The Threshold of the Visible World advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic--Kaja Silverman explores the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies. Accounting for these phenomena on both a conscious and an unconcious level, Silverman analyzes the psychic and (...) textual conditions under which our "field of vision" can be expanded. The title of this book is taken from Lacan's essay on the mirror stage. In that text, Lacan writes that "the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world." He thereby suggests that the visible world has no existence as such until the infant subject has access to an image of self. Lacan intimates that the mirror provides the frame through which one relates to others within the domain of vision, stressing the priority of narcissism and the ego over all other libidinal transactions. The Threshold of the Visible World provides a psychic, social and political specification of Lacan's claim, and most particularly of its implications for the subject's relations to the social other. This is accomplished through examination of the ego, as well as two other categories at the center of Lacan's account of the mirror stage: ideality and identification. This book is an ethical-political project which leads to the re-elaboration of a number of crucial theoretical categories--Silverman offers an account of the bodily ego, of identification, of idealization, of the gaze, of the look, and of the "photographic." The Threshold of the Visible World leads as well to the formulation of a fresh model for conceptualizing sexual, racial and class "difference," and the terms under which it might be dismantled. This book thus seeks to apprehend the field of vision through the frame of a different kind of bodily ego, and discover the pleasures to be derived from corporeal transport. (shrink)

Combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis in highly innovative ways, this book seeks to undo the binary opposition between appearance and Being that has been in place since Plato’s parable of the cave. It is, essentially, an essay on what could be called “world love,” the possibility and necessity for psychic survival of a profound and vital erotic investment by a human being in the cosmic surround. Here, the author takes her cue from Freud’s assertion that the “loss of reality” associated with (...) psychosis is a function of a disturbance not in the capacity to reason or perceive, but rather in the capacity for world love, the libidinal and semiotic circuity by means of which such love actualizes itself. In an implicit challenge to poststructuralist thought, the author claims that this love is always in response to a call issued by the world—that the world has, as it were, a vocation: its beauty ought to be seen. We must think of our own being-in-the world as a response to a primordial calling out to respond to this beauty. We are, the author suggests, at the very core of our being, summoned to what she terms world spectatorship. Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenological elaboration of care as the being distinctive of human being and the primarily Lacanian conceptualization of the language of desire specific to each human subject, this metapsychology of love attempts to integrate issues in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual culture, art history, and literary and film studies. (shrink)

Through a wide-ranging discussion, that extends from Ovid and Leonardo da Vinci to Gerhard Richter, and from philosophy and literature to time-based art, Kaja ...

Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki _Speaking about Godard_ New York: New York University Press, 1998 ISBN: 0-8147-8066-0 243 pp.

This article draws from Adriana Cavarero’s considerations on the role of the body in diverse contemporary modalities of violence. We propose a conceptual path along some ideas from Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman in order to state, on the one hand, an onto-epistemological turn that understands the body as the effect of social norms and, on the other, an ethical and political reflection about the levels of violent exposure that suffer those bodies that are excluded from (...) the cultural frames that make a life livable. The concave mirror—as a possibility for other alternative ways of representing the body—is postulated as an alternative to the hegemonic ways in which the representation operates in the configuration of the body as a totality and unity: those that theory links to the flat mirror. (shrink)

Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line is an anti-war film which can be read as an Orphic narrative meditating on the relationship between humans and “nature.” Many scholarly readings of the film have been attracted by analyzes that explore the influences of Cavell and Heidegger on Malick. Kaja Silverman’s recent opus, Flesh of My Flesh, contains a chapter titled “All Things Shining.” She elegantly examines how Malick’s film explores the theme of “finitude.” She argues that, ontologically speaking, human (...) existence gains a more intense “glow” when humans are made aware of their mortality. The present becomes paramount. But like Orpheus, the present seeks to make amends with the past. Taking Silverman’s analysis one step further involves exploring finitude through the film’s many animal, arboreal and geological images. Nature can be read as a “margin” that more fully enhances the film’s exploration of connection and finitude. To this end, the opening chapter of Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy is invaluable. Entitled “Tympan,” Derrida’s introductory essay introduces a wealth of ecological metaphors. These stimulate an interaction between Silverman’s model of finitude, Derrida’s surprising ecologies at the margin and Malick’s quest for what shines in all beings. (shrink)

