Sleep of Reason: An Atlas of the Philosophical Imaginary (original) (raw)
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The sleep of reason and of imagination produces monsters
Colloquium: New Philologies
Inspired by Francisco Goya's most famous etching, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797-99), in its interpretation as 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters', we decided to dedicate the 2019 special issue of Colloquium: New Philologies to the topic of nationalism. To this purpose, we organized the annual 3 rd AARC PhD Students' Conference entitled Language.Literature.Politics. 1918-2018. (Un)doing Nationalism and Resistance, with the support of the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt and under the patronage of the Alps-Adriatic-Rectors' Conference (AARC), to gather researchers on various academic levels not only from the Alps-Adriatic region but also from all over the world, to reflect upon the topic. The articles of this issue of Colloquium: New Philologies are a selection of the papers of this conference, which took place between 20 th and
On the Night of the Elemental Imaginary
This essay is a comparison between Schelling’s and Blanchot’s conceptions of the night of the imaginary. Schelling is the most romantic of the German idealist philosophers and Blanchot the most extreme of the French “deconstructionists.” Their historical link is actually indirect, but they offer two complementary views on the “same” impersonal nocturnal experience of the imaginary, the approach of which requires a certain self-overcoming of philosophy towards literature.
The Traversal of the Fantasy as an Opening to Humanity
Differences, 2022
How can we think about the role of the erogenous body and its manifestations in the final stage of an analysis, and the solidarity with the human that it enables? This essay examines the stakes of the traversal of the fantasy in the unfolding of an analysis, arguing that the aim of a psychoanalysis is to liberate the unconscious quest that traverses the analysand by giving expression to what has been censored in his or her body. Paradoxically, however, I claim that this censored quest is not only unique to the individual analysand, but something that articulates that subject to humanity as a whole. While Freud consistently underscores the fundamental solitude of the human being with respect to the free drive and the fantasies to which it gives rise, the underexamined corollary of this position is that human reality is fundamentally transindividual and intersubjective, traversed by a quest that impacts each and every human being but that belongs to no one in particular. The second part of the essay explores how this transindividual dimension was experienced, and with what consequences in a clinical case of hysteria; the third turns to the procedure of the Pass that for Lacan guarantees the production of the analyst, arguing that this procedure is essential to the guarantee precisely because it confirms the opening to the human that is the logical conclusion of an analytic cure.
This introduction is a promise to tell of this special issue's origins and to speak of the hopes of this body of work. Even while we make this promise we know we will fail. Yet we see this failure, this gap between the promise and what remains, as precisely what the monster offers to our thinking. That is, the monster highlights the supposed divisions between the acceptable and conventional and their assumed opposites, drawing attention to the production of knowledge, including how knowledge comes to be embodied. While striving for coherence across our collective voices, so that the text may be readable for others, we want to underscore how collectives are easily rendered invisible, almost as if we are one, even while we are at least five editors of this special issue. Indeed, monstrous analyses aim to bring forth what may often be ignored, particularly the more than one in the one, the way the human is inhabited by, and made possible through, other beings on whom/which it is dependent for ongoing liveliness. In this timely Frankenstein text, we seek to make visible the patchworks and the sutures between our thinking, experiences, passions and embodied knowledges. In practice, we want to show that academic productions are labour, and in so doing we aim to use our disparate and converging voices to capture this labour, showing how ideas may start with one person but are always more than that person, in origins and what remains here. We therefore italicise when a specific idea comes from one of the editors, acknowledging their labour, while also showing
Review of Imagination and the Imaginary
European Legacy, 2018
To create an overview of how the concept of imagination has been articulated by historical and contemporary thinkers, could seem a daunting task. It is not so, however, when you are being guided by Kathleen Lennon. Her book Imagination and the Imaginary introduces the essentials regarding the history of the concept of imagination within phenomenology, supplemented with psychoanalysis and postmodern theories. Lennon provides us with a thorough examination of the different ways in which imagination, the imaginary and the imaginings of the world have been articulated, and her book ought to be a primary stepping-stone in an exploration of these concepts.
Building From Our Demonic Nature: For A Para-Biological Definition of Fantasy
LaDeleuziana, 2021
This paper reconstructs a definition of fantasy as a literary and artistic genre drawing mainly from para-biological texts, that is, from texts that present unorthodox philosophies of nature. We especially resort to three of the less famous books from Czech-Brazilian thinker Vilém Flusser-A história do Diabo, Vampyroteuthis infernalis and Natural:mente-, in which he proposes an image of nature as a devilish immanence. The main objectives, in reappropriating these and other philosophies of nature as if they were theories of fantasy, are, first, to show how, through simple thought-experiments, the ensemble of phenomena usually associated with nature could be understood ethically as evil and aesthetically as weird (instead of as good and pure, as some Romantics believed, or as completely neutral, as the hard sciences imply). And second, to access a couple of fantasy works in light of this understandment, explaining how the creation of a strange, virtual world, which is the prerequisite of fantasy, could be based solely on the agglutination and rearrangement of aspects of our own, actual world. This would have several consequences for the common characterizations of fantasy and science, since the two categories should, then, intertwine: either fantasy is ultra-realistic, instead of surreal, or science is simply an exercise of producing imaginative counterfactuals similar to fantasy's worldbuilding.
