Pub Date : 2012-03-19DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127174
J. Tsaaior
Introduction For some time now, the negotiation and interrogation of the plethora of problems plaguing postcolonial Africa have remained the burden of African poetry and, indeed, literature and history. Indelibly inscribed within the schema of this interrogation is the overwhelming perennial concern and engagement with history and memory which, understandably, stem from the repercussions the chequered complex of problems has had--and is still having--on the continent. Africa's postcolonial contradiction finds manifestation in political perfidy and subterfuge by a decadent political elite, economic paralysis and strangulation by a petit bourgeoisie in active collaboration with their counterparts in the metropolitan centers and a crippling social morass and moral atrophy. Much of these problems can be located in the historical contingencies of the colonial and imperial enterprise as well as the betrayals and ineptitude of the postcolonial leadership. But as Makouta-Mboukou observes, "the enemies of man are not only found outside one's own house but also within it." (1) Thus, in an increasingly postmodernist world of tremendous development in science and technology, digital and satellite communication, much of Africa continues to tell a tale whose leitmotifs are recrudescent fratricidal conflicts, genocidal wars, corruption, poverty, hunger, disease, injustice, greed, gratuitous ethnic nationalism, etc. Paradoxically, the continent is richly blessed with human, mineral and economic resources. This paradox is what Femi Ojo-Ade calls a "corpus of contradictions." (2) Jideofor Adibe articulates this paradox which defines Africa and is complicit in the generation of crises and conflicts with external propelling exigencies thus: No continent is pulled in as many directions and often conflictual directions as Africa. It is the continent where different countries, and even nationalities within countries, are sharply divided, and sometimes defined by emotive external allegiances. Hence, we have Anglophone Africa, Francophone Africa, Lusophone Africa, Arab Africa, Bantu Africa, Christian Africa, Islamic Africa, Diaspora Africa etc. (3) It is this warped state of affairs that has provided the impetus for many African writers- and in this case poets-who feel sufficiently concerned to appropriate public space to valorize a continent's ignoble condition and unebbing tide of adversities. Joe Ushie and the "Civan" Metaphor The "Civan" metaphor is a veritable trope which idealizes the overweening gravitation or proclivity to war and conflict in Africa. As such, it celebrates and promotes martial confrontation among communities, ethnic nationalities and nation-states. It espouses to the condition of, and imperative for, communal conflicts, social unrests, political instability, and economic despoliation. It is an obsession which turns war and conflict into a pastime or vortex. The metaphor, therefore, represents the propensity to war and communal conflict--quite oft
{"title":"Postcolonial History, Memory and the Poetic Imagination: Interrogating the “Civan” Metaphor in Joe Ushie’s Eclipse in Rwanda.","authors":"J. Tsaaior","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127174","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction For some time now, the negotiation and interrogation of the plethora of problems plaguing postcolonial Africa have remained the burden of African poetry and, indeed, literature and history. Indelibly inscribed within the schema of this interrogation is the overwhelming perennial concern and engagement with history and memory which, understandably, stem from the repercussions the chequered complex of problems has had--and is still having--on the continent. Africa's postcolonial contradiction finds manifestation in political perfidy and subterfuge by a decadent political elite, economic paralysis and strangulation by a petit bourgeoisie in active collaboration with their counterparts in the metropolitan centers and a crippling social morass and moral atrophy. Much of these problems can be located in the historical contingencies of the colonial and imperial enterprise as well as the betrayals and ineptitude of the postcolonial leadership. But as Makouta-Mboukou observes, \"the enemies of man are not only found outside one's own house but also within it.