In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases into (...) stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

Global bioethics and the environment -- Biodiversity -- Health -- Disease -- Drugs -- Food -- Water -- Global bioethics in practice.

This essay examines Deleuze's account of time and the wound in The Logic of Sense and, to a lesser extent, in Difference and Repetition. As such, it will also explicate his understanding of the event, as well as the notoriously opaque ethics of counter-actualisation that are bound up with it, before raising certain problems that are associated with the transcendental and ethical priority that he accords to the event and what he calls the time of Aion. I will conclude by (...) proposing a dialectic between the two aspects of time that he counterposes (Aion and Chronos, roughly the disjunctive and the conjunctive) that does not instantiate any kind of a priori privilege of the one over the other. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea that Deleuze’s oeuvre is best understood as a philosophy of the wound, synonymous with a philosophy of the event. Although this wound/scar typology may appear to be a metaphorical conceit, the motif of the wound recurs frequently and perhaps even symptomatically in many of Deleuze’s texts, particularly where he is attempting to delineate some of the most important differences (transcendental, temporal, and ethical) between himself and his phenomenological predecessors. I raise some some potential problems for (...) this trajectory, most of which revolve around Deleuze's use of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

The article presents a study that aims to bring together the image and the word or ways of knowing through the concept of words and their respective ways to see images. Accordingly, when words are put together, phenomenological insight has been followed which does justice to lived experiences. Moreover, the author stresses the idea of the punctum in words as a wound.

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of (...) influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance. (shrink)

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of (...) influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance. (shrink)

If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory. Friedrich Nietzsche.

With a crown of thorns on his head, nails in his hands and feet, and a spear wound in his chest, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who was hanging on the Cross, has occupied Christians for hundreds of years and continues to do so. All Christian faith centres around Jesus, who sacrificed himself on the crucifix for this symbolized event, or "salvation of sinful mankind." In this framework, Christians believe that every human being should imitate the life of Christ as a (...) "model savior", and especially experience the same wounds and passion on the crucifix. Paul was the first to say that he had the scars of Christ on his body. Francis of Assisi and others followed him, and they were considered stigmatics/stigmata bearers. In our country, although there have been many studies on Jesus, no study on the subject of stigmata has been found. Therefore, in this article, the emergence of the understanding of stigmata in the context of bearing the wounds of Jesus Christ on the cross on the body of believers, its historical development, the perceptions of the Middle Ages and the stigmata of Paul and Francis of Assisi will be discussed. Thus, the development of the understanding of stigmata in the Christian world and how effective it is will be tried to be revealed. (shrink)

How should we respond to injuries done to us and to the hurts that we inflict on others? In this thoughtful book, Wounds Not Healed By Time, Solomon Schimmel guides us through the meanings of justice, forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation. In doing so, he probes to the core of the human encounter with evil, drawing on religious traditions, psychology, philosophy, and the personal experiences of both perpetrators and of victims.

The wounds inflicted by Homer's warriors fascinate readers, since they are vividly described and often curious or even grotesque. Commentators have struggled to explain some of them since commentaries began: some of the explanations are more curious than the wounds. Not surprisingly, the commentaries have not usually been graced by a high standard of anatomical or, especially, physiological background knowledge, and are often misleading in these respects. When such knowledge is applied, some wounds which have appeared problematic (...) become realistic, but some which have been accepted as straightforward become problematic. (shrink)

The wounds inflicted by Homer's warriors fascinate readers, since they are vividly described and often curious or even grotesque. Commentators have struggled to explain some of them since commentaries began: some of the explanations are more curious than the wounds. Not surprisingly, the commentaries have not usually been graced by a high standard of anatomical or, especially, physiological background knowledge, and are often misleading in these respects. When such knowledge is applied, some wounds which have appeared problematic (...) become realistic, but some which have been accepted as straightforward become problematic. (shrink)

The wounds inflicted by Homer's warriors fascinate readers, since they are vividly described and often curious or even grotesque. Commentators have struggled to explain some of them since commentaries began: some of the explanations are more curious than the wounds. Not surprisingly, the commentaries have not usually been graced by a high standard of anatomical or, especially, physiological background knowledge, and are often misleading in these respects. When such knowledge is applied, some wounds which have appeared problematic (...) become realistic, but some which have been accepted as straightforward become problematic. (shrink)