View from Nowhere: Essays in Literature, Mysticism and Philosophy
Chapter 2 Cabala and Literature 45 The View From Nowhere focused especially on The Scarlet Letter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, concluding with some reflections on the harmony between Cabala and some of the themes and styles that recur most insistently in the work of Walter Benjamin, in Surrealist mystic-revolutionary dissidence, and most recently, in a postmodern-literary avatar, in the 'word-game' techniques of such as Georges Perec. Although not forgetting where it's been, The View from Nowhere then moves on to (more strictly speaking) philosophical issues: If in the first two chapters I examine the impact of cabalistic hermeneutical extravagance and daring on literature, my aim in the last three chapters will be to explore the ways that 'a scripture for our time,' the Philosophy of Existence of Kierkegaard, had to be ineluctably 'misread'. Here my special focus is on Jean Baudrillard, prominent contemporary theorist of simulation and 'virtual reality.' Chapter Three, "The 'Fatal Strategies' of Søren Kierkegaard," examines Baudrillard's celebration, as carried on in Seduction (1979), of the style, or of what he calls the 'fatal strategies' of the Seducer in Kierkegaard's strange novel, "Diary of the Seducer," which in turn is central to the collection of "aesthetic" (Romantic) provocations that comprise Volume I of Either/Or (published with Volume 2, 1843). In order to make so much of the Seducer and Seduction here Baudrillard essentially is forced to ignore the 'edifying' intention that is so blatantly evident in the "ethical" stance, or the 'praise of marriage' that comprises of Volume 2 of Either/Or. Generally, permeating Kierkegaard's work, and, as a matter of fact, stated bluntly after 1846, when he abandons pseudonymity, or 'indirect communication' in favor of 'direct communication', is the notion of an evolution, or a climbing of 'the individual' from the Aesthetic Stage, whose symbol is promiscuity, through the Ethical Stage, whose symbol is marriage, to the Religious Stage, whose symbol is faith... Here I explore why I think that Baudrillard's approach is by far more 'radical', in the sense of threatening and challenging, than that of other readers (Adorno, Agacinski) who have taken Kierkegaard's "aesthetic" (principally pseudonymous) works more seriously than Kierkegaard said he wanted them to be. In the next chapter, "Transcending Hegel," which leans heavily on Adorno (Kierkegaard: the Construction of the Aesthetic), I then show how Kierkegaard has made a comparable 'misreading' of Hegel, but in order to find not an ally, as our anarchist-poststructuralist Baudrillard makes of Kierkegaard, but an opponent. Baudrillard's exclusive focus on the Aesthetic Stage makes of Kierkegaard a 'seductive' ally and charming precursor-in his opposition to the hegemony of Western 'productive' rationality; but Kierkegaard's obsessive resistance to viii Preface ix 'speculative reason' made of Hegel an enemy-of all spontaneity, passion and faith, as well as representing a dangerous and deceiving distraction from the tasks of the existential moment In a concluding chapter, "How To Be Really Nietzschean," I examine the reasons why, when Baudrillard reads Nietzsche, he does so more tamely and reliably than he reads Kierkegaard. Nietzschean 'deception' thereby becomes the very matrix and structure of Baudrillard's thought, very prominently, for example in L'Illusion de la fin, where he claims Nietzsche as a fundamental inspiration and precursor. Paradoxically, Baudrillard is at his most Nietzschean when reading Kierkegaard, whom he distorts, least so when faithfully repeating (simulating?) Nietzsche. Another dimension of The View from Nowhere is comprised of three shorter essays, plus some appendices relating to Kierkegaard, documented, if at all, much more informally than the five chapters, and much more intimate and conversational in tone, whose relation to the main themes of the book is tangential and exploratory, and whose purpose is to establish mood, ambiance and pace: Starting the book there is a "Preamble: Charles Baudelaire's Poëme du haschisch as Prototype for a Cinematic Perception of Reality." Connecting the two larger cabalistic and existential 'wings' of the book (between Chapters Two and Three) there is an essay which takes the reader through the 'other mad worlds' limned in a short novel of Gérard de Nerval: "Interlude: Psychotic Episode as Passage, Inferno and Paradise, Gérard de Nerval's Aurelia as Other World" ; and finally, in conclusion, a very brief meditation on what I think of as a kind of 'Kantian imperative' that translates into the task of the writer today: "Epilogue: Enigma, Exigence, Expiation-Hegel, Blanchot, Des Forêts." Finally, the purpose of the appendices I am including on Kierkegaard is to supply some existential concreteness for this very difficult and challenging thinker; for instance, through selections from his journals and incorporation of a glossary of some of his principal notions in Danish, along with some reflections that situate him very much in the midst of some raging contemporary issues (as for feminism, in the last appendix, "The Woman's Sacrifice and Symbolic Exchange").