Several authors have recently argued that the content of pains (and bodily sensations more generally) is imperative rather than descriptive. I show that such an account can help resolve competing intuitions about phantom limb pain. As imperatives, phantom pains are neither true nor false. However, phantom limb pains presuppose falsehoods, in the same way that any imperative which demands something impossible presupposes a falsehood. Phantom pains, like many chronic pains, are thus commands that cannot be satisfied. (...) I conclude by showing that some of the negative psychological consequences of chronic pain are a direct consequence of their imperative nature. (shrink)

The visible human body is composed of flesh and bones for the most part, yet an invisible orchestra of sensations and perceptions creates a virtual or phantom body that behaves like a shadow following every movement and gesture of its anatomical complement. This shadow becomes only “visible” to the individual when bodily integrity is affected, anatomically or cognitively. Phantom limbs have been known for a long time. They refer to the felt presence of a missing hand, leg, or (...) other body part as if it was still in place. Reciprocally and of a supposedly cognitive origin, phantom extremities are reported by some patients that feel the virtual presence of a supernumerary limb – signifying anatomical “overcompleteness.” However, other patients feel as one of their limbs does not belong to their body – signifying “foreignness”. Various shades of the so-called body integrity identity disorder exemplify the assumed complex signification processes within the human body. The Peircean theory of signs and the Uexküllian concept of endosemiosis are combined to approach the still poorly understood phantom phenomena in light of representation and embodiment. (shrink)

In it he came fully to terms with the inadequacy of traditional democratic theory." This volume is part of a continuing series on the major works of Walter Lippmann.

The evolutionary theory of artefact proper function holds that an artefact’s proper function is that effect which explains the reproduction of past instances of the artefact type. This theory has many sources but received its clearest presentation in Beth Preston’s essay “Why Is a Wing Like a Spoon?”. More recently, Preston has raised an objection to the theory, based on the phenomenon of ‘phantom functions’: these are functions that an artefact type is unable to perform, but which nonetheless apparently (...) constitute its proper function. Deflecting qi energy, for example, is the proper function of feng shui mirrors, even though no feng shui mirror is able to do this. Preston concludes that the existence of phantom functions refutes the evolutionary theory of artefact proper function. In this paper, the evolutionary theory is defended, by arguing that it can adequately account for phantom function cases. (shrink)

Phantom limb experiences demonstrate an unexpected degree of fragility inherent in our self-perceptions. This is perhaps most extreme when congenitally absent limbs are experienced as phantoms. Aplasic phantoms highlight fundamental questions about the physiological bases of self-experience and the ontogeny of a physical, embodied sense of the self. Some of the most intriguing of these questions concern the role of mirror neurons in supporting the development of self–other mappings and hence the emergence of phantom experiences of congenitally absent (...) limbs. In this paper, we will examine the hypothesis that aplasic phantom limb experience is the result of an ontogenetic interplay between body schemas and mirror neuron activity and that this interplay is founded on embedding in a social context. Phantom limb experience has been associated with the persistence of subjective experience of a part of the body after deafferentation through surgical or traumatic removal. We maintain that limited association is inconsistent with the extent to which phantom limb experience is reported by aplasic individuals. (shrink)

Mulder and colleagues [Mulder, T., Hochstenbach, J., Dijkstra, P. U., Geertzen, J. H. B. . Born to adapt, but not in your dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1266–1271.] report that a majority of amputees continue to experience a normally-limbed body during their night dreams. They interprete this observation as a failure of the body schema to adapt to the new body shape. The present note does not question this interpretation, but points to the already existing literature on the phenomenology of (...) the phantom limb in dreams. A summary of published investigations is complemented by a note on phantom phenomena in the dreams of paraplegic patients and persons born without a limb. Integration of the available data allows the recommendation for prospective studies to consider dream content in more detail. For instance, “adaptation” to the loss of a limb can also manifest itself by seeing oneself surrounded by amputees. Such projective types of anosognosia in nocturnal dreams should also be experimentally induced in normally-limbed individuals, and some relevant techniques are mentioned. (shrink)

