Subjectivity最新文献

This article articulates the practice of learning to feel taught in an Amsterdam yoga studio. Tattva Yoga constitutes one localized manifestation of postural yoga practices flourishing within neoliberal systems worldwide. As a scene of adjustment (Berlant, in Cruel optimism, Duke University Press, Durham, 2011) to conditions of precarity which shape the everyday lives of participants, Tattva Yoga encourages students to cultivate feelings of flexibility, openness, and balance. A close reading of Tattva Yoga practices identifies a performative logic to feeling, through which embodied action constitutes a form of subject cultivation. The case study, thus, offers an exploration of feeling as the intersection of body, subject, affect, and discourse, and as one means through which individuals enact subjectivities both continuous with and alternate to the demands of precarity.

How does the COVID-19 pandemic shape subjectivity? This paper is concerned with contributing to theorising subjectivity at an ontological level. It draws on a feminist new materialist understanding of subjectivity as an intra-active becoming of human-non-human matter that includes smell. Smellwalks are mobilised to apprehend how subjectivity is altered via restrictions around movement and social connection during lockdown. This sensory method recognises knowing is not simply a cognitive practice and that odour actively shapes understandings of ourselves and the world. The varying presence and absence of odours in and out of lockdown eventuate a re-arrangement of subjectivity which draws on Vannini's (2020) notion of atmospheric dis-ease. Lockdown produces a subjectivity of dis-ease which generates changes in perception of self and others, as sources of potential viral contagion. Lockdown's material conditions engender a 'socially flattened' and 'suspended subjectivity' as our 'normal' selves are experienced as being put on hold until the global crisis abates.

In this article, I argue that Deleuze and Guattari's famous trope about "an earth and a people that are lacking" in the Geophilosophy chapter of What Is Philosophy? must be examined through a specific assemblage: the necessity for shame-as a powerful, non-psychological, and nonhuman affect-to enter philosophy itself both to resist stupidity and to include all the disfranchised of classical Reason. I then turn to Isabelle Stengers' work against stupidity to determine how this assemblage can help us give shape to new multispecies apparatuses in the face of the Anthropocene. As a conclusion, I show that, through such apparatuses, shame truly becomes a geophilosophical force.

The relationship between 'philosophy' and the 'geo' has received renewed attention with the rise of the terrestrial and the planetary as leitmotifs for thinking about the collective subjectivation of particular kinds of world. In some of these conversations, this relationship is developed to consider how social collectives emerge with the production of particular kinds of territorial abstraction. Three decades since Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published What is Philosophy?, book that has a lasting legacy in developing geophilosophy as a particular mode of transcendental empirical enquiry, this special issue revisits the relationship between geophilosophy and the production of an alternative sense of the earth. In this introduction, we approach geophilosophy in its pluralism by showing how the concept does not only concern the question of how to retain a sense of difference and contingency in thought, but also concerns a mode of enquiry that presents opportunities to experiment with alternative forms of collective subjectivation. Assaying the legacy of Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy on contemporary forms of earth-thinking, the article identifies the unique demands and geophilosophical possibilities taken up by the contributors to this issue that question how to recuperate another sense of the earth.

In this article, I explore the interplay of abjection, space and resistance at the example of a protest intervention that reclaims a highly policed urban space in the city of Leipzig (Saxony, Eastern Germany)—the Main Station. Methodologically, I combine ethnographic material collected throughout the process of a performative counter-action attempting to reclaim and re-imagine Leipzig Main Station as a venue and politicized space with a contextual analysis regarding the discursive landscape evolving around and shaping this urban locale. My empirical analysis is structured along the theoretical discussion of abjection: While Butler's theorization (Butler in Bodies that matter, Routledge, New York, 1993) allows me to focus on the formative power of spatial exclusion and the disruptive potential of protest, theoretical accounts in which abjection is conceived as a “threshold zone” or “overlap space” (Sharkey and Shields in Child Geogr 6:239–256, 2008; Vighi et al. in Between urban topographies and political spaces. Threshold experiences, Lexington Books, Lanham, 2014) help me to outline ‘abject space’ as a space of negotiation and contradiction.