Online research in philosophy

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 87-99, December 2011.

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Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 117-123, September 2011.

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 39-51, September 2011.

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 1-5, September 2011.

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 101-115, September 2011.

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Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 63-76, September 2011.

This paper posits that the writings of Hélène Cixous convey a remarkable intimacy, firstly in the representation of love, with its relationship to knowledge and time; and, secondly, in the relationship her texts create with the reader. Cixous?s use of her life, from the publication of her dreams to the life events which are the creative impetus for texts such as The Book of Promethea (1983) and The Day I Wasn?t There (2000) inform a discussion of the figures of the (...) lover, the dead child, and that of the brother, his interdiction against appearing in her texts, and the ethical dimension this produces for the reader. Finally, the implications of Cixous?s imbrication of literature, dreaming, writing and life is considered as a gesture of intimacy which opens a possibility for radically reconceiving our usual separation of these realms of experience. (shrink)

In this supplement to a work co-authored with André Cresson, David Hume, sa vie, son ?uvre, left untranslated until now, Deleuze lays the groundwork for what he will later develop as an ?ethics without morality.? Contrary to morality, ethics engenders its general rule for action out of the immanence that grants it the power to affect and to be affected, that is, to increase or decrease its capacity to compose new empowering relations between beings, and between beings and the world. (...) The power to act is synonymous with the capacity to imaginatively create relations, in order to exist. In this way, the imagination reveals its ontological significance. Here we discern Deleuze?s Humean impulse encountering a fundamental Nietzscheanism. The translator?s introduction attempts to make explicit his specific philosophical motive, at this point only formative but, eventually, foundational for his later thought. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 2, Page 1-2, June 2011.

While Merleau-Ponty does not theorize sexual difference at any great length, his concepts of the flesh and the institution of a sense suggest hitherto undeveloped possibilities for articulating sexual difference beyond the male?female binary. For Merleau-Ponty, flesh is a ?pregnancy of possibilities? which gives rise to masculine and feminine forms through a process of mutual divergence and encroachment. Both sexes bear ?the possible of the other,? and neither represents the first or generic form of the human; each sex bears the (...) possibility of the other. By approaching sexual difference in terms of intersubjectively distributed possibilities rather than interlocking forms or types, we may grasp sexual difference in terms of both a developmental process in which bodies become sexed (and sometimes re-sexed) over time, and in terms of a social-historical process in which patterns of relation and exchange between sexed bodies shift over time, altering the very sense of sexual difference. (shrink)

This article examines the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (especially Cinema) and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud in terms of the intersection between corporeality, temporality, and the political. The first part analyzes the deconstruction of lyrical subjectivity in Rimbaud?s verse in relation to the breakdown of the ?sensory-motor link? described in the first volume of Deleuze?s Cinema; it discusses these homologous movements as a release of free-floating bodily potentiality. The second part shows how the shift from the first to the second (...) volume of Deleuze?s Cinema and the shift from verse to prose poetry in Rimbaud constitute the formal dimensions of a shared political project based on the transformation of bodily life, or a biopolitical transformation. This project can be understood as communist insofar as it attempts to liberate time from capital for the body and to produce a social form based on sharing the common (or common bodily potentials). (shrink)

This article seeks to deepen Giorgio Agamben?s brief investigation of the Foucauldian technical term dispositif, by locating it (and the triple structure which articulates it) in the larger context of his own contribution to the genealogy of ?governmentality.? Following Agamben?s reconstruction of the Christian paradigm for the divine government of the world, it explores the singular relation between governmental dispositifs and concurrent modes of subjectivation. It argues that the contingency of human action must first be secured for the governmental machine (...) to be able to operate. (shrink)

This article examines how Georges Bataille, one of the celebrated precursors of the postmodern death of a linguistic subject (the subject of the signifier), is also a Nietzschean, pre-Freudian thinker who offers us an account of the birth of an affective subject (the subject of mimesis). If critics still tend to recuperate Bataille within a ?metaphysics of the subject,? the present article shows that the central concept of his thought (i.e., ?sovereign communication?) needs to be reconsidered in the light of (...) his debt to Pierre Janet?s ?psychology of the socius,? an interpersonal psychology that transgresses precisely this metaphysics. In line with contemporary theoretical developments, Bataille?s account of the birth of the subject out of the laughter of the socius offers us a theoretical model to rethink the foundations of subjectivity in relational, mimetic terms. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux has recently leveled a controversial attack on critical philosophy and the transcendental turn through his concept of correlationism. This critique is motivated by the attempt to move away from a philosophy of human finitude towards a speculative materialism. In this paper I argue that Meillassoux?s understanding of correlationism does not adequately depict the critical turn, especially in regards to the distinction between the epistemological problem of realism and the problem of materialism. I attempt to show that by reading (...) the critical turn as anti-epistemological one can think of its turn away from things themselves towards relation and mediation in ways that are not necessarily against either science or materialism. (shrink)

