Subjectivity

RESUMEN: En la sociedad la diferencia entre los sexos se tradujo ideológicamente en un lenguaje binario y jerarquizado, donde el arte tuvo mucho que decir, ya que a través de sus creaciones el artista buscó siempre un término medio positivo que reconcilió lo masculino y lo femenino del ser humano. De esta manera los creadores presentaron lo femenino como un poder que no fue sino corrompido por la razón y que tuvo una importante relación desde tiempos ancestrales con la mujer, el arte y el matriarcado, frente al racionalismo patriarcal que ha sido dominante en todas las facetas del ser humano llegado este dominio hasta nuestros días. En el pensamiento del individuo y en su esfuerzo social, habría comenzado a surgir los signos precursores de una edad subjetiva, donde emergería un idealismo subjetivo, que se traduciría en una realización del individuo en la satisfacción de su más íntima naturaleza estética e intuitiva tratando de supeditar a este fin su existencia. Su verdadero propósito será el descubrimiento de una verdad más profunda, donde el poder de lo femenino y el arte estarían muy presentes. ABSTRACT: In society the difference between the sexes would ideologically translated into a binary language and hierarchical, where art would have much to say, and that through his creations the artist always seek a positive average they reconcile male and female of human being. In this way the creators presented the feminine as a power that would not have been corrupted by reason and logical thinking and would have an important relationship since ancient times with women, art and matriarchy, against patriarchal rationalism that has been dominant in all facets of the human being come this domain until today. In the thinking of the individual and social effort it would have begun to emerge harbingers of subjective age, which emerge a subjective idealism, which would result in a realization of the individual in meeting their most intimate aesthetic and intuitive nature trying to subordinating to this end its existence, its real purpose is the discovery of a deeper truth, where the power of the feminine and art would be very present.

Hisashi Fujita, "Désir et joie : deux philosophies politiques de la vie. Deleuze ou Bergson II", in Shin Abiko, Hisashi Fujita, Masato Goda (éds.), Tout ouvert : l'évolution créatrice en tous sens, Georg Olms Verlag : Hildesheim - Zürich - New York, coll. "Europaea Memoria" Band 114, 2015, pp. 225-247.

Inhalt
Christoph Binkelmann: Enthusiasmus und Skepsis. Das europäische Pendel
Burkhard Nonnenmacher: Kants Postulatenlehre als Prüfstein für Heideggers »These der neuzeitlichen Ontologie«?
Günter Zöller : Ex aliquo nihil. Fichtes Anti-Kreationismus
Kai U. Gregor: Eine Kritik innerhalb der Grenzen der Vernunft. Wilhelm Weischedels Grundlegungsversuch einer Philosophischen Theologie im Zeitalter des Nihilismus und ein Gedanke Fichtes
Marco Rampazzo Bazzan: Die Staatslehre Fichtes unter dem Aspekt der
politischen Theologie nach Carl Schmitt
Cristiana Senigaglia: Die Spur der Andersheit: Fichte und Levinas
Detlev Pätzold Hegels Philosophie der Religion: Die Stellung der Religion zwischen Kunst und Philosophie
Arthur Kok: Absoluter Geist und Schöpfung. Jan Hollaks neothomistische Hegelkritik
Kazimir Drilo: Kritik des religiösen Bewusstseins. Falk Wagners theologische Interpretation von Hegels »Wissenschaft der Logik«
Jakub Kloc-Konkołowicz: »Der Mensch lebt in zwei Welten […]«. Religion und Staat in Hegels Ansicht und in der heutigen Debatte
Elena Ficara: Der ontologische Gottesbeweis bei Hegel und in der analytischen Philosophie 
Robert Marszałek: Die Gegenwart der Religionslehre des mittleren Schelling
Mildred Galland-Szymkowiak Philosophie und Religion bei K.W.F. Solger.
Ein Beitrag zur nachkantischen Frage nach dem Prinzip der Philosophie
Patrick Grüneberg: Der transzendentale Gott
Wibke Rogge: Emmanuel Lévinas: Über die Beziehung des Unendlichen zum Seienden als Gemeinschaft in der Trennung
Ansgar Lyssy : Darwin, Gott und Neurotheologie. Was können uns die Biowissenschaften über die Religion sagen?