A WOUND ON POETRY: A READING OF PASOLINI’S TEOREMA Through analyzing Pasolini’s Teorema, the intention of the paper is to suggest that besides a sublimated effervescence that, according to Durkheim, blends people together, there is also another force that does not let itself be sublimated and for this reason checkmates the Symbolic order of society. This force is the death drive, namely the drive that, according to Freud, is beyond the pleasure principle and works against the flourishing of the individual (...) inside society. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in vulnerability focusses mainly on normative questions concerning its relevance for moral, political and legal theory. However, beneath these questions there lies another one which is epistemological: How do we gain clear knowledge about another person’s pain and suffering? How do we recognize a wounded life? Drawing primarily on the account of Elaine Scarry, the article aims at showing that the difficulties to apprehend and recognize a life as injured are not only grounded in political and cultural frames, (...) as Judith Butler contends, but also in the phenomenological and epistemic features of pain itself. Pain is epistemically fragile. Whereas it is almost impossible to ignore one’s own pain, it is very easy to overlook the pain of others. This epistemic slope has concrete effects on the social and political life. Regarding vulnerability, the normative question of recognition and the epistemic question of recognizability, thus, are closely intertwined. (shrink)

This study reviews various discourses around female sexual mutilation from the perspective of the human and social sciences, and also current debates between supporters of the cultural argument and those defending the universality of human rights. An aside about the Dogon myth of world order recorded by Marcel Griaule in Dieu d’eau or Aristotle’s philosophical discourse in the Reproduction of Animals is required in order to widen the debate and see its importance as regards the dignity of the human person. (...) In Aristotle woman is a freak accident, she interrupts the circle that goes from man to man so that he can start off again. Woman is a "catastrophe" necessary to the exercise of the male genitalia; her body is naturally mutilated and incomplete. In the Dogon myth the clitoris rises up like a termite-hill, it is oversized and must be knocked down, that is, excised. Between excessive size, monstrousness and ugliness come discourses which have since time immemorial accompanied and justified wounding the female genitals. But today a medical type of discourse, which is widely accepted, is aiming to repair excised genitalia and give back to women the happiness of a recovered body. Thus we may ask what "woman’s dignity" consists of and whether it is the same as the "dignity of the human person". (shrink)

Feet play a crucial role in migration, and experiences of death and hopes for new life are etched into migrants’ soles. In the face of complex and fraught ethical debates that have largely been deontological and teleological in tone, this article employs feet and footwashing as heuristic devices to suggest the need for receiving communities to develop a multi-textured virtue-based response alongside these. Cultivation of a habitus rooted in attention to bodies, service, power subversion, mutuality and confession could lead to (...) new life both for those in migration and those long settled. (shrink)

In the years since the publication of _The Wounded Healer_, countertransference has become a central consideration in the analytic process. David Sedgwick’s work was ground-breaking in tackling this difficult topic from a Jungian perspective and demonstrating how countertransference can be used in positive ways. Sedgwick’s extended study of the process candidly presents the analyst’s struggles and shows how the analyst is, as Jung said, "as much in the analysis as the patient". The book extends Jung’s prescient work on countertransference to (...) create a dynamic view of the analyst-patient interaction, stressing the importance of the analyst’s own woundedness and how this may be used in conjunction with the patient’s own. Sedgwick begins with a discussion of the need and justification for a Jungian approach to countertransference, then reviews Jungian theories and presents detailed illustrations of cases showing the complexity of transference-countertransference processes in both the patient and the analyst, and concludes with a model of countertransference processing. This Classic Edition also includes a new introduction by the author. It will be an important work for Jungian analysts, psychotherapists and other clinicians and students interested in the struggles of the therapeutic process. (shrink)

