본 연구의 목적은 현자의 사변을 강조하는 에크하르트의 신비주의와 직관적 체험에 근거한 여성 신비주의를 비교 검토함으로써 중세 그리스도교적 신비주의의 일면을 고찰하는 것이다.BR 에크하르트에 따르면 인간의 영혼은 신의 본성 안에 있는 모든 것으로 만들어진 것이기에 신의 본성을 부은 것이라 할 수 있다. 인간이 신에게 이르는 길은 인간이 자신의 형상을 벗어나 자신을 신의 형상으로 변형시켜야 한다. 이를 위해 인간은 자기 자신과 모든 사물로부터 떠나서 자유로워져야 한다. 에크하르트가 말하는 ‘영혼 속에 신의 탄생’은 신과 영혼이 하나임을 의미한다.BR 힐데가르트에게 주어진 근원적인 신비 체험은 경건한 자들에게 주어지는 (...) 영적 계시로서 신과의 합일이라는 복된 체험이다. 메히트힐트에게 있어서 신과의 신비적 합일은 ‘사랑’이라는 개념으로 나타나며, 정열적인 남녀의 사랑으로 형상화 된다. 카타리나에 따르면 그리스도는 인성을 입은 덕택에 천상에서 지상까지 다리를 놓을 수 있었다. 그러므로 인간의 영혼은 사랑 안에서 신과 하나가 될 수 있다.BR 에크하르트의 신비주의는 ‘영혼 속에 신의 탄생’이라는 사변적인 모습으로 나타나지만, 여성 신비주의는 그리스도 예수와의 혼인이라는 이미지를 통하여 내가 그리스도 안에 있는 조화로운 합일을 강조하며 신비적인 체험에 머무는 것이 아니라 이웃에 대한 사랑이라는 활동적 삶으로 나아간다. (shrink)

Nietzsche commits himself to a practice of honesty (Ehrlichkeit) in Schopenhauer as Educator. This article argues that this practice is an adaptation of Diogenes’s parrhēsia, the Cynic virtue of outspokenness, and that Nietzsche’s commitment to Ehrlichkeit increases from 1874 to 1888. The article emphasizes the interpersonal dimensions of Ehrlichkeit and parrhēsia and the author resists the widespread tendency to conflate Nietzsche and Diogenes in terms of shamelessness. The article demonstrates that, using Diogenes as an exemplar, Nietzsche gradually renounces the scholarly (...) pretense of hiding the personal significance of his opinions behind needlessly theoretical language. This development culminates in his explosive autobiography, Ecce Homo, which the author interprets, against the grain of Nietzsche scholarship, as the book of Ehrlichkeit, not Redlichkeit, par excellence. (shrink)

Philosophical suspicions about the place of shame in the psychology of the mature moral agent are in tension with the commonplace assumption that to call a person shameless purports to mark a fault, arguably a moral fault. I shift philosophical suspicions away from shame and toward its absence in the shameless by focusing attention on phenomena of shamelessness. In redirecting our attention, I clarify the nature of the failing to which ascriptions of shamelessness might refer and defend the (...) thought that, as an evasion of moral self-censure, shamelessness can be morally pernicious. Far from foregoing shame, I conclude, we should be mindful of its moral importance and unapologetic in its defense. (shrink)

Does shame have a limited moral role because it is associated with a loss of self-respect or is it an important emotional support for socially beneficial behaviours? Aristotle supports the latter position. In his ethical theory, he famously claims that shame is a semi-virtue essential in the habituation of moral norms. He clarifies this role in the Rhetoric’s lesser-known distinction between true and conventional shame, which implies human beings make subjective evaluations of those appropriated cultural norms. Importantly, he locates this (...) potential for ethical assessment in friendship and not in public discourse, as he thinks it would be shameless to publicly evaluate moral rules. The article ends by exploring potential critiques to his position and argues that Aristotle’s approach makes shame indispensable for moral progress, even though we might want to consider some limited role for shameless public protest. (shrink)

A recurring concern about luck egalitarianism is that its implementation would make some individuals, in particular those who lack marketable talents, experience shame. This, the objection goes, undermines individuals’ self-respect, which, in turn, may also lead to unequal respect between individuals. Loss of (self-)respect is a concern for any egalitarian, including distributive egalitarians, inasmuch as it is non-compensable. This paper responds to this concern by clarifying the relationship between shame and (self-)respect. We argue, first, a luck egalitarian society and ethos (...) would be radically different from the current one and incompatible with shame over lack of talent, and, second, that while shame may still occur in a less than ideal luck egalitarian society, this kind of shame does not undermine egalitarian commitments. (shrink)

