This paper explores the relationship between temporal continuity in nursing and temporal features of sickness. It is based on phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy, empirical studies of sickness time, and the nursing theories of Nightingale, of Benner and of Benner and Wrubel. In the first part, temporal continuity is defined as distinct from interpersonal continuity. Tensions between temporal continuity and discontinuity are discussed in the contexts of care management, of conceptualisations of disease and of time itself. Temporal limitations to (...) the methodological concept of situation are discussed. The main part of this paper explores nurses' possibilities to relate to their patients' time, and how temporal features of sickness may warrant temporal continuity of nursing. Three temporal characteristics of sickness are discussed: the immediacy of patients' suffering, the basic continuity of life through sickness and health care, and the indeterminism and precariousness of sickness. The timing of nursing acts is discussed. The paper explores how sickness is both part of the continuity of life, and threatens this continuity. It concludes that this tension is implicitly recognised in the temporal continuity of nursing, which allows for discontinuous and continuous aspects of sickness time. Nurses accordingly perceive the sick person's time at several levels of temporality, and distinguish highly complex temporal processes in their patients' trajectory. Temporal continuity provides the time, flexibility, and closeness for nurses to perceive and act into time dimensions of individual sickness. The paper shows that temporal continuity of nursing is grounded in temporal characteristics of severe sickness. It suggests that temporal continuity is an important theoretical concept in nursing. (shrink)

This paper examines Kierkegaard 's discussion of patience in some of his Upbuilding Discourses, and its connection with his understanding of the nature of selfhood as it appears both in the Discourses and in The Sickness unto Death. That understanding stresses that selfhood is not simply given, but is a task to be achieved—although a task that can only be achieved by the self that is formed in the process of undertaking it. For Kierkegaard, an account of the self (...) that recognizes its essential temporality must give a crucial role to patience as a virtue necessary for the formation and maintenance of personal identity. However, although the self is essentially temporal for Kierkegaard, it is also essentially such as to participate in eternity, and this complexity and tension in his concept of the self gives his understanding of patience a particular character—one that presents an important challenge to some of the dominant assumptions of recent and contemporary philosophy in both the analytic and the continental traditions. (shrink)

