Subjectivity最新文献

This article problematizes subjectification through the practice of norm critique. The study builds on interviews with some of the key initiators and participants in a project working norm critically with men and masculinity in relation to gender equality and climate change in Sweden. Through the psychoanalytical framework of enjoyment and fantasy, I develop a perspective on how and why a certain understanding of the norm-critical subject emerges. The analysis makes visible how the practice of norm critique, while challenging hegemonic masculine norms such as emotional stoicism, reinforces neoliberal ideals of individualized self-emancipation and the quest for authenticity and wholeness, which risks de-politicizing the issue of climate change.

Examining the author’s own experiences of narcotics addiction reveals certain aspects of the addicted mentality that have strong ethical valence. In general, this shows that addiction is not a state fundamentally characterized by lack. The rudiments of this position are found in some contemporary philosophy of addiction; also, it is contrasted with a common widely held mistaken view. Addiction should instead be understood in continuity with and as illuminating the nature of human personhood and subjectivity. Under a phenomenology specific to the author’s experience, addiction appears as a mode of experience that has an unmanageable overflow of narratives created as discourses concerning people, events, thoughts, and feelings; narratives embodied in assemblages of objects; and narratives appearing as mental images. These considerations suggest that pre-reflective connection to the world can be profoundly illuminative but also can isolate is from the world and, further, that our ethical values form from within our lives and not as an artificial addition. Our historical, narrative self-understanding has existential and moral import. Thus, addiction by its extremity exemplifies the ceaseless ethical activity of personhood.

Using the work of Louise Rosenblatt and her transactional theory of reading, this article examines the experiential nature of literature. Challenging notions of literature that rely solely on fixed categories, the writings of Louise Rosenblatt emphasize the dynamic nature of the literary work. A poem, a novel, or a play, Rosenblatt argues, is not an object but a lived event requiring the reader’s active participation. By exploring the concept of literary transaction, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the evolving role of the reader in producing and shaping the literary work. An analysis of the reader’s engagement with the potentialities of the text reveals the literary work as an interactive process of assembling and sharing meanings.

This article examines Christine Montalbetti’s novel Plus rien que les vagues et le vent (2014) (Nothing but Waves and Wind, 2017) to propose the ocean as a model to think about contemporary masculinities. This French road novel depicts homosociality in the post-2008 American landscape through the perspective of an outsider homodiegetic narrator. The ocean serves as a narrative model for the novel: its bodily connection with the characters embodies “hybrid masculinities” that emerge from a hybridity of patterns in an ongoing process of negotiation, appropriation and reformulation. In their travels, the characters eventually meet the ocean and testify to a fluid ontology that overturns the Modern detachment from the environment together with its humanist conception of “Man.” The ocean’s waves suggest a nonlinear timeline and an ongoing posthumanist reformation of subjectivities, like the ever-reshaping shorelines. In Montalbetti’s novel, the ocean as a model for hybrid masculinities accounts for novel forms of power relationships, where radical openness pairs with violence.

The paper explores the widely circulated idea that algorithms will soon be able to know people “better than they know themselves.” I address this idea from two perspectives. First I argue for the particular subjective qualities of experience and self-understanding issuing from our engagement with the world and the constitutive role of our reflexive relation to ourselves. These are not “known” by the algorithms. I then address our fundamental opacity to ourselves and the biased, partial, and limited nature of human self-understanding. Our failure to know ourselves is however essential to our subjectivity and therefore, to know a subject in a perfect way that bypasses these limitations is actually not to know them. Taken together, both directions show that while algorithmic knowledge of humans can be vast, and can outperform their own knowledge, it remains foreign to their subjectivity and cannot be said to be better than self-understanding.