This essay explores notions of maternal desire within feminist psychoanalysis with an interest in challenging heteronormative frameworks of analysis. Providing close critical readings of texts by Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Kaja Silverman and Hortense Spillers, I trace conceptual openings through which to interpret maternal sexuality as a mobile process of intersubjectivity that is grounded in changing historical relations of experience. I argue that Spillers’ approach transforms a critical process of reading desire away from the insularities and exclusions of (...) conventional psychoanalytic knowledges towards a democratic and reflexive process of representation and analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Looking at Love an Ethics of VisionMieke Bal (bio)Kaja Silverman. The Threshold Of The Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.“The eye can confer the active gift of love upon bodies which have long been accustomed to neglect and disdain,” writes Kaja Silverman in her most recent book, The Threshold of the Visible World. The sentence neatly summarizes her project. “The active gift of love” is (...) the central concept of this book and indicative of the utopian dimension of the theory of love she develops.With Lacan as her primary interlocutor, she sets out to answer a question of one of her students: “does psychoanalysis have a theory of love?” Strange as it might seem, psychoanalysis, so often associated with an excessive interest in sexuality, has not seemed to believe in love. Within the rigorous framework of a discipline that has no use for love and theorizes a bleak view of human nature, Silverman sets out to think through the questions that every parent is at a loss, yet needs, to address: what is love, how can choices in love be culturally encouraged, reoriented, or discouraged? Lacan’s texts on the imaginary order and the visual field, and the imaginary’s stubborn presence within the symbolic order, remain a key resource for those who, like Silverman, wish to understand and analyze, critique and refocus contemporary culture with an eye open to contradictions and complexities. 1The ground for love, the ability to love, is idealization, Silverman claims. Without idealization life would be unbearable, but idealizing is influenced by cultural norms and values that we internalize from early childhood on. Silverman’s project—”to articulate the psychic and aesthetic conditions under which we might be carried away from both ideality and the self, and situated in an identificatory relation to [culturally] despised bodies” [2]—is an attempt to put pressure on two elements of this interaction, “idealization” and “self,” but as she does so she acknowledges the force of the transhistorical, heavy, thick structure of the psyche that is hard, if not impossible, to change.This project, the development of an “ethics of vision,” forms a key part within the larger framework of Silverman’s work. In her first book, The Subject of Semiotics, she argues for and explains the semiotic status of psychoanalysis and the indispensable contribution of psychoanalysis to semiotics. The book remains a valuable handbook for an understanding of the importance of such divergent theorists as De Saussure and Benveniste, Kristeva and Peirce, Freud and Lacan, and the theorists of suture for a coherent and comprehensive theory of culture. One example that will speak to many a cultural analyst is the way Silverman disentangles, and then connects again, the often conflated conceptual pairs of metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement, and paradigm and syntagma, showing that the first pair is situated on the level of interactions between the signifier and [End Page 59] the signified, the second on the level of the signified, and the third on the level of the structuration of the signifier. 2With this book, then, Silverman lays the foundation for a psychoanalytical semiotic that is nevertheless radically cultural in orientation: no conflation or confusion of psyche and culture, no flattening of the one through the other, but an integration that demonstrates convincingly that what happens within a psyche is irrevocably cultural and that every cultural expression entertains a relationship with one or more psyches. The structural similarities and interactions between the two then seem self-evident. But how these interactions work is explained in a manner that renders them analyzable.Silverman is in the habit of raising questions that remain unanswered, and devoting her next book to them. The Subject devoted much attention and analytical energy to filmic images, notably through suture theory, in which the technique of “shot-reverse shot” is central. This technique consists of successive images: first of a character looking at something, and then of what that character presumably sees. This would be the cinematic equivalent of what narratology calls transitions of focalization, likewise a technique used to “suture” image to diegetic character in order to stimulate identification. As in narratology, the question then arises: what exactly... (shrink)