\" (1) Thus, in an increasingly postmodernist world of tremendous development in science and technology, digital and satellite communication, much of Africa continues to tell a tale whose leitmotifs are recrudescent fratricidal conflicts, genocidal wars, corruption, poverty, hunger, disease, injustice, greed, gratuitous ethnic nationalism, etc. Paradoxically, the continent is richly blessed with human, mineral and economic resources. This paradox is what Femi Ojo-Ade calls a \"corpus of contradictions.\" (2) Jideofor Adibe articulates this paradox which defines Africa and is complicit in the generation of crises and conflicts with external propelling exigencies thus: No continent is pulled in as many directions and often conflictual directions as Africa. It is the continent where different countries, and even nationalities within countries, are sharply divided, and sometimes defined by emotive external allegiances. Hence, we have Anglophone Africa, Francophone Africa, Lusophone Africa, Arab Africa, Bantu Africa, Christian Africa, Islamic Africa, Diaspora Africa etc. (3) It is this warped state of affairs that has provided the impetus for many African writers- and in this case poets-who feel sufficiently concerned to appropriate public space to valorize a continent's ignoble condition and unebbing tide of adversities. Joe Ushie and the \"Civan\" Metaphor The \"Civan\" metaphor is a veritable trope which idealizes the overweening gravitation or proclivity to war and conflict in Africa. As such, it celebrates and promotes martial confrontation among communities, ethnic nationalities and nation-states. It espouses to the condition of, and imperative for, communal conflicts, social unrests, political instability, and economic despoliation. It is an obsession which turns war and conflict into a pastime or vortex. The metaphor, therefore, represents the propensity to war and communal conflict--quite oft","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115045780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-19DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127173
David A. Colón
Although better known in the world of Spanish letters, Salomon de la Selva is a shadowy figure in the history of U.S. poetry. He was born on March 20, 1893, to be the eldest of ten siblings, in Leon, Nicaragua--a rare fact in the dearth of information we have about his early life. (1) According to Edgardo Buitrago and Carlos Tunerman, de la Selva lived in Nicaragua until the age of eleven, when he left his family and took a scholarship to live and study in the Northeastern U.S. We don't know for sure where he lived in the U.S. from the age of eleven to twenty-one, when, in 1914, he served as Ruben Dario's translator in New York, and the record becomes clearer. In 1915, de la Selva collaborated, with the American poet Thomas Walsh, to publish a translation of Eleven Poems of Ruben Dario, and henceforth his reputation grew. He was mentored by his compatriot Dario and the Dominican poet Pedro Enriquez Urena, and in 1916 de la Selva was appointed to the faculty of Williams College, to teach Spanish and French. He soon befriended Edna St. Vincent Millay, at the time a senior at Vassar, and sowed the seed of a profound, if short-lived, relationship between the two poets. (2) Like Millay, de la Selva preferred formal verse in English (3)--especially the sonnet, iambic meter, and rhyme--which explains in part why contemporary Anglophone critics now place him