Pub Date : 2010-09-22DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201061325
M. Davidson
I: "To decompose is to live, too" In Bending Over Backwards Lennard Davis coins the term "dismodernism" to describe the ways that disability challenges ideas of liberal autonomy and able-bodied normalcy that underwrite contemporary identity politics. As a social model, dismodernism shares with theories of postmodernism a skepticism toward grand narratives of Subjecthood and historical teleology, but Davis faults much postmodern theory for maintaining a social constructionist view of identity on the one hand while retaining a politics of multiculturalism and core group identity on the other. Reprising recent scientific discoveries in the field of genetics that disprove the biological basis of race, sexuality or ethnicity, he asks "how does it make sense to say there is a social construction of it." (1) Discourses of race, gender, and sexuality are products of late nineteenth-century medical science--as is disability--but unlike these other areas, disability crosses all such categories and is the one identity position that all of us, if we live long enough, may inhabit. Its pervasiveness and instability permit Davis to see disability as a kind of ur-identity constructed within the technologies of bio-power yet a subject position not bound by specific genetic, economic, or racial markers. The dismodernist ideal "aims to create a new category based on the partial, incomplete subject whose realization is not autonomy and independence but dependency and interdependence." (2) Although Davis conflates a postmodern philosophical stance toward performativity with a historical, post-civil rights cultural politics, he does point to a key limitation of rights claims that presume a healthy, independent (probably white, probably heterosexual, male) ideal to the exclusion of those deemed "defective" or unable to make "rational choices." In this respect he joins a number of recent theorists--Albert Memmi, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Berube, Eva Kittay, and Alasdaire MacIntyre--for whom a consideration of dependency challenges the social contract as it has been conceived from Rousseau and Hume to Rawls and asks whether contractarian ideals can stand the test of differently abled bodies? (3) Stated succinctly by Eva Kittay, dependency critique asserts that the idea of society as an association of equals "masks inequitable dependencies, those of infancy and childhood, old age, illness and disability. While we are dependent, we are not well positioned to enter a competition for the goods of social cooperation on equal terms." (4) Although liberal theories of social justice imply equal access to the public sphere, they do not account for individuals who, because of cognitive impairment or physical disability, cannot cooperate on "equal" and independent terms. Nor are dependent relations validated in the common weal. Citizens who need special accommodations are often stigmatized as narcissists, whiners, and drains on public funds. Their requests for "reasonable accommodat
在《弯腰向后》一书中，伦纳德·戴维斯(Lennard Davis)创造了“反现代主义”一词，用来描述残疾挑战自由自主和健全正常的观念的方式，这些观念是当代身份政治的基础。作为一种社会模式，后现代主义理论与后现代主义理论一样，都对主体性的宏大叙事和历史目的论持怀疑态度，但戴维斯认为后现代主义理论一方面保留了社会建构主义的身份观，另一方面又保留了多元文化主义的政治和核心群体的身份。他重述了遗传学领域最近的科学发现，这些发现否定了种族、性别或民族的生物学基础，他问道:“说这是一种社会建构，这怎么说得通?”(1)关于种族、性别和性的论述是19世纪晚期医学科学的产物——残疾也是如此——但与这些其他领域不同的是，残疾跨越了所有这些范畴，是我们所有人——如果我们活得足够长——都可能拥有的一种身份定位。它的普遍性和不稳定性使戴维斯将残疾视为一种在生物能源技术中构建的自我认同，但又不受特定基因、经济或种族标记约束的主体地位。非现代主义理想“旨在以局部的、不完整的主体为基础，创造一种新的范畴，这种主体的实现不是自主和独立，而是依赖和相互依赖。”(2)尽管戴维斯将表演的后现代哲学立场与历史的、后民权的文化政治混为一谈，但他确实指出了权利主张的一个关键局限性，即假设一种健康的、独立的(可能是白人、可能是异性恋者、男性)理想，将那些被认为是“有缺陷的”或无法做出“理性选择”的人排除在外。在这方面，他加入了最近的一些理论家的行列——阿尔伯特·梅米、玛莎·努斯鲍姆、迈克尔·贝鲁比、伊娃·基泰和阿勒斯代尔·麦金泰尔——对他们来说，依赖的考虑挑战了从卢梭、休谟到罗尔斯所构想的社会契约，并质疑契约主义理想能否经受住不同能力身体的考验?(3)伊娃·基泰(Eva Kittay)简洁地指出，依赖批判认为，社会是一个平等群体的概念“掩盖了不公平的依赖关系，包括婴儿期、儿童期、老年期、疾病期和残疾期的依赖关系。”虽然我们是依赖的，但我们并不能在平等的条件下为社会合作的成果而竞争。”(4)尽管社会正义的自由主义理论暗示了进入公共领域的平等机会，但它们没有考虑到那些由于认知障碍或身体残疾而不能在“平等”和独立的条件下合作的个人。依赖关系也不能在共同福利中得到证实。需要特殊照顾的公民经常被诬蔑为自恋狂、爱发牢骚的人、浪费公共资金的人。他们根据《美国残疾人法》提出的“合理便利”要求导致了一系列法庭案件，这些案件在很大程度上对原告不利。对口译员、看护者、治疗师和社会服务的需求使残疾人与自由主义的独立和自力更生的理想相冲突。(5)一种独立生活模式——残疾人权利运动的基础——能与阿拉斯代尔·麦金太尔所说的适用于我们所有人的“公认的依赖的美德”相吻合吗?(6)玛莎·努斯鲍姆(Martha Nussbaum)的《正义前沿》(Frontiers of Justice)一书以一个响亮的“还没有”回答了这些问题，并特别指责约翰·罗尔斯(John Rawls)的《正义理论》将残疾人、穷人和非人类动物的权利划归为不能包括在罗尔斯“原始立场”(即那些“人类合作既可能又必要的正常条件”)中的选民。(7)努斯鲍姆反对强调互利合作的人权契约模式，主张从她所说的“能力”(借用阿马特拉·森的说法)的立场出发，提出一种权利论述——“人们实际上能够做什么，并在某种程度上通过一种对生活的直觉观念得到信息，这种生活配得上人类的尊严。”．．．
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Pub Date : 2010-09-08DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051220
A. Pokhrel