This article reassesses the concept of identification in line with the increased importance phenomenology has taken on in film-philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of identification dominated film theory and criticism, and spectatorial engagement with elements of films was understood as what psychoanalysis calls secondary identification – the identification with stable subject-positions (characters) in the film-text. But non-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology offer film-philosophy a very different understanding of identification as (...) a non image-based, ‘blind’, bodily affective tie that is established between spectators and what Vivian Sobchack describes as ‘the sense and sensibility of materiality itself’ (Sobchack 2004, 65). By first exploring how this more bodily (for psychoanalysis, primary ) identification is theorized by psychoanalysts (Freud, Paul Schilder, Henri Wallon) and by film theorists (Kaja Silverman), the article proposes that film criticism make greater use of it in order to engage more meaningfully with the visible cultural specificities – size, skin colour, age, sex – of the images of bodies viewed on cinema screens. It is not just ‘the’ body that needs bringing back into thinking about film spectatorship, but culturally differentiated bodies , both on the screen and in the auditorium. A psychoanalytic and phenomenological film criticism of embodied cultural identity, one that attends to the materiality of the film and of the body-images and objects on the screen, may be the most culturally and politically useful successor to ‘screen’ theory of the 1970s and 1980s. (shrink)

Many critics view Irigaray's work as an extension or deconstruction of a Lacanian paradigm. Few actually analyse it as a direct challenge to Lacanian concepts of symbolic subjectivity, and the consequent, alternative framework this would envisage. This article discusses a poss ible beyond the phallus, in relation to mediating concepts of the female imaginary and symbolic within her work, and an understanding of the female imaginary and symbolic within different feminist interpretations of the maternal imaginary and symbolic, arguing that the (...) imaginary is crucial in delineating a non-separatist cultural sublimation of female desire. Feminist revisions of the Oedipal by Jessica Benjamin and Kaja Silverman are examined in relation to the question of a maternal imagin ary and symbolic. Irigaray objects to Silverman's privileging of a Lacan ian concept of symbolic castration because it cannot negotiate between the literal relation to the body, and the metaphors and language of our cultural symbolic. Her female imaginary and symbolic provide this mediating link in direct challenge to the overly literal penis of Freud's castration complex and the essentially metaphorical nature of Lacan's phallus. Her mediation is related to the work of diverse psychoanalytic thinkers such as Andrew Samuels, Cornelius Castoriadis and Anthony Elliott. Returning to a feminist reading by Margaret Whitford, this article finally negates a Lacanian understanding of these structures and goes on to explore Irigaray's creative bodily imaginary, within two of her papers on analytic practice. Elaboration of a bodily and creative imaginary within the clinical setting can represent necessary mediation between real and symbolic and between the psyche and culture: this HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No. 2 @ 1997 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) pp. 41-60 [0952-6951(199705)10:2] mediation is personified through the hysteric, not through the Oedipal Law of the Father, which is finally the key question in culturally locat ing female desire, thereby connecting the theory of psychoanalysis with practice and with history. (shrink)

Diotima at the Barricades argues that the debates that emerged from the burgeoning of feminist intellectual life in post-modern France involved complex, structured, and reciprocal exchanges on the interpretation and position of Plato and other ancient texts in the western philosophical and literary tradition. Paul Allen Miller shows how individual works of Anglo-American figures such as Toril Moi, Judith Butler, and Kaja Silverman, as well as movements such as queer theory, are rooted in feminist theoretical debates that began (...) in the sixties in France and have continued right up to the present day. (shrink)

In Moral Case Deliberation, healthcare professionals discuss ethically difficult patient situations in their daily practice. There is a lack of knowledge regarding the content of MCD and there is a need to shed light on this ethical reflection in the midst of clinical practice. Thus, the aim of the study was to describe the content of healthcare professionals’ moral reasoning during MCD. The design was qualitative and descriptive, and data consisted of 22 audio-recorded inter-professional MCDs, analysed with content analysis. The (...) moral reasoning centred on how to strike the balance between personal convictions about what constitutes good care, and the perceived dissonant care preferences held by the patient. The healthcare professionals deliberated about good care in relation to demands considered to be unrealistic, justifications for influencing the patient, the incapacitated patient’s nebulous interests, and coping with the conflict between using coercion to achieve good while protecting human dignity. Furthermore, as a basis for the reasoning, the healthcare professionals reflected on how to establish a responsible relationship with the vulnerable person. This comprised acknowledging the patient as a susceptible human being, protecting dignity and integrity, defining their own moral responsibility, and having patience to give the patient and family time to come to terms with illness and declining health. The profound struggle to respect the patient’s autonomy in clinical practice can be understood through the concept of relational autonomy, to try to secure both patients’ influence and at the same time take responsibility for their needs as vulnerable humans. (shrink)

In this article, I first problematize the concept of rationality as educational ideal through the use of feminist philosophy. I then offer an alternative concept of rationality as educational ideal based on my reading of Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity, epigenesis, and rationality. In a last part, I explore the ontological and normative dimensions of this new concept of rationality through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “hyper-dialectics.”.