Camp might be said to be a queer object to the extent that it resists any attempt to define it in language. This essay reads Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair as a demonstration of the more performative and affective understanding of camp that is needed to overcome the conceptual impossibility of camp’s existence in language alone. This essay reconceptualizes camp as a performative and affective social phenomenon by reading the protagonist of White’s text as an exemplary figure who resists disciplinary (...) identity and legibility through a series of camp performances. Camp emerges at the conclusion of this essay as a mediation of a particular subject–object relation, and its emblem is the bandaid. For if shame appears to tyrannize the life of Twyborn’s protagonist, that subjugation is not total: shame’s performativity gives birth to a defiantly camp persona that re-routes shame as shamelessness. Camp advertises itself as a means of living in and living through performances of gender and sexuality. Shame is thus an important resource for both understanding the protagonist of White’s text and understanding the camp politics of queer critique that he embodies. Camp is a queer object that facilitates the healing of the shameful wound afflicting performative identities. (shrink)

This article develops a new phenomenological account of the shame people typically tend to feel when seen naked by others. Although shame at nakedness is a paradigmatic and widespread form of shame, it has been under-explored in the literature on shame. The central thesis of the article is that shame at nakedness is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and constituted by our capacity for social self-consciousness. I argue that our ability to sense how others see us (...) and judge us gives rise to a dynamic tension between our effort to control our public self-presentation and the experience of being exposed to others in an uncontrolled manner. What makes us prone to feel shame or shame anxiety at being seen naked is that we feel that we have revealed our naked and true self as potentially or actually shameful and that our public persona has been undermined. Furthermore, the vulnerability and lack of control that are part and parcel of naked exposure can be a source of shame. In my analysis, shame at nakedness encompasses both literal bodily nakedness and other kinds of uncontrolled and unguarded exposure. The article also offers an argument as to the roots of the more or less ubiquitous tendency to feel shame at exhibiting one’s genitals in public. I develop my account through critical engagements with the main contemporary attempts to account for shame at nakedness, critiquing their insufficiencies and reframing their insights. (shrink)

(2013). SLUMBERING KISSES, SHAMELESS ENTANGLEMENTS: “la découverte de freud”. Angelaki: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 3-15.

An important question that is often raised, whether directly or indirectly, in philosophical discussions of shame‐inducing behavior concerns whether the experience of shame has unique moral value. Despite the fact that shame is strongly associated with negative affective responses, many people have argued that the experience of being ashamed plays an important motivating role, rather than being an obstacle, in living a moral life. These discussions, however, tend to take for granted two interrelated assumptions that I will be problematizing: 1) (...) that the subject's shame is warranted; 2) that the shame is directly attributable to the subject's own actions. I challenge these assumptions by turning to a phenomenon I call secondhand shame, namely, shame that is induced by another person's shameless behavior. This essay examines the gender and racial dynamics that so frequently intensify secondhand shame, and suggests that this troubling phenomenon, when shared as a group experience, can be morally transformative, particularly when it leads to unified public resistance to shameless conduct. (shrink)

The paper asks the question, whether nakedness embodies a potential wisdom. It deals with two different approaches to the phenomenon of nakedness: the first one rejecting, the second one appreciating the corporeality. The authors show different meanings the various cultures and civilizations attributed to nakedness, e.g. nakedness as a religious symbol of social subordination or belittling or of a specific national dominance . Attention is paid also to the meanings of nakedness in Jainism, where the (...) nakedness is a symbol of non-possessiveness; in Christianity, where the approach to nakedness is ambiguous, in tantrism with its vision of a person with numerous bodies, where the role of nakedness and sexuality is seen in cosmic context. Thus the meaning of nakedness remains multiple, depending on its context and visualization. The authors reject the pornography culture of contemporary society in favor of gymnosophy as the hierophany of the naturalness of nakedness. (shrink)

What is the relation between shame and shamelessness? It may seem obvious: shamelessness is simply the absence of shame. But on reflection, it becomes clear that the story is considerably more complicated. Michelle Mason's intriguing "On Shamelessness" prompts such reflection. Mason argues that we should be mindful of the "moral importance of shame" and "unapologetic in its defense", and she does so via an examination of shamelessness and an argument to the effect that shamelessness is a moral fault. The tacit (...) assumption is that insofar as shamelessness is a moral fault, the value of shame is vindicated. I challenge that assumption. (shrink)