The epidemic of COVID-19 appears to be reshaping the world, separating before and after, present and past. Its perceived novelty raises the question of what role the past might play in the present epidemic and in responses to it. Taking the view that the past has not passed, but is present in is material and immaterial remains, and continuously emerging from these, we argue that it should not be studied as closed narration but through the array of its traces, which (...) constitute the texture of the present. To that end, and building on long-term ethnographic research on past and present epidemics in western Kenya, we assemble here some preliminary observations on the first weeks of COVID-19 in Kenya. We explore how the acute epidemic crisis currently unfolding is intertwined with layered fragments of earlier epidemic events, attending to material infrastructures, institutional practices, and ritual responses, to the presence of virally loaded bodies, pharmaceuticals, and their residues, and to the resurgence of often painful memories and emotions. People in this region have experienced a long century of epidemics and anti-epidemic measures of varying duration and intensity, from colonial and postcolonial sleeping sickness and smallpox to HIV/AIDS and more recently cancer, alongside actual or anticipated outbreaks of cholera and Ebola. This local perception of one long epidemic qualifies the notion of a radical temporal break that the COVID-19 pandemic is often associated with in European conversations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 369-372 [Access article in PDF] Unity of Agency and Volition:Some Personal Reflections Stephen Weiner The issues of unity of agency, self-as-narrative, and more generally, volition are highly personal to me. Indeed, I would say I have frequently been obsessed with them. I am 52 years old, and date the onset of my psychiatric symptoms—my long-term misery—very specifically: 11:00 pm Pacific Standard Time, August (...) 28, 1965. At almost precisely that time, I started obsessing that I was homosexual and, in fact, turning into a girl. Within days, derealization followed: for instance, the houses in my neighborhood seemed one-dimensional—they seemed as though they were painted, as though I could stick my hand or an object through them. Colors seemed less bright as well—but I hardly had words for all this at the time: it was an overwhelmingly preverbal feeling, but I found some words for it.I was also depressed, and knew I was depressed—that is, I was worried, had trouble sleeping, and had suicidal thoughts and feelings. Within weeks, I asked my parents if I could see a psychiatrist, and I did. I remember asking my psychiatrist if he ever thought about the possibility that everything might be an illusion, and he quoted the refrain from "Row, Row, Row Your Boat": "merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream." But just asking him produced a chilling feeling that he did not exist and, largely for this reason, I did not mention unreality feelings again to therapists for another 20 years.So, like Dr. Wells' patient Edward, described by James Phillips (2003), I was in trouble; like Edward, I was starting to construct a narrative. I started feeling that I had "to tell my story" at about this time—before then, I had not felt a need to do that. That may be partly because young children take life for granted (at least, I did), and it may be partly because suffering, by its very nature, demands explanation; both reasons were probably operating—certainly, both my parents told me years later that I had seemed emotionally distressed as a child, and my mother told they would have given me Ritalin if it had been available. So, to other people (my parents and my teachers) I was mentally ill in some sense, and I have some pretty clear memories of what I now recognize as depression, especially in the second and third grades; but I did not think of myself as sick and I did not think of myself as suffering—and I did not experience the duality (at least) of selves that I started to experience almost immediately in August 1965.Phillips further points out that the "future Edward" could look back in his narrative, at a later age, and reconstruct his history either as someone with a continuing mental illness, or as someone who had attained a secure, healthy adulthood and saw his experience as adolescent pain in the service of ultimate adult health and integration. I see my story, I am sorry to report, as [End Page 369] one of unremitting basic pain but with the positive dimension that I was able to go on, obtain a good education, work a good deal in my adult life, and father a child. But my narrative—and am I not, as a highly verbal person, almost constrained to think of my life as a narrative?—has been one, as Phillips (following Kleinman) realizes, of suffering. It is, above all else, an illness narrative. I find the approach of J. Melvin Woody (2003)—of privileging performing and performing arts and spatial metaphors over story—less relevant and true to myself, although I see no reason to argue with Mary's preference for such forms. It may be that the temporal discontinuities she has experienced predispose her to see herself in such terms—may, in fact, necessitate doing so. I am not exactly sure why, but it probably has to do with acting, with trying on and performing one role... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 369-372 [Access article in PDF] Unity of Agency and Volition:Some Personal Reflections Stephen Weiner The issues of unity of agency, self-as-narrative, and more generally, volition are highly personal to me. Indeed, I would say I have frequently been obsessed with them. I am 52 years old, and date the onset of my psychiatric symptoms—my long-term misery—very specifically: 11:00 pm Pacific Standard Time, August (...) 