The question of whether the ascended and glorified body of Christ retains the marks of the wounds first became an issue of theological importance in the fifth century with the writings of Cyril of Alexandria and it continued to be developed until the Reformation, when both Luther and Calvin rejected the idea. For the patristic and medieval theologians, the enduring reality of the wounds testify to the intimate connnection between the economy of God’s salvific work within the created (...) order and the eternal economy. It underscored God’s ongoing good intention for, and engagement with, fallen creation. However transformed in glory, the ascended Christ is not to be thought of as dehominised and the evidence of his history as the incarnate and suffering human being is not to be erased. Suffering and sinful humanity finds itself in the Son at the right hand of the Father and it can see there the evidence that the divine heart has and continues to beat with compassion for humanity in its continuing brokenness. It is the enduring presence of the marks of the wounds in heaven that testifies to the divine engagement with the sinful human condition, in both judgment and mercy, which in turn is the basis of humankind’s response of thankfulness. Résumé L’idée que le corps glorifié du Christ, lors de son Ascension, portait ou ne portait pas les stigmates de ses souffrances, devint une question théologique importante pour la première fois au ve siècle, dans les écrits de Cyrille d’Alexandrie, et continua d’être discutée jusqu’à la période de la Réforme, lorsque Luther et Calvin rejetèrent d’emblée cette idée. Aux yeux des Pères de l’Église et des théologiens de l’époque médiévale, la permanence des plaies ouvertes témoignait du rapport étroit entre l’économie salvifique de Dieu à l’intérieur d’un ordre créé et l’économie éternelle. Cela soulignait la continuité de la bienveillance de Dieu et son engagement envers la création déchue. Même glorifié, le Christ de l’Ascension ne doit pas être perçu comme non humain, et les preuves de son passage sur la terre, comme être humain ayant connu la souffrance, ne doivent pas être effacées. Une humanité pécheresse et souffrante se retrouve dans le Fils, à la droite du Père, et reconnaît la compassion du Coeur divin qui continue de battre pour l’humanité sans cesse brisée. La présence durable au ciel des plaies ouvertes témoigne de l’engagement de Dieu envers l’humanité pécheresse, dans son jugement ou sa clémence ; en retour, cet engagement s’avère être le fondement de la réponse de gratitude de l’humanité. (shrink)

The culmination of three decades of studying and treating survivors of adult onset trauma, _Wounded by Reality_ is the first systematic attempt to differentiate adult onset trauma from childhood trauma, with which it is frequently confused. When catastrophic events overtake adult lives, they often scar the psyche in ways that psychodynamically oriented clinicians struggle to understand. For Ghislaine Boulanger, the enormous challenge of working with these patients is unsurprising. Survivors of major catastrophe, whether a natural disaster, a life-threatening assault, a (...) serious accident, or an act of terrorism, experience a near-fatal disruption of fundamental aspects of self experience. The sense of agency, of affectivity, of bodily integrity, the capacity for self-reflection, the sense of time, and the ability to relate to others - all are called into question. (shrink)

The focus of this note is the simile attached to Menelaus’ wound in Iliad 4 and its Virgilian transformation in Aeneid 12. My goal is to flesh out and specify the sense of the Homeric simile; as the parentheses in my title suggest, I call upon Virgil chiefly as a fellow-interpreter. Since an important part of my argument is that the simile only takes on its full significance when considered in its narrative context, I begin by setting the scene.

Body and image are crucial to the elaboration of both Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy andClaire Denis’s work in cinema. Nancy’s short book about the body, Corpus ,though it may initially have appeared as a minor work in his œuvre, has since been shown,and notably since the intervention of Jacques Derrida, as the cornerstone of much ofNancy’s late thought. As Derrida demonstrates, Nancy’s interest in the body turnsaround the crucial trope of touch which comes to stand, in his philosophy, as the marker (...) ofthe most fundamental limits that shape our understanding of and interaction with theworld: between inside and outside, subject and object, matter and meaning. As such, theconcept of touch frequently recurs in the discussion of art works, where the inscription of amaterial trace coincides with, or touches upon an evanescent sense. Nancy’s discussions ofartistic meaning have frequently centred around images – both painterly and filmic – asthe phenomena whereby the real, in manifesting its presence, is granted a certain sense.1Claire Denis, in common with the vast majority of live-action filmmakers, necessarily dealsin images and bodies – images of bodies – but her frequent refusal to provide thetraditional cinematic signifiers of psychological depth often means that the spectator isbrought up short before the strangeness of these bodies as bodies, which in turn opens upan interrogation as to the sense of her images. The mutual fascination that exists betweenNancy and Denis is well established, demonstrated by Nancy’s detailed, published engagements with Denis’s films – Beau travail , Trouble Every Day , L’Intrus – as well as by Denis’s short film portrait of the philosopher – Vers Nancy –and her cryptic appropriation of his text L’Intrus . But their engagement witheach other’s work appears in the image of Nancy’s somewhat abstract conception of touch:an approaching and withdrawing, a momentary proximity to the other that serves as muchto consolidate the stable identity of the one as it does to share in the identity of the other.Mirroring this intermittent relationship, this article will seek not to over-state theinterpenetration of the two œuvres, but merely to sketch some points of contact betweenthem, turning notably around the fascinating, but perhaps ultimately untouchable figureof the wound. (shrink)