This essay aims to identify several related themes that regularly appear in posthumanist scholarship but which have not been theorized sufficiently, including the rhetoric of temporal and historical rupture, the logic of dialectical reversal, the effacement of human/animal difference, and above all the critical ascendancy of the term ?posthumanism? itself. If one of the aims of posthumanism is to render the face of the human unknowable to itself, then to what extent does the human that re-names itself ?posthuman? do so (...) in order to lay claim once again to a dubious self-knowledge? The rhetoric of posthumanism, moreover, implies a progressive narrative that ironically mirrors the Enlightenment principles of perfectibility that it would oppose. Drawing from Derrida?s notion of the ?democracy to come,? I argue that the advent of the posthuman must always remain deferred. Just as the promise of democracy remains unfulfilled, the posthuman must infinitely postdate its arrival in any present. (shrink)

In this paper, I juxtapose the work of two contemporary feminist philosophers: Christine Battersby and Adriana Cavarero ? both working within the Continental tradition ? to show how they go well beyond feminist critique to produce different images of self-identity and conceptions of the political. Both reject traditional positions on selfhood but also (in different ways) stress the materiality of bodies and provide alternatives to the work of post-structuralists, such as Judith Butler. My aim is to draw out some of (...) the politico-legal implications of their differing images of selfhood. In the final section I then apply both their (different) approaches to the concept of self to ask how their respective arguments can inform contemporary political questions regarding privacy and dissensus. (shrink)

Distance is central to both Heidegger?s depiction of being-in-the-world and Derrida?s theorization of the culture of friendship. It is equally fundamental to the structure of language and, I argue, to the concept of the foreign. This essay brings together these theories of distance and demonstrates the ways they act on and through each other, the role that linguistic distance plays in constructing both foreigners and friends, and the permeable semantic boundaries that the concept of distance shares with movement, strangeness, instability, (...) and indefiniteness. It further contends that this semantic seepage has proven threatening to certain species of philosophy and politics and prompted disciplinary efforts ? to eradicate distance, regulate foreigners, immobilize meaning, and stabilize friendship ? that are remarkably structurally similar and sometimes mutually supportive, but that both Heidegger and Derrida, by contrast, undertake a significant revaluation of distance and the foreignness and indeterminacy associated with it. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 2, Page 175-180, June 2011.

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 2, Page 189-193, June 2011.

This paper seeks to demonstrate that in Lyotard?s later works the sublime is posited as a response to nihilism. This demonstration is significantly complicated by the fact that while Lyotard frequently gave the sublime a positive valuation, he also identified it with nihilism. The paper charts Lyotard?s confrontation with nihilism throughout his career, showing how the themes with which he characterizes nihilism in his earlier works are repeated as characteristics of the sublime in his later works. It then argues that (...) for Lyotard the sublime acts as both a characterization of the nihilism of contemporary cultural conditions, and as a resource with which to respond to nihilism. Lyotard?s deployment of the sublime as such a response can be understood as an instance of his use of the sophistical strategy of retorsion, finding from within nihilism itself the potential for resistance. Moreover, this position may be understood as motivated by a rejection of revolutionary programmes for changing social conditions, and by the desire to preserve a space for justice ? understood as respect for difference. For Lyotard, the abyss between meaning and existence which characterizes both nihilism and the sublime preserves this space better than any attempt to close or bridge it. (shrink)

This essay sets out from a reading of two photomontage projects by South African artist Jane Alexander, ?Adventure Centre? (2000) and ?Survey: Cape of Good Hope? (2005?09), one of Alexander's ongoing ?survey? projects, and remarks on the overwhelming impulse on the part of critics and interpreters to anthropomorphize the figures appearing in the photomontage images. It goes on to explore the hypothesis that Alexander's work in fact resists or refuses these attempts at anthropomorphization, and that this resistance is connected with (...) the more openly political aspects of her work, as well as with a more general refusal of anthropomorphism by photography. The second part of the essay frames a possible engagement with Alexander's photomontages through terms offered by Walter Benjamin's ?Little History of Photography,? and looks at Benjamin's peculiar concern with a kind of anti-portraiture: a photographic genre that would feature the human face in an anonymous way, without being concerned with identity. The essay closes with a consideration of the genre of the photographic survey historically, and traces an impulse, evident in the survey, to treat the human as only one of many figural elements composing the crypto-industrial landscape. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 1, Page 1-3, 01Mar2011.