_The Phantom of the Ego _is the first comparative study that shows how the modernist account of the unconscious anticipates contemporary discoveries about the importance of mimesis in the formation of subjectivity. Rather than beginning with Sigmund Freud as the father of modernism, Nidesh Lawtoo starts with Friedrich Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical diagnostic of the ego, his realization that mimetic reflexes—from sympathy to hypnosis, to contagion, to crowd behavior—move the soul, and his insistence that psychology informs philosophical reflection. Through a transdisciplinary, (...) comparative reading of landmark modernist authors like Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Georges Bataille, Lawtoo shows that, before being a timely empirical discovery, the “mimetic unconscious” emerged from an untimely current in literary and philosophical modernism. This book traces the psychological, ethical, political, and cultural implications of the realization that the modern ego is born out of the spirit of imitation; it is thus, strictly speaking, not an ego, but what Nietzsche calls, “a phantom of the ego.” _The Phantom of the Ego _opens up a Nietzschean back door to the unconscious that has mimesis rather than dreams as its _via regia,_ and argues that the modernist account of the “mimetic unconscious” makes our understanding of the psyche new. (shrink)

Music invents, constructs, quite simply makes the body, in sonorous spaces that resonate both within and between us. The disciplinary power of music was well known to the ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese. This disciplinary power holds simply for listeners, but of course is especially true for performers, for people who train their bodies in relation to the prostheses, the instruments, that make music possible. Both systematic and historical, this book is the first truly comprehensive critique of organology (the study (...) of musical instruments as related to the human body). (shrink)

In a working note to The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes an enigmatic call for “a psychoanalysis of Nature.” This paper argues that there are two interrelated ways in which this call might be taken up. First, it might be taken as the demand to give voice to the deep sense of a nature, conceived in terms of unconscious desire rather than scientific rationality, that precedes and exceeds human life. Second, we might do a psychoanalysis of our relationship (...) to nature, of the ways in which modern thought tends to deny and repress the unconscious, organic desire at its heart. This paper addresses the psychoanalysis of nature in both these senses. The first part of this paper takes up Merleau-Ponty’s well-known discussion of the phantom limb in Phenomenology of Perception in order to give a critique the mind-body dualism implicit in traditional attempts to account for this and related phenomena, and in order to present Merleau-Ponty’s own account of the phantom limb in terms of being in the world. Second, I argue that being in the world requires that we repress not only aspects of our personal pasts, but also our organic nature itself. Third, I argue that much of modern scientific thinking tends to deny the bodily and unconscious dimensions of conscious life—it is this denial that calls for a psychoanalysis in the second sense of studying our troubled and repressive relationship to nature. This denial of our own naturalness is accompanied by a denial of the unconscious and irrational nature of nature itself; finally, I will speak to the ways in which psychoanalysis might go further back than we might expect—beyond our childhoods and to the organic heartbeat of life itself. (shrink)

This essay begins with the impossibility of thinking back, or at least of conscious memory, and the need to fix on a fragment, before unconscious memory may emerge as inscription. I then follow the intuition of a link, contained in the cover image of Malcolm Bowie's book Freud, Proust, Lacan: Theory as Fiction, between fictions which theorize and the apparition of the feminine as a haunting incompleteness. It is suggested that such apparitions may be read — like the image in (...) Plato's chora, as read by Pierre Fédida — as a surviving trace, hovering phantom-like between reminiscence and existence. As such, the image might be seen not only as the impensé of theory, producing in texts auratic moments which condense signifiers of present encounter and lost memory trace, but furthermore as the unthinkable feminine negative of masculine pursuit, returning us quite simply to a nodal point of silent gazing. (shrink)

