Online research in philosophy

Introduction -- How orphans believe: Deleuze, national cinema and Majidi's The color of paradise. Deleuze: on realism and movement-Image -- Deleuze: neorealism (and a brief analysis of Kiarostami's life and nothing more) -- Majidi: The color of paradise -- Deleuze and Majidi: the faith of Mohammad -- "What are filmmakers for in needy times?" On Heidegger and Kiarostami's Taste of cherry -- An overview of Kiarostami's Taste of cherry and the question of the medium -- Heidegger on art and truth (...) -- Heidegger and Kiarostami -- Committed perception: Merleau-Ponty and Children of heaven -- Carroll on emotions -- Merleau-Ponty and embodied Imagination -- Censorship and Children of heaven -- Perception and ideology. Regarding you: Lacanian gaze and ethics in Kiarostami's Close-up -- A brief overview of Close-up -- Misreading Lacan's gaze -- The three orders: real, symbolic and imaginary -- The Lacanian gaze -- Gaze in Close-up -- The ethical function of the gaze in Close-up -- Stolen Jouissance: Lacan, feminism and Meshkini's The day I became a woman. A brief overview of The day I became a woman -- Hava: the birth of desire -- From Hava to Ahoo: from demand to desire and jouissance -- Traversing the fantasy: from Hoora to Meshkini -- Meshkini: the fourth woman of the story -- Deafening silence: Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles can fly and marginal politics -- Bahman Ghobadi and Turtles can fly -- The abject -- Can Ghobadi speak? National cinema and national mission, once again -- Hegemonic movement: on the way to the Green Movement -- The future of Iranian cinema is the future of the Green Movement. (shrink)

In this essay, I closely read one of the last major works of the late Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, along with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting forGodot. Ricoeur argues that recognition has not received sufficient attention in the philosophical tradition. Those who have approached the question come mainlyfrom a Hegelian perspective, which posits recognition in terms of struggle. Against this model, Ricoeur argues that we ought to make room for mutual recognition, not grounded in violence and reciprocity but in mutuality. (...) While Beckett illustrates Ricoeur’s point, especially at the affective level—one of Ricoeur’s possible “states of peace”—I argue that Beckett pays greater attention to friendship in comparison to Ricoeur. (shrink)

We argue that Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative and alienation provides a largely untapped, though potentially fruitful way of re-thinking the question of political agency within the context of globalization. We argue that the political agency of many around the world has been placed in an exceedingly fragile position due to the rapid pace of globalization, the movement of multi-national corporations from their previous national headquarters, etc. We use Ricoeur’s work to argue that the alienation of globalization is not something (...) that can be simply overcome either in a unified world-state or a retreat to protectionist nationalism, because institutional mediation—and consequently alienation—is in some sense constitutive of all politics: the world of political representation operates by its own set of rules, which are at least partially disconnected from the represented world. Using the work of Mouffe, a radical democratic theorist, we then flesh out an ideal of agonistic citizenship (which recognizes both the need for and the inevitability of discursive struggle in politics) in a number of overlapping communities of interest, rather than tying political participation solely to the sovereign government of my state. The state will remain important, but because globalization has disenfranchised so many from their participation in “local” modes of self-governance (tied to the state in which they live), we have a responsibility to re-envision what political participation means outside the traditional context of the state. Rather than merely citizens of a particular state, we need to begin thinking of ourselves politically—and then acting—as “citizens” of Green Peace, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, or whatever other supra-local concrete universals or communities of interest to which we belong, investing the time and energy there that we might previously have invested solely in our state’s government. (By implication, we must also ensure that these organizations work in transparent democratic ways themselves.) We believe that by re-plotting our narratives of political engagement in this way, we can positively respond to the alienation created by globalization, while avoiding both the extremes of “McWorld” (hyperglobalism) and “Jihad” (complete skepticism towards, or war against globalization) that Benjamin Barber and David Held have recently described. (shrink)

This paper analyzes two inauthentic approaches to the problem of boredom from Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s perpectives. I maintain that their narratives—Nausea and “The “Seducer’s Diary”—fit this problem perfectly, as it is through narratives that we appreciate and learn to avoid boredom. I also submit that their solutions are doomed to failure because they attempt to be the sole authors of their own stories, without making room for alterity.