed the planning of Dadaglobe. She further emphasizes the central importance Tzara attached to including Dadaist work from the German-speaking countries, considering the context of post-war enmities and indeed, at a very basic level, censorship of international postal communications. Her fastidious reconstruction of Tzara’s shifting plans about presentation and layout is outstanding and enables her to identify a kind of editorial materialism, a combinatory play with mobile parts that is akin to Dada’s montage principle. Another highlight is her reading of the portrait photographs and collages sent to Tzara, as purposeful manipulations of individual identity within the standardized protocols of the new passport regime instituted after 1918. The actual reconstruction of Dadaglobe in the book’s second part comprises exactly 160 pages, as originally envisaged by Tzara. Decisions about the placement of the textual and visual materials conform to Tzara’s plans where applicable. But this is not an entirely historicizing reconstruction. In terms of layout, Tzara was compelled to respect the limited reproduction and printing processes available at the time, but did everything he could to push these to their limits. Given the far greater control and handling scope available today, Sudhalter et al. have chosen to limit their options to just a handful, in order to approximate those that would have informed the Dadaists’ practice, and the text has been set in a beautiful twenty-first-century sans serif, Riforma. The reconstruction comprises some texts and images published here for the first time, but more significantly, it provides a new, all-important context for materials that scholars are already familiar with. All told, Dadaglobe is a brilliant illustration of Tzara’s adherence to the principles of collective authorship, multilingualism, chance and montage, and of Dada’s responses to the crisis of the self, of reason and of politics which continue to resonate today. Making for enthralling reading and viewing, the reconstructed Dadaglobe resembles an artist’s book, a genre that is experiencing a resurgence in our digital age. At one point Sudhalter calls Dadaglobe Dada’s ‘most generative project’ (p. 70). Rather than signal the movement’s ultimate demise, as it did when Tzara abandoned it in 1921, this beautifully reconstructed Dadaglobe is bound to open a new chapter in Dada’s creative and critical history.

Literatur und Leben, 1996

Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust is pornographic not because it graphically describes a woman’s sexual mal... more Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust is pornographic not because it graphically describes a woman’s sexual maltreatment, but because it violently abuses language, cutting it up and degrading it before the eyes of the reader. Such at least is the conclusion reached by Wolfram Schutte in the review which he writes of the novel when it first appears in 1989.2 His epigrammatic inversion is an extreme, if problematic formulation of issues central to any discussion of Jelinek’s writing. Not only does it shift our attention away from the content of the texts to their form. It implicitly raises questions as to the gender both of the subject who wrote the texts, and of the very language in which they are composed (in Schutte’s scenario, language features as the abused woman, with Jelinek taking the role of the abusing man).

Telos, Jun 20, 1999

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli ... more 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 14 vols. (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Ver-lag, 1980), Vol. 5, p. 291. For Nietzsche's comments on Cesare Borgia see Vol. 5, p. 117, Vol. 6, pp. 136, 229, ...

Literatur Fur Leser, 2007

New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion, 2009

Abstract The chapter argues that the aspects of Heidegger's thought which are most usefu... more Abstract The chapter argues that the aspects of Heidegger's thought which are most useful to feminist philosophy of religion are not the obviously spiritual terms, like Gelassenheit or releasement borrowed from Meister Eckhart, but instead the focus on co-existence and ...

Comparative Critical Studies, 2015

Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self, 2012

The Modern Language Review, 2004

ion is stripped of its prized objectivity and unmasked as itself a terrified intervention in the ... more ion is stripped of its prized objectivity and unmasked as itself a terrified intervention in the environment. This rude demystification deprives reason of its most valuable attributes, of its impartiality and reliability. At the same time, however, it reimbues it with an unsuspected specificity, with affect, experience and desire. Regrounded in a moment of originary anxiety, reason loses its treasured objectivity but gains in its place a barely conceivable immediacy. If the first step of critique was to explain the ambivalence of rationality by revealing the situative, contextbound materiality of conceptual thought, the second step must be to unearth this sediment of emotion, to retrieve and reinstate the experiential content of each concept. This is not a happy undertaking, for the emotion unearthed is fear. The connotations of awe, of wonder, of surrender which might be drawn from this state of mind are, in Adorno and Horkheimer's account, scarcely discernible. Rather than dis...

Literatur für Leser, vol. 30.4, 2007

The article uses Lang's last silent movie 'The Woman in the Moon' (1929) critically to interrogat... more The article uses Lang's last silent movie 'The Woman in the Moon' (1929) critically to interrogate the account of purposive action — doing things for reasons — that Heidegger developed almost simultaneously in 'Being and Time' (1927)

NeuroExistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. ed. Gregg Caruso an... more NeuroExistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. ed. Gregg Caruso and Owen Flanagan. Oxford UP, 2018 pp.126-146