This is a theological response to two programmatic essays, “Science and the Future of Theology: Critical Issues,” by Arthur Peacocke and “What Game is Being Played? The Need for Clarity about theRelationship between Scientific and Theological Understanding,” by David A. Pailin. It argues that the two authors, well informed by the recent developments in science, are reduplicating some methodological and epistemological trends common to nineteenth‐century theology. The feasibility of their project should, therefore, be examined on whether they succeed in answering (...) the questions posed to the liberal project that dominated theological and philosophical scholarship in the last century. They are found to be wanting in their inadequate response to three considerations: (1) the persistence of particular manifestations of religion and theology's enduring refusal to accept thoroughly scientific “enlightened” criteria, (2) the epistemological implications of the eschatological character of the Christianmessage, and (3) the trinitarian paradigm for Christian theology and the life of faith. (shrink)

Dans Shameless, Cristiana Franco étudie les représentations du chien dans la Grèce ancienne et son rapport avec le féminin. Au cœur de cette enquête, deux questions principales : pourquoi les textes tracent-ils un portrait ambivalent du chien, entre fidélité et trahison? Pourquoi des traits canins sont-ils souvent associés à des figures féminines négatives? Le livre en anglais est une réédition de l’essai en italien Senza ritegno (Bologna, 2003), dans la traduction de Matthew Fox, complétée...

This article examines naked protests as efforts to advocate for social justice, particularly against patriarchal oppression and state violence. It explores ways in which women use naked body protests as a form of resistance, thereby negating dominant narratives of its impropriety. Naked protests are examined for how they might be mobilised against patriarchy and institutional oppression. This is done through the use of three data sources, namely a radio podcast interview of two women student protestors who staged a naked body (...) protest during the #FeesMustFall violence in 2016; a video recording of a protest staged by working class women against the destruction of their homes in Dobsonville, Soweto on 12 July 1990; and interviews conducted with 14 women who participated in naked body protests. The article employs critical discourse analysis to understand women’s role in advocating for social change and decoloniality. In addition, it delves into different affective registers experienced by women protesters during protests and interviews. Findings suggest that politics of protests are saturated with affective registers that range from anger to rage, fear, sadness, pain, joy and a sense of power. African women’s naked bodies in protest are a link to generational power that creates a rupture, which interrupts violence and coloniality. Moreover, the analysis suggests that naked protest is a powerful form of protest that transforms a woman’s body from social constructions of vulnerability and consumption to a site of militancy, defiance and one that speaks back from a position of solidarity and strength. These protests demonstrate a grounded African feminism, which enables African women to speak from their location and reality. (shrink)

This essay critically analyzes two dominant narratives that explain and lament the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. First, I extend Jill Locke’s (2016) concept of “The Lament that Shame is Dead" to show the limitations of criticizing Trump in terms of the “death of shame.” I then turn my attention to the problems inerent in recent characterizations of Trump as a petulant child. Drawing from Locke (2016) on shame and Freud (1914) and Lee Edelman (2004) on the (...) politics of “the child,” I argue that characterizing Trump as shameless, childish, or as a shameless child only affirms, rather than deposes, Trump’s right-wing populist strategy and keeps the focus on him as a personality rather than on the broader social and political context in which he emerged. I argue this has implications for the rise of right-wing populism in the West, more broadly. (shrink)

Aristotle’s conception of vice is notoriously problematic. On the one hand, it appears as the antithesis of virtue; as such, it may seem, like virtue, to rest on principles, except that in the case of vice the principles are bad ones. On the other hand, vice may be something more like the privation or absence of virtue: not the negative pole or opposite of virtue but the condition of not being at all guided by rational principles or logos. As a (...) way of approaching Aristotle’s notion of vice, I propose to examine two disapproved qualities that Aristotle mentions briefly in his Rhetoric, and which are adduced as the opposites of emotions. The two qualities are ingratitude, which is represented as the opposite of feeling grateful, and shamelessness, the opposite of the emotion shame. Both ingratitude and shamelessness have the appearance of vices, even though they are contrasted here not with virtues but with passions or pathê. Examining the logic of these pairings will, I hope, shed light not only on ingratitude and shamelessness but also on the complex and unstable nature of vice itself. (shrink)