From the Romantic era onwards music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time.  Through its play of themes and recurrence of events music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history.  Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define.  Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought.  For if this age understood time, it was through a melody.
  This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time.  Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music.  They chart the development across the course of the nineteenth century of music’s capacity to convey the manifold nuances of time, revealing how music would finally become seen as the ideal instantiation of time and human existence itself.  At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

Aux mois d'avril et de mai 1981, Michel Foucault prononce un cours qu'il intitule Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l'aveu en justice. Il y poursuit l'élaboration de la notion de gouvernement par la vérité, introduite en janvier 1979 dans La naissance de la biopolitique puis reprise en janvier 1980 dans Le gouvernement des vivants pour donner un contenu positif et différencié à la notion de savoir-pouvoir et opérer par rapport à celle d'idéologie dominante un second déplacement.

Le cours est la trace d'un engagement militant : le fruit de l'alliance nouée avec des juristes radicaux, sous l'égide de l'École de criminologie de l'Université catholique de Louvain, à l'occasion d'un projet de révision du code pénal en vigueur en Belgique. Adressé à un public de juristes et de criminologues, il replace l'analyse du développement de l’aveu pénal dans l’histoire plus générale des technologies du sujet et examine diverses techniques par lesquelles l’individu est amené, soit par lui-même, soit avec l’aide ou sous la direction d’un autre, à se transformer et à modifier son rapport à soi. D’entrée de jeu, Michel Foucault annonce que le problème qui l’occupe a deux aspects. Politique : « savoir comment l’individu se trouve lié, et accepte de se lier au pouvoir qui s’exerce sur lui ». Philosophique : « savoir comment les sujets sont effectivement liés dans et par les formes de véridiction où ils s’engagent ».

Ainsi conçues, les leçons peuvent se lire comme une suite donnée à Surveiller et punir ou comme une première esquisse de l’analyse de la parrêsia et des formes alêthurgiques développée dans Le courage de la vérité. Avec le sujet avouant, ce n’est pas seulement le thème du dire vrai qui est introduit. Parce que les formes de véridiction ont partie liée avec l’assujettissement et la déprise de soi, c’est aussi la question de ce qui s’en déduit pour la philosophie critique – qu’en l’occurrence, Michel Foucault met en œuvre, à la croisée de l’activité pratique et de l’activité théorique, de la politique et de l’éthique.

« On parle souvent de la récente domination de la science ou de l’uniformisation technique du monde moderne. Disons que c’est là la question du "positivisme", au sens comtien du terme, et peut-être vaudrait-il mieux associer à ce thème le nom de Saint-Simon. Je voudrais évoquer, pour y loger les analyses que je vous propose, un contre-positivisme qui n’est pas le contraire du positivisme, plutôt son contrepoint. Il se caractériserait par l’ étonnement devant la très ancienne multiplication et prolifération du dire vrai, la dispersion des régimes de véridiction dans des sociétés comme les nôtres. »

Enclosed is the syllabus and course notes from the upper division course I teach in PostModernism and Post-Marxist Critical Theory. It occurs to me that some of these essays--ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno, Baudrillard, Foucault, and the feminist post-modern theorist Donna Haraway may offer some insight and some tools for comprehending the dark times in which we live. While these essays may not be directly aimed at understanding the rise of phenomena like the Alt-Right, toxic masculinity, and particularly violent forms of patriarchy, I think they can show us something about the ideological trends that set us on out current morally troubling path.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Available now from Penn State University Press, with a foreword by Pat J. Gehrke. Order here: https://www.amazon.com/Metanoia-Rhetoric-Authenticity-Transformation-Self/dp/0271085924/ref=sr_1_1?crid=DL9ENJNF09HO&keywords=ellwanger+metanoia&qid=1581529316&sprefix=ellwanger%2Caps%2C150&sr=8-1

Available now from Penn State University Press, with a foreword by Pat J. Gehrke.