In the article, I propose that the body phantom is a phenomenal and functional model of one’s own body. This model has two aspects. On the one hand, it functions as a tacit sensory representation of the body that is at the same time related to the motor aspects of body functioning. On the other hand, it also has a phenomenal aspect as it constitutes the content of conscious bodily experience. This sort of tacit, functional and sensory model is (...) related to the spatial parameters of the physical body. In the article, I postulate that this functional model or map is of crucial importance to the felt ownership parameters of the body (de Vignemont 2007), which are themselves considered as constituting the phenomenal aspect of the aforementioned model. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is one of Alain Badiou’s principle philosophical enemies. Kant’s critical philosophy is anathema to Badiou not only because of the latter’s openly aired hatred of the motif of finitude so omnipresent in post-Kantian European intellectual traditions—Badiou blames Kant for inventing this motif—but also because of its idealism. For Badiou-the-materialist, as for any serious philosophical materialist writing in Kant’s wake, transcendental idealism must be dismantled and overcome. In his most recent works, Badiou attempts to invent a non-Kantian notion of (...) the transcendental, a notion compatible with the basic tenets of materialism. However, from 1988’s Being and Event up through the present, Badiou’s oeuvre contains indications that he hasn’t managed fully to purge the traces of Kantian transcendental idealism that arguably continue to haunt his system—with these traces clustering around a concept Badiou christens “counting-for-one”. The result is that, in the end, Kant’s shadow still falls over Badiouian philosophy—this is despite Badiou’s admirable, sophisticated, and instructive attempts to step out from under it—thus calling into question this philosophy’s self-proclaimed status as materialist through and through. (shrink)

This article starts from the observation that practices of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ or ‘governance by data’ are reconfiguring modes of social relationality and collectivity. By building, first, on an empirical exploration of digital bordering practices, we qualify these emergent algorithmic categories as ‘clusters’—pulsing patterns distilled from disaggregated data. As fluid, modular, and ever-emergent forms of association, these ‘clusters’ defy stable expressions of collective representation and social recognition. Second, we observe that this empirical analysis resonates with accounts that diagnosed algorithmic governance as (...) a threat to legal subjectivity and socio-political cohesion, and called for a reinvigoration of democratic values and their re-alignment with new ‘infrastructural publics’. Against this backdrop, however, we explore alternatives avenues of legal imagination by pushing in a different (somewhat opposite) direction. Against the re-inscription of liberal categories, we linger with the promise and prospect of illegibility as resistance against the foreclosure of future potentialities in algorithmic forms of subject-making. Instead of falling back on the projection of autonomous human agency and liberal subjectivity to counteract the ‘cluster’, we imagine emancipatory expressions of resistance that are enacted through fugitive, opaque, and experimental collectivities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phantom Mediators: Reflections on the Nature of the Violence in AlgeriaRéda Bensmaïa (bio)Translated by Hassan MelehyIn order to justify himself, each person depends on the crime of the other. There is a casuistry of blood where an intellectual, it seems to me, has no place, except to take up arms himself. When violence responds to violence in an exasperating delirium that makes the simple language of reason (...) impossible, the role of intellectuals cannot be, as we read every day, to excuse from afar one act of violence and condemn another, which has the effect both of angering the one condemned of violence to the point of rage and of encouraging the one who is not condemned to more violence. If they themselves don’t join the combatants, their role (a more obscure one, to be sure!) must be only to work in the direction of an appeasement so that reason may again have a chance.—Albert Camus, Actuelles IIIAt a secondhand bookstore in Santa Monica, I found a story by Friedrich Torberg: “Mein ist die Rache” (“Vengeance is Mine”). The author describes the sadistic practices of a concentration-camp commandant in 1943 who drives a group of Jewish prisoners to commit suicide one after the other. It is almost unbearable to read. One reader, apparently an emigré German Jew, added some bitter marginal notes after the war. On the last page this reader penciled in, “America is full of Jews who love Germany and long for it.”The night after I read this book, a question occurred to me that has stayed on my mind ever since and that I want to pass on to you: What would we all give, each one of us, each individual German, for this not to have happened? It’s a”pan-German” question. Perhaps we will know something more about ourselves if each one of us tries to answer it individually, as honestly and above all as concretely as possible. And doesn’t it lead to three other questions that are worrying us?: What was? What remains? What will be?—Christa Wolf, “Parting from Phantoms”A few weeks after reading Christa Wolf’s text, the same questions continue to haunt me. “Pan-Maghrebian” questions: what would we be willing to give, each one of us, each Algerian in any case, for what is happening now never to have occurred?What was? What remains? What will be? These are the questions that have guided me in the different steps of writing the text I offer here.In the very fine article he contributed under the heading of “The Intellectual and Society” to the Encyclopaedia Universalis, philosopher François Châtelet wrote, “If we confine ourselves to the three historical groups we have arbitrarily taken as examples—the Greek sophist, the ‘judge’ of the Russell Tribunal, and the eighteenth-century philosopher, it is clear that the would-be intellectual claims to be the teacher and the advocate of political [End Page 85] freedom, of the rights of the person, the architect of a transparent society in which the individual and the citizen coincide.“Doubtless,” added Châtelet, “one aspect or another prevails on him, according to the circumstances; but a certain structure subsists, which may allow us to define, superficially and differentially, intellectuals as a group and an agency” [my emphasis].Beginning with this definition, I would like to examine the following questions: What is the status of intellectuals in a country like Algeria? How can it be explained that they have been and still are the victims of the violence that strikes them today?Given the current situation of international politics, the example of Algeria is inevitable, because in the opinion of numerous analysts what is happening in that country is a test case, a limit case that may serve as an indicator of what the future holds for the formerly colonized countries. For many analysts, the evolution of the political situation in Algeria may also serve as an analytical operator in the large ideological movements that are shaking not only the countries of the Maghreb but also the Arab-Muslim world in its totality. And in... (shrink)