as a marginal figure. By the measure of experimentation, his English poems seem flaccid compared to those of avant-garde contemporaries like Pound, Williams, or Cummings. Today poets and scholars find it easy to regard formal verse from the early twentieth century as intellectually and stylistically retrograde, but to truly understand de la Selva's work we need to reconsider norms of artistic radicalism, and for two related reasons: he was far more aesthetically challenging when writing poems in Spanish, and English verse forms were alien to him. When dealing with a poet who endeavors to escape the restraints of "the Tradition"--and here nationality does play a part in the implicit sense of entitlement--we see the deconstruction of forms, and thus beauty fails the new aesthetic, replaced with what Eliot famously described as intensity. (4) But when that poet is entering "the Tradition," he swims against the wave of the avant-garde to do something quite different: to dialogue for the sake of establishing legitimacy. De la Selva, as a native Nicaraguan living and writing in the U.S., entered not only an alien literary tradition, but also an alien language, and given all the cultural spheres this process generates, de la Selva's achievement should be regarded with these political implications in mind. Steven White, writing on de la Selva's work in both English and Spanish, considers de la Selva as "a Nicaraguan poet who wrote his first book, Tropical Town & Other Poems, in very traditional English verse forms, then rejected the English language entirely to produce, in Spanish, El soldado desconocido, an
尽管Salomon de la Selva在西班牙文学界更为人所知，但他在美国诗歌史上却是一个模糊的人物。他于1893年3月20日出生在尼加拉瓜的利昂，是十个兄弟姐妹中的老大——这是一个罕见的事实，因为我们对他的早年生活知之甚少。根据Edgardo Buitrago和Carlos Tunerman的说法，de la Selva一直住在尼加拉瓜，直到11岁时，他离开了家人，拿了奖学金去美国东北部生活和学习。我们不确定他从11岁到21岁在美国住在哪里，1914年，他在纽约担任鲁本·达里奥的翻译，记录变得更加清晰。1915年，德拉塞尔瓦与美国诗人托马斯沃尔什合作，出版了鲁本达里奥的十一首诗的译本，从此他的名声鹊起。他得到了他的同胞达里奥和多米尼加诗人佩德罗·恩里克斯·乌雷纳的指导，1916年，德拉塞尔瓦被任命为威廉姆斯学院的教员，教授西班牙语和法语。他很快结识了埃德娜·圣文森特·米莱(Edna St. Vincent milay)，当时是瓦萨学院(Vassar)的一名大四学生，并在两位诗人之间播下了一段深刻而短暂的关系的种子。和米莱一样，德拉塞尔瓦更喜欢用英语写正式的诗歌——尤其是十四行诗、抑扬格和押韵——这在一定程度上解释了为什么当代以英语为母语的评论家现在把他视为一个边缘人物。从实验的角度来看，与庞德、威廉姆斯或卡明斯等同时代的先锋派诗人相比，他的英语诗歌显得软弱无力。今天，诗人和学者们很容易把20世纪早期的正式诗歌视为智力和风格上的倒退，但要真正理解德拉塞尔瓦的作品，我们需要重新考虑艺术激进主义的规范，原因有两个:他用西班牙语写诗时，他在美学上更具挑战性，而英语诗歌形式对他来说是陌生的。当面对一个试图摆脱“传统”束缚的诗人时——在这里，国籍确实在隐含的权利意识中发挥了作用——我们看到了形式的解构，因此美在新美学中失败了，取而代之的是艾略特著名的“强度”。(4)但是，当诗人进入“传统”时，他逆流而上，去做一些完全不同的事情:为了确立合法性而进行对话。De la Selva作为一个在美国生活和写作的尼加拉瓜人，不仅进入了一个陌生的文学传统，也进入了一种陌生的语言，考虑到这个过程所产生的所有文化领域，De la Selva的成就应该考虑到这些政治含义。史蒂文·怀特用英语和西班牙语评论德拉·塞尔瓦的作品，认为德拉·塞尔瓦是“一位尼加拉瓜诗人，他的第一本书《热带小镇和其他诗歌》是用非常传统的英语诗歌形式写的，然后他完全抛弃了英语，用西班牙语创作了《El soldado desconocido》，这是一部结合了各种体体史(编年史、日记、信件、以及民谣)对历史的微观体验进行多方面的描述，最终成为普遍的。”事实上，《热带小镇》(1918)既是德拉·塞尔瓦的第一本诗集，也是他的第一本英文书。尽管有传言说他在英国出版了第二本英语诗歌书《士兵歌唱》(a Soldier Sings, 1919)，但这本书的现存副本已经不存在了。(6)《士兵歌唱》，怀特指出，它“所谓的存在是尼加拉瓜诗人埃内斯托·梅贾·桑切斯将参考书目信息(伦敦:博德利头，1919年)寄给[尼加拉瓜评论家]豪尔赫·爱德华多·阿雷利亚诺的结果。当时，豪尔赫·爱德华多·阿雷利亚诺正在为基础出版物《Salomon de la Selva Homenaje》汇编关于德拉塞尔瓦的书籍和文章的广泛参考书目。阿雷拉诺本人认为《士兵歌唱》是“一个传奇，是我们充满神话的文学中的又一个神话”。…
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Pub Date : 2012-03-19DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127178
Yubraj Aryal
Jacque Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Vols I trans. Geoffrey Bennigton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), ISBN978-0-226-44429-0; 978-0-226-14430-6, Pages 349; 293. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Beast and the Sovereign is a collection of last seminars in two volumes given by Jacques Derrida from 2001-2003 on the relation between animality and sovereignty. In the seminars, Derrida pushes on a "certain analogy between the beast and the sovereign, the beast that sometimes seems to be the sovereign, like the beast that is outside or above the law" (4). It is in fact the extension of his earlier project on sovereignty in Politics of Friendship (1997) and Rogues (2004). The beast is not just a trope, he argues, but something against which sovereignty of the sovereign is established. Derrida claims that "beast is not alone" because the sovereign is the beast's friend. They live in the same territory-outside the field of law. Contrary to Schmitt, Derrida argues that sovereignty can, more or less, be related to "pre-political, before the nation-state, sovereignty of the state-free-citizen, of the citizen-state" (21). It seems to me that our advocacy for the absolute freedom of citizens is a desire for the "return of the beast" or return to the pre-political state of life. He shows the pre-political sovereignty of the citizen, in which the "savage man" or the "beast" would enjoy the same happiness of absolute freedom. The beast is "alone," "independent," "unique," "indivisible," and does not relate to others for its world. Likewise, the sovereign enjoys "isolation," "exception," is "set off," "separated" and holds exceptional power to suspend laws. Derrida offers a critique of Giorgio Agamben's formulation of bios and zoe in Homo Sacer and State of Exception in order to show the incompatibility in his idea of sovereign power as the reason of the stronger. Derrida shows the problematic of relating the animal to either side of the distinction between bios and zoe. He says, "Agamben's text: does the animal come under bios or zoe ? ... man defined as zoon logon ekhon, the animal, the living being possessed of logos. What does that mean? ... the whole tradition we are speaking has been governed by this definition, the difficulties of which ... depending on whether one accepts or not Agamben's proposed distinction between 'essential attribute' and specific difference,' a distinction I found to be fragile" (337). The same logic Derrida persists, in and through a critique of Martin Heidegger's attempt to attribute the logos as reason and power, which overpowers Being. Heidegger treats animality as "nonpower" or "nontruth" or nonBeing and says that animality does have a characteristic of "disturbing, a little frightening, both intimate and terrible," which he associates with the Greek Deinon in Introduction to Metaphysics (242-43). …
雅克·德里达，《野兽与君主》，译。Geoffrey Bennigton(芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社，2011)，ISBN978-0-226-44429-0;978-0-226-14430-6，页349;293. 《野兽与君主》是雅克·德里达2001-2003年间关于动物与君主之间关系的两卷文集。在研讨会上，德里达推动了“野兽和君主之间的某种类比，野兽有时似乎是君主，就像在法律之外或之上的野兽一样”(4)。事实上，这是他早期在《友谊的政治》(1997)和《流氓》(2004)中关于主权的项目的延伸。他认为，野兽不只是一个比喻，而是一种与君主的主权相对立的东西。德里达声称“野兽并不孤单”，因为君主是野兽的朋友。他们生活在同一个领域——法律领域之外。与施密特相反，德里达认为主权或多或少可以与“前政治，在民族国家之前，国家-自由公民的主权，公民国家的主权”有关(21)。在我看来，我们对公民绝对自由的倡导是一种对“野兽回归”或回归前政治生活状态的渴望。他展示了前政治时期的公民主权，在这种主权中，“野蛮人”或“野兽”同样享有绝对自由的幸福。野兽是“孤独的”、“独立的”、“独特的”、“不可分割的”，与它的世界无关。同样，君主享有“孤立”、“例外”、“被抵消”、“分离”，并拥有暂停法律的特殊权力。德里达对Giorgio Agamben在《Homo Sacer》和《State of Exception》中对生命和佐伊的表述进行了批判，以表明他将主权权力作为强者的理由的观点是不相容的。德里达展示了将动物与生物和佐伊之间的区别联系起来的问题。他说，阿甘本的文本:动物是属于bios还是zoe ?…人被定义为zoon logon ekhon，动物，拥有理性的生物。这是什么意思?…我们所谈论的整个传统都受到这个定义的支配，其困难之处在于……这取决于一个人是否接受阿甘本提出的区分“本质属性”和“特定差异”的观点，“我发现这种区分是脆弱的”(337)。德里达坚持同样的逻辑，通过批判马丁·海德格尔试图将逻各斯归为超越存在的理性和力量。海德格尔将动物性视为“非权力”或“非真理”或“非存在”，并说动物性确实具有“令人不安的，有点可怕的，既亲密又可怕”的特征，他将其与希腊的Deinon联系在一起形而上学导论(242-43)。…
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Pub Date : 2012-03-19DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127175
Laurie Johnson
The prospects for a phenomenology of technology have been guided in the past decade by a split between supporters of Martin Heidegger and those who subscribe to Bernard Stiegler's critique of Heidegger. This essay proposes that both are needed for a phenomenology of what Edward Castronova calls 'synthetic worlds' (large on-line environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft). Here is a phenomenology that must take into account histories of design and technical evolution to account for the particular 'fantasy of disembodiment' that shapes a user's experience of a synthetic world, forgetting the bodily engagement with hardware.