In his writings on the gaze and the body in Being and Nothingness , Jean-Paul Sartre describes the ways in which bodies are exposed and vulnerable to the anonymous gaze of the other, and how they in the midst of their vulnerability depend entirely on being seen by the gaze for their meaning and their very being. Although it sometimes appears as quite depressingly restrictive, Sartre’s analysis of the gaze and his account of the body offer rich and important resources (...) for recognizing the force of objectifying categories and meanings in the constitution of identities. This article suggests that Sartre’s almost remorseless descriptions of how the body is molded by the gaze of the other provide a productive point of departure for understanding the becoming of singular identities, as they are lived on the margins and in the intersections of established categories which determine them in often oppressive ways. Being marked by difference, whether sexual, ethnic, racial, or other, is in many ways being trapped by the objectifying gaze of the other in such a way that the ability to return the gaze and claim a subject position is deeply circumscribed. The article gives an account of Sartre’s analysis of the phenomenon of the gaze as the force which objectifies me before the other and of his description of the body as it is subjectively experienced as objectified. This “third ontological dimension of the body” captures the tensions inherent in subjectivity and brings to light its perpetual exposure to its own unknown exterior as it is seen and constituted by the other. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Aufsatz untersucht das Verhältnis von Scham und Armut im Werk Ulrich Bräkers: Die Lebensgeschichte und Natürliche Ebentheuer des Armen Mannes im Tockenburg ist an der Vorbildlichkeit schamhafter Armut orientiert, ringt jedoch mit der paradoxen Notwendigkeit der schamlosen Inszenierung schamhafter Armut. Die Rede über den Gassenbettel zeichnet sich demgegenüber durch experimentelle Strategien der Beschämung des Publikums mithilfe einer Rhetorik der Evidenz und der Zeugenschaft aus. Die in Bräkers Tagebüchern enthaltene Jauss-Novelle schließlich, die hier erstmals einer genaueren Betrachtung unterzogen wird, kreist (...) um eine Figur schamloser Armut und sexueller Ausschweifung. Dass die in ihrer obszönen Explizitheit erstaunliche Jauss-Novelle nie vollständig und im Zusammenhang als literarisches Werk publiziert wurde, führt vor Augen, dass Scham eine Schlüsselfunktion für die Selektionsmechanismen des literarischen Betriebs besitzt.The article examines the relation between shame and poverty in the writings of Ulrich Bräker. The famous Lebensgeschichte und Natürliche Ebentheuer des Armen Mannes im Tockenburg is oriented towards a model of humble and shameful poverty, but at the same time struggles with the paradox it has to enact: the shameless staging of a bashful form of poverty. In contrast to this, the Rede über den Gassenbettel is characterized by experimental strategies of shaming the audience by its rhetoric of testimony and evidence. Finally, the Jauss-novella revolves around a figure of shameless poverty and sexual obscenity. The text which is part of Bräker’s diaries is examined here more closely for the first time. The fact that the novella was never published fully as a genuine literary work shows that shame plays a crucial role in the making of the literary canon. (shrink)

This book offers an analysis of shame and develops an interdisciplinary and comparative interpretation of Confucian shame as a moral disposition, the ability of critical moral-development and self-cultivation.

Sexuality is a basic feature of human life. Gender, sexual and romantic attraction, sexual excitement, and sexual desire and fantasies all move in various degrees through our daily awareness. However, despite this pervasiveness, there is much disagreement surrounding the nature of such things and experiences. This book explores just these issues in an attempt to get clear about this enigmatic aspect of our existence. Through a series of interrelated essays, internationally acclaimed philosopher James Giles takes the reader on a fascinating (...) journey to the depths of experiential, social, biological, and evolutionary aspects of sexual life. Presenting his arguments and ideas in a clear and easy to follow language, Giles criticizes several popular views, clearing the way for his own unique vision of human sexuality. Often controversial, always engaging, these pages will prove to be absorbing reading for anyone who has ever pondered the nature of sexuality and why it fills our lives in the way it does. (shrink)

Professor Wodak is well known in academic circles focused on the far-right and critical discourse analysis. In this book, she uses her experience in both fields to reflect on the normalization of f...

Interpersonal relationships represent an essential aspect of mental wellbeing and social functioning. If all the symptoms contain a relational meaning, shame represents the relational affect par excellence both in terms of its origin and its purpose. This paper aims to highlight the role of shame as an affect inherent in the rhythmic nature of the encounter with the other, as well as the pathological elements of this aspect in both its conscious and unconscious dimensions. There is a heterogeneous quantitative and (...) qualitative declination of shame, or of the defenses against this affect, among the various pathologies. We consider the fundamental needs of belonging and acceptance and the parallel abandonment anguish from various psychoanalytic and philosophical theoretical perspectives and then analyze the link between their dissatisfaction and the origin of shame. We also touch on the different interpretaions of shame based on eastern and western cultural norms. These hypotheses are closely intertwined with the beliefs of classical psychopathology. The role of the body in the encounter with the other and in the experience of shame is also examined. In particular, we study the role of this affect in schizophrenia, depression, eating disorders, and personality disorders. (shrink)

Shamelessly Promethean -- The end of humanity -- The end of history -- The end of reality -- Atlas never shrugs -- (R)evolutionary spectre.