In ‘Against vaccine nationalism’, Nicole Hassoun misrepresents our argument, distorts our position and ignores crucial distinctions we present in our article, ‘Love thy neighbor? Allocating vaccines in a world of competing obligations’. She has created a strawman that does not resemble our position. In this reply, we address two features of ‘Against vaccine nationalism’. First, we address a phantom premise. Hassoun misattributes to us a thesis, according to which citizen-directed duties are stronger than noncitizen-directed duties. This thesis is a (...) figment of her imagination, not a fragment of our argument. Second, we address a shape-shifting ism. Ambiguity attaches to ‘vaccine nationalism,’ ambiguity that Hassoun exploits despite our distinguishing various meanings of the phrase. As a result, the type of vaccine nationalism she argues against is not the type we defend. (shrink)

Analogies of grief to amputation and phantom limb are common in memoirs and literary accounts of loss.1 Consider, for example, C. S. Lewis's response to the suggestion that he will "get over" the loss of his wife, in A Grief Observed: Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he's had his leg off it is quite another. … There will (...) be hardly any moment when he forgets it. … His whole way of life will be changed. … At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.2 As Matthew Ratcliffe has argued, though such references may... (shrink)

Title: The Phantom Public Sphere Publisher: University of Minnesota Press ISBN: 0816621268 Author: Bruce Robbins Title: Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 0801844339 Author: Thomas Bender.

How the brain constructs one's inner sense of gender iden-tity is poorly understood. On the other hand, the phenomenon of phantom sensations-- the feeling of still having a body-part after amputation--has been much studied. Around 60% of men experience a phantom penis post-penectomy. As transsexuals report a mismatch between their inner gender identity and that of their body, we won-dered what could be learnt from this regarding innate gender-specific body image. We surveyed male-to-female transsexuals regarding the incidence of (...) phantoms post-gender reassignment surgery. Addition-ally, we asked female-to-male transsexuals if they had ever had the sensation of having a penis when there was not one physically there. In post-operative male-to-female transsexuals the incidence of phan-tom penises was significantly reduced at 30%. Remarkably, over 60% of female-to-male transsexuals also reported phantom penises. We explain the absence/presence of phantoms here by postulating a mis-match between the brain's hardwired gender-specific body image and the external somatic gender. Further studies along these lines may provide penetrating insights into the question of how nature and nur-ture interact to produce our brain-based body image. (shrink)

This paper brings neuroscientific experiments into relation with concepts from phenomenological philosophy to investigate phantom sensations from the perspective of embodied subjectivity. Using a mirror device to create intersensory effects in subjects experiencing phantom sensations, one can create illusions aiming at alleviating phantom pain. Neuroplasticity as a general property of the brain and cortical remapping as a specific mechanism underlying the success of this procedure are interpreted with the phenomenological notions of body image, body schema, and body (...) memory. It is argued that a phantom can be understood as an ambiguous unity of body-imagistic neglect and body-schematic remembering. This neurophenomenological approach highlights the significance of the polarity of subjective-objective embodied experience one the one hand, and the spatial and temporal horizons of the emergence of phantoms on the other. Thereby, implicit and explicit forms of remembering, habitual and reflective modes of behavioural and cognitive self-representation and -understanding can be compared according to how the body integrates its various sensations. (shrink)