28, 1965. At almost precisely that time, I started obsessing that I was homosexual and, in fact, turning into a girl. Within days, derealization followed: for instance, the houses in my neighborhood seemed one-dimensional—they seemed as though they were painted, as though I could stick my hand or an object through them. Colors seemed less bright as well—but I hardly had words for all this at the time: it was an overwhelmingly preverbal feeling, but I found some words for it.I was also depressed, and knew I was depressed—that is, I was worried, had trouble sleeping, and had suicidal thoughts and feelings. Within weeks, I asked my parents if I could see a psychiatrist, and I did. I remember asking my psychiatrist if he ever thought about the possibility that everything might be an illusion, and he quoted the refrain from "Row, Row, Row Your Boat": "merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream." But just asking him produced a chilling feeling that he did not exist and, largely for this reason, I did not mention unreality feelings again to therapists for another 20 years.So, like Dr. Wells' patient Edward, described by James Phillips (2003), I was in trouble; like Edward, I was starting to construct a narrative. I started feeling that I had "to tell my story" at about this time—before then, I had not felt a need to do that. That may be partly because young children take life for granted (at least, I did), and it may be partly because suffering, by its very nature, demands explanation; both reasons were probably operating—certainly, both my parents told me years later that I had seemed emotionally distressed as a child, and my mother told they would have given me Ritalin if it had been available. So, to other people (my parents and my teachers) I was mentally ill in some sense, and I have some pretty clear memories of what I now recognize as depression, especially in the second and third grades; but I did not think of myself as sick and I did not think of myself as suffering—and I did not experience the duality (at least) of selves that I started to experience almost immediately in August 1965.Phillips further points out that the "future Edward" could look back in his narrative, at a later age, and reconstruct his history either as someone with a continuing mental illness, or as someone who had attained a secure, healthy adulthood and saw his experience as adolescent pain in the service of ultimate adult health and integration. I see my story, I am sorry to report, as [End Page 369] one of unremitting basic pain but with the positive dimension that I was able to go on, obtain a good education, work a good deal in my adult life, and father a child. But my narrative—and am I not, as a highly verbal person, almost constrained to think of my life as a narrative?—has been one, as Phillips (following Kleinman) realizes, of suffering. It is, above all else, an illness narrative. I find the approach of J. Melvin Woody (2003)—of privileging performing and performing arts and spatial metaphors over story—less relevant and true to myself, although I see no reason to argue with Mary's preference for such forms. It may be that the temporal discontinuities she has experienced predispose her to see herself in such terms—may, in fact, necessitate doing so. I am not exactly sure why, but it probably has to do with acting, with trying on and performing one role... (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Common Sense and Theological 9 9 Exper_,ence on the Bas s o,f Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophy NATHAN ROTENSTREICH The position of Franz Rosenzweig's thinking within the framework of presentday philosophy is difficult to ascertain. Though he was deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition, his chief work, The Star o] Redemption (Der Stern der Erlgsung, 1921), was conceived outside the main discussions of the philosophical controversy in the twenties. He formulated (...) his ideas side by side with the trends of German philosophy, but not by way of keeping pace with these trends. Yet his polemic against traditional philosophy in general, and against idealism in particular brings Rosenzweig close to the character of the rebellion represented by Existenz-Philosophie. 1 I The question of grounding a philosophical system or a set of philosophical ideas with an objective toward faith clearly poses the difficulty, in terms of the ultimate authority, of maintaining the validity of such a system of ideas. Could that authority be reason, which as a source of ideas and confirmation is outside faith while having consequences or expressions within the scope of faith? Or is faith, asserting the existence of God and his relations to world and man, an independent source? In case faith is an independent source, does it have the guarantee of its validity in its own boundaries, or does it still point to a source of validity which is outside faith and yet is not reason? It seems that Franz Rosenzweig was willy-nilly in his concern with this question. As said before the first approach would have been to construct a system along rational lines. This, however, would have done violence to a basic anti-rationalistic trait in Rosenzweig's thinking that can be clearly discerned in his The Star o] Redemption, in his Kleinere Schri]ten and in his small book, Understanding the Sick and Healthy, published until now in English only. Rosenzweig's criticism of rationalism may be summed up as follows: a) Reason strives for a unified conception of the world; and in support of this monistic fiction its assimilative energy is ready to seize upon all arguments that militate against the doctrines and practices of faith. b) Reason tends to ignore the existence of the individual which it regards as 1On the relation between Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger, see Karl LSwith, "M. Heideggerand F. Rosenzweigor Temporality and Eternity," Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch,III (Sept., 1942),53-77. [353] 354 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY merely one of the variations of an all-inclusive unity. The question of the relation of the particular to the general or of the individual to the whole, which has engrossed philosophers since time immemorial, has no place in rationalistic systems. c) Since reason places the understanding above the things to be understood (and hence also above the data of religious experience, including the existence of God), we find that from a speculative and historical point of view rationalism has a strong bias against religion or theology. The other way open to Rosenzweig was to rely on the principle of Revelation, but he could not adopt this principle as the basis of his system for the following reasons" a) The first reason can be understood from Schelling's paradox: He who adheres to Revelation does not philosophize, and he who philosophizes finds Revelation inadequate for his purposes. Since Rosenzweig was basically a philosopher --despite his protestations to the contrary--he was precluded by that very fact from appealing to the evidence furnished by Revelation. On the contrary, he sought to find a non-rational basis for Revelation itself. b) The second reason that precluded Rosenzweig from taking the traditional course of relying on Revelation is implicit in that principle itself as Rosenzweig understood it. Revelation in his system has no enlightening or cognitive significance, or what is called in Christian theology Kerygma, instructive knowledge. In Revelation, he says, God reveals only revelation; He reveals himself to man and to man alone.2 In his view, then, Revelation does not transmit informative content and hence has no dogmatic significance. It is a dialogue that posits the existence of the participants, the existence of God, and (highly important for... (shrink)