Robert J.C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell Publication, 2008), Page 291, ISBN: 9781405101295. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over the past decade, more specifically since power devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in June 1999, there has been a revival of the discourses on Englishness and English national identity. Apparently the terms such as English or Englishness may sound overtly familiar to us; however, their discursive formations are complex and varied, suggesting deeper cultural and historical implications. Is one's English identity synonymous with a common political citizenry of England? Or is it framed in terms of common membership of an ethnic community based on one's affinity with language, religion, history, and blood or 'race'? What constitutes true English national consciousness? Robert J.C. Young's The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008) is a remarkable contribution to this renewed debate on the issues of Englishness and English national identity, which go beyond "the challenges of devolution, or even the end of empire" (1). For him, these issues are an outcome of complex historical and cultural discursive formations, in which "Englishness was never really about England, its cultural essence or national character, at all" (1). Framing the discourse of Englishness within the diverse discourses of "race"--in which "race" is evoked variously as the concepts of biology, genetics, lineage, physical typology, ethnicity, nation, and so on, Young fascinatingly explores the cultural implications of the racial discourses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He avers that English national identity is a diasporic global identity. To explicate the cultural aspects of unstable English national identity, Young's book, from the very beginning, examines different race theories and the contesting ideas of race in English cultural history and science, where the term "race"--more particularly 'Saxonism' or 'the Anglo-Saxon'--is used interchangeably with the concepts of both nation and ethnicity. Similarly, he shows a dialectic between the English race and the Irish race, or Saxon and Celt, as a part of the popular racial discourses of the nineteenth century. For the English as a race was usually conceived and defined in terms of their relationship with the Irish as a race. Although Young alludes to different scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses about race, such as the notions of Aryan superiority supported by the scientific evidence of cranial measurements and similar other practices, the main purpose of his book seems to lay emphasis on the heterogeneous and dynamic global English identity. In his attempt to define global English identity, what he prefers to call English ethnicity, Young uses the lens of a binary dialectic between Saxon and Celt, especially the Irish Celts, again and again. Mainly in chapter four "The Times and Its Celtic Challenges," he not only discusses different race theories but al
罗伯特·j·c·杨，《英国民族的观念》(牛津:布莱克威尔出版社，2008)，第291页，ISBN: 9781405101295。在过去的十年里，更具体地说，自从1999年6月权力下放到苏格兰、威尔士和北爱尔兰以来，关于英格兰性和英格兰民族认同的论述已经复苏。显然，像英语或英伦风这样的术语对我们来说可能听起来很熟悉;然而，它们的话语构成是复杂多变的，暗示着更深层次的文化和历史意蕴。一个人的英格兰身份是否等同于英格兰的普通政治公民身份?或者它是基于一个人的语言、宗教、历史、血统或“种族”的亲和力，而被框定为一个民族社区的共同成员?什么构成了真正的英国民族意识?罗伯特·杨(Robert J.C. Young)的《英国民族观念》(The Idea of English Ethnicity, 2008)对这场关于英格兰性和英国民族认同问题的新辩论做出了杰出贡献，这超越了“权力移交的挑战，甚至是帝国的终结”(1)。对他来说，这些问题是复杂的历史和文化话语形成的结果，其中“英格兰性从来都不是真正关于英格兰、它的文化本质或国民性。杨在“种族”的不同话语中构建了关于英国人的话语——在“种族”中，“种族”作为生物学、遗传学、血统、身体类型学、种族、民族等概念被不同地唤起，杨引人入胜地探索了19世纪和20世纪初种族话语的文化含义。他断言，英国的民族认同是一种散居的全球认同。为了解释不稳定的英国民族认同的文化方面，杨的书从一开始就考察了不同的种族理论和英国文化史和科学中关于种族的争论，其中“种族”一词——更具体地说是“撒克逊主义”或“盎格鲁-撒克逊”——与国家和种族的概念交替使用。同样地，他展示了英格兰种族和爱尔兰种族之间的辩证法，或者撒克逊人和凯尔特人之间的辩证法，作为19世纪流行的种族话语的一部分。因为英国人作为一个种族通常是根据他们与爱尔兰人的关系来构思和定义的。尽管杨暗示了关于种族的不同科学和伪科学话语，比如雅利安人优越的概念，这一概念得到了头骨测量和类似其他实践的科学证据的支持，但他的书的主要目的似乎是强调异质性和动态的全球英语身份。在他试图定义全球英语身份(他更喜欢称之为英语种族)的过程中，杨一次又一次地使用了撒克逊人和凯尔特人(尤其是爱尔兰凯尔特人)之间二元辩证法的镜头。主要在第四章“时代及其凯尔特人的挑战”中，他不仅讨论了不同的种族理论，而且展示了印刷媒体在传播主流种族意识形态方面的作用。…
{"title":"Ethnicity, Race and Question of Englishness","authors":"A. Pokhrel","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051220","url":null,"abstract":"Robert J.C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell Publication, 2008), Page 291, ISBN: 9781405101295. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over the past decade, more specifically since power devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in June 1999, there has been a revival of the discourses on Englishness and English national identity. Apparently the terms such as English or Englishness may sound overtly familiar to us; however, their discursive formations are complex and varied, suggesting deeper cultural and historical implications. Is one's English identity synonymous with a common political citizenry of England? Or is it framed in terms of common membership of an ethnic community based on one's affinity with language, religion, history, and blood or 'race'? What constitutes true English national consciousness? Robert J.C. Young's The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008) is a remarkable contribution to this renewed debate on the issues of Englishness and English national identity, which go beyond \"the challenges of devolution, or even the end of empire\" (1). For him, these issues are an outcome of complex historical and cultural discursive formations, in which \"Englishness was never really about England, its cultural essence or national character, at all\" (1). Framing the discourse of Englishness within the diverse discourses of \"race\"--in which \"race\" is evoked variously as the concepts of biology, genetics, lineage, physical typology, ethnicity, nation, and so on, Young fascinatingly explores the cultural implications of the racial discourses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He avers that English national identity is a diasporic global identity. To explicate the cultural aspects of unstable English national identity, Young's