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Pub Date : 2012-03-19DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127172
R. Arana
The name of William Blake is nowhere mentioned per se in On Beauty--not even alluded to in the way one might expect of a novel that seems in so many ways a direct response to some of Blake's most passionate concerns. It is even possible that, while she certainly studied Blake's poetry at Cambridge University, Zadie Smith was not thinking specifically of Blake as she composed most of On Beauty. But hints abound of a deep connection. When she began writing On Beauty during the 2002-2003 academic year, Zadie Smith was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Boston, studying "moral philosophy" and thinking about her experience of America and of academia. Blake, too, had been thinking of America (and particularly of Boston's revolutionaries) as he composed his two intriguing and prophetic poems about trends in moral philosophy. The philosophical correspondences between Blake's and Zadie Smith's texts are arguably legion but, I admit, quite subtle--which is why I propose to examine "hints" only of Blake-like conceptualizations in Zadie Smith's hilarious send-up of trans-Atlantic academic life. (1) Blake and Smith, I propose, reached strikingly similar critical positions towards philosophical trends current in their respective eras. And while Smith's fictional Boston area is an especially bighearted tribute to the city and its environs--and especially to its most generous and spirited citizens, both Smith and Blake excoriate those who, for selfish ends, disparage beauty and in so doing sabotage justice, love, joy and genuine freedom. On Beauty, like Blake's two poems on America, indicts the reprehensible intellectual discourses of the day that undermine human happiness and corrupt the social order. (2) To discern the important common elements between Blake and Smith, we need first to look at Blake's fundamental concerns, to see the Blake afflatus in a holistic way. This is not easy. Scholars, until very recently, have long and obdurately and even rancorously debated what Blake was up to. Saree Makdisi (a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA; Edward Said's nephew) has tenaciously and meticulously addressed some of the most perplexing cruxes of Blake scholarship in William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s and brightly elucidated, there, (3) some of Blake's key passages in America: A Prophecy and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Makdisi disputes scholarship that--based on the rants against tyrants and the moaning over slavery and other injustices featured in Blake's works--lumps Blake with Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and their circles to establish Blake's bona fides as a "rights" and "civil liberties" advocate. Recent revisionists (Makdisi paramount among them) make the case that Blake was coming at these ideological issues from a completely different angle (a much more broadly moral and future-oriented angle), which enabled him to imagine where the rights revolutions set in motion
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Pub Date : 2012-03-19DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20127176
M. P. Harper
There is something unsettling about the suicide of Gilles Deleuze, not in a social, historical, or religiously moral sense, judging the act itself, but rather in a philosophical and a singular sense, his suicide in particular, Deleuze's act. It is perhaps troubling specifically to those who think with his philosophy, a philosophy as much of life as for life. The trouble arises immediately from the difficulty in readily assimilating what appears to be an obvious paradox in general--a suicide and a philosophy of life. Nor is one immediately able to resist what seem to be natural impulses of synthesis and identification (not to go as far as interpretation): Deleuze the man and Deleuze the philosopher, Deleuze as an act of death and Deleuze as thought of life. And yet, these are unsynthesizable poles particularly because of the ways in which Deleuze conceptualizes suicide, because of the function or the figure of suicide in his philosophical movements. Unlike Michel