In recent years a significant debate has arisen as to whether Kierkegaard offers a version of the “narrative approach” to issues of personal identity and self-constitution. In this paper I do not directly take sides in this debate, but consider instead the applicability of a recent development in the broader literature on narrative identity—the distinction between the temporally-extended “narrative self” and the non-extended “minimal self—to Kierkegaard's work. I argue that such a distinction is both necessary for making sense of Kierkegaard's (...) claim that we are ethically enjoined to become selves, and can indeed be found in Either/Or and the later The Sickness Unto Death . Despite Kierkegaard's Non-Substantialism, each of these texts speaks (somewhat obliquely) of a “naked self” that is separable from the concrete facticity of human being. In both cases, this minimal self is linked to issues of eschatological responsibility; yet the two works develop very different understandings of “eternity” and correspondingly divergent accounts of the temporality of selfhood. This complicates the picture of Kierkegaardian selfhood in interesting ways, taking it beyond both narrativist and more standard neo-Lockean models of what it is to be a self. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

This edition replaces the earlier translation by Walter Lowrie that appeared under the title The Concept of Dread. Along with The Sickness unto Death, the work reflects from a psychological point of view Søren Kierkegaard's longstanding concern with the Socratic maxim, "Know yourself." His ontological view of the self as a synthesis of body, soul, and spirit has influenced philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre, theologians such as Jaspers and Tillich, and psychologists such as Rollo May. In The Concept (...) of Anxiety, Kierkegaard describes the nature and forms of anxiety, placing the domain of anxiety within the mental-emotional states of human existence that precede the qualitative leap of faith to the spiritual state of Christianity. It is through anxiety that the self becomes aware of its dialectical relation between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vice and Naturalistic OntologyChristopher R. Williams (bio)Keywordscausality, criminality, determinism, medical model, positivismThese questions have been posed: Is vice (encompassing criminal and other wrongful conduct) best regarded as “sick” behavior, “immoral” behavior, or some other type altogether? Are we to understand vice in natural-medical terms, or are we better served by utilizing a moral framework? Is criminality reducible to and best categorized as a metaphysical type the essential features of (...) which are neurological or otherwise biological in nature? Or, perhaps, is criminality closer to a (non-natural) sociological type, the essential features of which can be understood only through reference to social norms and cultural conventions? These are torturously involved philosophical and theoretical questions that have given rise to an equally torturous volume of literature. Without pretending to do justice to these questions or their corresponding literature, several key considerations that must be inserted into and accounted for within the discursive pursuit of these inquiries are worth noting.Where a naturalistic ontology is employed within the study of vice, we reduce the intricacies of deviant behavioral phenomena to what we presume to be their underlying medical/biological properties. It is worth remembering that behavior itself cannot rightfully be said to be “sick”; rather, what we mean to say is that the behavior in question—in our case, various forms of “vice”—is symptomatic of some underlying illness or medical/biological condition. The presumed underlying sickness and the behavior itself are distinct, ontologically linked only through their theorized relationship to one another. This, then, is a key assumption of the medical approach to vice and its ontological classification as a natural-medical kind: that there exists a relationship between the behavior (a symptom) and the underlying illness or medical condition, and that the relationship is of the causal kind. Vice, it is suggested, is a change in state that is caused by (or, at the very least, is a direct consequence of) sickness or illness. Second, to legitimate such attributions, the illness supplying the requisite causal force must be identifiable and its causal connection to the behavior must be or be capable of being sufficiently explicated. In other words, once we have identified the relevant medical/biological properties and the behavior to which they stand in causal relatedness, we must be prepared to characterize this dynamic—we must be able to show exactly how and why such and such a condition gives rise to such and such a behavior.Problematically, causation itself is and has always been a contentious metaphysical specimen. Hume (1955) reminded us of the troubling reality [End Page 39] that we cannot ever “see” one thing cause or necessitate another. We are left, rather, to merely presume the existence of causal relationships between things. How is it, exactly, that disorder in neurodevelopment can necessitate certain behavioral outcomes? Even if we can “see” (in the empirical sense) the disorder and equally “see” the behavior, we cannot of course witness the precise causal action of the former upon the latter. Even if we are content inferring causal action in such cases, we still need to demonstrate the basic conditions of causality. To show that Condition X is causally related Behavior Y, we need to show that they are regularly associated with one another, that Condition X temporally preceded Behavior Y and, most challengingly, that no other conditions or factors have an intervening (e.g., additive, synergistic) influence. Hypothetically, if we were to posit a causal relationship between schizotypal personality traits and violent behavior, we would need to establish: (1) that schizotypal traits and violent behavior regularly coexist; (2) that those traits presented before the manifestation of the violent behavior; and (3) that no other factors (biological, psychological, and/or sociological) contributed in any meaningful way to those manifestations. We would thus need to systematically rule out family dynamics, income, education, intelligence, substance use, and so forth, as contributing factors. If, in turn, we were to determine that the presence of schizotypal traits alone is not sufficient—even if a necessary condition—to produce violent behavior but, rather, that those traits act in concert with other variables to produce the behavior, then we would not truly be... (shrink)

This thesis examines the practice of haemodialysis and kidney transplantation, the two medical therapies available for persons with kidney failure, from a phenomenological perspective. A basic assumption made in the thesis is that contemporary biomedicine is deeply embedded in the cultural, historical, economic, and political circumstances provided by the particular local, national, and transnational contexts in which it is practiced. The aim of the thesis is twofold. On the one hand, the aim is to examine the forms of person- and (...) patienthood enacted and negotiated in haemodialysis and kidney transplantation care and in the daily lives of persons with kidney failure. On the other hand, the aim is to investigate the ways in which the enacted and negotiated forms of person- and patienthood are culturally embedded and normatively charged. In order to examine and investigate this twofold aim, an empirical material has been gathered that comprises observations and in-depth interviews with patients and caregivers at four haemodialysis units, one in Riga, Latvia, and three in Stockholm, Sweden. The theoretical approach and methodology of the study is cultural and phenomenological in character, drawing on an ethnological and anthropological understanding of culture as processual and relational, and on a phenomenological understanding of personhood as embodied and intertwined with the surrounding world. The thesis shows that patients’ encounters and attempts to deal with the diagnoses and treatments associated with kidney failure are complex and often misalign them with the normatively charged orientations enacted and recommended by medicine. The complex situation that emerges when they undergo transplantation, for example, stands in stark contrast to the widespread official view of organ transplantation as a self-evidently health-bringing and normalising therapy. Through their repeated and extensive experiences of undergoing haemodialysis and living with the disease, patients eventually become able to create a synthesis between their lived experiences of their own body and their body as a medical object – what in the thesis is called a ‘sick body’ – a synthesis that allows them to reorient themselves in life and experience a sense of direction. This process relies, to a large extent, on the temporal structure that haemodialysis affords life; it is by repeatedly undergoing the treatment that patients become able to create a sick body. Even so, many of them find this temporal structure problematic; they experience it as disruptive of their control and future-orientedness and as causing an existentially difficult-to-handle boredom. The thesis also shows that the political developments and the norms prevalent in the two national contexts studied greatly affect the orientations of the treatment practices and the participants’ lives. In both Riga and Stockholm, ideals of freedom, activity, control, and self-actualisation influence what forms of patienthood and personhood are enacted. The study indicates that persons who fall ill with a serious and chronic disease only gradually become able to understand and actively cope with their differently embodied circumstances of life. This suggests that medical professionals should not too hastily enlist their patients as experts on their own bodies, but rather provide them with the time and support necessary for making repeated attempts at creating and maintaining a life with a sick body. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Though the ideas of health and sickness are very much at the heart of Nietzsche’s mature thought, scholars have offered little on what exactly he means by sickness. This is particularly true when Nietzsche presents his conception of sickness in more narrowly physiological terms, as he does explicitly in the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality. In this paper, I present an account of what Nietzsche means by physiological sickliness and sickness, and how (...) these notions are related to asceticism. In particular, I argue that for Nietzsche human beings have been subject through all of history to epidemics of nervous inhibition and exhaustion. In explaining these physiological conditions, I detail the basic understanding of the nervous system in the nineteenth century and show how Nietzsche’s diagnosis of sickness in this system explains many of the mysterious elements of the Third Essay. In my final section, I sketch out the meaning of the ascetic ideal against the backdrop of this nervous sickness. (shrink)