book, from the very beginning, examines different race theories and the contesting ideas of race in English cultural history and science, where the term \"race\"--more particularly 'Saxonism' or 'the Anglo-Saxon'--is used interchangeably with the concepts of both nation and ethnicity. Similarly, he shows a dialectic between the English race and the Irish race, or Saxon and Celt, as a part of the popular racial discourses of the nineteenth century. For the English as a race was usually conceived and defined in terms of their relationship with the Irish as a race. Although Young alludes to different scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses about race, such as the notions of Aryan superiority supported by the scientific evidence of cranial measurements and similar other practices, the main purpose of his book seems to lay emphasis on the heterogeneous and dynamic global English identity. In his attempt to define global English identity, what he prefers to call English ethnicity, Young uses the lens of a binary dialectic between Saxon and Celt, especially the Irish Celts, again and again. Mainly in chapter four \"The Times and Its Celtic Challenges,\" he not only discusses different race theories but al","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125764935","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 : 2010-09-08DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051219
J. Litaker
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Pub Date : 2010-09-08DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051212
A. Alkhas
I. Introduction "The picture hangs on the wall like a rifle or a hat." This statement might well be attributed to Marcel Duchamp, the 'originator' of the readymade, if one were to hazard an educated guess, but it is in fact from the introductory pages of Martin Heidegger's 1936 essay "The Origin of the Work of Art" ("Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes"). (1) Heidegger (1889-1976) and Duchamp (1887-1968) lived parallel lives that do not seem to have crossed on the historical plane. And yet, intersection occurs as Heidegger moves toward an aestheticization of philosophy and Duchamp moves toward a philosophization of art. This intersection is seemingly disavowed on both sides. Heidegger, who catalogs more than a dozen exemplary "great" works of art in his influential essay, chooses none from the twentieth century. (2) Duchamp satirizes the question of ontology in his remarks to Pierre Cabanne: "I don't believe in the word 'being.' The idea of being is a human invention ... It's an essential concept, which doesn't exist at all in reality." (3) The contradiction stemming from Duchamp's avowed disbelief in "being," which he then explains using terms related to being ("human," "being is," "essential," "exist," "reality") suggests, however, his awareness that one cannot escape from the question of being. Indeed, Duchamp's works explore forms of being and display striking affinities with Heidegger's explorations in "The Origin of the Work of Art." Heidegger, on the other hand, surreptitiously slips a twentieth century work of art into his catalog of "great" art: his own essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art," thus acknowledging the potential of contemporary art to be "an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence." (4) "The Origin of the Work of Art" is based on lectures given in 1935 and 1936, over twenty years after the advent of Duchamp's readymades. The essay appears soon after Heidegger's so-called Kehre, or turn, when he purportedly switched course and began to pursue a more radical questioning of metaphysics, attempting to return to the beginnings of Greek thought and abandoning traditional philosophical discourse in favor of a more poetic style. (5) Thomas McEvilley in his article "Empyrrhical Thinking (and Why Kant Can't)" has described Duchamp's abandonment of painting, (6) which occurred soon after he introduced the readymades, as a decisive "turn," one that "was to be so portentous for the art of the rest of the 20th century." (7) McEvilley outlines how critics sought the cause of this important shift, ascribing it, for example, to Duchamp's two-month visit to Munich in 1912. For McEvilley, however, it was Duchamp's (re-)reading of Greek philosophers during his stint as a librarian at the Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve in 1913 that had the greatest influence in triggering his "turn away from subjectivity." (8) Among the philosophers that he studied, it was Pyrrho, the first great skeptic, wh
“这幅画挂在墙上就像一把步枪或一顶帽子。”这句话很可能出自现成品的“鼻祖”马塞尔·杜尚(Marcel Duchamp)之口，但实际上它出自马丁·海德格尔(Martin Heidegger) 1936年的文章《艺术作品的起源》(“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”)的引言页。(1)海德格尔(1889-1976)和杜尚(1887-1968)过着相似的生活，在历史层面上似乎没有交集。然而，当海德格尔走向哲学的审美化和杜尚走向艺术的哲学化时，交集就出现了。双方似乎都否认了这个交集。海德格尔在他那篇颇具影响力的文章中列举了十多件堪称典范的“伟大”艺术作品，却没有选择20世纪的作品。(2)杜尚在对皮埃尔·卡班纳的谈话中讽刺了本体论的问题:“我不相信‘存在’这个词。存在的概念是人类的发明……这是一个基本概念，在现实中根本不存在。”(3)杜尚宣称不相信“存在”，然后他用与存在相关的术语(“人类”、“存在是”、“本质”、“存在”、“现实”)来解释“存在”，由此产生的矛盾表明，他意识到人无法逃避存在的问题。事实上，杜尚的作品探索了存在的形式，并与海德格尔在《艺术作品的起源》中的探索表现出惊人的相似性。另一方面，海德格尔偷偷地把一件二十世纪的艺术作品放进了他的“伟大”艺术目录:他自己的论文《艺术作品的起源》，从而承认当代艺术的潜力是“一种重要和必要的方式，在这种方式中，真理发生了，这对我们的历史存在是决定性的。”(4)“艺术作品的起源”是基于1935年和1936年的讲座，在杜尚的成品出现20多年后。这篇文章出现在海德格尔所谓的Kehre(转向)之后不久，据说他改变了路线，开始追求对形而上学的更激进的质疑，试图回到希腊思想的起点，放弃传统的哲学话语，倾向于更诗意的风格。Thomas McEvilley在他的文章《超然思维(以及为什么康德不能)》中描述了杜尚对绘画的放弃，这是在他引入现成品后不久发生的，是一个决定性的“转折”，一个“对20世纪余下的艺术来说是如此不祥的转折”。(7)麦克艾维利概述了批评家们是如何寻找这一重要转变的原因的，例如，他将其归因于杜尚在1912年对慕尼黑进行的为期两个月的访问。然而，对于麦克埃维利来说，杜尚在1913年担任圣吉纳维耶夫图书馆图书管理员期间对希腊哲学家的(重新)阅读对他产生了最大的影响，促使他“远离主观性”。在他所研究的哲学家中，第一个伟大的怀疑论者皮洛特别引起了杜尚的兴趣，也许部分原因是因为皮洛以放弃绘画而转向哲学而闻名。(9)杜尚希望在他的艺术中变得更哲学的愿望反映了海德格尔希望在他的哲学中变得更诗意的愿望，他们对主体性的共同不信任导致他们每个人都质疑艺术和哲学的持续生存能力。海德格尔晚期的一篇文章的标题是“哲学的终结和思考的任务”，杜尚经常因为宣布艺术的终结而受到赞扬和指责。(10)尽管他们明显的悲观主义(海德格尔的特点是一种严厉的、预言性的语调，与杜尚戏谑的、讽刺的超然形成鲜明对比)，他们的计划本质上是积极的。为了重振我们在世界上的经验，(11)他们试图通过重新连接早期的思维模式，来绕过他们认为形而上学对主体性的错误依赖所造成的僵局。…
