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292 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Butterfly Redreaming: Rethinking Free, with Zhuangzi Flying Westerly with Descartes, Lacan, Waldman…

by Kyoo Lee

Humanities 2015, 4(2), 198-211; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4020198 - 15 Apr 2015

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 8899

Usually, Zhuangzi’s parable of “the butterfly dream/dreaming butterfly” is read as an enigmatic version, from “the East”, of the Cartesian skeptical challenges to “objective reality” or else the Lacanian psycho-drama of the “pure gaze” in which “he”, Zhuangzi, “is a butterfly for nobody”, [...] Read more.

Usually, Zhuangzi’s parable of “the butterfly dream/dreaming butterfly” is read as an enigmatic version, from “the East”, of the Cartesian skeptical challenges to “objective reality” or else the Lacanian psycho-drama of the “pure gaze” in which “he”, Zhuangzi, “is a butterfly for nobody”, who stands for “the Real”. Retooling some of the critical insights from these standard dialectical or anxiogenic approaches to this allegorical puzzle of self-identity, both of which, however, tend to leave unquestioned or else structurally overrate the binarized inner-exclusivity of typical pairs such as in/out, subject/object, illusion/reality, and all/nothing, this article proposes a relatively novel, fluid model of unraveling the speculative knot, the dots of lepidopterological spacetime irreducible to a simpler “point” in space and time. As we follow the narrative sequence more micro- and macrologically at once, with holistic, philopoetic attention to its intricate conceptual cues and contextual clues, especially its streaks and energies of “oppositional poetics” envisaged by Anne Waldman, for instance, we come to see more clearly the trans-categorical auto-generativity of its modal openness, its oddly powerful, non-militarily propelled, avant-garde peripherality. As Zhuangzi’s butterfly gets freed this way from the discursive net where it is lost and found (often instantly dead), the vocalized figure of the “irritating” narrator, too, will change more freely, flying in and out and back in “daoistically” rather than agonistically. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

217 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Reoccupying Metaphor: On the Legitimacy of the Nonconceptual

by C. D. Blanton

Humanities 2015, 4(1), 181-197; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4010181 - 5 Mar 2015

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5186

Abstract

Hans Blumenberg’s magisterial defense of modernity against the reproach of secularization, elaborated most extensively in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966, 1974), develops both a distinctive method of philosophical history and the groundwork of a philosophical anthropology, predicated on the emergence of [...] Read more.

Hans Blumenberg’s magisterial defense of modernity against the reproach of secularization, elaborated most extensively in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966, 1974), develops both a distinctive method of philosophical history and the groundwork of a philosophical anthropology, predicated on the emergence of human self-assertion as theoretical curiosity. But as Blumenberg’s work attests more generally, this argument both devolves on and comprises an excursion into metaphorology, transposing the grounds of legitimation from dialectic to rhetoric. This paper explores the implications of such a metaphorical transfer, suggesting that Blumenberg not only presupposes a cryptic mode of poetics, but also (against its own anthropological intention) invests that poetics with the power to negate the category of the human as such. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

325 KiB

Open AccessArticle

In Search of Lost Community: The Literary Image between “Proust” and “Baudelaire” in Walter Benjamin’s Modernization Lament

by Karyn Ball

Humanities 2015, 4(1), 149-180; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4010149 - 6 Feb 2015

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 8729

Abstract

This essay takes up the encounter between philosophy and literature through a reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s remarks from “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” about Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as an attempt “[t]owering above” other ventures into Lebensphilosophie to “lay hold of the [...] Read more.