Though the ideas of health and sickness are very much at the heart of Nietzsche’s mature thought, scholars have offered little on what exactly he means by sickness. This is particularly true when N...

In this analysis of the Iran-Iraq war, Sick asserts that two major naturally wealthy regional powers consciously chose to forego diplomatic means to resolve their disputes.

Marx's rethinking of the combination between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value during the 1860s is very important in order to reconsider the co-presence of different forms of historical temporality and exploitation. Postmodernism presents a picture of a plurality of historical times in which the old lies beside the modern and the sweatshop beside the high-tech factory. Because it fails to provide an explanation of the relation between these forms, postmodernism produces a false image of an 'ahistorical' present. In this (...) article I want to show how the combination of differentials of surplus-value works and why a representation of a plurality of historical temporalities synchronised by the temporality of socially-necessary labour is the most adequate image to comprehend it. The theoretical task is to show how the mature categorial structure of Capital not only does not need an historicist philosophy of history, but is in fact incompatible with it. (shrink)

This article contributes to understanding of Contemporary Art and of the temporality of contemporaneity, along with the philosophy of time more generally. I propose a diachronic contemporaneity over time gaps – elective contemporaneity – through examination of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, the Third Analogy and the concept of ‘following’ among artistic geniuses; diachronic recognition and disjunctive synchronicity discoverable in William Kentridge’s multimedia artworks; as well as non-chronological temporal implications of superimpositions in late Palaeolithic cave art suggesting ‘graphic respect’. Elective contemporaneity (...) shows up complexity in relations to past and present, putting in question definitions of ‘Contemporary Art’ restricted to either chronology or supposedly definitive paradigms. (shrink)

The paper first introduces the concept of implicit and explicit temporality, referring to time as pre-reflectively lived vs. consciously experienced. Implicit time is based on the constitutive synthesis of inner time consciousness on the one hand, and on the conative–affective dynamics of life on the other hand. Explicit time results from an interruption or negation of implicit time and unfolds itself in the dimensions of present, past and future. It is further shown that temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity are (...) closely connected: While implicit temporality is characterised by tacit bodily functioning and by synchronisation with others, explicit temporality arises with states of desynchronisation, that is, of a retardation or acceleration of inner time in relation to external or social processes. These states often bring the body to awareness as an obstacle as well. On this basis, schizophrenia and melancholic depression are investigated as paradigm cases for a psychopathology of temporality. Major symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder, thought insertion, hallucinations or passivity experiences may be regarded as manifesting a disturbance of the constitutive synthesis of time consciousness, closely connected with a weakening of the underlying pre-reflective self-awareness or ipseity. This results in a fragmentation of the intentional arc, a loss of self-coherence and the appearance of major self-disturbances. Depression, on the other hand, is mostly triggered by a desynchronisation from the social environment and further develops into an inhibition of the conative–affective dynamics of life. As will be shown, both mental illnesses bear witness of the close connection of temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