{"title":"Heidegger in Plain Sight: “The Origin of the Work of Art” and Marcel Duchamp","authors":"A. Alkhas","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051212","url":null,"abstract":"I. Introduction \"The picture hangs on the wall like a rifle or a hat.\" This statement might well be attributed to Marcel Duchamp, the 'originator' of the readymade, if one were to hazard an educated guess, but it is in fact from the introductory pages of Martin Heidegger's 1936 essay \"The Origin of the Work of Art\" (\"Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes\"). (1) Heidegger (1889-1976) and Duchamp (1887-1968) lived parallel lives that do not seem to have crossed on the historical plane. And yet, intersection occurs as Heidegger moves toward an aestheticization of philosophy and Duchamp moves toward a philosophization of art. This intersection is seemingly disavowed on both sides. Heidegger, who catalogs more than a dozen exemplary \"great\" works of art in his influential essay, chooses none from the twentieth century. (2) Duchamp satirizes the question of ontology in his remarks to Pierre Cabanne: \"I don't believe in the word 'being.' The idea of being is a human invention ... It's an essential concept, which doesn't exist at all in reality.\" (3) The contradiction stemming from Duchamp's avowed disbelief in \"being,\" which he then explains using terms related to being (\"human,\" \"being is,\" \"essential,\" \"exist,\" \"reality\") suggests, however, his awareness that one cannot escape from the question of being. Indeed, Duchamp's works explore forms of being and display striking affinities with Heidegger's explorations in \"The Origin of the Work of Art.\" Heidegger, on the other hand, surreptitiously slips a twentieth century work of art into his catalog of \"great\" art: his own essay, \"The Origin of the Work of Art,\" thus acknowledging the potential of contemporary art to be \"an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence.\" (4) \"The Origin of the Work of Art\" is based on lectures given in 1935 and 1936, over twenty years after the advent of Duchamp's readymades. The essay appears soon after Heidegger's so-called Kehre, or turn, when he purportedly switched course and began to pursue a more radical questioning of metaphysics, attempting to return to the beginnings of Greek thought and abandoning traditional philosophical discourse in favor of a more poetic style. (5) Thomas McEvilley in his article \"Empyrrhical Thinking (and Why Kant Can't)\" has described Duchamp's abandonment of painting, (6) which occurred soon after he introduced the readymades, as a decisive \"turn,\" one that \"was to be so portentous for the art of the rest of the 20th century.\" (7) McEvilley outlines how critics sought the cause of this important shift, ascribing it, for example, to Duchamp's two-month visit to Munich in 1912. For McEvilley, however, it was Duchamp's (re-)reading of Greek philosophers during his stint as a librarian at the Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve in 1913 that had the greatest influence in triggering his \"turn away from subjectivity.\" (8) Among the philosophers that he studied, it was Pyrrho, the first great skeptic, wh","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130423895","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 : 2010-09-08DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051217
Jerome McGann
{"title":"The Crisis in the Humanities","authors":"Jerome McGann","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051217","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121099470","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 : 2010-09-08DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051213
Kelly Oliver
This essay examines media images of women in recent conflicts in the Middle East. From the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to protests in Iran, women have become the public face of violence, carried out and suffered. Women’s bodies are figured as sexual and violent, a potent combination that stirs public imagination and feeds into stereotypes of women as femme fatales or “bombshells.” Because the so-called war in Iraq is unlike others in that there is no front-line, U.S. women have been engaged in combat along with men. Women soldiers, not technically allowed on the front lines, continue to see action, to kill and to be killed. A shortage of military personnel leads to stretching the rules regarding women in ground combat forces. But, reportedly, the American public is no longer shocked at the idea of women dying in war; there is no more attention paid to fallen women than fallen men. Women’s participation in integrated units for the most part goes unnoticed. The women in these units adjust