Cognitive science is shamelessly materialistic. It maintains that human beings are nothing more than complex physical systems, ultimately and completely explicable in mechanistic terms. But this conception of humanity does not ?t well with common sense. To think of the creatures we spend much of our day loving, hating, admiring, resenting, comparing ourselves to, trying to understand, blaming, and thanking -- to think of them as mere mechanisms seems at best counterintuitive and unhelpful. More often it may strike us as (...) ludicrous, or even abhorrent. We are. (shrink)

Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate — or hates to love — about “French lovers” and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels. Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the (...) women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say. The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T– in Denon’s No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Crébillon fils’s Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters’ words and their true intentions — the libertine double entendre — are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Crébillon fils’s Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized — or degenerate — erotics are the subjects of both Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage and Laclos’s On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade’s Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism. [Publisher's abstract]. (shrink)

Psychopaths appear to be ‘creatures apart’ – grandiose, shameless, callous and versatile in their violence. I discuss biological underpinnings to their pale affect, their selective inability to discern fear and sadness in others and a predatory orienting towards images that make most startle and look away. However, just because something is biologically underpinned does not mean that it is innate. I show that while there may be some genetic determination of fearlessness and callous-unemotionality, these and other features of the (...) personality may arise from developmental failures in the interpersonal reception of their emotions, needs and their sense of self. One is unlikely to be able to own inner experiences if shamed for having them, or if, having them, one does not know how to regulate and soothe. So psychopaths may learn to attend away and suppress them. Rather than a fully inherited difficulty, they may have become unable to reflect on inner states, so meta-emotions and self-reflective emotions like guilt and shame do not fully arise. They retain enough sensitivity to know their difference, and hide. I suggest that psychopaths are characterised by a nested sense of self, arising from the surprising effect of shame on these seemingly shameless characters. They do not have an integrated sense of self across context or across time or in relation to a generalised social other. With a nested sense of self, diminished intensity and scope of affective experience (in both directly experienced and vicarious forms) they lack textured access to a personal, owned and integrated past. Thus they lack the kind of access to the past required for a motivationally compelling planning of the future. They lack the emotional investment in the future that enables us to overcome the motivation to act opportunistically and myopically. These individuals live strangely in time. They have a fugitive sense of self and live nimbly among many pasts. They present an elegant and coherent mask to the person they are addressing in the moment and generate possible futures without conviction. (shrink)

[INTRODUCTION] Like the terms 'dialectic', 'Aufhebung' (or 'sublation'), and 'Geist', the term 'concrete universal' has a distinctively Hegelian ring to it. But unlike these others, it is particularly associated with the British strand in Hegel's reception history, as having been brought to prominence by some of the central British Idealists. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that, as their star has waned, so too has any use of the term, while an appreciation of the problematic that lay behind it has seemingly (...) vanished: if the British Idealists get any sort of mention in a contemporary metaphysics book (which is rarely), it will be Bradley's view of relations or truth that is discussed, not their theory of universals, so that the term has a rather antique air, buried in the dusty volumes of Mind from the turn of the nineteenth century. This is not surprising: the episode known as British Idealism can appear to be a period that is lost to us, in its language, points of historical reference (Lotze, Sigwart, Jevons), and central preoccupations (the Absolute). Even while interest in Hegel continues to grow, interest in his Logic has grown more slowly than in the rest of his work, with Book III of the Logic remaining as the daunting peak of that challenging text - while it is here that the British Idealists focussed their attention and claimed to have uncovered that 'exotic' but 'vanished specimen', the concrete universal. Finally, as the trend of reading Hegel pushes ever further in a non-metaphysical direction, it might be thought that the future of the concrete universal is hardly likely to be brighter than its recent past - for it may seem hard to imagine how a conception championed by the British Idealists, who were apparently shameless in their metaphysical commitments, can find favour in these more austere and responsible times. In this paper, however, I want to make a case for holding that there is something enlightening to be found in how some of the British Idealists approached the 'concrete universal', both interpretatively and philosophically. At the interpretative level, I will argue that while not everything these Idealists are taken to mean by the term is properly to be found in Hegel, their work nonetheless relates to a crucial and genuine strand in Hegel's position, so that their discussion of this issue is an important moment in the reception history of his thought. At a philosophical level, I think that the question that concerned Hegel and these British Idealists retains much of its interest, as does their shared approach to it: namely, how far does our thought involve a mere abstraction from reality, and what are the metaphysical and epistemological implications if it turns out it does not? As such, I will suggest, taking seriously what these British Idealists have to say about the concrete universal can help us both in our understanding of Hegel, and in our appreciation of the contribution Hegel's position can make to our thinking on the issues that surround this topic. (shrink)