Although VL30 retrotransposable elements have been associated with certain cancers for nearly twenty years, because of their expression in rodent malignancies and recombination into murine sarcoma viruses, their causative role, if any, in cancer has been uncertain and enigmatic. Recent findings suggest loss of normal transcriptional control of specific VL30 element expression may make a critical contribution to tumor progression at a step associated with malignant conversion, by bringing into play a cellular program normally involved in wound healing. This program, (...) the fibroblast anoxic response system, includes an adaptation to glycolytic metabolism, secretion of metalloproteinases, and activation of an endonuclease. While appropriate for facilitating debris removal during wound healing, loss of control of this program in a cell which has already progressed to the benign neoplastic state has the potential to simultaneously produce the invasiveness and genomic instability charateristic of malignancy. Examination of tumors and tumor derived cell lines has confirmed that key aspects of this system are in fact activated in cancer. (shrink)

We propose to study the wound healing in Zebrafish by using firstly a differential approach for modelling morphogens diffusion and cell chemotactic motion, and secondly a hybrid model of tissue regeneration, where cells are considered as individual objects and molecular concentrations are described by partial differential equations.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recognizing Wounds and Giving Uptake The Undoing of Dominant Collective MemoriesEmily Walsh*, PhD (bio)I want to begin this response by thanking Dr. Kirmayer and Dr. Potter for taking the time to craft insightful and intellectually stimulating responses to my article. Both commentaries enabled me to clarify the complexity of the question of how best to commence the undoing of dominant collective memories (DCMs) in psychiatry. In this response, (...) I will clarify what I intend to capture by the term DCMs, tackle two problems identified with my account, and end by remarking on the solutions proposed by the authors, defending that a hybrid combination of both positions leaves us with the most robust solution to the problems created by DCMs.I briefly outline in the article that DCMs are singular and exclusionary collective memories underpinned by colonialism. Potter expresses concern about being left with uncertainty regarding what sorts of DCMs serve to deny the violence faced by the colonized given this definition. This concern is important as it shows that there is some conceptual confusion about how to distinguish ordinary collective memories from DCMs, which I propose ought to be rejected. Addressing this concern would also be useful for the reason Potter makes; to help better motivate why change is required in psychiatry regarding DCMs. In response to Potter's definitional concern, I will now posit a thicker explanation of DCMs, which outlines how they are distinct from ordinary collective memories on three grounds.DCMs are unique from other kinds of collective memory insofar as they deny that there could be various perspectives of the same event. This denial occurs in multiple ways, such as silencing, scapegoating, attacking, and undermining others' perspectives, painting certain actors as all good and others as all bad. Therein lies the danger of DCMs as I have defended that people are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but they are at the mercy of their social situation. Good examples of cases of the kind of DCMs I have in mind are how colonial nations defend their reasons for engaging in colonialism and failing to acknowledge sectors of history entirely (such as failing to recognize horror crimes against certain social and ethnic minorities). Such a failure to integrate both positive and negative parts of a nation's history is not [End Page 249] present in all contexts. For instance, Germany has integrated teaching about the horrors endured during Nazi Germany into their historical narrative of the past to avoid reproducing similar atrocities in the future. Places like the UK and Canada are slower to follow suit and admit that there are horrors present in the nation's past too.DCMs are also unique in legitimizing and reproducing negative and positive stereotypes, ideals, and cultural myths. Such stereotypes tend to be harmful such as "I expect X group always to steal," but they can also be positive "I expect X to be the most intelligent person I've ever met." As Fanon instructed us (Fanon 1964, 1967), these stereotypes are entrenched in the content of DCMs. Similarly, they are reproduced with the intent of controlling specific populations of persons. If, after all, I have 'evidence' that you are a thief by 'nature,' I will seek to protect my belongings from you. The problem is that the 'evidence' is not evidence—it is a form of DCM. The evidence fails to see processes of racialization and colonialism and thereby, advertently or inadvertently, reproduces them.As reiterated by Kirmayer in his commentary, DCMs are not primarily concerned about individual and discrete events, but they aim to produce narratives of events. According to Kirmayer, these narratives are imbued with explanations and rationalizations that drive the plot forward in time. My primary concern in the article was to show that DCMs can work to move the plot backward in time as a means of controlling specific populations—back to a time the world does not recognize as a time but forces racialized persons to keep perpetually enduring the aftereffects of (Al-Saji, 2013, 2021). Thus, there are deep contradictions in DCMs which are not present in all collective memories. On the one hand, DCMs deny the violence inflicted on the... (shrink)