by using newer forms of birth control to make their periods less frequent or eliminate them altogether; and the military has disbursed a portable urination device that women soldiers call a “weenus” for long road-trips. They find ways of adapting their bodies to the male standards of war. Women are serving and dying, but conservatives think women should be mothers and not killers. And some military policy-makers foresee reopening debates about women’s participation in combat once the war is over. It is telling that although women’s deaths in Iraq get little attention in the media or from the American public, women’s involvement in abusive treatment of “detainees” at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba continue to haunt debates over acceptable interrogation techniques and American sentiments toward the war. In addition, the sexual nature of the abuse was used by some commentators to argue that women shouldn’t be in the military; and that their very presence unleashed sexual violence. Although the deaths of women in the war in Iraq received little attention, reports of women’s violence and abuse captured public imagination. Why? Why did the images of women abusers from Abu Ghraib generate so much press and media speculation? Elsewhere, I answer this question by analyzing both the media coverage and the events themselves within the context of a pornographic, or voyeuristic, way of looking at sex and violence, which is normalized through popular media. 1
{"title":"Media Representations of Women and the \"Iraq War\"","authors":"Kelly Oliver","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051213","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines media images of women in recent conflicts in the Middle East. From the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to protests in Iran, women have become the public face of violence, carried out and suffered. Women’s bodies are figured as sexual and violent, a potent combination that stirs public imagination and feeds into stereotypes of women as femme fatales or “bombshells.” Because the so-called war in Iraq is unlike others in that there is no front-line, U.S. women have been engaged in combat along with men. Women soldiers, not technically allowed on the front lines, continue to see action, to kill and to be killed. A shortage of military personnel leads to stretching the rules regarding women in ground combat forces. But, reportedly, the American public is no longer shocked at the idea of women dying in war; there is no more attention paid to fallen women than fallen men. Women’s participation in integrated units for the most part goes unnoticed. The women in these units adjust by using newer forms of birth control to make their periods less frequent or eliminate them altogether; and the military has disbursed a portable urination device that women soldiers call a “weenus” for long road-trips. They find ways of adapting their bodies to the male standards of war. Women are serving and dying, but conservatives think women should be mothers and not killers. And some military policy-makers foresee reopening debates about women’s participation in combat once the war is over. It is telling that although women’s deaths in Iraq get little attention in the media or from the American public, women’s involvement in abusive treatment of “detainees” at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba continue to haunt debates over acceptable interrogation techniques and American sentiments toward the war. In addition, the sexual nature of the abuse was used by some commentators to argue that women shouldn’t be in the military; and that their very presence unleashed sexual violence. Although the deaths of women in the war in Iraq received little attention, reports of women’s violence and abuse captured public imagination. Why? Why did the images of women abusers from Abu Ghraib generate so much press and media speculation? Elsewhere, I answer this question by analyzing both the media coverage and the events themselves within the context of a pornographic, or voyeuristic, way of looking at sex and violence, which is normalized through popular media. 1","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128215730","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 : 2010-09-08DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051216
Paul Kintzele
In her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), Virginia Woolf used the occasion of a "pageant" given at a country house to present, in compressed form, the long march of history. As Mr. Page, a reporter, watches the final tableau, "The Present Time," he makes notes for himself: "Miss La Trobe conveyed to the audience Civilization (the wall) in ruins; rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort; witness also woman handling bricks. [...] Now issued black man in fuzzy wig; coffee-coloured ditto in silver turban; they signify presumably the League of...." (1) The word that Mr. Page does not write down is--presumably--"Nations," the League of Nations being the international organization founded in 1919 after World War One, which, at the time Woolf was writing Between the Acts, was conspicuously failing to stop the war it was designed to prevent. Woolf's connection to the League was not only as an interested observer of international