-Brooklyn, July 14, 2000 hashish, a modern observer-experimenter reports is like riding a pony that has its own mind. 2 Baudelaire, it is true, tries to minimize this element of the unexpected. He cautions his reader to consign his "experience" to an evening entirely free from mundane duties. One argues immediately with our poet whether such a thing is possible! What, are we to stop breathing, our first and most mundane duty, so we can get stoned? Or is this period "when we have nothing else to do" some kind of literary convention, like Wordsworth's notoriously nonexistent "moment of traquillity" wherein we recollect our "emotion" in the form of "poetry" ? Or, better yet, are we entering the even calmer tranquillity of a church? You won't want to pay a bill or write an angry letter to your editor. Make sure you have nothing unpleasant to do, and that you won't be disturbed. One is, however, always disturbed when one doesn't want to be, by definition... A modern composer, 3 one who is likely to include the sound of a dripping sink into a musical composition, views every "inopportune" visit as a potential for artistic enrichment, and he says he has a difficult choice to make every time he is "interrupted." A Surrealist author, 4 and somewhat of a mystic too, was said to have been very open to others; and in fact some visitor's importunity will keep the rest of us from ever knowing for sure how Mount Analogue was supposed to end. A similar intrusion cut Coleridge off from that otherworldly lecturer, whose dictation he said he was taking at the time, of the opium-derived dream that became merely that magnificent fragment we know only as "Kubla Khan" ! With words, and especially when these are poetic, we might not mind leaving a bit, the best part even, to the imagination. No unfamiliar medicine, however, would be complete without instructions on the bottle, a "mode d'emploi," and Baudelaire gives us a nice little informational pamphlet too, to go along with our dose. Our poet puts on his white jacket and plays "scientist" for us: we are treated to a history, an etymology, instructions about diet and environment, and imprecise if solemn warnings about quantity of intake. A certain man is referred to who once "took too much," the same individual who realized that he had to go to some onerous social function and who was not able to find an appropriate antidote at the pharmacist's. Now he has learned to "moderate" his intake. All the same not everything can be planned and that is part of the charm of this voyage: "you have over ordinary travelers this curious privilege of not knowing where you are going." Even the unplanned is part of the plan.
Atlantis, 2009
The traces of Edgar Allan Poe in the work of Jorge Luis Borges have long been recognised, but both in the Argentinian writer's own hands and others', comment has tended to concentrate on three areas of the American author's work, namely: the detective fiction; the novel Arthur Gordon Pym; and Poe's literary theory. This paper will explore another facet, i.e. the possible intertextual relations and parallels between Poe's tales of terror and Borges' admired metaphysical fictions. The side-by-side examination of 'The Fall of the House of Usher', Poe's most celebrated Gothic tale, and 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', Borges' fable of the intellectual attraction of an imaginary planet, reveals significant links, both overt and covert, between Borges' tale and Poe's, highlighting the seductively similar yet also strikingly divergent forms in which both writers privilege the textual and intertextual in exploring and developing the concept of a parallel reality.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Dream-worlds, Labyrinthine Journeys, Imaginary Shapes (I)
Ekphrasis Journal, vol. 11, issue 1/2014, 2014
For many observers, the incessant processes of urban growth that started at the beginning of the twentieth century had transformed the cities fi n-de-siècle into foreign and crowded places of a labyrinthine tangled metropolitan space. Inspired by several cinematic and textual analogies, our purpose as urban explorers will be to read the imagistic and textual codes and attempting to discover the fascinating pathways of interpretation. Without con fi ning ourselves to a simple fl anêrie, to a subjective gaze objectifying urban space, as once required by the Modernist view, our approach seeks to think about cities in various ways, but mainly as imaginary constructs – coincidentia oppositorum of rationality and sensitiveness, of conscience and inspiration. By setting out precisely some similar features between the city as organic form and the human body, our study doesn’t aim to provide any historical or chronological frame but attempts to bring together complex ways of analysis from the privileged terrain of urban studies to geocriticism, art history, mythology and even psychoanalysis. Keywords: labyrinth, dream-world, dream architecture, subconscious, tessellation, initiatic journey, dromenon.