Luce Irigary

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

This essay explores Aristotle's discovery of touch as the most universal and philosophical of the senses. It analyses his central insight in the De Anima that tactile flesh is a "medium not an organ," unpacking both its metaphysical and ethical implications. The essay concludes with a discussion of how contemporary phenomenology-from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray-re-describes Aristotle's seminal intuition regarding the model of "double reversible sensation."

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey
Male–male sexuality is the central trope of Boys’ Love (BL) manga with stories tending to revolve around a central uke-seme (‘bottom’–‘top’) pair. Although focused on men, BL is produced and consumed primarily by women. This article presents, from an anglophone British perspective, analysis of age-stratified male–male romance – paederasty – as portrayed in BL. My corpus consists of 234 commercially-translated original Japanese BL manga stories, created by 100 different mangaka (author-artists), published commercially in English between 2003 and 2012. A total of 68 (30%) of these stories were identified as involving agestratified relationships, eight of which were selected for detailed analysis. Seven were selected for typicality: Waru (2007) by Yukari Hashida deemed the most typical. Fangs (2008) by Hiroki Kusumoto was also included in analysis as the most atypical age-stratified story in order to test the robustness of identified patterns. I argue that that, from an anglophone perspective, the characteristic themes of age-stratified BL map surprising well onto the eroticised intra-familial dynamics of Freud and the intra- and inter-familial economics of Lévi-Strauss. The patterns identified are evidenced and discussed under the following headings: the mother identified son, the doubly divested man, the castrated father, men on the market and the mother with the phallus. These themes help build and substantiate my argument that age-stratified BL might work, within an anglophone context at least, as a feminist critique of patriarchy through the mechanism of phallic divestiture.

This keynote paper for Workshops on Psychoanalysis & Art History raises questions about the ability of neuroscientific theory to replace older psychoanalytic models. On the one hand, scholars in the arts and humanities have raised important doubts about the ability of brain science to offer real insights into such complex cultural phenomena as the history of art. If neuroscience turns out only to offer very limited theoretical tools, then it is likely we are not going to abandon psychoanalysis any time soon. On the other hand, a growing number of art historians, especially new researchers, find neuroscience more robust and ‘of the moment’ than psychoanalysis and are beginning to apply neuroaesthetic ideas to art-historical problems. Concepts such as ‘mirror neurons’ and ‘neuroplasticity’, for example, suggest new ways of understanding behavioural responses to works of art and the importance to artists of the natural environment. This paper, however, urges caution. It is argued that rather than abandoning psychoanalytic approaches to the history of art we should instead review the method. The greatest value of the current excitement about neuroscientific ‘discoveries’ might be to make us question what actually constitutes a psychoanalytic approach and to update the concepts that we all too habitually employ.

This book is about representations of the body in all fields (fine art, medicine, ethnography, racial studies, biology). It is intended for artists, art students, and people interested in theories of art.

This is the 2021 revision. Every couple of years I rewrite and update this book. The original was published by Stanford University Press in 1999 and is now out of print. This revision (the third "edition") includes examples from contemporary art, and assignments for classroom use.

All comments & questions are welcome!

The purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of practices in organization from a phenomenological point of view. It explores the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s advanced phenomenology and ontology for understanding the role of the lived body and embodiment for practices in organisational life-worlds. Based on an embodied relational approach, the concept of an emergent and responsive “inter-practice’ in organisations will be developed. For showing a possible enactment of this embodied inter-practicing, improvisation is explored. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on embodied responsive and responsible inter-practices in organisations are discussed.

Badiou's contemporary claim that truth processes can no longer be considered as indifferent to sexual difference is set here in the context of the French philosophical moment of the second half of the twentieth century—a sequence in which the deployment of the category of “the feminine” by Badiou's philosophical peers precisely entailed a formalization of women's different relation to “the symbolic.” When compared, in particular, with the philosophy of sexual difference elaborated by Luce Irigaray, Badiou's intertwining of “woman,” love and the universal—both pre- and post- his inflexion on the sexuation of truths—is confronted to the systematic counter-proposition of alternative conceptual constellations. Might it not, then, be possible that the comparison of Badiou and Irigaray ultimately brings into play something of the order of a demonstration of thought's sexuation?

Recent findings from studies of epileptic patients and schizotypes have suggested that disruptions in multi-sensory integration processes may underlie a predisposition to report out-of-body experiences (OBEs: Blanke et al., 2004; Mohr et al., 2006). It has been argued that these disruptions lead to a breakdown in own-body processing and embodiment. Here we present two studies which provide the first investigation of predisposition to OBEs in the normal population as measured primarily by the recently devised Cardiff anomalous perception scale (CAPS; Bell et al., 2006). The Launay-Slade Hallucination scale (LSHS) was also employed to provide a measure of general hallucination proneness. In Study 1, 63 University students participated in the study, 17 of whom (26%) claimed to have experienced at least one OBE in their lifetime. OBEers reported significantly more perceptually anomalies (elevated CAPS scores) but these were primarily associated with specific measures of temporal-lobe instability and body-distortion processing. Study 2 demonstrated that OBEers and those scoring high on measures of temporal-lobe instability/body-distortion processing were significantly impaired, relative to controls, at a task requiring mental own-body transformations (OBTs) (Blanke et al., 2005). These results extend the findings from epileptic patient studies to the psychologically normal population and are consistent with there being a disruption in temporal-lobe and body-based processing underlying OBE-type experiences.