This essay takes up the encounter between philosophy and literature through a reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s remarks from “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” about Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as an attempt “[t]owering above” other ventures into Lebensphilosophie to “lay hold of the ‘true’ experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses”. Despite his initial affirmation of Bergson’s understanding of experience as connected with tradition, Benjamin criticizes the philosopher’s account for sidestepping “the alienating, blinding experience of the age of large-scale industrialism” in reaction to which, as Benjamin insists, Bergson’s philosophy of memory developed. Yet even as Bergson shuts out the historical import of modernization, according to Benjamin, he also spotlights a “complementary” visual experience “in the form of its spontaneous afterimage”. Benjamin subsequently defines Bergson’s philosophy as “an attempt to specify this afterimage and fix it as a permanent record”, an endeavor that inadvertently “furnishes a clue to the experience which presented itself undistorted to Baudelaire’s eyes, in the figure of his reader”. If the literary critic might be viewed here as weighing in on a long-running antagonism between philosophy and literature, then his assessment is resolute: by praising the self-conscious historicity of Baudelaire’s lyric, Benjamin declares that poetry succeeds where Lebensphilosophie fails. Notably, Baudelaire is not the only figure to upstage “ahistorical” Bergson, since Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud facilitate this victory. To contextualize the second section of “Motifs”, where Benjamin discusses the novelist’s “immanent critique of Bergson” this essay offers a reading of “On the Image of Proust” as a propadeutic to Benjamin’s privileging of “Baudelaire” over “Bergson” in the first section of “Motifs” to broach the destinies of diminished perception before he turns to Freud in the third section. Drawing upon Freud’s thermodynamic model of a selective and protective perceptual-conscious system from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Benjamin explains how perception calcifies in adapting to industrialism. Notably, however, his “energetics” does not remain bound by closed-system economic premises insofar as he conceives Baudelaire’s correspondances as an antidote to reification and modernization fatigue. The resulting configuration emerges against the backdrop of a lament about the decline of tradition-infused, long-term experience [Erfahrung] that accompanies the rise of isolated experience [Erlebnis]. In tracking Benjamin’s seemingly melancholic emplotment of the literary image between “Proust” and “Baudelaire”, the essay ultimately focuses on how he amplifies its sociohistorical potential to attest to the dehiscence of tradition as a community-sustaining force. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

204 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Nietzsche’s “Love” for Socrates

by Drew A. Hyland

Humanities 2015, 4(1), 3-16; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4010003 - 13 Jan 2015

Viewed by 6763

Abstract

In this essay I contest the prevailing view that Nietzsche almost exclusively criticizes Socrates, by a careful consideration of his encounter with Socrates in the Birth of Tragedy and Twilight of the Idols. By showing that in Nietzsche’s own sense he “loved” Socrates, [...] Read more.

In this essay I contest the prevailing view that Nietzsche almost exclusively criticizes Socrates, by a careful consideration of his encounter with Socrates in the Birth of Tragedy and Twilight of the Idols. By showing that in Nietzsche’s own sense he “loved” Socrates, I am able to raise a number of important issues for further consideration. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

196 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Community of Others or What is a Humanist Critique of Empire?

by Kalpana Rahita Seshadri

Humanities 2014, 3(4), 699-710; https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040699 - 1 Dec 2014

Viewed by 3939

Abstract

The essay argues that the perceived waning of the influence of the Humanities (Literature, Continental Philosophy, Art, and Religion) and their irrelevance to contemporary problems of globalization and environmental issues is due to a limited exploration of the notion of interdisciplinarity. The essay [...] Read more.

The essay argues that the perceived waning of the influence of the Humanities (Literature, Continental Philosophy, Art, and Religion) and their irrelevance to contemporary problems of globalization and environmental issues is due to a limited exploration of the notion of interdisciplinarity. The essay suggests that, insofar as contemporary power relations pose a problem for our conception of human-being, the resources offered by the humanities acquire a renewed value and power for thinking through the era of the anthropocene. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

201 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Action versus Movement: A Rebuttal of J. M. Bernstein on Rancière

by Thomas Brockelman

Humanities 2014, 3(4), 687-698; https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040687 - 19 Nov 2014

Viewed by 4111

Abstract

Rebutting J. M. Bernstein’s interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics in an essay where Bernstein uses Rancière to praise classic Hollywood cinema, the present article turns to a series of recent essays and a lecture by Rancière to argue that, pace Bernstein, for Rancière [...] Read more.

Rebutting J. M. Bernstein’s interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics in an essay where Bernstein uses Rancière to praise classic Hollywood cinema, the present article turns to a series of recent essays and a lecture by Rancière to argue that, pace Bernstein, for Rancière the conditions that demanded 19th-century modernism’s critique of the intertwined concepts of narrative and action still prevail today, in the era of entertainment cinema. The egalitarian social condition foreshadowed by the aesthetic for Rancière demands suspension of the very conditions of domination of nature and passive spectacle endemic to contemporary life. In other words, my essay argues that Rancière must and does remain committed to a version of aesthetic modernism, albeit one founded in an undoubted realism and a concomitant ideal of social equality. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

188 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Extravagance in The Hunger Games

by Kelly Oliver

Humanities 2014, 3(4), 675-686; https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040675 - 17 Nov 2014

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 11380

Abstract

I argue that Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games is an emblem of what Julia Kristeva calls the “extravagant girl” who wants to have it all and to be the best at everything. Katniss has an ambiguous gender identity, both masculine and feminine, [...] Read more.

