Between the Scylla of Discursivity and the Charybdis of Pantextualism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review: A Poetics of Postmodernism
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 131.172.
Writing and Reading the Self with a Thousand Eyes
In his exploration of bold or frank speech as significant to “the care of the self,” Foucault made plain his disquiet with psychoanalysis – a disquiet shared by many Post-structuralist theorists; these same theorist, however, also doubt Foucault’s claim that care of the self is possible – which is problematic to anyone wishing to further Foucault’s incomplete project. By taking Derrida’s “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event” as a single text for attentive reading alongside “Fearless Speech” this short paper seeks to investigate how care of the self can take place within an awareness and function of post-structuralist deconstruction of language – particularly the written word. It is the conclusion of this author that Sarah Kofman’s “Nietzsche and Metaphor” demonstrates that critically informed frank (or confessional) parrhesiastic writing nurtures “the ever dancing self” by what might be called “writing and reading the self with a thousand eyes.”
This preface, initially published in 2003, sketches out the evolution of literary and cultural studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. In particular, the argument examines the issue of the exhaustion and the supersession of postmodernism.
Negative Dialectics and the Aesthetic Redemption of the Postmodern Subject
2017
; you have all stood as exemplary models of brilliance for those who have had the pleasure of being in your company. I would also like to thank my parents, Tim and Cynthia Fehrman, for giving me the ability to pursue a college education through all of their support. Special thanks to the Honor's Program Director Dr. Sarwar, as well as Erin Sutherland. I would further like to thank Dr. Chervenak of the Department of Political Science. As well, thanks to my employers over the last four years, Heathcliff Hailey, Joaquin Rodas, Walker Reisman, Tobias Womack, and Amy Mossberg for being understanding of my schedule and general transition of attitude. Thanks as well, goes out to David Bear, Elizabeth Ferguson, and August Louko for being the foils and emotional support for philosophical ideas and existential crises over the last four years. iii Foreword This paper marks for me the culmination of ruminations that began with the study of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, studies of Emile Durkheim's anomie, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, and ended with the emergence of a worldview that encompasses the current predicament faced by the postmodern individual. By investigating the construction of identity, and the rampant devaluation of traditional values in our current society, I thought there must be a common source; it has been the search for this source that has led me to this thesis over the last four years, perhaps, going back even farther. My time as student pursuing a philosophy degree exposed me to the works of philosophers that have given me the proper nomenclature and lexicon to be able to formulate this process of devaluation I see every day in society. As well, though, as I believe that individuals in the United States possess varying degrees of nihilism, I have faith that the individual will subscribe to valuations that empower, not hinder. For to be honest, if one is to understand the power structure in the West as representing the vast multitude of subjects at the bottom, overseen by the very few at the top, and if power and its attendant, authority, do not come simply from the possession of money, then power must come in the form of either truth, freedom, authenticity and/or subscribing to traditional valuations already possessing the positive power of not only participation in them, but also, intrinsically, the historical legitimacy of culture and custom. This fact may not be entirely elucidated by the following work; instead, the impression may be that subjectively subscribed valuation is a source of "surrogate" power, or "the power of the powerless" as it exists for the iv disenfranchised denizen at the bottom of the socioeconomic power structure, a proposition I am hesitant to fully make. At least, though, through the aesthetic active participation of producing art, or the project of artful living, perhaps the individual may again approach truth, freedom, and authenticity. Lastly, this work does not fully explore all the various angles and prescriptions for overcoming the disenfranchisement of universal commodification. Much of the work I did exploring this topic took me in the direction Nicholas Gane took in his work Max Weber and Postmodern Theory, whereby he used the sociological work of Max Weber and worked it out through three French postmodernists: Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Foucoult. This current paper deviates from this approach, exploring the source of the nihilism through the phenomenological position of the German dialecticians. Though, in the future, I wish to explore the notions of Baudrillard's erotic sphere, and more specifically, how sex may correlate to aesthetic objects as perhaps objects that contain not only mystery, but also, perhaps negatively, the potential for danger and death; the dialectic relationship between Eros and Thanatos that may or may not correlate to creation or annihilation that exist together within mystery objects.
Beyond Modernism and Postmodernism: The Narrative of Re-embodiments,
Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology: Exploring re-embodiments, London: Routledge, 2016
The illusory quest for disembodiment, against which the quest for re-embodiments is reacting, appears to be common among 'macroparasites' who live off the work, products and lives of others. Historically, this illusion of disembodiment appears to have legitimated exploitation of others, but in doing so has led the ruling classes of civilizations to destroy the real conditions of their own existence. The modernist and postmodernist forms of this illusion, it is suggested, are transmogrifications of the illusion of disembodiment on which medieval civilization was based. The military aristocracy and the clergy defined themselves through Neo-Platonic Christianity and identified with the eternal, while despising nature, the peasantry and women. This suggestion, that modernist and postmodernist quests for disembodiment are a transmogrification of medieval Neo-Platonic Christianity, is used to expose and reveal the oppressive and destructive nature of the narrative of 'progress' driven by the aspirations of the privileged classes in the modern/postmodern world to free themselves from the constraints of embodiment. The quest for disembodiment is manifest in the quest to free the economy from dependence on labour and natural resources, to be unbound by time and place and to be free of the humdrum of everyday life by entering the world of 'Second Life', an online virtual world. The modern and postmodern forms of the quest for disembodiment, it is suggested, now threaten the future of humanity. This analysis of the continuities in the quest for disembodiment is deployed to clarify the liberating mission of the quest for re-embodiments, exemplified by the quest for Earth democracy and ecological civilization. The narrative of the Age of Re-Embodiments is inseparable from the struggle for 'real' democracy (where members of communities have real power and really govern themselves) with the liberty to augment rather than undermine the ecological communities of which we are part.