politics, but also at a more personal level; her husband, Leonard, had long championed the League, and his 1916 book, International Government, was instrumental in drafting the very charter for the League. (2) The fact that Mr. Page is only able to get "League of ..." down in his notes suggests that Virginia saw the incompleteness of the international project that the League represented. When a member of the audience, Mr. Streatfield, offers his thoughts on the meaning of Miss La Trobe's historical pageant, he says, "To me at least it was indicated that we are members one of another. Each is part of the whole. [...] We act different parts; but are the same." He concludes, "Scraps, orts and fragments! Surely, we should unite?" (3) But moments later, the appearance of warplanes in the sky over Pointz Hall destroys any hope for unity. It was through this devastating and despairing juxtaposition at the end of Between the Acts that Woolf concluded a writing career that, in ways subtle and overt, fully engaged the political questions of the time. In particular, I argue that the internationalist convictions that were held by Leonard Woolf were also held and indeed shaped the modernist style of Virginia. In the aftermath of the first World War, one of the most pressing questions was how to prevent another such conflagration from ever happening again. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, talk of extracting reparations from Germany stood in contrast to equally earnest negotiations regarding an international organization that would, in some way or another, keep the peace. Woodrow Wilson often receives the credit for the founding of the League of Nations, and no doubt it was through his advocacy that the Conference linked the question of the immediate post-war settlement to the larger, if more nebulous, question of international law. But the idea for an organization that would collectively ensure peace and facilitate political and economic relations did not originate with Wilson or any other single person. Immediately after the outbre
在她的最后一部小说《幕间》(Between the Acts, 1941)中，弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫(Virginia Woolf)利用在乡间别墅举行的“盛会”这一场合，以压缩的形式呈现了历史的长征。身为记者的佩奇一边看最后一幕“当下”(the Present Time)，一边为自己做笔记:“拉特罗布小姐向观众传达了文明(城墙)的废墟;通过人类的努力重建(见证人与hod);还有一名妇女在搬运砖块。[…现在是戴着毛茸茸假发的黑人;咖啡色的银色头巾;它们大概代表着....联盟"(1)佩奇先生没有写下的词大概是“Nations”，国际联盟是第一次世界大战后1919年成立的国际组织，在伍尔夫写《战争之间》的时候，它显然没能阻止它原本想要阻止的战争。伍尔夫与国联的联系不仅是作为一个感兴趣的国际政治观察家，而且在更个人的层面上;她的丈夫伦纳德(Leonard)长期以来一直支持国际联盟，他1916年出版的《国际政府》(International Government)一书在起草国际联盟宪章方面发挥了重要作用。Page先生只能在他的笔记中记下“联盟”，这一事实表明Virginia看到了联盟所代表的国际项目的不完整性。当一名观众，斯特雷特菲尔德先生，对拉筹伯小姐的历史盛会的意义提出他的看法时，他说，“至少对我来说，这表明我们是彼此的成员。每一个都是整体的一部分。[…我们扮演不同的角色;但都是一样的。”他总结道:“残片、碎片和碎片!当然，我们应该联合起来。”但片刻之后，战机在波因茨大厅上空的出现摧毁了所有团结的希望。正是通过《幕间》结尾这种毁灭性和绝望的并置，伍尔夫结束了他的写作生涯，以微妙和公开的方式，充分参与了当时的政治问题。特别是，我认为伦纳德·伍尔夫所秉持的国际主义信念也影响了弗吉尼亚的现代主义风格。在第一次世界大战之后，最紧迫的问题之一是如何防止另一场这样的大火再次发生。在1919年的巴黎和会(Paris Peace Conference)上，要求德国赔款的讨论与同样认真的关于建立一个以某种方式维护和平的国际组织的谈判形成了鲜明对比。伍德罗·威尔逊常常被认为是创立国际联盟的人，毫无疑问，正是通过他的倡导，国际会议才把战后立即解决的问题同更大的、虽然更模糊的国际法问题联系起来。但是，建立一个能够共同确保和平、促进政治和经济关系的组织的想法并非出自威尔逊或任何其他个人。1914年战争爆发后，国际联盟(League of Nations Society)立即在英国成立，并与美国的“强制和平联盟”(League to enforcement Peace)一道，开始主张建立更持久的国与国之间的关系。(4)战争结束后，这些争论被重新提起，但即使在战胜国中也存在相当大的混乱和犹豫;问题出现了，但没有明确的答案。如何执行国联的决定?是否应该有一个具有约束力的国际法庭?什么时候使用经济制裁，什么时候使用军事力量?战败的国家会被允许加入国联吗?列强的殖民地会有代表权吗?虽然建立联盟的愿望强烈到足以使它成为会议上的头等大事，而且确实强烈到足以使它成为现实，但是在联盟成立之初，人们对它的确切性质有过怀疑，而在联盟近二十年的历史中，这些怀疑从未完全消除过。…
{"title":"Voyaging Out: The Woolfs and Internationalism","authors":"Paul Kintzele","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051216","url":null,"abstract":"In her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), Virginia Woolf used the occasion of a \"pageant\" given at a country house to present, in compressed form, the long march of history. As Mr. Page, a reporter, watches the final tableau, \"The Present Time,\" he makes notes for himself: \"Miss La Trobe conveyed to the audience Civilization (the wall) in ruins; rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort; witness also woman handling bricks. [...] Now issued black man in fuzzy wig; coffee-coloured ditto in silver turban; they signify presumably the League of....\" (1) The word that Mr. Page does not write down is--presumably--\"Nations,\" the League of Nations being the international organization founded in 1919 after World War One, which, at the time Woolf was writing Between the Acts, was conspicuously failing to stop the war it was designed to prevent. Woolf's connection to the League was not only as an interested observer of international politics, but also at a more personal level; her husband, Leonard, had long championed the League, and his 1916 book, International Government, was instrumental in drafting the very charter for the League. (2) The fact that Mr. Page is only able to get \"League of ...\" down in his notes suggests that Virginia saw the incompleteness of the international project that the League represented. When a member of the audience, Mr. Streatfield, offers his thoughts on the meaning of Miss La Trobe's historical pageant, he says, \"To me at least it was indicated that we are members one of another. Each is part of the whole. [...] We act different parts; but are the same.\" He concludes, \"Scraps, orts and fragments! Surely, we should unite?