This article brings together two concepts, ‘phantom fat’ and ‘liminal fat’, which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, ‘race’, (...) disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance for subjectivity. While it is important to consider corporeality and selfhood as malleable and open to change in order to mobilise oppressive normativities around gendered bodies and selves, we argue that more attention should also be paid to the persistence of corporeality and a feeling of a relatively stable self, and the potential for empowerment in not engaging with or idealising continuous transformation and becoming. Furthermore, we suggest that the concepts of phantom fat and liminal fat can help shed light on some problematic ways in which feminist studies have approached – or not approached – questions of fat corporeality in relation to the politics of health and bodily appearance. Questions of weight, when critically interrogated together with other axes of difference, highlight how experiential and subjugated knowledges, as well as critical inquiry of internal prejudices, must remain of continued key importance to feminist projects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 462-464 [Access article in PDF] The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism,by Ann Banfield; 452 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, $55.00. We have grown accustomed to reading Woolf philosophically. Lucio Ruotolo, Mark Hussey, Gillian Beer, and Pamela Caughie are just a few notable scholars who have used philosophical texts and themes to shed light on Woolf's novels and (...) life, but Ann Banfield's The Phantom Table marks the beginning of a new approach. Contrary to the poststructuralist readings of the last two decades, Banfield treats Woolf as a "philosophical realist" (p. 294), an interpretation that presupposes that "Truth, although logically constructed, remains nonetheless objective, a discovery, as opposed to a creation, of the mind" (p. 94). To justify this approach, Banfield makes a case for privileging Bertrand Russell's "symbolic logic" (p. 42) as "a key if limited influence on Woolf's thinking about language" (pp. 42-43). Simply appropriating elements of Russell's rigorous epistemology, however, is not enough to determine Woolf's thinking, for as Banfield claims: "Woolf's philosophically inflected aesthetic is not one Russell would have foreseen" (p. 54). Roger Fry's astute reflections on Post-Impressionism aesthetics complement Russell's philosophical approach and thereby provide Woolf with a framework for the "novel's realism [which] must relate two competing realities, the private world and the public persona" (p. 324). Through an extraordinarily insightful analysis of the work of Russell and Fry, Banfield offers an intelligent interdisciplinary interpretation of the rigorous epistemological presuppositions at the base of Woolf's aesthetic.Central to Banfield's project is the conviction that reality is mind-independent (p. 101). On this view, "modern fiction ultimately aims to describe a reality beyond privacy" (p. 298), but to understand how we can access that reality we must carefully distinguish sensations, sense-data, and sensibilia. According to Russell, sensations are the private experiences or awareness of a subject, whereas a sense-datum is "that external object of which in sensation the subject is aware" (p. 70). Sensibilia, the lynchpin of Russell's and Banfield's theory, have the same ontological status as sense-data, though they are not necessarily data to a specific mind. Banfield cleverly articulates the ontological priority of sensibilia by reversing Berkeley's famous dictum: "What brings about" sensibilia's "actualization is the perspective's occupation by a subject and the corresponding interception of sensibilia by sense-organs located in time and space" (pp. 74-75). Sensibilia need not be perceived to exist, which places the perceiving subject at the mercy of sensibilia, rather than making sensibilia ontologically dependent upon the perceiving mind.Given the primacy of sensibilia, the epistemological "goal is now to leave one's perspective and imaginatively project oneself into other perspectives, even the possible ones inhumanly occupied, to experience the world as it would be without the thinker" (p. 213). According to this system, the perceiving [End Page 462] subject and the modernist artist become irrelevant because they can inhibit our experience and/or understanding of sensibilia. Eliminating the subject and effacing the author, therefore, become necessary so that "artistic creativity" (p. 173) is given free flow, which means that for art to achieve its goal of seeing "the world 'as far as possible as it is in itself, and not merely through the distorting medium of personal desire'" (p. 382), the death of the subject is mandatory—though this death of the subject differs considerably from Roland Barthes's, Michel Foucault's, and Paul de Man's. Once the subject is eliminated, which occurs in Woolf's novels according to Banfield, the novelist will be able to create a "method of multiple perspectives" which functions as a "route to wider knowledge" (p. 312) of sensibilia.In the last part of the book, Banfield examines how "Fry's aesthetic derives from analytic philosophy" (p. 248) and then argues that Woolf incorporates much of this aesthetic into her work. Fry makes a clear distinction between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Impressionism represents the "totality... (shrink)