Order here: https://www.amazon.com/Metanoia-Rhetoric-Authenticity-Transformation-Self/dp/0271085924/ref=sr_1_1?crid=DL9ENJNF09HO&keywords=ellwanger+metanoia&qid=1581529316&sprefix=ellwanger%2Caps%2C150&sr=8-1

O presente estudo buscou privilegiar uma análise biográfica das experiências de membros de uma categoria particular de praticantes do candomblé, quais sejam, as filhas e filhos do òrìṣà Logun Edé (Lóògùn Ẹdẹ, Oloogun Ede). O propósito dessa investigação é o de elucidar as formas dos vínculos que elas e eles estabelecem com a divindade. A relação da pessoa com o òrìṣà não me parece ser uma experiência isolável do conjunto da vida da adepta (ou adepto), mas uma constante integração entre ambos que permite, por vezes, a confusão entre os seus limites.

Para estudar essa relação, propus aos meus interlocutores que desenvolvêssemos uma apreciação retrospectiva sob a perspectiva da vida de santo e da culminação no sacerdócio – meus interlocutores são mães e pais de santo. Procurei assim encontrar subsídios para uma teorização mais adequada do relacionamento entre a pessoa e sua divindade e que fizesse justiça às diversas dimensões que o òrìṣà assume no cotidiano de seus filhos.

Há aí a noção primordial, no meu entendimento, de que o òrìṣà é; ou seja, de que ele existe em si, não somente como um arquétipo ou um repertório de imagens para o povo de santo com os quais se identifica, mas que a adepta a ele se relaciona como uma alteridade com agência e com a qual se comunica.

As interpretações e acionamentos dos adeptos admitem sempre variabilidade pois são acionados pelas experiências subjetivas. Nos processos de identificação e relacionamento, os adeptos conflituam, negociam e reinterpretam. A variabilidade dos acionamentos dos adeptos em relação aos òrìṣà, depende não apenas da variabilidade das experiências subjetivas mas das características estruturais do repertório cosmológico dos òrìṣà que admite plasticidade e inconsistência.
Dadas as intensas articulações entre a vida cotidiana e a vida religiosa, as negociações com os òrìṣà produzem-se também como um “cuidado de si”.

Palavras-chave: Religiões Afro-Brasileiras; Noção de Pessoa; Subjetividade; Cuidado de si; Economia Simbólica; Resistência cultural

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

À luz do arcabouço teórico existencial de O Ser e o Nada – obra magna de Jean- Paul Sartre –, pretende-se abordar a gênese ontológica da “realidade humana” enquanto “nadificação” e “falta ontológica”, assim como as manifestações e as conseqüências oriundas da paixão humana fundamental em se metamorfosear em transcendência hipostasiada, isto é, em tornar-se Ser Em-si-Para-si: querer-se Ser consciência e, ao mesmo tempo, projetar-se Ser pleno e acabado, de densidade infinita e sem fissuras.

In this paper I trace an important conceptual shift which emerged during my fieldwork with fishermen in the South West of Ireland. I begin by describing how my role as a social researcher was interpreted as a valuable 'bridge' between different (epistemological) positions, namely the fishermen and scientists. This approach rests on the belief that individual actors occupy discrete subject-positions capable of being articulated and understood within consensus-making processes. Going to sea marked, for me, a literal and metaphorical departure from this understanding. Rather than thinking of fishermen as bounded, individual subjects acting on and in a 'dumb' external world, and thus having a 'position' from which to make themselves understood, I began to attend to experiences which extended across and between people, places and things. In part two I analyze how the concept of 'continuous experience' helps us to think about experience as relational and contingent, unsettling the (governing) call to identify one's position. Attending to the ways in which experience unfolds through the immediate mattering of relations between people, places and things also allows us to move beyond explanatory modes which seek to identify how subjects are produced through particular structuring relations. In the final part of the paper I describe how the excess of sociability can suspend normal roles and relations, including those which exist between 'researcher' and 'subject'.