\" (3) But moments later, the appearance of warplanes in the sky over Pointz Hall destroys any hope for unity. It was through this devastating and despairing juxtaposition at the end of Between the Acts that Woolf concluded a writing career that, in ways subtle and overt, fully engaged the political questions of the time. In particular, I argue that the internationalist convictions that were held by Leonard Woolf were also held and indeed shaped the modernist style of Virginia. In the aftermath of the first World War, one of the most pressing questions was how to prevent another such conflagration from ever happening again. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, talk of extracting reparations from Germany stood in contrast to equally earnest negotiations regarding an international organization that would, in some way or another, keep the peace. Woodrow Wilson often receives the credit for the founding of the League of Nations, and no doubt it was through his advocacy that the Conference linked the question of the immediate post-war settlement to the larger, if more nebulous, question of international law. But the idea for an organization that would collectively ensure peace and facilitate political and economic relations did not originate with Wilson or any other single person. Immediately after the outbre","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117043483","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 : 2010-03-22DOI: 10.5840/jphilnepal201051211
Yubraj Aryal
My aim in this editorial is to prove that only an affective criticism of literature and society, unlike the Jamesonian political reading, can broadly correspond to social facts' relation to the human subjectivity. And such criticism of literature recasts our interpretation of the social in a new key of affects in order to confute any readings that impair the deep aesthetic conditions of affect underneath the social. I argue that the social/political is a manifestation/'symptom' of the affects, and therefore, to understand any social phenomena or 'political unconscious' of the literature and society, the incorporation of affect under discussion is imperative. I claim that every social is already an aestheticized social. There is no social which is not aesthetically conditioned. So when we interpret the social, we always need to weigh the underlying affective aesthetic dimension of the social. My use of the term 'aesthetic' here refers to the body and its affective engagement with the world, and 'social' to political, economic and ideological representations. And also, my sense of affective criticism refers to the body, affectivity and affects rather than language, text and emotion. I would first like to begin with my surgery of the social. A common question: What does it mean to 'think' the social? If the social constitutes economic and political practices of a given society and relationship of its members of a particular time, what forces constitute the fundamental substance of such practices and relationships? In other words, what constitute a socialized self (and even cognitive apparatus) in which are made manifest our economic and political practices, as well as the sets of relationships between social members manifest? My answer to these questions is that it is the affects and the affective relations of bodies that constitute the very phenomenon of a social self. The social-the content of subjectivity-is mere a surface effect or a 'symptom' of the affects. Every social representation is a codified affect. As Nietzsche says, "the relation of representation and power [affect] is so close that all power is represented and every representation is of power." (1) The latent content of every social code is affect. If we remove the rubble of the social, we reach out to the bottom of human existence, where aesthetic processes are active in the formation of the socialized self. In an attempt to reread the nature of social, we find its underpinnings in the creativity and affirmation within [human] body. The body is a power house of auto-affects, which impose becoming in social realities and its semiotics, and thus create socialized self. One example for such imposition of auto-affects to social reality, as Foucault refers to, is the constitution of the gay community in San Francisco in the 1980s which was formed, not from the top down (state to society to individual), but from the "self-affectivity" of men who constituted themselves as gay, and eventual
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Pub Date : 2010-03-18DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105113
R. Tally