Besides pure declarative arguments, whose premises and conclusions are declaratives (“you sinned shamelessly; so you sinned”), and pure imperative arguments, whose premises and conclusions are imperatives (“repent quickly; so repent”), there are mixed-premise arguments, whose premises include both imperatives and declaratives (“if you sinned, repent; you sinned; so repent”), and cross-species arguments, whose premises are declaratives and whose conclusions are imperatives (“you must repent; so repent”) or vice versa (“repent; so you can repent”). I propose a general definition of argument (...) validity: an argument is valid exactly if, necessarily, every fact that sustains its premises also sustains its conclusion, where a fact sustains an imperative exactly if it favors the satisfaction over the violation of the imperative, and a fact sustains a declarative exactly if, necessarily, the declarative is true if the fact exists. I argue that this definition yields as special cases the standard definition of validity for pure declarative arguments and my previously defended definition of validity for pure imperative arguments, and that it yields intuitively acceptable results for mixed-premise and cross-species arguments. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben criticizes Michel Foucault's distinction between 'productive' bio-power and 'deductive' sovereign power, emphasizing that it is not possible to distinguish between these two. In his view, the production of what he calls 'bare life' is the original, although concealed, activity of sovereign power. In this article, Agamben's conclusions are called into question. (1) The notion of 'bare life', distinguished from the 'form of life', belongs exclusively to the order of sovereignty, being incompatible with the modern bio-political (...) notion of life, that is univocal and immanent to itself. In the era of bio-politics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe ('form-of-life'). (2) Violence is not hidden in the foundation of bio-politics; the 'hidden' foundation of bio-politics is love (agape) and care (cura), 'care for individual life'. (3) Bio-politics is not absolutised in the Third Reich; the only thing that the Third Reich absolutises is the sovereignty of power (Aryan race) and the nakedness of life (the Jews). (4) St Paul's 'messianic revolution' does not endow us with the means of breaking away from the closure of bio-political rationality; on the contrary, Paul's 'messianic revolution' is a historical precondition for the deployment of modern bio-politics. (5) Instead of homo sacer, who is permitted to kill without committing homicide, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat. (shrink)

In certain contemporary theories of the politics of shame, shame is considered a pernicious emotion that we need to avoid in, or a salutary emotion that serves as an infallible guide to, democratic deliberation. The author argues that both positions arise out of an inadequate notion of the structure of shame and an oversimplistic opposition between shame and shamelessness. Plato's dialogue, the Gorgias, actually helps to address these problems because it supplies a deeper understanding of the place of shame in (...) democratic politics in ways that address our contemporary dilemmas. It does this first, by avoiding the simple opposition between shame and shamelessness and secondly, by articulating three different kinds of "politics of shame" that can characterize democratic deliberations. Finally, Plato's treatment of shame extends upon contemporary ethical and psychoanalytic notions of shame in ways that are directly relevant to the our contemporary political situation. (shrink)

What interests us and claims our attention in Nazism is, essentially, its ideology, in the definition Hannah Arendt has given of this term in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this work, ideology is defined as the totally self-fulfilling logic of an idea, an idea “by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process.” “The movement of history and the logical process of this notion,” Arendt continues, “are supposed to correspond to each other, so that (...) whatever happens, happens according to the logic of one ‘idea.’”2Ideology, in other words, interests us and claims our attention insofar as, on the one hand, it always proposes itself as a political explanation of the world, that is, as an explanation of history on the basis of a single concept—the concept of race, for example, or the concept of class—and insofar as, on the other hand, this ideological explanation or conception of the world seeks to be a total explanation or conception. This totality signifies that the explanation is indisputable, leaving neither gaps nor remainders—unlike philosophical thought, from which ideology shamelessly draws the greater part of its resources but which is characterized by a risky, problematic style, what Arendt calls the “insecurity” of philosophical questioning . 2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , p. 469; hereafter abbreviated OT. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy teach at the University of Human Sciences of Strasbourg, France, and are also visiting professors at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of The Literary Absolute and, related to the topic of politics, “The Jewish People Don’t Dream” . Lacoue-Labarthe is also the author of Typography and La Fiction du politique . Nancy has written “Sharing Voices” in Transforming Hermeneutics and La Communauté désoeuvrée . Brian Holmes is a doctoral candidate in romance languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of the journal Qui Parle. He is currently at work on the parody of authorial identity in Cervantes and Flaubert. (shrink)

