The Writer’s Condition and the Concept of Fear (original) (raw)
Related papers
Fear and Anxiety in the Dimensions of Art (pp. 333-346)
ARGUMENT: Biannual Philosophical Journal Art Inquiry, Vol.2, no.2,, 2012
In this article I follows different types of aesthetic fear, that is an anxiety induced by a work of art, from aesthetic and anthropological perspectives. I interested in haw fear and pleasure are related in the catharsis, in Edmund Burke's notion of sublime, in Goya's Black Paintings, as well as in the thought of Paul Virilio. The aesthetic fear appears together withe other feelings (such as pity or sadness), and primarily together with pleasure, which then is either autonomous or is born from a fascination with evil.
Exploring the motifs of death and immortality
Journal of Language, Technology & Entrepreneurship in Africa, 2009
felt threatened by the eventuality of death, inculcating in them a fear so great that all possible strategies are engaged in the search for an avenue that would prepare them for this eventuality. A careful exploration of human activities surrounding the issues of death and immortality reveals an obsession with the expression of the possibility of defeating death through the artistic act. Art functions as the arena where human beings can mock, jeer, and repudiate mortality. Indeed, death is a central conundrum in philosophical, literary and even religious arguments that focus on human identity and reality. The usefulness of literature in exposing human fears, aspirations and desires is emphasized as literature functions as the meeting point where all manner of philosophies are presented and debated. In examining how the motifs of death and immortality are represented in the artistic act, it is imperative that this article draws from a wide range of genres. Apparently, both oral and w...
Mimesis , 2021
This essay aims to focus on some affinities and differences between the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s literary, theatrical and cinematographic work and Nietzsche’s thoughts on the theme of “free death”. The aim of this intercultural reflection is to set up an aesthetic and ethical-existential comparison between two of the major interpreters of modernity, respectively European and Japanese. While Nietzsche’s reflection on suicide is influenced solely by Western philosophical tradition, Mishima’s artistic and bodily meditation on seppuku (切腹) is characterized by the tension between European sensibility and Japanese cultural identity, which coexist and contrast in the same time. Mishima hybridises, in his artistic-literary work, the traditional “Way of the Warrior” (Bushidō 武士道), precepts of Hagakure (葉隠), Zen Buddhism and Japanese nationalist radicalism with the values of heroic Greece, Wagner’s romanticism and a peculiar reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy. How does Mishima interpret Zarathustra’s warning to die “at the right time”? How does Nietzsche’s thought, through Mishima’s reading, come into contact and intertwine with Japanese art and traditional thought? What is the relationship between Nietzsche’s aesthetics, existentialism and Zen Buddhism? By analysing some important relations such as that between love, old age and death and that between freedom, obedience and subjectivity I will try to go through these questions.
Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference, Issue 3 (2015) Death : Absence, Anxiety, and Aesthetics
2015
tension between the conscious and unconscious that underscores and emphasizes the novella's pivotal theme of anxiety-a tension that is also present in Zhukovsky' s painting. Each interacting with themes of absence, anxiety and aesthetics, together the articles in this issue illustrate how humankind devotes a considerable part of its cultural production to grappling with the end of life, through visual art, architecture, and literature. As a cross-cultural phenomenon, the end of human life fascinates us, scares us, and puzzles us, but never leaves us indifferent. We paint and photograph its victims, we write about its process, we detect patterns in the ways people meet the end of their existence, and produce lasting works of art in the process. Nonetheless, it continuously escapes our grasp, even if we actively seek to take hold of it. Death, with all the attempts to capture it in images, words, objects, or built structures, remains the great unknown. 8 | JOURNAL OF THE LUCAS GRADUATE CONFERENCE meskerken for this issue's layout design. A final word of thanks goes to Frans
2019
Death anxiety refers to the human experience of death awareness and the accompanying inescapable disquiet it provokes. It is a phenomenon in human existence which has attracted substantial studies from existential and psychological perspectives. Noting that every individual experiences this anxiety at some point in life, largely as a result of the awareness of the inevitability of death, the manner and extent to which it is experienced vary from individuals. Meanwhile, existential reflections have described ‘death acceptance’ as the healthy route to lessening this angst. It therefore presupposes that acceptance of death (i.e. knowing that one is a being-towards-death and therefore embracing and acknowledging it) is existentially therapeutic. On this note, in studying J. P. Clark’s Of Sleep and Old Age, artistic creativity is being constructed in the study as an existential therapy against death anxiety for the poetic persona. It is premised, on the one hand, on the poet’s eloquent v...