_Features a reconstruction of an unfinished text by Jacques Derrida from his most penetrating series of readings of Heidegger’s philosophy._.

In this essay I contrast Freud’s account of mourning in Mourning and Melancholia to that of Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. In suggesting a somatic as well as a psychic response, Merleau-Ponty, I argue, more accurately accounts for the ways in which we experience loss and why, contrary to Freud’s suggestion, mourning’s work is never completed.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 73-89 [Access article in PDF] Phantom Rights Conversations Across the Abyss (Hugo, Blanchot) Suzanne Guerlac —"The writer must save the world and be the abyss, justify existence and give speech to what does not exist...."1—Who is speaking?—Maurice Blanchot.—But this was already revealed to me by the Tables. How are what you call the "two sides [deux versants]" of literature to be distinguished from the "double (...) ray [double rayon]" or the "double face" of the work of art, revealed to me by the voice of Death through the table—through the Winds of the Tomb—and which I recognized as the double furrow of the real and the ideal I had always inscribed through my writing?—What is in question at this point is not merely approaches to literature, or the mechanisms of what you call "genius," but literature itself, and with it, the very operations of the human mind. I asked the question "how is literature possible?" in response to Paulhan in 1942.2 A few years later the question returned differently: is literature possible... after Auschwitz?I have responded to the discourse of the death of art with a notion of writing as an art of death. Is this somehow the same as what the Winds of the Tomb revealed to you? Who knows? You have been dead for more than a century, I have been dying for what seems like ages. 1 "I wrote a book... of the cut off head... I stopped at the point where only you can continue."3 Victor Hugo is speaking, alluding to Le dernier jour d'un condamné, a novel written in a first-person voice which cuts off just before the guillotine drops. His remark acknowledges the commonplace that one cannot speak one's own death, not only because one does not live to tell it, but because one never really experiences it. Another literary figure to have given this matter a lot of thought (along with his friend Georges Bataille) is Maurice Blanchot, whose meditations on writing insist on questions of death and voice.In Hugo's remark, however, it is above all the address that arrests our attention and tempts us to engage Hugo in conversation with Blanchot. Hugo is speaking to André [End Page 73] Chénier, or rather to the spirit of Chénier, which ostensibly communicates to participants in séances conducted in Jersey in 1853-54 under the guidance of the celebrated psychic Mme. de Girardin. He addresses the voice of a dead poet, an absent voice that can only speak through a peculiar form of writing that spells out letters one by one through the tappings of a table. It is a voice that writes since it can no longer speak, having lost its head to the guillotine during the French Revolution. During the séances, Hugo asks Chénier to recount the experience of his death. Is it because Chénier is in the unusual position of speaking from beyond the grave that Hugo expects him to do the impossible, to go beyond the silenced voice of the condemned man, that is, beyond the reach of fiction? How are we to read this writing of the Tables, and what does it have to do with "literature"?The transcript dramatizes fundamental notions concerning writing, death, and relations between the two that Blanchot will theorize a century later in his critical writings. Here, Hugo demands Chénier's impossible account of his own death specifically in response to a demand of writing. What is at stake is not only the continuation of the narrative necessarily aborted in Hugo's novel —"I stopped at the point where only you can continue"—but also the continuation of the poetry of Chénier, interrupted by the poet's untimely death. Responding to Chénier's expressed concern, Hugo and his companions offer to assist Chénier in the completion of his poems. "André," Hugo begins:You desire, and we also desire, to see your oeuvre completed. We will gather piously, and with the respect due your... (shrink)