Starting with service robotics and industrial robotics, this paper aims to suggest philosophical reflections about the relationship between body and machine, between man and technology in our contemporary world. From the massive use of the cell phone to the robots which apparently “feel” and show emotions like humans do. From the wearable exoskeleton to the prototype reproducing the artificial sense of touch, technological progress explodes to the extent of embodying itself in our nakedness. Robotics, indeed, is inspired by biology (...) in order to develop a new kind of technology affecting human life. This is a bio-robotic approach, which is fulfilled in the figure of the cyborg and consequently in the loss of human nature. Today, humans have reached the possibility to modify and create their own body following their personal desires. But what is the limit of this achievement? For this reason, we all must question ourselves whether we have or whether we are a body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:R. D. Ackerman BELIEVING IN A FICTION: WALLACE STEVENS AT THE LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGY The "ring of men" of "Sunday Morning" will chant their "devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source" (CP, pp. 69-70).' Solar nakedness is deferred even as it is named. The problem for belief is the question of appearance (...) and representation. Things appear as and like.... The phenomenological return to things is also a turn to fiction, as Husserl understood: "If anyone loves a paradox, he can really say... that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology... is fiction. ' " The sun is divine, and it is not; it is both naked and clothed, savage and civilized, source (or end) and means. But such paradox is ultimately unsatisfying, and as we will see with Stevens, the need for belief—for an image or idea of totality—forces the issue of fiction and reality. The Stevens we will have in view is not the Stevens—as if there were such a creature. Our Stevens is the one most persuaded by promises such as those of phenomenology, the one most concerned with decreation (reduction) and fresh beginnings, with discovery and recognition, with imagination, the body, and the earth. This is the Stevens for whom the barrier of language presages at last not absence and difference but fictive recovery of presence and identity, the one for whom poetry represents a way of belief beyond mysticism even as it bodes mythic proximity. Finally, this is the Stevens who predominates throughout the prose (as well as in much of the poetry), who tries mightily to secure a belief while disencumbering himself of metaphysics—but alas, I think, with small success. Although Stevens's association of the problem of belief with the idea of fiction occurs in early poems such as "A High-Toned Old Christian 79 80Philosophy and Literature Woman" and "To the One of Fictive Music," his most intensive involvement with fiction as belief dates from the early 1940s and spans the period of his major essays and his last four volumes of poems. He recounts, for instance, a 1942 conversation with a student: "I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction. The student said that that was an impossibility, that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time" (L, p. 430). What does it mean to believe in a fiction? That is my main subject here, as we seek out the limits of the phenomenological Stevens. His letters of this period are preoccupied with the problem of fictive belief: "If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else.... A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing.... In one of the short poems that I have just sent to the harvard advocate, I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction. I think that the history of belief will show that it has always been in a fiction" (L, p. 370). The poem referred to, "Asides on the Oboe," begins: The prologues are over. It is a question now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. (CP, p. 250) Acknowledging that "in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction" (L, pp. 430-31), Stevens nonetheless singles out the nominative function of poetry as the essence of its claim to supremacy: "Poetry means not the language of poetry but the thing itself.... The subject matter is what comes to mind when one says of the month of August... 'Thou art not August, unless I make thee so'" (L, p. 377). The quoted line (also from "Asides") underscores the paradox that for Stevens the essence of fiction (the nontrue) is its capacity to nominate the true or the real. This... (shrink)

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial (...) Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which contemporary western cultures have attempted to legitimize certain sites of bodily nakedness (such as communal showers, bathing children and other `public' displays) by maintaining a contextual space or frame which attempts to exclude the sexual. Noting the ways in which that legitimacy has broken down in recent decades, the article suggests that the slippage between the sexual and the naked results from both a breakdown in the `heterosexual matrix' as well as a (...) postmodern crisis of `the context'. (shrink)

‘Religion and corporeality’. At first sight, the coordinating conjunction «and» sounds rather odd here because in the vision of many people spirituality and materiality necessarily exclude each other. Still, many scholars have offered abundant evidence that Christianity is a religion of embodiment. Yet, as will become clear from the works of the theologians Erik Peterson and André Guindon, the turn toward the body within Christianity is primarily a turn toward a clothed body. This may explain why the Italian philosopher Giorgio (...) Agamben has argued that our culture, which is heavily influenced by Christian theology, is characterized by the impossibility of nakedness. In his view, we should try to think a possible nakedness of man by liberating it, piece by piece, from the theological fabric which is wrapped around it. The question that I want to raise here is whether such a naked nudity is really a human option. Drawing on Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and introducing the notion of corporeal vulnerability, I will argue that it is not. (shrink)