Foucault, whose words have been, in one way or another, used to "explain" acts in which he allegedly engaged and have been made to equal a "death drive," (1) Deleuze appears to treat suicide unambiguously and consistently as a failed line of flight, as a botched experiment. Nevertheless, when he invokes Foucault's thought in "A Portrait of Foucault," (2) Deleuze conceptualizes the figure with intensity closely akin to an embrace, though cautious and resistant to its draw. His thinking through the line Outside, through drawing the line, is particularly compelling and illuminating to an inquiry into one of the significant theoretical divergences between the two thinkers, namely their conceptions of desire and pleasure. My essay extends this inquiry not in order to settle but rather to mobilize the figure of suicide as a line of flight, souci de soi, in terms of desire and pleasure. (3) It is rather a movement towards engaging Foucault's and Deleuze's conceptions of suicide through the significance of the notion to their philosophies of living. While it is the drawing of an interlocution, it is also an effort to desubjectify suicide and speak of it, in a way, between Deleuze and Foucault, as a movement, an acceleration, and a techne. To ask "what is suicide" presents an ontological query that perhaps is not the appropriate approach to the question vis-a-vis Foucault's program. But, literally and conventionally, in terms of common sense, how does one think the concept suicide? More often than not, it finds itself integrated in the medical discourse (though its itinerary meanders through religious and legal discourses), linked with morbidity, clinical depression, despair, renunciation, an obsession or fascination with death or a death-drive, a loss of interest in or value of life, even with a lack of morality. (4) In a variety of ways, James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault, considered to be one of the four major biographies of the thinker, (5) seems to both draw and build on these conn
吉尔·德勒兹的自杀令人不安，不是从社会，历史，或宗教道德的角度来判断，而是从哲学和独特的角度来判断，尤其是他的自杀，德勒兹的行为。这可能特别让那些认同他的哲学的人感到不安，他的哲学既是生活的哲学，也是生活的哲学。问题的直接原因是，很难轻易地把自杀和人生哲学这两种似乎是显而易见的一般悖论混为一谈。人们也不能立即抵制似乎是自然冲动的综合和认同(而不是解释):德勒兹是人，德勒兹是哲学家，德勒兹是死亡的行为，德勒兹是生命的思想。然而，这些都是不可综合的极点特别是因为德勒兹将自杀概念化的方式，因为自杀在他的哲学运动中的作用或形象。与米歇尔·福柯(Michel Foucault)不同，福柯的话语以这样或那样的方式被用来“解释”他据称参与并被等同于“死亡冲动”的行为(1)，德勒兹似乎毫不含糊地、始终如一地将自杀视为一种失败的逃跑路线，一种拙劣的实验。然而，当他在《福柯肖像》中引用福柯的思想时，德勒兹将这个人物概念化，其强度与拥抱非常相似，尽管他对拥抱的吸引力持谨慎和抵制态度。他在《外在》这条线上的思考，通过画出这条线，对于探究两位思想家之间一个重要的理论分歧，即他们对欲望和快乐的概念，特别有说服力和启发性。我的文章扩展了这个研究，不是为了解决这个问题，而是为了动员自杀的形象，作为一条逃跑的路线，在欲望和快乐方面，souci de soi。(3)更确切地说，这是一场通过福柯和德勒兹的自杀概念对他们的生活哲学的重要性来引入福柯和德勒兹自杀概念的运动。虽然这是一种对话的描绘，但它也是一种将自杀去主体化的努力，在某种程度上，在德勒兹和福柯之间，它是一种运动，一种加速，一种技术。问“什么是自杀”提出了一个本体论的问题，这可能不是福柯的纲领所提出的问题的适当方法。但是，从字面上和传统上来说，就常识而言，人们如何看待自杀这个概念?通常情况下，它发现自己融入了医学话语(尽管它的旅程蜿蜒于宗教和法律话语中)，与发病率、临床抑郁症、绝望、放弃、对死亡或死亡驱动的痴迷或迷恋、对生命的兴趣或价值的丧失，甚至缺乏道德联系在一起。(4)詹姆斯·米勒的《米歇尔·福柯的激情》被认为是这位思想家的四部主要传记之一，(5)似乎以各种方式汲取并建立了这些联系，从思想的碎片和支离破碎的话语中解读和演绎福柯，他的肖像的主题。这种方法强化了自杀对生命的普遍反对，福柯打破了这种二分法。德勒兹通过情感和感知，实验和思考来接近福柯的“肖像”，这允许一个开放和绘制新的平台。在同样的意义上，我试图让福柯打破“自杀”，特别是通过考虑他的问题“主体是如何被迫解读自己关于什么是被禁止的?”(6)这是一个可以揭示逃跑路线与自杀、“生活艺术”中的自杀以及政治中的自杀之间的关系的问题。在一篇名为《最简单的快乐》(The simple of Pleasures)的奇特文章中，福柯设想了一个枪支商店的店员，他帮助人们选择最适合自己的自杀方式。他在文章开头否认自己会是另一个争论自杀是否合法或道德的人，但文章似乎既颠覆了这一点，又在某种程度上做到了这一点。．．．
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Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171619
Shiva Rijal
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Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201161523
Yubraj Aryal
Introduction The question I want to raise here is the following: what form of politics supports an active and sovereign way of cultivating and caring of the self that would not simply be an instantiation of political power but is capable of becoming part of collective organizations without being overpowered by these collectives? It is in this light that I want to show how an affective politics gives us the potential for new subjectivities and new kinds of politics. In my attempt, I am taking a detour to discover the nonsubjective subjectivity beyond the mechanisms of power in order to speak of "a subject of practices" of the body that stimulates the active understanding of the sovereign way of cultivating and caring of the self. The new