The Wounded Researcher addresses the crises of epistemological violence when we fail to consider that a researcher is addressed by and drawn into a work through his or her complexes. Using a Jungian-Archetypal perspective, this book argues that the bodies of knowledge we create degenerate into ideologies, which are the death of critical thinking, if the complexity of the research process is ignored. Writing with soul in mind invites us to consider how we might write down the soul in writing (...) up our research. (shrink)

The publication of Derrida's fragment Le Calcul des langues — Distyle offers an insight into Derrida's negotiation with empiricism and his rethinking of rhetoric in the early 1970s. Delineating Condillac's pervasive idealization of empiricism, Derrida gestures to a pain-becoming-pleasure and pleasure-becoming-pain that resists the fixed identity of the proper body. His emphasis on the pains and wounds of rhetoric registers both the limits of Condillac's philosophical project and the possibility of another kind of empiricism, of the gaps that border (...) on the word and the body. The article includes a reading of rhetoric and sex in Rousseau, as a gesture to Derrida's still unpublished seminar on rhetoric. It closes with an examination of the two-columned nature of Derrida's work, which ends mid-word and mid-sentence. (shrink)

One of the urgent tasks facing Christian educators at the present time is how they might encourage the spiritual growth of their students. This paper invites reflection on this central question by discussing the role aesthetics might play with particular focus on its relationship to the ‘spiritual senses’, a theme which has been strikingly absent from recent publications on religion and Christian education. Paying particular attention to the work of the contemporary French phenomenologist, Jean-Louis Chrétien, I shall argue that art (...) invites us to listen to as well as to see the power of beauty. Educators should not ignore this capacity of art to engage the spiritual senses within a contemplative ethos of silence. But I go further than simply pointing to these seminal ideas about Christian formation, by discussing the ‘wound’ that beauty inevitably inflicts. I illustrate this suggestion by referring to Pope Benedict XVI's essay ‘Wounded by the Arrow of the Beautiful’ and to two visualizations of religion: Delacroix's painting Fight between Jacob and the Angel and Beauvois' film Of Gods and Men. (shrink)

This paper explores the scientific production of experimental wounds, suggesting that these scientific research programs illuminate the consequences of the historical relationship between technical knowledge production and the state's monopoly on violence.

Taken from a published report on wound ballistics research during World War II, Figure 1 depicts the abdomen of a cat that has been shaved, anesthetized, marked with a grid, and shot. The individual squares are frames, the caption says, “ from a high speed motion picture of a cat’s abdomen, showing the volume changes and movements caused by a 6/32nd inch steel sphere.” We can recognize in this image the conventions of scientific inscription. The technologies are sophisticated, quantitative, impressive. (...) The image speaks for itself. Or does it? What exactly is happening when an anesthetized cat with a shaved abdomen painted with a grid gets shot, in a laboratory, and when that event is hyper-documented in high speed photographs, and deployed in a range of texts as evidence? And what do these human creations — these highly quantified experimental wounds — tell us about the culture and practice of twentieth-century science? (shrink)