The undraped human form is ubiquitous in Western art and even appears in the art of India and Japan. Only in China, François Jullien argues, is the nude completely absent. In this enthralling extended essay, he explores the different conceptions of the human body that underlie this provocative disparity. Contrasting nakedness with nudity, Jullien explores the traditional European vision of the nude as a fixed point of fusion where form joins truth. He then shows that the absence of the (...) nude in Chinese art evinces an understanding of the human body as changeable and transitory. Viewed in light of each other, these differing concepts allow for a new way of thinking about form, the ideal, and beauty, enabling us to delve deeper into the relationship between art and the ideas that lie at its roots. Beautifully illustrated and gracefully translated into English for the first time, _The Impossible Nude_ will fascinate anyone interested in art history, Chinese art, or aesthetics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minor Socratics* PHILIP MERLAN OF MEN MORE OR LESS DECISIVELY influenced by Socrates, three--Antisthenes (c. 455-360), Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-356), and Eucleides of Megara (c. 450380 )--became founders of schools (or sects) often referred to as "minor Socratic schools." These schools are the Cynic, the Cyrenaic, and the Megaric, respectively. The names of the last two are self-explanatory. That of the first sounds somewhat like "dog (kytn)-like." By (...) some it is assumed to have been derived from the meeting place of Antisthenes with his followers, the gymnasium of Kynosarges; x others believe it to be contemptuously indicative of the dog-like life of the members of the sect (shamelessness, begging, barking, biting). 2 In this sense it was proudly and defiantly accepted by the members themselves, a What we know of the ethical teachings of the Megaric school amounts to hardly more than one sentence, in which the Good seems to have been identified with the One. 4 All we can say of this formula is that it, in some way, links the * Size (very limited), scope (ethical doctrines only), manner of presentation (for the general reader and rather dogmatic), etc., of this article were determined by the character of the Encyclopedia of Morals, in which it originally appeared. The present footnotes try to make up for some of the shortcomings unavoidable in this kind of article. [The Journal is grateful to Philosophical Library, Inc. for permission to reprint this article. The footnotes were subsequently added by Professor Merlan and appear here for the first time.] As the only collection of fragments of Cynics (Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, Monimus, Demonax, Oenomaus, Teles, Bion) is that contained in F. W. A. Mullach, Fragmenta philosophorum graecorum (Paris: 1865), vol. II, pp. 274-429, which is hard to obtain (the collection of fragments by A. W. Winekelmann, Antisthenis fragmenta [1842] even harder), I shall quote them directly from the sources. There was no need to do so with the Cyrenaics, as we have two recent collections of their fragments: G. Giannantoni, 1 Cirenaici (Florence, n.d.: [1958])--they will be quoted as G--and E. Mannebach, Aristippi et Cyrenaicorum fragmenta (K~51n-Leiden: 1961), which will be quoted as Ma. A generous selection of fragments of Megarians, Cynics and Cyrenaics in German translation with introduction and notes is contained in W. Nestle, Die Sokratiker (Jena: 1922), pp. 79-177. Our knowledge of Antisthenes would considerably be enriched if we could follow H. Kesters, who, in a number of publications (one of them: Plaidoyer d'un Socratique... [Louvain: 1959]) ascribes Themistius, Or. XXVI to Antisthenes. However, the ascription is doubtful. i I.e., Whitehound: D.L. VI 13. Elias, In Cat. (CAG XVIII/I, Berlin: 1908), p. Ill, 2-29. Busse has a fourfold explanation of the name, all connected with the word Kt~v. Cf. K. v. Fritz, Quellenuntersuchungen zu Leben und Philosophie des Diogenes von Sinope (Leipzig: 1926), pp. 47-49. D.L. VI 60. 55; Stob. vol. III, p. 462, 16 W.-H. Quotations from Stobaeus refer to: K. Wachsmuth, O. Hense, loannis Stobaei Anthologium, 5 vol. (Berlin: 1884-1902); they are by volume, page, and line of this edition. 4 Eus. PE XIV 17, 1; D.L. II 106 (~v x6 dtTu06v). [143] 144 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Megarians to the Eleatic school 5 but also to some aspects of Plato's Philebus and his Laws, and also to the Epinomis, and, above all, to his lecture or course of lectures "The Good," the conclusion of which was that it is the One which is the Good. 6 And though we know that many Megarians were engaged in political activities,7 we do not know in what way, if any, that highly abstract ethical doctrine was linked to practice. It is entirely different with the other two schools, in which ethical theory is immediately applied to life and theoretical aspects of philosophy are often neglected or even absent. However, there is some doubt as to whether Antisthenes can actually be considered the fountainhead of Cynicism. He seems to have undergone the influence of Socrates late in his life, when he had already been active as a... (shrink)

Satire is often the best way of revealing the truth (recall Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"). Sokal's spoof exposed the hypocrisy practiced by these so-called cultural revolutionaries. They claim to be democratizing thought, but they purposely write in tongues for an initiated elite. They claim that their work is transformative and subversive, but they focus obsessively on the linguistic and social construction of human consciousness, not on the hard reality of people's lives. Their claim to originality is particularly offensive to (...) historians who have always known that social structure and cultural meaning change over time. With few exceptions, their pretensions obscure their nakedness. (shrink)