Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó – Tamás Lénárt – Attila Simon – Roland Végső: Introduction. In: Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó – Tamás Lénárt – Attila Simon – Roland Végső (eds.): Life After Literature. Perspectives on Biopoetics in Literature and Theory. Springer, 2020, 1–16. (original) (raw)
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This book offers innovative investigations of the concept of life in art and in theory. It features essays that explore biopoetics and look at how insights from the natural sciences shape research within the humanities. Since literature, works of art, and other cultural products decisively shape our ideas of what it means to be human, the contributors to this volume examine the question of what literature, literary and cultural criticism, and philosophy contribute to the distinctions (or non-distinctions) between human, animal, and vegetal existence. Coverage combines different methodological aspects and addresses a wide field of comparative literary studies. The essays consider the question of language (as a distinctive feature of human existence) in a number of different contexts, which range from Aristotle’s works, through several historical layers of the philosophical discourse on the origins of speech, to modern anthropology, and 20th century continental philosophy. In addition, the volume includes concrete case studies to the current post-humanism debate and provides literary, art historian, and philosophical perspectives on animal studies. The historical multiplicity of the various cultural representations of biological existence (be that human, animal, vegetal, or mixed) might serve as a productive foundation for discussing the nature and forms of literature’s critical contributions to our understanding of these fundamental categories. This volume opens up this subject to students and scholars of literature, art, philosophy, ethics, and cultural studies, and to anyone with a theoretical interest in the questions of life. List of Contributors: Petar Bojanić, Vittoria Borsò, Hajnalka Halász, Ernő Kulcsár Szabó, Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó, Tamás Lénárt, Csongor Lőrincz, Gábor Tamás Molnár, Márió Z. Nemes, Csaba Olay, Attila Simon, Susanne Strätling, Ábel Tamás, Jessica Ullrich, Roland Végső, Georg Witte
From Biopolitics to Biopoetics: a Hypothesis on the Relationship between Life and Writing
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2018
The objective of this article is to examine the theoretical potential of the dialogues between literary critique and biopolitical thought, with an analysis centered on a reconsideration of the concept of interpretation. In order to accomplish this, we analyze the shift in Michel Foucault's thought around the beginning of the 1970s, a time during which the notion of life took prominence over the study of literature as a specific discipline. From this transformation, a particular way of approaching both literary and, generally speaking, artistic creations can be derived that would give rise to a biopoetics perspective.
The book of desire: Towards a biological poetics
In this paper I propose to understand the current paradigm shift in biology as the origination of a biology of subjects. A description of living beings as experiencing selves has the potential to transform the current mechanistic approach of biology into an embodied-hermeneutic one, culminating in a poetics of nature. We are at the right moment for that: The findings of complex systems research, autopoiesis theory, and evolutionary developmental biology are converging into a picture where the living can not longer be described in terms of causal mechanisms (as is, e. g., the Watson-Crick “central dogma”). Instead, organisms bring forth themselves physically and thereby generate a hermeneutic standpoint, interpreting external and internal stimuli interfering with their auto-creation according to embodied values. This can be observed empirically during embryonic develoment, where genetic instructions do not act as orders, but rather as perturbations being interpreted by an auto-maintaining developmental centre. The notion of organic subjectivity opens the living realm to a hermeneutic perspective. Since any encounter has a meaning and is interpreted accordingly, it creates a perspective of innerness or self. This self experiences all external and internal stimuli as values. The innerness is coextensive with the material dimensions of biochemical processes as their other, or symbolic, side. By this process the subjective perspective of organisms is open to other’s experience. Meaning and value become visible, as they are generated in material, embodied form. Instead of being separate from nature as pure “mind” or “language”, man shares with any other being the same “conditio vitae” of experienced meaning and expressive feeling.
Research in Phenomenology, v. 40, 2010
In a move that has puzzled commentators, Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am rejects claims for continuity between the human and the animal, aligning such claims with the ideology of “biologistic continuism.” This problematization of the logic of the human-animal limit holds implications for how we are to understand life in relation to auto-affection, immanence in relation to transcendence, and naturalism in relation to phenomenology. Derrida’s abyssal logic parallels the “strange kinship” described by Merleau-Ponty, though only if this strangeness is intensified as “hetero-affection” by incorporating death into life. Following Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Grosz, we locate the creative moment of this abyssal intimacy in the transformative productions of sexual difference. This positive account of the excess of hetero-affection reconciles phenomenology with evolution and offers a figure for thinking the thickening and multiplying of the differences between human and non-human, living and nonliving, corporeal and cosmic.