Art as a Cathartic Expression of the Self Understood as an Existential Object
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022
The article presents an idea of what art is based on the individual's cathartic expression, in which his exploration of the self finds what it expressions reflected in the images it produces, interpreted by those who are willing to admire it. In this sense, the objective of this work is to understand how art came to become an essential element for human existence, composing an elementary part of his psychic health. To achieve this understanding, authors on art and its manifestations over time have been used in a bibliographic research. As a result, the text in question is presented, showing all the cathartic force that it allows to expose. The development of the human mind and civilizing processes make life more masked under the hallucinogenic effects of evolution and the principles of power and sociogenic relationships. Art and its symbolic expression is not a technique that develops only with time or practice; much more than that, it needs to be constantly elaborated and redesigned , starting from the reading of the reality that makes up society and the challenges posed by existence. Artistic abstraction is a complex intellectual construction, where visual and non-visual elements, with objective and subjective characters are present, tying together a brilliant psychological drama that involves various moments of the artist, where their respective worlds are represented as creatures expressed in images, expressing the same feelings as those that inhabit the world as we know it, with the difference that the literal condition of the world was subjectivated by the artist's surreal perception. Finally, it is concluded that art is a profound cathexial expression of what man feels as being repressed by his limited existence in time and space.
2022
This article is proposed as a study on the issue of the relationship between the datum of death and the aesthetic context of the creation of a literary work, and therefore of authorial poetics. Starting with an in-depth study of the concept of literature and poetics 'of death', it will be intended to proceed with research on the related philosophical and critical issues, to provide an overview of the most important insights on the subject. Thanks to a comparative and transmedia approach, the discourse will be addressed to the theory of death in literature, considering in a broad sense the most significant contemporary critical proposals. Thus, literary and cinematographic case studies will be proposed, as part of a reflection on the issue from a theoretical point of view. The ontological implications relating to the creation of the work of art will also be considered, in order to deepen, with full awareness, the relationship between the poetics of death and works of a not only artistic and literary nature, but also the testimonial.
Why Heideggerian Death Anxiety in not Truly Uncanny: Existential Feelings and Psychiatric Disorders
Discipline Filosofische, 2018
The aim of this paper is to provide a phenomenology of uncanniness which shows that although Martin Heidegger in his path breaking analysis of existential anxiety and human finitude puts his finger on some key elements of what in German is known as " das Unheimliche " , this analysis falls short of displaying what it means to have a truly uncanny experience for reasons of neglecting the constitutive powers of embodiment and intersubjectivity. To understand the true nature of the uncanny, we should turn to experiences of automata, corpses, ghosts and doubles found in horror stories and to the lives of persons afflicted by certain mental disorders, such as Cotard syndrome and Capgras delusion. To feel and perceive oneself to be dead (Cotard syndrome) or family members to have been replaced by impostors (Capgras delusion) are not only more profoundly uncanny experiences than facing the general meaninglessness of life, targeted by Heidegger; they are in many ways experiences that can teach us more about the phenomenology of being-in-the-world than Heidegger's account of existential anxiety is able to do. The experiences reported by persons suffering from such mental disorders force us to acknowledge how all pervasive and powerful so called existential feelings can be in affording – and denying – structure and content to our perceptions and thoughts when we inhabit a world.
Art — depression — fiction: A variation on René Thom’s three important kinds of human activity
Semiotica, 2005
The construct of 'alexithymia,' formulated in the late 1960s, described the inability to express one's feelings as a deficit in the signifying-abilities of men and women. In this study, the profile of the alexithemic serves as a point of reference for a discussion concerning language and consciousness and the cognitive/neuroscientific turn in the past decades. The objectives of this paper are to show that the cognitive/neuroscientific turn profoundly a¤ected the understanding of alexithymia in particular and the relationship between language and consciousness in general. As the dominant cognitive/ neuroscientific models of consciousness ignore the social embeddedness and the importance of the signifying abilities of human beings, this paper presents alternative models of consciousness and issues of intersubjectivity by proposing a variation on a model from René Thom's 'catastrophe theory' and Uexkü ll's theory of 'autoambience.' These models, predicated upon social embeddedness and semiotic ability, explain how certain circumstances, such as are often identified as 'depression,' can be catalysts of productive outcome. In particular, the notion of 'play' in René Thom's catastrophe theory underscores the primacy of 'language play' as a combinatorial signifying activity with a restorative function that is exemplified in the notion of fiction in the work of David Lodge.