This is a study of the way in which Levinas approaches the experience of human expression from two perspectives: firstly, as a pre-thematic or pre-cognitive ?experience,? which requires that he revisit Husserl's pre-objective intentionality and explore the relationship between the upsurge of sensation (?Urhylè?) and its ?intentionalization? as consciousness self-temporalizing. Thereafter, Levinas must contend with the implications of his own writing (his thematization and rhetoric), which includes his claims for the face. This implies that he must grapple with criticism to (...) the effect that he is providing a (foundationless) hermeneutics of face-to-face encounters (later, of an affective memory that repeats without recollected representations). Levinas acknowledges that his writing is a ?dramatique des phénomènes? and not a phenomenology of actions (Totality and Infinity, ?Preface?). How, then, to avoid charges of arbitrary description? How to step outside the primordiality of ?the phrase? (Lyotard) or the conceptualization that threatens claims to ?pure? phenomenology? This is really what is at stake in Levinas's second great work (1974). In this essay, I explore the role that ?substitution? plays in weaving together conceptuality and phenomenality. I contrast this with other forms of ?dramatization,? from narrative witnessing (Delbo, Kertesz), to minimalist sculpture (Giacometti). (shrink)

At the core of conceptual understandings underlying a common-sense comprehension of matter is an assumed opposition of the intelligible and the sensible. Drawing on the writings of Giles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz, this essay attempts to rethink the relations of matter through the work of materiality in the context of art. Focusing on the installation COVERS, by Melbourne-based artist Fiona Abicare, this examination argues that a mobilization of the disordering effects of matter instigates an interval. In this passage (...) of undecidability an understanding of matter as a vehicle for expression or medium for signifying something external to itself is challenged via a ceaseless interchange across the thresholds of surface and depth, face and mask, ornament and decoration. (shrink)

This essay stages a dialectical confrontation between Adorno?Horkheimer on one hand and Benjamin?Badiou on the other against the background of the former's reductive portrait of Ulysses in Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which depicts him as a proto-bourgeois archetype of profit-seeking and acquisitive ethos. In sharp contrast, Walter Benjamin's allegorical materialism foregrounds, by dialectical illumination, hieroglyphic traces of Homeric virtues. These, I argue, are sustained and further amplified by Alain Badiou's topological ethics and loop-politics.

Rejecting the notion that Picasso's representations of faces should always be considered in a biographical context as portraits, it is argued that in considering them as human faces we encounter a crisis in the idea of an essential humanity. The essay then discusses Picasso's faces relation to Georges Bataille's treatment of vernacular portrait photography and of animality in human emotional expression, arguing that Picasso's human faces court the inhuman. This inhuman countenance, bred so effectively in the artist's work in the (...) 1930s and 1940s, raises in turn the question of the origin of the human in the inhuman. Turning to Bataille's discussion of the cave of Lascaux, discovered in 1940 and made to stand for the question of humanity posed so brutally by the war, the essay analyses the irruption of the origin of the human ideal in the sovereign act of the depiction of animality. A double refusal of destinies, of animality and of humanity, is caught before our eyes in such depictions. This temporal suspension of destinies is read back into Picasso's (in)human faces. (shrink)

This essay traces out the context that allowed numerous early modern thinkers to deny that animals had faces. Using early- to mid-seventeenth-century writing by, among others, John Milton, John Bulwer and Ben Jonson, it shows that faces were understood to be sites of meaning, and were thus, like gestural language and the capacity to perform a dance, possessed by humans alone. Animals, this discourse argued, have no ability to communicate meaningfully because they have no bodily control, and as such they (...) are faceless beings without individuality and without a sense of self-consciousness. The ethical implications of such a reading of the human face are far reaching. (shrink)

This paper seeks to articulate the significance of an intimate connection that exists between faces and images. It argues that the manner in which images face us ? a picture's turning toward a viewer ? is the primary condition of its meaningfulness. The article explicates the significance of an image's facing through a dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical understanding of the human face. The analogy I draw between Levinas's notion of the face and the facing (peniyya) of images runs against (...) predominant readings of Levinas which emphasize the Levinasian ambivalence, not to say hostility, toward the visual, and the clear opposition he makes between the face's infinity and the finite and objectifying essence of images. My aim, however, is to show that there is an interesting sense in which Levinas's reflections on the human face offer, perhaps in spite of Levinas, a crucial prism for approaching pictures: I show that the Levinasian face can be understood in a manner that illuminates a dimension of alterity in pictures, one that remains uncontainable and, as such, questions the responsibility of the interpreter and opens up the ethical depth of the image. As a central case study, I turn to a series of provocative graffiti images, chimeric animal-human faces, which were created by Klone, a Tel Aviv-based street artist. (shrink)