Deleuze is often considered an anti-phenomenologist. He even writes disparagingly of phenomenology’s ‘paltry’ lived-body, which we find in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Nonetheless, Deleuze still generated an original theory of phenomena. So rather than determining whether Deleuze was a phenomenologist or an anti-phenomenologist, we might instead attempt to formulate what a Deleuzean phenomenology would be. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomena are possible on account of three levels of harmonic integration: among the parts of the phenomenal world, among our body parts functioning in sensation, and between our body and the world enveloping us. All these overlappings bind us into the flesh of the world. Yet, a Deleuzean phenomenology would be based on precisely the opposite principles: the phenomenal world consists of incompatible differences shockingly forced upon us, all while our body functions disjunctively within itself and with our surroundings. Deleuze characterizes this sort of incohesion by referring us to the Dadaist machinery of Rube Goldberg and Buster Keaton. By showing how these principles allow for an alternate interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s Gestaltist illustrations, we will consider the possibility that not only is a Deleuzean phenomenology possible, it may also be a superior means to account for the phenomenality of phenomena.

Arts, Culture and Blindness is the first book to study adult and child art students actually participating in courses designed with their needs in mind in universities and schools for the blind. In doing so it uniquely delves into the topic of the culture of education and society and its affects on an understanding of blindness and the visual arts. Furthermore, through an analysis of individual and group behaviour, the book also introduces a new cultural model for studying blindness and disability, investigates the social influences on the nature of blindness and the treatment of people who are blind, and examines the influences that have affected the self belief of blind students and the way they create art.

There are a number of books on the education of people who are blind or deaf. However, these are largely descriptive or based on experimental rather than observational or social research. Furthermore, books that have analysed blindness and the arts only analyse tactile perception in the education of students who are blind, not social and cultural factors. In addition, although there have been many books and articles analysing research on the perception of aesthetics and blindness, there are only two, one first published in the 1950s and now long out of print (Lowenfeld V & Brittain WL, 1987), and the other published in 2003 (Axel E & Levent N Eds., 2003) that consider the practice of this subject in depth. In particular, there have been no books solely addressing the culture of arts education by non-visual means.

In the Handbook of Disability Studies (Albrecht GL, Seelman KD & Bury M, 2001), Albrecht also identified the need for more works on the experience and cultural history of disability. In this respect, this book represents a unique study of the theory of blindness and the arts. In its first section it analyses traditional models of blindness and disability, finding that the history of disability is more a reflection of changes in society towards its scientific study and classification. This book then presents a unique social psychological study of arts students, both children and adults, in situ, their understanding and practice of the arts, particularly the visual arts, and their reaction to the attitudes of their teachers, past and present.

In researching the material for Arts, Culture and Blindness, the author has collaborated with internationally renown charities in the area of blindness, galleries, exhibitions and art, such as Art Education for the Blind, New York and BlindArt, London, leading to interest from museum and gallery professionals in his work.

University courses and practising teachers can also benefit from this book. In particular, there are few resources which directly relate to studies of teaching practise in undergraduate and postgraduate courses specialising in the education of students with physical disabilities, or students studying for undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees in subjects such as disability studies, sociology, social and applied psychology, and fine art and design.

This essay explores Aristotle’s discovery of touch as the most universal and philosophical of the senses. It analyses his central insight in the De Anima that tactile flesh is a “medium not an organ,” unpacking both its metaphysical and ethical implications. The essay concludes with a discussion of how contemporary phenomenology—from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray—re-describes Aristotle’s seminal intuition regarding the model of “double reversible sensation.”

Through a detailed analysis of the story “The Three Sisters” from Couto’s collection O Fio das Missangas (“The Bead Necklace”) published in 2004, I reveal this space of magic, these relational practices that permeate most (if not all) of Couto’s writing, whether we are dealing with short-stories or novels or poetry. I choose to analyse this specific story to reveal Couto’s relational practices and its accompanying ideas of enchantment and mystical apprehension of the world because the story centers on the relational in terms of male/female relationships (the inter-personal) while also allowing the relational to be explored in terms of the trans-human (the movement from the human self to the non-human self, the Grander Self). Furthermore, the fact that the story revolves around the importance of creativity (in various forms) and presents it as the mechanism that permits the self to break away from the socio-political restrictions imposed by the status-quo and connect with the uncanny (the Grander Self), allows me to emphasize how the relational is deeply linked to a way of being and seeing that can only be attained when one allows a poetic insight to come in, when one breaks away from the chains of the dissecting and restrictive angle of knowledge apprehension imposed by pure reason. And these are, I argue, paramount aspects of Couto’s overall writing. By doing a close reading of “The Three Sisters” I am also emphasizing my argument (and Couto’s argument of relationality): the part is revealed and focused on in a minute way to illustrate how it yearns to become part of the whole, how it is in fact connected with the whole even if it is not consciously aware of that connection or rejects that connection because of societal impositions. Everything is connected: we only have to stare at the part enough time to see in it the immensity of all reality, to see how it calls to itself all there is out there. My medium then becomes part of my main message, part of the author’s ultimate message. I have analysed some of Couto’s other short stories using a similar prism of relationality in my book Transcultural Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity (2011). Moreover, my analysis, will also point to some similarities that exist between Couto’s writing with its close links to what I term African classical ontologies and epistemologies of holism and some aspects of Zen Buddhist philosophy and the philosophy of the French Feminist Luce Irigaray. These similarities have been also explored at length in my aforementioned book. All quotations referenced here, pertaining to Couto’s works, are my own translations.

This paper focuses on the petroglyphs of Central Asia, mainly those from the territory of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Although my prime interest here is to interpret this rock art within the context of Indo-Iranian mythology, taking into account that there has recently been a heated debate on the potential of using a textual perspective to interpret rock art (e.g. Tilley 1991, 1993; Bradley 1993; Malmer 1993; Whitley 1993; Lewis-Williams 1995; Layton 1996), in this paper I refer, as well, to the more general question of applying the semiotic approach to interpreting rock art, one that is, to some extent, rooted in a textual framework.