In letter 7.24 Pliny provides his readers with a character sketch of the elderly matriarch of a distinguished and wealthy Italian family-Ummidia Quadratilla. Ummidia passed her later years as a fan of the theater; specifically, "she had pantomimes." Pliny disapproves of the shows presented by these performers, and he chastises Ummidia for her interest in pantomime. In fact he views her conduct as symptomatic of a vice among women in general: "I have heard that she herself used to relax her (...) mind with checkers or watch her pantomimes, as women do in the idleness of their sex." We should not be surprised by these comments; there was a tradition of ambivalence among the Romans toward the professions of the theater, and when women became involved with these professions, the ambivalence could turn to contempt. Given the general disposition of Roman males toward pantomime and women, modern readers should not so readily accept Pliny's assessment. By training her slaves as pantomimes, Ummidia was greatly increasing their value. From numerous ancient sources we know that the monetary value of slaves trained in the theatrical professions was among the highest accorded any slave. Moreover, because of Ummidia's endowment of a theater in her native Casinum and the performance of Ummidia's pantomimes in public games, we might say that she was the manager of a small "theatrical empire." Finally, because of the great interest in pantomime on the part of the masses and the desire of the upper classes, including members of various imperial families, to soothe these masses with games, control of popular pantomimes might have given Ummidia access to limited political power. (shrink)

_The Temporality of Political Obligation _offers a critique and reconceptualization of the ways in which our political obligations – what we owe to political authorities and communities, and the reasons why we ought to obey their rules – have been traditionally conceptualized, justified, and contested. Drawing from theories of time and temporality, Justin Mueller demonstrates some of the unacknowledged assumptions and theoretical blind spots shared among these ostensibly opposed positions, and the problems and contradictions that this neglect of (...) time poses. Enriching the literature on the philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, Mueller demonstrates how their theoretical frameworks on time can be used to analyze a political problem that is usually confined to the concerns of normative liberal democratic theory. Politically, this book provides readers with the means to better identify and analyze the diverse temporalities they encounter in everyday life, and better understand their experiences of them. A welcomed and timely read which will be of interest to scholars involved in recent efforts to engage with the social and political dimensions and consequences of time and temporality. (shrink)

This essay argues that, while much has been gained by medicine's focus on the spatial aspects of disease in light of developments in modern pathology, too little attention has been given to the temporal experience of illness at the subjective level of the patient. In particular, it is noted that there is a radical distinction between subjective and objective time. Whereas the patient experiences his immediate illness in terms of the ongoing flux of subjective time, the physician conceptualizes the illness (...) as a disease state according to the measurements of objective time. A greater understanding of this disparity in temporal experiencing provides insights into the lived experience of illness and can preclude difficulties in communication between physician and patient. (shrink)

This paper takes Porochista Khakpour’s personal narrative of chronic illness, disability, and addiction in Sick: A Memoir (2018) as a starting point to reflect on social and material features of sick bodily subjectivity. In ways heretofore largely unexplored by tradi-tional phenomenologies of illness, I ask what different modalities of the body come to light if we move beyond the privatization of dis-ease as a biological dysfunction and instead bring into focus its re-lation with conditions of existence that make and keep (...) some of us sick. (shrink)

In this article, I will pursue three aims. First, I would like to demonstrate the non-transcendental character of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, namely, his claim that a strict division between a priori and a posteriori is an abstraction that derives from a more primordial unity that is given in our lived experience. I will criticize authors such as H. Dreyfus and T. Carman who treat the body and bodily character of our existence as a classical Kantian a priori that functions as a (...) condition of experience without itself being a part of the experience. The claim I would like to defend in this regard is that reflections on the conditions of our experience must themselves be a part of our experience. The second task is to show how Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of temporality helps him to avoid this strict division between a priori and a posteriori. Based on this, I will elucidate some of the most obscure passages of Phenomenology of Perception. Finally, I will claim that the notion of optimal grip can neither be explained by the reference to our body, as Carman claims, or to brains, organisms and their copings with the environment, as Dreyfus argues. Instead, I will claim that the maximal grip is rather a consolidation or intensification of the temporal ecstasy. (shrink)

Why does Plato write dialogues? Why more than one? The Temporality of Human Excellence begins with a brief introductory consideration of these questions, and concludes with a suggestion about two things: the intent of his use of this form, and the manner of its concrete realization in a set of two dozen or so dialogues. Taking up each dialogue as a separate drama, the reading seeks to focus attention on how each, by its characters, their interplay and conversation, and (...) the apparent lack of positive issue to the discussion they engage in, contributes to a sketch of human excellence as a complex power developed and grown into as consummation in the maturing, over time, of a human being. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to offer a reading of Reinhart Koselleck’s work as an ally of critical theory. My contention is that, despite customary accusations of Koselleck being an anti-Enlightenment historian detrimental to social criticism and emancipatory politics, his investigations on the semantic fabric of modern society may actually expand our resources for the critique of domination. In order to make this argument plausible, I reconstruct some antinomies that are at the basis of Koselleck’s work (state/society, language/reality, (...) experience/expectation) and discuss their critical potential. This analysis shows that, rather than a rejection of the spirit of critique, Koselleck contributes to the temporalization of the practice of critique as such: namely, a clarification of the contradictions and potentials of a reflexive practice imbued in the struggle between the need to comprehend the world as it is and the right to experiment with other forms of life. (shrink)