I argue that we should rethink the nature and scope of Spinoza’s “one and the same” relation. Contrary to the standard reading, the nature of this relation is not identity but a union, and its scope includes all idea-object pairs, even God and the idea of God. A crucial reason we should adopt this dual picture is that the idea of God must be one and the same as something found when Nature is conceived under each of the other attributes. (...) If “one and the same” is interpreted as a relation of identity, this requirement cannot be met. However, maintaining that God and the idea of God are one and the same not only fulfills this requirement, but also is independently motivated. I also briefly consider how the thesis that God and the idea of God are one and the same affords us with positive insights concerning the nature of this relation. (shrink)

With the themed issue “The Critical Phenomenology of Borders and Migration,” we at Puncta wish to highlight the need for a continued systematic reflection on the lived experiences of migrants in relation to the political and social structures that inform these experiences. By claiming that critical phenomenology can be a fruitful approach to this work, we insist that the complex lived experience of migrants should not only be acknowledged and included in the form of examples and anecdotes, but systematically integrated (...) and interrogated in philosophical conversations on migration-related matters. The hope is that critically attuned phenomenological analyses of migrant lived experiences may contribute to offer new knowledges indispensable for understanding what is actually at stake—philosophically, politically, ethically, and existentially—with the particular situations that migrants, border-crossers and border-dwellers continually negotiate. (shrink)

On the face of it, Plato's treatment of aisthesis is decidedly ambiguous. Sometimes he treats aisthesis as a faculty which, though distinct from all rational capacities, is nonetheless capable of forming judgments such as ‘This stick is bent’ or ‘The same thing is hard and soft’. In the Theaetetus, however, he appears to separate aisthesis from judgment, isolating the former from all prepositional, identificatory and recognitional capacities. The dilemma is easily expressed: Is perception a judgmental or cognitive capacity, or is (...) it a non-judgmental, non-cognitive capacity? If the former, how does perception differ from belief? If the latter, is perception a faculty of the rational or irrational soul? Not surprisingly, the topic has received much scrutiny over the years. And equally unsurprisingly, the debate has turned as much on what it means for a capacity to be judgmental, cognitive, non-judgmental or non-cognitive, as on whether Plato says that it is of either kind. (shrink)

At 47e–53c of the Timaeus Plato presents his most detailed metaphysical analysis of particulars. We are told about the construction of the physical universe, the ways we can and cannot talk about the phenomena produced, and about the two causes – Necessity and Intelligence – which govern the processes and results of production. It seems to me that we are told too much and too little: too much, because we have two accounts of the generation of phenomenal particulars – one, (...) the ‘formal account’, which makes use of the receptacle, Forms and form-copies, and a second, the ‘geometrical account’, which appeals to geometrical shapes, the Demiurge and, apparently, matter; too little, because there is insufficient guidance as to how to relate the two accounts. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Topoi introduces and summarises the relationship between three main varieties of 'enactivist' theorising about the mind: 'autopoietic', 'sensorimotor', and 'radical' enactivism. It includes a brief discussion of the philosophical and cognitive scientific precursors to enactivist theories, and the relationship of enactivism to other trends in embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Background Studies have shown that medical students and residents believe that their ethics preparation has been inadequate for handling ethical conflicts. The objective of this study was to determine the self-perceived comfort level of medical students and residents in confronting clinical ethics issues. Methods Clinical medical students and residents at the University of Maryland School of Medicine completed a web-based survey between September 2009 and February 2010. The survey consisted of a demographic section, questions regarding the respondents’ sense of comfort (...) in handling a variety of clinical ethics issues, and a set of knowledge-type questions in ethics. Results Survey respondents included 129 medical students (response rate of 40.7%) and 207 residents (response rate of 52.7%). There were only a few clinical ethics issues with which more than 70% of the respondents felt comfortable in addressing. Only a slight majority (60.8%) felt prepared, in general, to handle clinical situations involving ethics issues, and only 44.1% and 53.2% agreed that medical school and residency training, respectively, helped prepare them to handle such issues. Prior ethics training was not associated with these responses, but there was an association between the level of training (medical students vs residents) and the comfort level with many of the clinical ethics issues. Conclusions Medical educators should include ethics educational methods within the context of real-time exposure to medical ethics dilemmas experienced by physicians-in-training. (shrink)

This title, first published in 1991, opens with an account by Gadamer of his own life and work and their relation to the achievements of hermeneutics. Building upon the key theme of dialogue, Gadamer and Hermeneutics provides a series of essays, either linked Gadamer to other major contemporary philosophers or focusing on a given Gadamerian theme. This book will be of interest to students of literary theory.