Durante a história do pensamento geográfico, antagonismos mostraram-se poderosos o suficiente para estimular o surgimento de correntes do pensamento e métodos de análise geográfica bastante distintos: de um lado, a objetividade versus a subjetividade; de outro, a materialidade versus imaterialidade. Este artigo apresenta como estes antagonismos participam da análise geográfica, refletindo sobre as limitações de suas manifestações extremadas, como um caminho para o objetivo desta reflexão teórica: a sugestão de uma posição intermediária em meio a este imbróglio teórico, inspirados no pensamento de Augustin Berque acerca da mediação da materialidade e imaterialidade consagrada no neologismo geogramas. Como uma estratégia metodológica, o texto do artigo parte das grandes discussões que envolveram materialidades e imaterialidades no período da reação ao florescimento do neopositivismo da década de 1950. É abordado, também, as manifestações da objetividade e da subjetividade na pesquisa geográfica, que dão suporte para pensarmos na materialidade e imaterialidade dos elementos da paisagem e nos conceitos apropriados pela geografia. É utilizado como estratégia de reflexão a metáfora da paisagem como texto, que serviu como um instrumento de reflexão sobre os problemas advindos da utilização de formas extremadas de imaterialidade. Por fim, destaca os efeitos mais práticos do desacordo entre a materialidade e a imaterialidade, utilizando as categorias raça e cultura como instrumentos reflexivos.

Este artigo se debruça sobre a análise dos efeitos políticos da configuração do personagem Madame Satã, no filme "Madame Satã" (2002), de Karim Aïnouz. Destaca-se, no caso, uma intimidade que nasce de uma proximidade construída no espaço e no tempo diegéticos e que ao mesmo tempo permite explorar lugares e situações praticamente atemporais e indefinidos: pele, poros, mofo e rachaduras nas paredes, suor, purpurina, tecidos, objetos de cena cotidianos. Desta forma, o corpo de Satã assume o lugar de uma fala política que substitui a representação, instaurando novos formatos de resistência no cinema brasileiro contemporâneo.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Subjetividade. Afetos. Homossexualidade. Corpo. Cinema.ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the analysis of the political effects of the configuration of the character Madame Satã, in Madame Satã (2002), by Karim Aïnouz. It is noteworthy, in this case, an intimacy born of proximity built in space and diegetic time that, at the same time, lets you...

This article provides a different angle to understand the Cambridge Analytica (CA) data scandal. It focuses on the role of models and simulations in the big data campaigning tools CA allegedly used, and their epistemological and ontological potential to produce and reproduce voters' digital doubles that would first colonise and eventually replace the analogue selves they were related to. By integrating and revising Zuboff's surveillance capitalism framework with Debord's classic theory of the Spectacle, the article argues that the dystopian simulations played as real life experiments by surveillance capitalist firms such as CA have the ultimate goal of replacing analogue humanity with digital humanity – the two kinds are ontologically different albeit dialectically related. The predictive models that these simulations produce are only as good as the capacity of the digital doubles in the simulations to shape the behaviour of analogue selves in line with the simulations' parameters and goals.

“Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry” imbricates Emanuel Levinas’s ethics of the care-for-the-other and the experience of resistance and capitulation in the context of political prisons.  It responds to basic questions: Why, under the paideia of the totalizing system, do we so often come to lose our ethical bearings, our social identities, such that we capitulate in this way?  Yet again, why is it that we also so often resist when resistance seems impossible? Through textual analysis of publicly documented memoirs, interviews, letters and of my own experiences, this article analyses the paideia of totalizing systems and illustrates with Levinas not only the indispensability, however occluded, but also the living presence of ethics of the other in the political realm.

The aim of the paper is to analyze the Hegelian interpretation of the notion of “irony” in the light of its evolution thorough the Berlin courses and in a comparison with the edition of the Ästhetik published by Hotho. The analysis of the last course of the 1828-29 is of particular importance, because there the notion of irony, which traditionally appears to be harshly criticized by Hegel, is taken as a decisive moment for the very concept of art. In this course, Hegel explicitly distinguishes between a “practical irony”, which he continues to criticize, and an irony that we could define as “artistic” or “aesthetic”, which he instead assumes as a significant moment in the constitution of the ideal. The discussion of this course can lead to a redefinition of Hegel’s interpretation of irony as it has been established by much of the critical tradition.