La bioética: 35 años de historia
Revista Latinoamericana de Bioética, 2015
Bioét ica ética INTRODUCCIÓN El presente artículo es una síntesis pedagógica sobre los hitos más fundamentales que dieron origen y han marcado la historia de la naciente disciplina llamada "bioética". La Bioética parte de un presupuesto básico para su reflexión moral, la promoción de la vida (en todas sus manifestaciones) como condición (sine qua non) sin la cual, la dignidad de la existencia del ser humano y su mundo carecen de sentido. Este supuesto apodíctico (incondicionalmente cierto, necesariamente válido) toma vigencia ante la desvalorización del ser BIOética: 35 Años de Historia La «Vivir es constantemente decidir lo que vamos a ser (...) La vida es lo que hacemos y lo que se nos pasa».
Cosmos & History, 2022
The theoretical biology movement originating in Britain in the early 1930’s and the biosemiotics movement which took off in Europe in the 1980’s have much in common. They are both committed to replacing the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and they have both invoked theories of signs to this end. Yet, while there has been some mutual appreciation and influence, particularly in the cases of Howard Pattee, René Thom, Kalevi Kull, Anton Markoš and Stuart Kauffman, for the most part, these movements have developed independently of each other. Focussing on morphogenesis understood as vegetative semiosis, in this paper I will argue that the ideas of these movements are commensurate. Furthermore, synthesising them would enable us to see life processes as proto-narratives. Doing so will involve synthesising biohermeneutics, Peircian biosemiotics with Waddington’s theoretical biology and Piagetian genetic structuralism, and this, I claim, would strengthen the challenge of these traditions to mainstream biology. At the same time, this should contribute to overcoming the opposition between the sciences and the humanities, developing a broader tradition of Schellingian thought which involves developing the humanities and then demanding of the physical and biological sciences that they are consistent with and can make intelligible the emergence of humans as conceived by the humanities.
The dichotomy of system versus history is a time-honoured issue that has inflicted many scientific disciplines, including biology. Ever since the publication of his Systema Naturae in 1735, Carolus Linnaeus' position as father of taxonomy has been established, but his attempt at systematisation has also been severely challenged from time to time by natural historians. This paper will discuss the issue of natural system versus natural history, using Carolus Linnaeus and Charles Darwin as examples. The theoretical point of attack is Darwin's critique of systematics in his Origin of Species and Michel Foucault's critique of classification in his Les mots et les choses. While both Foucault and Darwin criticise Linnaeus for putting nature in the Procrastian bed of classification, the British evolutionist opts for narrativisation to present his version of natural history. This narratological project, though based on scientific observations and experiments, relies heavily on the many devices of textualisation. It can be seen especially in Darwin's voyage writings; it can also be seen in Linnaeus' less systematic writings, such as A Tour in Lapland, despite the latter's general reservation about rhetoric, especially in his debate with the French naturalists. If one compares the prototype of natural history, i.e., that by Pliny the Elder, one will easily find the long tradition of representing nature mediated by some set of discursive strategies. In this regard, neither Linnaeus nor Darwin is exceptional. An interesting example showing narrative encoding is the textual parallel between the first chapter of Origin of Species and the Book of Genesis, especially the experience of Foreword -This paper was originally delivered at the Seminar of 'Codes in Sign Systems' at the International Semiotics Institute, which met in Imatra, Finland, on 3 rd -9 th June 2004. As the organiser of the seminar, Dr Kalevi Kull of Tartu University, is by profession a biologist, and the Seminar was devoted to biosemiotics, I gave a brief survey of the changing concept of code in recent biological studies before shifting to my main concern of the controversy over coding in natural history and natural system. The latter part of the essay discusses how Linneaus' and Darwin's nature writings are encoded, and suggests that whilst code is indispensable to discourse, different types of discourse call for different ways of coding.
[Prospectus] - Biopoetics: Towards a Deconstructive Empiricism
solutionsforpostmodernliving, 2021
[Prospectus Updated on JANUARY 4 2023] Biopoetics is an experimental book of philosophy that invites its readers to learn a new ethico-aesthetic lexicon by asking its readers to exercise their imaginations. Biopoetics is composed of six chapters, called “sessions”, in which the author defines different clusters of interrelated philosophical concepts. Inspired by the Fluxus Performance Workbook and Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, each of the book’s sessions is succeeded by a set of exercises that invite the reader to imagine the implications of the philosophical concepts defined in the preceding session. “Biopoetics”, the book’s titular philosophical lexicon, is deeply affected by the practices of deconstruction and schizoanalysis, and it is subtly informed by figures, functions, and structures from comparative biology and measure theory.