sense of politics that I am exploring here is not an effect of the discursive power relations, which Michel Foucault in his earlier career would advocate for, but it is the fundamental affective force in the emergence of new subjectless subjectivities. The new dimension of politics and its affective relations to subjective emergence are not a cultural relation of power and knowledge but of creative emergence of the self. They refer to the openness to body, openness to participation in self-stylization of body and the self. Affective Politics The affective politics questions a kind of politics with a misleading conception of human beings according to which they are inherently political (mutually agreed to form a consensus for living) and easily capable of articulating their interests rationally to reach to a common goal in life. The traditionalist notion of politics assumes human beings agreed to live together rationally on certain common interests. But affective politics, a new sense of being political or doing politics, adds up another distinct ethos in the human beings according to which they are expected to participate in a creation of new, opening up genuinely new ways of thinking, feeling and action in life. This is what I mean by affective politics. Human beings do not just live together more or less rationally in a given political structure and create shared thoughts, feelings and actions but are capable of creating entirely new values within and beyond the given politics. Certainly becoming a subject is something one cannot do on one's own; it is an intensely social process of shared values. Politics forms our becomings and reciprocally our becomings shape the becoming of politics. The co-dependability of our subjective becoming and becoming sociality is at the heart of the affective politics. So when we study an account of politics, we need to analyse how subjective becoming interfaces with social becoming. What sort of affective process--to affect and to be affected--as an engagement with the world is involved in creating a "communicative consensus" upon people's mutual goals and interests? The new modes of thinking, feeling and action occur not at the level of power relations but at the level of the bod
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Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201161524
A. C. Amaya
There are many evidences of anthropophagy in the history of mankind, from the ritual preparation and consumption of the brain mass of dead men in the Paleolithic age (2), to the recent erotic rituals of a discreet German citizen. However, the cannibalistic act in itself is considered unacceptable due to reasons that can be successively referred to the intolerable and the unthinkable in most civilizations. However, the harshest rejection seems to come from Western culture. In fact, the silence about and condemnation of the cannibalistic act sets the ego of the modern individual against the cannibalistic imprint of the irrational, where one finds the morbid failure to distinguish between anthropophagy, insensitiveness and cruelty, in short, what any missionary might regard as a basic form of demonism. The effects of such a judgment are seen in the indifference and fear of researchers who approach this subject, sometimes with the best intentions. (3) Taking a different path, this essay argues that cannibalism is not just a verifiable social fact but may also clarify a considerable part of the dynamics of the death impulse in different social formations. But, instead of regarding the problem as a dilemma--about the differences between the logical formulation of arguments that guarantee a scientific 'foundation' for the thanatic impulse that characterizes cannibalism and the reconstruction of mythical traditions, ritual procedures and symbolic systems--I think it would be more productive to choose a strategy which runs in both directions: an ethnographic interpretation as well as a deconstruction of the limits that every age places on the topic of cannibalism, from a conceptual perspective that acts as a framework for the general dynamics of Latin American culture. In this sense, the denial of cannibalism by Hispanic culture is part of a general project aimed at the abolition of Amerindian