I argue that Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games is an emblem of what Julia Kristeva calls the “extravagant girl” who wants to have it all and to be the best at everything. Katniss has an ambiguous gender identity, both masculine and feminine, paternal and maternal. And she has ambivalent desires. I conclude that this ambiguity and ambivalence open up new possibilities for girls and initiate an aesthetics of ambiguity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

694 KiB

Open AccessArticle

An Archeology of Fragments

by Gerald L. Bruns

Humanities 2014, 3(4), 585-605; https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040585 - 24 Oct 2014

Viewed by 7474

Abstract

This is a short (fragmentary) history of fragmentary writing from the German Romantics (F. W. Schlegel, Friedrich Hölderlin) to modern and contemporary concrete or visual poetry. Such writing is (often deliberately) a critique of the logic of subsumption that tries to assimilate whatever [...] Read more.

This is a short (fragmentary) history of fragmentary writing from the German Romantics (F. W. Schlegel, Friedrich Hölderlin) to modern and contemporary concrete or visual poetry. Such writing is (often deliberately) a critique of the logic of subsumption that tries to assimilate whatever is singular and irreducible into totalities of various categorical or systematic sorts. Arguably, the fragment (parataxis) is the distinctive feature of literary Modernism, which is a rejection, not of what precedes it, but of what Max Weber called “the rationalization of the world” (or Modernity) whose aim is to keep everything, including all that is written, under surveillance and control. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

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314 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Bridging the Divide: Literature, Dao and the Case for Subjective Access in the Thought of Su Shi

by Curie Virág

Humanities 2014, 3(4), 567-584; https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040567 - 23 Oct 2014

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 6483

Abstract

In the 11th century in China, there was an unusual moment in which a number of philosophers, later associated with the Daoxue—or Neo-Confucian—school, confronted what they perceived as a long-standing sense of disjunction between inner, subjective reality and the structured patterns of [...] Read more.

In the 11th century in China, there was an unusual moment in which a number of philosophers, later associated with the Daoxue—or Neo-Confucian—school, confronted what they perceived as a long-standing sense of disjunction between inner, subjective reality and the structured patterns of the cosmos. One way they sought to overcome this disjunction was by positing new theories of the cosmos that focused on the underlying, shared reality behind the myriad differentiations of phenomena. A potential tension was born that affected how thinkers understood the relationship between wen 文 (writing, literature, culture) and Dao 道 (the cosmic process, the ultimate reality, the normative path). Some thinkers, like Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤 (1017–1073), believed that wen was simply a vehicle for carrying the Dao, and was thus, implicitly, dispensable. This idea was met with resistance from one of the leading intellectual figures of the time—the philosopher, poet and statesman Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101). While some of Su’s contemporaries, in their attempts to demonstrate that the world was real, and that truth was knowable, downplayed the role of individual experience and perception, Su stressed the necessity of subjective, individual experience as giving access, and concrete expression, to Dao. Su’s philosophical project came in the form of defending the enterprise of wen—writing as a creative, individual endeavor—and asserting that the quest for unity with the Dao could only be realized through direct, personal engagement in wen and other forms of meaningful practice. Through his philosophy of wen, Su sought to show that the search for truth, meaning and order did not—and could not—be achieved by transcending subjective experience. Instead, it had to be carried out at the point of encounter between self and the world, in the realm of practice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

136 KiB

Open AccessArticle

No Lords A-Leaping: Fanon, C.L.R. James, and the Politics of Invention

by David Marriott

Humanities 2014, 3(4), 517-545; https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040517 - 2 Oct 2014

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 8843

Abstract

What happens to Fanonism when, instead of resistance or liberation, it becomes a discourse of invention? What happens to Fanon’s critique of colonialism and his imagining of a decolonial future, when that critique and imagining are staked not on the refusal of racial [...] Read more.

What happens to Fanonism when, instead of resistance or liberation, it becomes a discourse of invention? What happens to Fanon’s critique of colonialism and his imagining of a decolonial future, when that critique and imagining are staked not on the refusal of racial humanity itself (in the sense of an appeal to a “new humanism”…), but in the sense that Fanonism itself, as such, would be a discourse and reading of invention? In this essay I compare Fanon’s reading of invention with that of C.L.R. James’s reading of spontaneity in Notes on Dialectics. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Encounters between Literature and Philosophy)

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