Represented as the face of Venice, the houses of the Grand Canal were used during the Renaissance to support the portrayal of the Venetian Republic's unique structure of governance. Paolo Paruta's dialogue, Della perfettione della vita politica, a work of political theory on the Venetian Republic, is one such text used here to examine how in a changing context of modernization, architecture has been presented as a representation of state. Paruta's use of architecture as a representation of state was conceptually (...) different from those earlier writers such as Gasparo Contarini who presented the uniqueness of Venice's social qualities through its orderly governance and law. Fundamental to Paruta's incorporation of architecture to the conceptualization of Venice was Daniele Barbaro's interpretation of Vitruvius? representation of the body-of-state, being reflected in the architectural makeup of the city. However, Vitruvius? text, De architectura, described the monarch's body reflected in the architecture and urban strategies of the late Roman Republic. Paruta's use of the text and of Daniele Barbaro aimed to transfer these values to the Venetian Republic and its social formations. Subtly forging links between the radicalism of Doge Andrea Gritti's renovatio programmes and the power struggles of the young patricians, Paruta's aim for architecture was to support the preservation of Venetian values as distinct from those of Rome. Indications are that Paruta's message was understood. To examine the comprehensibility of Paruta's political propositions, his terms and arguments are analysed in the context of three different architectural composition types used in Venetian houses of the mid-sixteenth century. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of the face as it is caught suspended in private contemplation in candid photography. It starts with a celebrated lineage of photography of anonymous faces that promise the revelation of a secret, absorbed self: Paul Strand's 1916 portrait of a blind street peddler, made with a special right-angled lens; Walker Evans's New York subway portraits (1938?41), shot clandestinely from under his coat; Luc Delahaye's L?Autre (1995?97), ?stolen? from the Paris Metro in the 1990s; and Philip-Lorca (...) diCorcia's Heads (2001), gigantic strobe-lit portraits on the streets of New York. The paper then turns to Australian photographer Cherine Fahd, whose work insistently alludes to the redemptive potential of this promise. This potential is interpreted in terms of Emmanuel Levinas's ethical responsibility to the other, Ariella Azoulay's ?civil contract of photography? and Giorgio Agamben's eschatological understanding of photographic testimony. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida's face appeared prominently on the covers of his books as well as inside them, on posters for his public lectures, on drawings and lithographs. Derrida was also a film star whose face appeared on screen, demonstrated by the fact that at least three films depict him in some depth and reveal his talents and charisma as a performer. In the first of these, in chronological order, Ghost Dance, directed by Ken McMullen in 1983, Derrida, playing himself, is asked (...) whether he believes in ghosts and replies with a smile: ?that's a hard question because you see I am a ghost.? ?The cinema is the art of invoking ghosts,? he declares and then proceeds to explain that film is always a mise-en-scène of ghosts who send us to an invisible beyond. ?A ghost is a trace that signals in advance the presence of its absence.? This is a structure the film borrows from Sioux attempts to establish a relation with ancestors, to let their history haunt them, to make the past a living future. For Derrida, the figure of the ghost was to resurface ? perhaps we should say return ? with Specters of Marx (1993). This essay will be a ghost dance that attempts to argue that Jacques Derrida is not only a revenant (a returner) but also an arrivant, one who arrives. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between subjectivity and representational form. More specifically, it discusses the transformation in self-representation between life and death by the artist Roger de la Fresnaye, reflecting his modernist articulations of life to pre-modern, classicist figurations of death. For the artist, modernity could not bear the demands that dying made upon representation, as unable to fully accord death a sign. Modernity's dissolution of the subject annihilated the very permanence of identity and presence that death guaranteed, but without (...) its covenant of ritual and history. Instead, classicism provided a coherent anterior body, another face from which he could speak after death: ?one? would always be present to speak for him. The face therefore addresses culture through its specific appeal to, and demand of, time, space, and history. (shrink)

This paper examines the apparent contradictions between the use of the fragmented close-up in Fernand Léger's film Ballet mécanique (1924) and his depiction of the cohesive face in his painting in the early 1920s. I argue that this paradox stems from Léger's seeing, in certain pre-war movements whose aesthetics were premised on fragmentation, an endorsement of the supreme value of technology and modernity to the human subject, and of the suborning of that subject to industrial modernity, with all the catastrophic (...) human consequences that were then witnessed in the First World War. These ?aesthetics of fragmentation? are then compared and contrasted with Purism's post-war reconciliation of ?man? as a cohesive being, achieved through its conservative revision of modernist aesthetics. This critique is effected through the ?portmanteau? of Ballet mécanique, which is effectively an assemblage of different pre-war modernist aesthetics contrasted with Purist depictions of cohesive form. (shrink)

In this article I revisit the relationship between Immanuel Kant and the Marquis De Sade, following not Jacques Lacan but Pierre Klossowski. In the process I suggest that Sade's work is marred by a series of antinomies that prevent him from stating a pure practical libertine reason and leave his view purely theoretical.