thought as a prior condition for the construction of a new type of individual and the implementation of new ways of individuation. The result has been an interposed identity, that is, a simulacrum of a subject that appears before the conquered man as ideal by means of the linguistic, policing, and institutional power of the conqueror. Such a construction of the subject ends up producing a collective unconscious that, paradoxically, puts the stigma of cannibalism (4) on the initial identity of the indigenous people of America, but at the same time, refuses to recognize the trace of cannibal thought and ritual in the constitution of psychic life, as a vector that guides the destiny of the flows of desire and leaves an imprint on the processes of social inscription. (5) In the methodic search for such a relationship between the traces and the act of cannibalism, it is interesting to consider certain research guidelines set forth by Foucault and Derrida. On the one hand, according to Foucault, it would be necessary to describe the field of enunciates on cannibalism that
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Pub Date : 2011-11-01DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201171616
Darrell P. Arnold
Introduction Hegel like Goethe and many thinkers of the Romantic period describes numerous systems as "organisms," "organic wholes," "living wholes," etc. Among these are the discipline of the history of philosophy, which he considers an "organic developing whole," (1) the discipline of physics, which also is "organic whole," not a simple "aggregate," (2) the "organism of the state," (3) and even geological nature, which he refers to as "the primary organism." (4) In various contexts he also speaks of the "living development" of the Idea or of Mind. (5) In all of these cases, one may wonder whether Hegel is simply using a popular metaphor of his time, as Rolf-Peter Hostmann argues, (6) or whether he intends to define systems more concretely. While I will argue that Hegel in fact understands these "organisms," "living wholes," and so on more strictly in accord with a definition of the living being, which he outlines in the Science of the Logic, in the end a serious metaphor can do much the same work. In any case, where Hegel refers to a system as organic without making some further qualifications, he appears to be pretty strictly characterizing it in accordance with the view of the organism laid out in his works on logic. Accepting Kant's view, in these texts he describes an organic system as a whole in which the parts and whole are reciprocally means and ends. (7) Here Hegel's basic view of organic systems will be described, and it will be shown that, in expanding on Kant's view of the organism in the Encyclopedia treatment of the logic, Hegel characterizes an organic system in accord with findings of the early nineteenth century life sciences in ways that anticipate many ideas developed not only by early general systems theory but also by later system thinkers. In this article similarities between Hegel and systems theoreticians will be pointed out, especially with a concentration on the ecologically oriented theoreticians. In the last section of the paper some key differences between their views will be noted. Hegel on Organic Systems The task in Hegel's logic is to describe the basic categories of human thinking, much in line with Kant's project. In Hegel's case, these are of course also the categories of the Absolute. Hegel lays out a philosophically reflective view of an "organism" in the logic, specifically in the section on "Life." Here Hegel is describing the formal character of Idea, i.e., the network of basic concepts that structure thought that he has been describing in the logic up to this point, the final section of the book. The "unmediated Idea" has been described as "Life." Now he says that as objective--thus mediated--it is an organism. This objectivity of the living being is the organism; it is the means and instrument of the end, perfect in its purposiveness since the Notion constitutes its substance; but for that very reason this means and instrument is itself the realized end, in which the subjective end is thus immediately b
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