Until about thirty years ago, the extent of disclosure about and consent-seeking for medical interventions was influenced by a beneficence model of professional behaviour. Informed consent shifted attention to a duty to respect the autonomy of patients. The new requirement arrived on the American scene in two separate contexts: for daily practice in 1957, and for clinical study in 1966. A confusing double standard has been established. 'Daily consent' is reviewed, if at all, only in retrospect. Doctors are merely exhorted (...) to obtain informed consent; they often minimise uncertainties about 'best' treatment and they feel duty-bound to provide patients with an unequivocal recommendation for action. 'Study consent' in a clinical trial is reviewed prospectively, and doctors are compelled by regulation to point out that there is insufficient evidence to make a rational choice between two compared treatments. It has been impossible to devise informed consent practices that satisfy, in full, the competing moral imperatives of respect for autonomy, concern for beneficence with emphasis on the value of health, and a vigil for justice. A way must be found to experiment with various discretionary approaches that would strike a realistic balance among competing interests. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a critical phenomenological investigation of immigrant indebtedness, with special focus on its temporality. I understand immigrant indebtedness as a relation of debt where what is owed is gratitude, and which takes on a special meaning when the debtor in question is racially construed as immigrant. Understood as such, immigrant indebtedness has the power to function as a social structure that organizes, conditions and impacts people’s lives. By analysing writer and poet Sumaya Jirde Ali's descriptions of (...) immigrant indebtedness in dialogue with Marianne Gullestad, Alia Al-Saji and Maurizio Lazzarato, I argue that the harm of immigrant indebtedness becomes visible once we pay attention to its temporal structure—involving the permanence of the debt-relation, the freezing and distortion of the past, as well as their limiting effects on future and present. (shrink)

John Alderson, Principled Policing: Protecting the Public with Integrity Winchester, U.K.: Waterside Press, 1998, 185 pp.

DNA transfer directly from cell to cell (conjugation) is common among prokaryotes, particularly Gram‐negative bacteria like Escherichia coli. The phenomenon invariably requires a set of plasmid genes in the DNA donor cell. In addition, E. coli itself makes limited and specific contributions to the donor activity of strains carrying the conjugative plasmid F. These contributions have yet to be defined biochemically, but it is already clear that the cell envelope is an importan nexus between plasmid‐ and chromosome‐encoded proteins required for (...) the establishment and maintenance of DNA donor activity. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The sensorimotor theory is an influential, non-mainstream account of perception and perceptual consciousness intended to improve in various ways on orthodox theories. It is often taken to be a variety of enactivism, and in common with enactivist cognitive science more generally, it de-emphasises the theoretical role played by internal representation and other purely neural processes, giving theoretical pride of place instead to interactive engagements between the brain, non-neural body and outside environment. In addition to offering a distinctive account of the (...) processing that underlies perceptual consciousness, the sensorimotor theory aims to offer a new and improved account the logical and phenomenological character of perceptual experience, and the relation between physical and phenomenal states. Since its inception in a 2001 paper by O’Regan and Noë, the theory has prompted a good deal of increasingly prominent theoretical and practical work in cognitive science, as well as a large body of secondary literature in philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of perception. In spite of its influential character, many of the theory’s most basic tenets are incompletely or ambiguously defined, and it has attracted a number of prominent objections. This thesis aims to clarify the conceptual foundations of the sensorimotor theory, including the key theoretical concepts of sensorimotor contingency, sensorimotor mastery, and presence-as-access, and defends a particular understanding of the respective theoretical roles of internal representation and behavioural capacities. In so doing, the thesis aims to highlight the sensorimotor theory’s virtues and defend it from some leading criticisms, with particular attention to a response by Clark which claims that perception and perceptual experience plausibly depend on the activation of representations which are not intimately involved in bodily engagements between the agent and environment. A final part of the thesis offers a sensorimotor account of the experience of temporally extended events, and shows how with reference to this we can better understand object experience. (shrink)