Amputation of a limb can result in the persistent hallucination that the limb is still present [Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1998]. Distressingly, these socalled ‘phantom limbs’ are often quite painful. Of a friend whose arm had been amputated due to gas gangrene, W.K. Livingston writes: I once asked him why the sense of tenseness in the hand was so frequently emphasized among his complaints. He asked me to clench my fingers over my thumb, flex my wrist, and raise the arm (...) into a hammerlock position and hold it there. He kept me in this position as long as I could stand it. At the end of five minutes I was perspiring freely, my hand and arm felt unbearably cramped, and I quit. But you can take your hand down, he said. (quoted in [Melzack, 1973] 53) In addition to the obvious medical issues, phantom limb pain also presents philosophical problems. Here’s a thorny one: are phantom limb pains hallucinations of pain? (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, the doctrine of informed consent has become a focal point in discussions of medical ethics. The literature of informed consent explores the evolution of the principle of autonomy, purportedly emerging from the mists of 19th Century medical practice, and finding its earliest articulation in legal cases where wronged citizens asserted their rights against medical authority. A commonplace, if not obligatory, feature of that literature is a reference to the case of Mary Schloendorff and the opinion (...) written by Judge Benjamin Cardozo by which the case is remembered. Commentators today applaud the prescience of Cardozo for an early articulation of what eventually would become bioethical orthodoxy concerning informed consent and its place as a bulwark of patient autonomy. They inevitably quote Cardozo's famous statement, “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”. (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, the doctrine of informed consent has become a focal point in discussions of medical ethics. The literature of informed consent explores the evolution of the principle of autonomy, purportedly emerging from the mists of 19th Century medical practice, and finding its earliest articulation in legal cases where wronged citizens asserted their rights against medical authority. A commonplace, if not obligatory, feature of that literature is a reference to the case of Mary Schloendorff and the opinion (...) written by Judge Benjamin Cardozo by which the case is remembered. Commentators today applaud the prescience of Cardozo for an early articulation of what eventually would become bioethical orthodoxy concerning informed consent and its place as a bulwark of patient autonomy. They inevitably quote Cardozo's famous statement, “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”. (shrink)

This study is a major reappraisal of Virginia Woolf's relationship to Bloomsbury and the aesthetic and philosophical developments of her time. Through extensive archival research, Ann Banfield offers the first full analysis of Woolf's engagement with the theories of a remarkable trinity of thinkers: G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Roger Fry.

This article is a phenomenological exploration and description of certain selected aspects of living the specificities and conundrums posed by what is usually, if problematically, called a ‘phantom limb’. Using my own body as an ‘intimate laboratory’, I attend to the dynamics and mutability of the supposed ‘phantom’, both during the post-operative period of the above-the-knee amputation of my left leg as well as after I began to use and incorporate my prosthetic leg. Throughout, I explore the reversible (...) aspects of my two legs as ‘phantom’ and ‘real’, present and absent, and visible and invisible — paying attention, as well, to the lived and linguistic sense we make of our bodies in ‘parts’ and our bodies as ‘whole’. (shrink)

Almost everyone who has a limb amputated will experience a phantom limb--the vivid impression that the limb is not only still present, but in some cases, painful. There is now a wealth of empirical evidence demonstrating changes in cortical topography in primates following deafferentation or amputation, and this review will attempt to relate these in a systematic way to the clinical phenomenology of phantom limbs. With the advent of non-invasive imaging techniques such as MEG (magnetoencephalogram) and functional MRI, (...) topographical reorganization can also be demonstrated in humans, so that it is now possible to track perceptual changes and changes in cortical topography in individual patients. We suggest, therefore, that these patients provide a valuable opportunity not only for exploring neural plasticity in the adult human brain but also for understanding the relationship between the activity of sensory neurons and conscious experience. We conclude with a theory of phantom limbs, some striking demonstrations of phantoms induced in normal subjects, and some remarks about the relevance of these phenomena to the question of how the brain constructs a 'body image.'. (shrink)