Conceptual metaphors structure our understanding of abstract ideas and complex concepts and, in this sense, are also key to our thinking and communicating about the human mind. Some of the dominating conceptual mappings are the metaphors of MIND AS BODY, MIND AS MACHINE/TECHNOLOGY and MIND AS SPACE. Audiovisual and other media draw on these conceptual metaphors in their attempts to represent aspects of the mind, e.g. when allowing spectators glimpses inside their characters’ memories. Recent studies suggest that some of film history’s most common conventions of mind-representation refer to such metaphoric conceptualizations. Yet despite their apparent timelessness and near universal comprehensibility, these strategies of representation cannot be considered independent from specific contexts of production, culture, and technology.
This chapter examines instances of MIND AS CONTAINER in early cinema flashbacks, proposing that, while relying on similar metaphoric concepts, different audiovisual realizations also convey slightly different meaning and – intentionally or unintentionally – reveal differences in the underlying conceptions of the mind and its representability. Believing that much insight is to gain by laying out how cognitive determinants and cultural specifics interact in the making and understanding of audiovisual representations, the chapter also aims to contribute to the larger project of cognitive cultural studies.

The trope of private property may usefully be approached culturally according to its own logic of denial. What is apparently most powerfully denied in the ownership of property is the right of others to take advantage of that property without their being given consent. Among the discursive articulations of this right to exclude are “No Trespassing” and “This [property] is wholly mine”. Suchlike speech acts contribute to an economic subjectivity that wishes, above all, to establish personal liberty through the sovereign practice of ownership. This sovereignty, however, is philosophically inconsistent with a market context that demands that one ceaselessly exchange one’s goods and act as “guardian” to the commodity form. The pleasure of denying the market itself access to one’s property is thus continually thwarted. This fact discloses multiple tensions within the logic of political economy.

Keywords: capitalism, subjectivity, speech acts, feudalism, philosophy of economics

This paper examines how middle-aged and older post-Soviet immigrants in eastern Berlin navigate the neoliberalized landscape of work-based integration in face of their long-term unemployment. I first show how these immigrants’ own insistence on the centrality of paid work for their feeling integrated contributes to their experience of collective despondency and enrollment in exploitative quasi-markets, including workfare. Focusing on this insistence, I examine how it draws strength primarily from their continued subscription to the conceptions of self as deeply socially embedded, and of work as a practice of such an embedding, adopted through their Soviet-era socialization into the culture of dispersed personhood and obligation to work, rather than from their adoption of neoliberal concepts of citizenship in Germany. Contributing to geographies of post- socialist experience of neoliberalized regimes of citizenship and immigrant integration this paper thus highlights how some of the aspects of post-socialist subjectivities dovetail unexpectedly with the neoliberal project.

Whilst the concept of the subject has been called into question by many diverse approaches within contemporary political and social theory, there remains a focus upon agency, now attributable to reformulated subjectivities or assemblages. I query the persistence of this grammar of agency and ask whether politics can do without a ‘scene of the subject’. Spinoza’s philosophy, in particular his conception of conatus, has inspired and offered some basis for rethinking agency. I examine two such prominent positions (Judith Butler and Jane Bennett) and argue that ultimately neither captures the political promise of Spinoza’s philosophy. Configuring a concept of morphology to analyse this scene, my argument detaches the conatus from a narrow focus upon human desire, and focuses attention upon the scene of the subject as folded into a wider complex body. My approach also returns a study of power to the discussion: the conatus is the power to persist but it is also a differential force and site of conflict. By placing the spotlight on the scene of subjectivity in this way, the contemporary political theorist avoids the false antinomy between agency and structure, whilst continuing to track the production and composition of subjectivity in new political forms.

This article explores polyamorous women’s potential to enlarge the concept of sexual subjectivity through their engagement in nontraditional relationships and their attempts to reject sexual objectification. Polyamorous people openly engage in romantic, sexual, and/or affective relationships with multiple people simultaneously. Polyamory differs from swinging with its emphasis on long-term, emotionally intimate relationships and from adultery with its focus on honesty and (ideally) full disclosure of the network of sexual relationships to all who participate in or are affected by them. Both men and women have access to additional partners in polyamorous relationships, distinguishing them from polygamy. This ethnographic analysis expands sociological understanding of women’s sexuality by investigating this previously unexamined area of sexual subjectivity. Specifically, the author analyzes some of the ways that polyamorous women expand so-called normal social roles, discusses their s...