Subjectivity最新文献

The aim of this paper is to defend the emerging conceptualization of healthy sexuality (Bianchi in Figurations of Human Subjectivity: A Contribution to Second-Order Psychology. Springer, Berlin, 2020) against the traditional authoritative concept of sexual health as defined by the WHO. Becoming a sexual subject means following a sexual trajectory with episodes of one’s own bodily experiences, genital satisfaction, intimate attachment, acceptance of sexual identity, sexual pleasure, mutual sexual satisfaction and planned parenthood. In each of these episodes, the individual may experience feelings of pressure, fear, shame, pain and/or joy and pleasure. The extent to which the subject has a healthy sexuality depends on whether these feelings/emotions facilitate or inhibit healthy sexuality. The concept of healthy sexuality runs counter not only to quantitative statistical demographic measures of sexual health, but also to the existing arsenal of sexology questionnaires. Qualitative empirical research is being conducted into the facilitators and inhibitors of a healthy sexuality (in the first author’s PhD research).

The pandemic and all of its restrictions dominated public attention and social practices for almost three years. There was declared a state of exception in many national contexts during the pandemic. A revolution took place in the governing of bodies and the obstruction of sociality or the basic togetherness of humans. In a direct, physical way, the pandemic regulations were radically individualizing to a degree that had not been seen in either normal societies or normal crises and emergencies. This pandemic condition of being exposed represented a kind of extreme object existence.

Hiding from war, violence, and persecution in a secret, confined place affects the subjectivity of the occupants. The hideout’s material properties and the hiders’ silence to avoid detection enter deep into their lives. This co-constitution of subjectivity and hiding becomes manifest in their affects, feelings, and emotions, as will be illustrated by an analysis of Anne Frank’s lived experience of hiding for two years from Nazi persecution. She and her fellow hiders maintained a regime of silence in the secret annex of a canal house in Amsterdam to prevent their discovery and deportation. The hideout’s material and social restrictions created a subjectivity of hiding that devalued Anne Frank’s existence as a human being.

Politics is frequently understood through the body. However, liberal political theory and, therefore, American law focus upon a question of rights, rather than of needs. Due to this, liberal political theory occludes vulnerability and the facticity of bodies from political thought. Embodiment, a given but also an uncomfortable facet of life, pushes us to consider how political and legal decisions impact people’s lives. It necessitates that political and legal decisions are made by considering the ways in which they can and will effect all people, not just the independent, autonomous, and rational actor. This legal embodiment theory allows us to make visible the ways in which marginalized people’s bodies frequently are the site of specific restrictions. The paper begins with a discussion of embodiment and care ethics. It then progresses to gender-affirming healthcare and abortion and how embodiment arises in those legal discourses. Then, it moves to a discussion of queer sexuality in education, engaging with ideas of disgust. Finally, it broaches the question of the State’s role when it comes to legal embodiment. If we consider embodiment through a lens of a shared good, then legal embodiment ought to prioritize decisions which will promote caring relationships between the individual’s body and the State.

This introduction to the “Fictional Subjectivities” collection lays out the significance of literature in the study of subjectivities and provides a framework for a literary analysis of subjectivities. It highlights the ability of fiction to present a diversity of subjectivities to readers, who are invited to engage with and experience subjectivities different from theirs while reading a book. It also insists on the importance of a sustained reflection on fiction, as our lives are intertwined with narratives and our subjectivities constructed and reworked by fiction.

Despite their often perceived linearity, the past, present, and future are intricately woven together. Previous experiences shape our perception, nourishing potential scenarios and enriching our evaluations. Sociocultural contexts reinforce this interplay, directing our attention toward various aspects based on our social positions. This scenario forms the context for the present study, which investigates perspectives of young Chilean men from two considerably distinct life conditions: business students and incarcerated individuals. Using semistructured interviews and a phenomenologically inspired analysis, we found that participants (amidst COVID-19) referred to similar pessimistic evaluations for their country but, on the contrary, remarkably converged on optimistic future expectations for their personal lives. Despite their markedly different personal life stories. The conclusions point to the stark experience of individuals "freed" from social structure, nurtured by recent neoliberal Chilean history.

Intersubjectivity has long fascinated thinkers who have challenged the notion of the unitary subject. Its alternative, the intersubjective self, is permeable and reciprocal, open to and shaped by the others. Questions of intersubjectivity have become increasingly urgent as a result of the rise of social media which metaphorically brings users together as a shared mind. This article probes questions of relationality and the narratable nature of human self (cf Cavarero in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Routledge , London, 2000; Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself Fordham. University Press, New York, 2005) in a work of fiction that compares the relationalities created by social media and the subjective experience: Patricia Lockwood’s novel, No One Is Talking About This (2021). The very opacity of the novel probes the question of what (inter)subjectivity might mean in the age of social media. More broadly, the article seeks to test the relevance of feminist theories of relational and narrative self within the context of the novel.

The paper mobilises a personal experience of participation in a population-based health screen to explore wider aspects of subjectivity, choice and freedom. The screen is a familiar feature of contemporary society and represents a broader ‘health imperative’. It intrinsically enforces a binary choice and thus, within its own remit, produces two reductive modes of being its subject characterised, respectively, by assent and refusal. Merleau-Ponty’s account of a ‘conditioned freedom’ operating within a primordial, embodied subjectivity, however, allows a recuperation of aspects of my enactment of choice that tend otherwise to be eclipsed within the screen’s binary logic. The thinking of two more recent writers deepens my understanding of how this freedom might play out within experience. David Abram helps me grasp the extent to which I encounter the screen as an ageing animal. Meanwhile a contrast with a very different historical and inter-cultural confrontation explored by Eduardo De Castro raises far-reaching questions around the bindingness of decision and the self/other relation.

Anti-capitalist subjectivities are produced through politically generative refusals of the divisive, profit-oriented, and manageable subject positions made available by capitalism’s socio-symbolic order. Pushing back against liberal political theories which presume subjectivity to be a priori or coherent, this article employs psychoanalytic theory to grapple with the flowing, changing, patterned, and disjointed nature of anti-capitalist subject formations. Although mainstream psychoanalysis has, historically, aligned with the dictates of capital, I argue that psychoanalytic theory nonetheless offers a useful resource for understanding how anti-capitalist refusal can foster emancipatory desires and situated political commitments within and among subjects. In fleshing out these arguments, I engage with the role that fantasy plays in forming anti-capitalist subjectivities. I also consider what solidarity building and political action mean with respect to anti-capitalist subjectivity. By way of conclusion, I argue why we should make the case for anti-capitalist subjectivity, offering some directions that future work may take.

Nothing has done more to cement William James’s reputation than his unrepentant individualism. In a present marked by the challenge of imagining modes of transformative action worthy of our planetary travails, James’s individualism appears dated, unworthy of the present. Yet such judgement neglects its pragmatic dimension, as well as its political connections to James’s anarchistic pluralism. Situating anarchism at the centre of James’s vision, this article argues that his defence of individuals constitutes no ontological postulate but forms part of a speculative theory of change. Rather than apologia for individual heroism, James’s individualism is better understood in the impersonal voice of the “fourth person singular:” individual lives matter not as originary sources of heroic action but as zones of divergence through which terrestrial forces of mutation and metamorphosis pass. Revisiting connections between James’s individualism, pragmatism, and anarchism, the article offers a radical reappraisal of James’s thought as a vital method for intensifying unruly forces of transformation on an earth unstable and unsafe.