In “Melancholia, temporal disruption, and the torment of being both unable to live and unable to die”, I discuss the way in which the temporal desynchronization of melancholia can disrupt the melancholic’s relation to their own death and, on a Heideggerian interpretation, the meaning and significance of their life. In their thoughtful commentaries, Kevin Aho and Gareth Owen draw out some important points for further elaboration and clarification, the most pressing of which invoke Heidegger’s interpretation of time and the radical (...) temporalities of fundamental attunements. As Aho anticipates, this is the conception of time that underpins my interpretation of melancholia and, because this is important... (shrink)

Contrary to the idea that there are fundamental differences between the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, the thesis shows that there exists a profound similarity in the direction of their projects, by exploring how they took up Kant's critical legacy concerning the temporality of language: the belonging together of language and time. The ground of Kant's system and of the necessity of systematicity - the three-fold synthesis which 'generates' time under the direction of conceptuality - is elucidated (...) via the Second Analogy and the Critique of Teleological Judgment. It is argued that Kant's understanding of language and time remains fixed within a circular justification of Newtonian Science, which prevented him from taking up the critical resources of his treatment of teleological concepts and applying it to his idea of the critical system itself. Heidegger's and Benjamin's work may be understood as taking up the hermeneutic circularity of Kant's philosophical system, though freeing it from its appeal to a limited time determination. They both develop notions of a more originary temporality in conjunction with a linguistic phenomenology. They further allow this more critical thinking of language and time to reflexively fall back on the writing of philosophy itself. Their understanding of the temporality of language is explored through the way 'translation' focuses, in each case, a thinking of tradition and of linguistic works. The thesis rejects attempts to separate Heidegger's early work from his later approach, and further rejects a tendency to focus on Benjamin's style of writing in isolation from its theoretical basis. The thesis concludes by arguing that the work of both Heidegger and Benjamin points to a rethinking of Kant's legacy of the necessity of system, in terms of system as the inescapable belonging together of language and time. (shrink)

Though the film does not have as its goal reestablishing authentic temporality asHeidegger understands it, Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener nonethelesstakes Heidegger’s exploration of the link between ideology and temporality as its point ofdeparture. The film depicts the politicisation of Justin Quayle through anarrative structure that breaks from an everyday or ideological conception of time.Politicisation occurs, the film implies, through an encounter with feminine enjoyment, anencounter that transforms the subject’s relationship to time and facilitates the subject’sentrance into a (...) non-ideological temporality or what one might call a temporality of the real.Justin’s romance with Tessa entails navigating her enjoyment, and the processof doing so alters his sense of time andtransforms him into a political being. This is the transformation that the film, through itstemporal structure and narrative form, attempts to effect on the spectator as well. Romancethus becomes the vehicle for political awakening rather than the path, as we see in itstraditional cinematic deployment, to an apolitical retreat. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.3 (2003) 225-226 [Access article in PDF] Travelers in the Land of Sickness Eric J. Cassell THE PROBLEM OF knowing another person and the world in which that person lives, particularly someone with major mental illness, is addressed in this interesting and rich essay. The number of different metaphors and concepts Potter employs to describe the task of crossing into and then understanding the (...) thoughts, emotions, symptoms, constraints, context, and perspectives of another testifies to the difficulties involved.Yet, as I read the essay, it was not clear what the clinician world traveler, moral tourist, empathizer (and other categories) is supposed to do on the journey to another person. Why do we reach out to the sick person? What is it that we want to know or do that makes this trip necessary? Potter is primarily concerned with mental illness—the examples she cites are patients with schizophrenia—while my experience has in the main been with persons with physical illness, but for the moment, the differences are less important than the central lesson. The illness that the patient presents—the experience of the symptoms, the impairments, disability, and disruptions of the emotional and social existence that happen because of the disease result from an amalgam of the disease process with the specific nature of the sick person. There is no disease in pure form; there is no disease in abstract for clinicians. There is only this sick person. She correctly quotes me, because of all this, as pointing out the importance of integrating knowledge of this particular patient with the abstract knowledge of disease to understand the illness as it is expressed in this person. All to form a basis for the treatment of the patient and especially to help relieve suffering because suffering is always personal, particular, and individual. (It is important in thinking about this topic to remember that most serious diseases, psychiatric and otherwise, are chronic and take place over significant lived time. The acute schizophrenic symptoms or the acute infectious diseases, as dramatic as they are, distract attention from the importance of the place of the sick person.)In physical disease, our long (and continuing) history of separating human beings from nature and the body, and the importance medicine places on objectivity and the objective, have made the inevitable personalization of the disease and symptoms virtually invisible. After ages of explaining psychiatric diseases as the alienation of the person, and a long psychoanalytic period of finding their origins in the person, in the last 30 years these diseases have become increasingly objectified. The place of the person has been diminished as psychiatry has entered the DSM, neurotransmitter, and effective psychotropic drug era. For both physical and mental disease, however, and whatever the current ideology, the nature of person is crucial in determining the onset, diagnosis, course, treatment, and outcome of each illness. It is in order to have an impact on these crucial aspects of sickness that clinicians must come to know their patients to the degree possible. [End Page 225]But there is something more. Nancy Potter quotes a woman with schizophrenia as saying, "All that was my former self has crumbled and fallen together and a creature has emerged of whom I know nothing. She is a stranger to me... She is not real—she is not I... She is I—and because I still have myself on my hands, even if I am a maniac, I must deal with me somehow." (Potter, 2003, p. 215)Must she deal with this crazy self alone? Is that not what her doctors and caregivers are for? But how can they take care of her, protect her, keep what is left intact, and sustain her until she is (hopefully) better without knowing who she is? She makes clear in those few phrases that inside her there is a person with a past, a family, a world, a culture, a role(s) in life, relationships, a body, dreams for the future, things she does, and all the other things that make up a person. It is in... (shrink)