I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy. [...] Many members of my generation never broke free of this; others did, by inventing their own particular methods and new rules, a new approach. I myself "did" history of philosophy for a long time, read books on this or that author. But I compensated in various ways: by concentrating, in the first place, on authors who challenged the rationalist tradition in this history (and I see a secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, constituted by their critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the denunciation of power ... and so on). Gilles Deleuze, "Letter to a Harsh Critic" (1) In his Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that "What the history of philosophy displays to us is a series of noble spirits, the gallery of the heroes of reason's thinking," but that the history of philosophy would have little value if thought of as a mere collection of opinions, in themselves arbitrary and thus worthless: "But philosophy contains no opinions; there are no philosophical opinions." (2) Hence, Hegel says, those who wish to understand the history of philosophy by studying the individual philosophers it comprises, rather than achieving a more universal idea of the totality of its thought, will be missing the forest for the trees. "Anyone who starts by examining the trees, and sticks simply to them, does not survey the whole wood and gets lost and bewildered in it." (3) For Hegel, the history of philosophy is the overarching concept, and the evolutionary realization, of philosophy itself. Let it be said up front: Gilles Deleuze hates this history of philosophy. Indeed, he does not care for the philosopher and philosophy underlying that view: "What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics." (4) However, Deleuze does not abandon or reject the history of philosophy. Rather, he transforms the project into something else, a "nomadography," which projects an alternative history of philosophy that not only allows Deleuze to "get out" of that institution, but allows us to re-imagine it in productive new ways. Deleuze's distaste for the history of philosophy, the Hegelian institution presented to him and his contemporaries in school and which formed a basic requirement of the profession of philosophy in France, is overcome by his peculiar approach to the history of philosophy, an approach that redeems philosophy as it transfigures it. Typically, any discussion of Deleuze's career draws a line between his "early" work, those monographs produced between 1953 and 1968 dealing with individual figures from the history of Western philosophy, and Deleuze's later work "written in his own voice" (such as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense), (5) followed by his 1970s-era collaborations with Felix Guattari, and finally with his diverse post-Capitalism and Schizophrenia writin
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Pub Date : 2010-03-18DOI: 10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105114
J. Williams
So each year you bring the object to C and you nail it to her door, at the beginning of winter, because she dreads the season where all things turn inwards. Each year you do the same. But it is never the same. Neither the season, nor the gift, nor the trees, nor the early winter wind turning from lowlands to hills, nor the wood cracking on the door, nor the newly polished handle, shining against the tarnish built up over time; an ever rougher grain under your hand, until now, as once again you fail to open the door, but this time because your damp hand slips; you still turn away and everything still passes. Will you open it before oblivion strikes one of you from the earth? In 1995, a few months before his death by suicide, in the final stages of a very long illness, Gilles Deleuze revisited his impressions, sources, ideas and new metaphysics for the problem of empirical oblivion. (1) The resulting essay "Immanence: a life..." draws upon many of his earlier books and traces new relations between their concepts. It is therefore a work of reminiscence and new beginnings. There is never one without the other for Deleuze. His argument is of rare philosophical courage, intensity, depth, gentleness and troubling difficulty. It is comparable to moments in Montaigne, Pascal, Hume and Barthes, where a philosopher condenses years of investigation and reflection into a very personal, yet universally resonant pattern of observations, deductions and problems. Montaigne prepares for Deleuze's fearless account, indeed shares its Stoic roots, where anguish and the consequent cruel baseness we humans draw from our terror of death are overcome not through certainty, either in annihilation or ethereal survival, but in the tempered tracing of a new line of thought on life and death, free of the commonplace disguised as knowledge and of the government of living and dead souls disguised as faith. (2) The essay is then a two-fold resistance to oblivion. It counters the process of effacement in death and disintegration, but it also strikes against evasive and illusory resolutions of natural loss and our anguish. What then is empirical oblivion? It one side only of a larger problem Deleuze reconstructed and shaped, by trying to create positive concepts adequate to its overcoming. A problem for Deleuze is never resolved. (3) Instead, it interacts with different times in different ways such that each must find the best way to balance its positive and negative effects by transforming it. (4) For example, the problem of how to raise a child is different depending on the cultures, epochs, families, clans, tribes, societies and places where it is considered. The right 'solution' at one time can well be a mistake earlier or later. This does not mean that each epoch has its own problem independent of all others; on the contrary, they are related and earlier solutions bequeath new components to later ones, while later ones can reveal the limits and errors of earlier ones. How cou
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