This article develops an existential perspective on what has been called ‘narcissism’. Using both the psychoanalytic tradition and the literary myth of Narcissus as ‘touchstones’, it unfolds a view of existential dilemmas and possibilities that are announced by this discourse. As such, it seeks to clarify the existential task of embodying human vulnerability – a journey that is potentially the source and depth of human compassion. With the help of the perspectives of A. H. Almaas and Eugene Gendlin, the phenomenon (...) of ‘soulful space’ is named, and pursued in both logical and evocative ways. 'Soulful space' is articulated as an existential achievement and an alternative response to the call of Narcissus: an embodiment of both vulnerability and freedom; a freedom-wound that grounds interpersonal empathy and openness. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 4, Edition 1 July 2004. (shrink)

What if our politics are shaped by the texture of wounds rather than the identity of selves? What possible future will have been opened up by posing that very question? I take up Eve Sedgwick’s invitation to begin with stigma “as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy” for a transformative queer politics and elaborate Sedgwick’s attention to spoiled identity through Hortense Spiller’s conceptualization of the flesh. The flesh substantiates the grounds for a materialist ontology that begins with stigma, the (...) materiality of the wound, to constitute a transformative politics toward a fugitive elsewhere. Reading Sedgwick and Spillers together opens up a transformative ontological register that spans the material, affective, and fugitive. I argue that the hieroglyphics of the flesh give us knowledge of ourselves and others and the world we have lived through but also invite us to transform who and what we are, how we relate, and what a world might look like where our being is not constituted by fugitive survival. I suggest that such hieroglyphics can be engaged by touching wounds understood as a haptic reading of textures impressed on our embodied being while paying attention to the lines of flight that erupt from the wound. (shrink)

Abstract:What if our politics are shaped by the texture of wounds rather than the identity of selves? What possible future will have been opened up by posing that very question? I take up Eve Sedgwick’s invitation to begin with stigma “as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy” for a transformative queer politics and elaborate Sedgwick’s attention to spoiled identity through Hortense Spiller’s conceptualization of the flesh. The flesh substantiates the grounds for a materialist ontology that begins with stigma, the (...) materiality of the wound, to constitute a transformative politics toward a fugitive elsewhere. Reading Sedgwick and Spillers together opens up a transformative ontological register that spans the material, affective, and fugitive. I argue that the hieroglyphics of the flesh give us knowledge of ourselves and others and the world(s) we have lived through but also invite us to transform who and what we are, how we relate, and what a world might look like where our being is not constituted by fugitive survival. I suggest that such hieroglyphics can be engaged by touching wounds understood as a haptic reading of textures impressed on our embodied being while paying attention to the lines of flight that erupt from the wound. (shrink)

Though the exact dating is contentious, philosophy at some point took a “linguistic turn,” or maybe a few of them. Certainly late in the twentieth century, influenced by literary theory, the discipline began to attend to language with nearly Talmudic care. “Everything is a text,”1 we read, and since, after all, we were reading it, the notion seemed persuasive. Soon enough, of course, critics perceived that those playing about in this approach to language were having entirely too much fun, getting (...) a little too literary for philosophical tastes. Whether ill tempered or simply tempering, insightful or sullen, criticism noted not only that some theorists seemed insufficiently attentive to historical context—a claim .. (shrink)

As a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on the resolution and prevention of enmity, this article concerns how enmity deforms social as well as individual personality. Societies need time and must exert significant effort, much of it intellectual, in order to recuperate: they need to recover both from harms that others have intentionally done them and from having done harm to others. Social recuperation is difficult because the tactics and standards of wartime seep into civilian and personal domestic life. (...) In contemporary American life, the proliferation of armed and gated communities, the institution of the house gun, the general acquiescence in stop-and-frisk encounters, and the incarceration in huge numbers of gang members and small-time drug dealers are examples. An inverse relationship of wartime and peacetime abuses is also apparent: behaviors associated with civilian private life are deployed during wartime as techniques with which to humiliate and torture enemy combatants. This type of mimetic effect reaches the limit of complexity when wartime abuses that mirror domestic abuses are then mirrored in their further application to domestic settings that themselves have become militarized. (shrink)