This article proposes an interpretation of the status of the Grundnorm in Hans Kelsen’s legal theory which addresses the broader philosophical problem of the ultimate foundation of normativity. It begins by reviewing the main objections that have been raised against Kelsen’s theory, pointing out that most of these can be met by a ‘transcendental’ interpretation of the Grundnorm as a condition of possibility for legal cognition. It then argues that in order to solve the problem of the ultimate foundation for (...) legal validity it is also necessary to read the Grundnorm in light of the parallel category of ‘nomo-dynamicity’, which Kelsen introduced in all his legal writings beginning with the Pure Theory of Law of 1933. This yields a conception of legal validity as an ‘essentially temporal’ category, from the point of view of which the problem of ultimate foundations cannot emerge because the beginning is by definition not situated conceptually within time. The broader conclusion is therefore that overcoming the problem of the ultimate foundation of normativity requires abandoning the theologico-political assumption that valid norms are posited through a sovereign gesture analogous to that through which God is supposed to have created the universe ex nihilo. Construing normativity as ‘essentially temporal’ implies that the search for ultimate foundations must run into a category that is entirely foreign to political theology but well known to phenomenology: that of an ‘always-already’. (shrink)

Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the shift in the temporality of life from Merleau‐Ponty's Phénoménologie de la perception to his later works. Although the Phénoménologie conceives life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, Merleau‐Ponty develops a nonserial theory of time in the later works, one that acknowledges the verticality and (...) irreducibility of the past. Life in the flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that structures its passage. (shrink)

The essay seeks to bring William James into dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche around the issue of the nature of sickness, and its overcoming or convalescence. It is, at first glance, folly to reconcile religious rebirth with the convalescence that led Nietzsche to the “great health.” To try and see beyond this folly, we will consider carefully the site in which health emerges for both thinkers. This discussion is further motivated by an interest in the prospects for religion after the (...) death of God. (shrink)

This article presents Gadamer’s interest in temporality as his strategy for advancing hermeneutics as philosophy of experience, a strategy becoming significantly more salient with the appearance of his 1992 essay, ‘Wort und Bild’. I demonstrate how temporal categories readily demarcate the problem of ontological imbalance so central in Gadamer’s philosophical project, a demarcation that removes any illusion of compatibility between Gadamer and the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. The article also considers some common misunderstandings of Gadamer resulting from a failure (...) to take full account of his interest in temporality, misunderstandings that prohibit recognizing the radical potential of Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy for our understanding of human finitude. A full account of this orientation must begin with a grasp of the exemplariness of art in his philosophy, and in this connection, the article raises the question of Gadamer’s late interest in the distinct exemplariness, not of lyric poetry, but of narrative art. (shrink)

Best known as a philosopher, one of the founders of existentialism, Kierkegaard also wrote books whose themes were primarily religious, psychological or literary. He was opposed to much in organised Christianity, stressing the necessity for individual choice against prescribed dogma and ritual. In this book, he concentrates his penetrating psychological observations on the theme of despair.

Recent philosophical work on temporal experience offers generic models that are often assumed to apply to all sensory modalities. I show that the models serve as broad frameworks in which different aspects of cognitive science can be slotted and, thus, are beneficial to furthering research programs in embodied music cognition. Here I discuss a particular feature of temporal experience that plays a key role in such philosophical work: a distinction between the experience of succession and the mere succession of experiences. (...) I question the presupposition that there is such an evident, clear distinction and suggest that, instead, how the distinction is drawn is context-dependent. After suggesting a way to modify the philosophical models of temporal experience to accommodate this contextdependency, I illustrate that these models can fruitfully incorporate features of research projects in embodied musical cognition. To do so I supplement a modified retentionalist model with aspects of recent work that links bodily movement with musical perception (Godøy, 2006; 2010a; Jensenius, Wanderley, Godøy, and Leman, 2010). The resulting model is shown to facilitate novel hypotheses, refine the notion of context-dependency and point towards means of extending the philosophical model and an existent research program. (shrink)