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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Bergson On Poetics: Philosophy, Literature And Science, Michel Dalissier Feb 2023

Bergson On Poetics: Philosophy, Literature And Science, Michel Dalissier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this paper, I analyze Henri Bergson’s insightful and contrasted vision of poetry. First, I show in what sense Bergson sympathizes with the idea that the poet must be credited to surpass the novelist in offering to us an unparalleled emotional apprehension of the world. Second, I nonetheless underline how Bergson grants the product of the poet, i.e., the poem itself, a problematic linguistic status, inasmuch as the focus of his analysis shifts from an intersubjective poetical apprehension of feelings to their individual poetic appreciation, or from the spiritual dimension of poetry to its material dimension. Third, I further suggest …


Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper Jan 2023

Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the …


The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton Jun 2022

The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq James Dutton “reads” identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally “Eurocentric” authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of “lost time.” This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of …


The Symbolism Of Clothing: The Naked Truth About Jacques Lacan, Peter D. Mathews Feb 2022

The Symbolism Of Clothing: The Naked Truth About Jacques Lacan, Peter D. Mathews

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In the work of Jacques Lacan there exists an extended metaphor of clothing, whereby the ‘naked’ truth is always ‘clothed’ in deception. For Lacan, clothing functions at the intersection of the symbolic and the imaginary, with outward appearance shaping what we imagine to be underneath in order to determine the landscape of symbolic desire. Joan Copjec considers the political implications of this metaphor, arguing that utilitarianism, in particular, divides desire into a false dichotomy of rational, naked desire, and the ornamental clothing of irrationality, a mindset woven into both capitalism and French colonialism. The article then examines two examples from …


A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong Feb 2020

A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Seung-hoon Jeong discusses in his paper global action thrillers about the war on terror. He highlights the biopolitical abjection of counterterrorist agents from their state agencies. This abjection ends up either self-reaffirming in the manner of a sovereign agent (the Bond series) or terrorizing their sovereign system (the Bourne series), while both are trapped in the vicious cycle of terror and counterterror. More notable is the “mind-game” sci-fi genre. Source Code, among others, stages a loop of a traumatic counterterrorist mission with retroactive causality, a closed circuit of neoliberal productivity and pathological abjection in a video-game narrative. The time-travel …


Infidelity As Reality: Re-Staging The Global South With Abbas Kiarostami’S Close-Up, Sinan Richards Sep 2019

Infidelity As Reality: Re-Staging The Global South With Abbas Kiarostami’S Close-Up, Sinan Richards

Artl@s Bulletin

In this article, we contend that, in the fields of art and visual culture, the Global South is both an elaborate lie and a radical opportunity for transformation. We investigate Kiarostami’s Close-up alongside Lacan’s psychoanalysis to show how Close-up’s filmic narrative evokes the same ‘polyvalence’ and ‘slipperiness’ as the notion of the Global South. We argue that Kiarostami’s Close-up retroactively changed Sabzian’s fate, and in so doing, Kiarostami’s re-staging actively overwrites History itself. We read the same narrative move in the concept of the Global South to suggest that the Global South adopts the Kiarostamian strategy of infidelity as reality …


Foucault And The Recommencement Of Philosophy, Javier De La Higuera Dec 2018

Foucault And The Recommencement Of Philosophy, Javier De La Higuera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Javier de la Higuera discusses in his “Foucault and the Recommencement of Philosophy” the idea of a recommencement of philosophy that Michel Foucault has posited on several occasions, although with different meaning and intentions. This article reconstructs how he approached this in the 1960s and shows the fundamental changes that this idea of recommencement underwent in the later Foucault. In his last three years at the Collège de France, Foucault appeared to reinterpret the very idea of philosophy based on his analysis of ancient spirituality and of parrhesiastic philosophical practice. The interpretation that Gilles Deleuze gave of late Foucault, devoted …


Of The Processes Of Subjectivation As A Subspecies Of The Event: The Deleuzian Reading Of The Later Foucault, Francisco J. Alcalá Dec 2018

Of The Processes Of Subjectivation As A Subspecies Of The Event: The Deleuzian Reading Of The Later Foucault, Francisco J. Alcalá

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “On the Processes of Subjectivation as a Subspecies of the Event: the Deleuzian Reading of the Later Foucault” Francisco Alcala discusses the well-known theoretical separation that occurred between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault after the publication of The Will to Knowledge. Deleuze disagreed with the new function that Foucault attributed in this book to the apparatuses of power (to be constitutive of truth) because he considered that such an approach denied an inherent status to the phenomena of resistance, making all reality a truth of power. The aim of this paper is to analyze this controversy: …


Regaining The Subject: Foucault And The Frankfurt School On Critical Subjectivity, Miguel Alirangues Dec 2018

Regaining The Subject: Foucault And The Frankfurt School On Critical Subjectivity, Miguel Alirangues

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Regaining the Subject: Foucault and the Frankfurt School on Critical Subjectivity” Miguel Alirangues sketches a possible meeting place in which two currents of critical thought (Adorno and Horkheimer, on the one hand, and Foucault, on the other) can come into dialogue. Without these two currents and, more crucially, without the dialogue between them, as he points out, we cannot today think of political antagonism towards the social structures of domination and therefore we cannot think of praxis and agency. The essay proceeds as follows: firstly, the author notes the places in which Foucault spoke of his relationship …


The Eventualization Of Political Thinking: From The Arab Revolutions To The Trump Era, Oscar Barroso Dec 2018

The Eventualization Of Political Thinking: From The Arab Revolutions To The Trump Era, Oscar Barroso

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The Eventualization of Political Thinking: From the Arab Revolutions to the Trump Era", Óscar Barroso maps out some of the most important contemporary philosophies of the Event: those of Rancière, Badiou, Hardt and Negri and Žižek. These philosophies of the event are defined as post-humanist political proposals that entrust emancipation not to the realization of anthropological ideas but to the emergence of difference. Examining the pessimistic interpretation that these authors make of what has happened since the events of 2011, the author questions whether too much trust has been placed in the supposed virtue of difference and, …


Situating A Badiouian Anthropocene In Hagiwara's Postnatural Poetry, Dean A. Brink Dec 2014

Situating A Badiouian Anthropocene In Hagiwara's Postnatural Poetry, Dean A. Brink

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Situating a Badiouian Anthropocene in Hagiwara's Postnatural Poetry" Dean A. Brink discusses the ecological dimension of the poetry of one of the founding voices in modern Japanese poetry, Sakutarō Hagiwara (1886-1942). Brink argues that Hagiwara developed a poetics characterized by engagements with nonhuman organisms and actants to situate the materiality of these actants in ways that diffuse the binary of "language" and "nature" and present a postnatural relationality that Bruno Latour describes. Drawing on the recent work of Alain Badiou, Brink explores materialist alternatives to representationalism—including the Lacanian triangle of the imaginary real and symbolic—by emphasizing human-nonhuman …


Tele-Visioning Terror, Caroline Zekri Sep 2011

Tele-Visioning Terror, Caroline Zekri

Re-visioning Terrorism

This paper is devoted to the relationship between terrorism and media, with a special focus on the theoretical notions of “icon”, “mass” and “distance”. It aims to show how the phenomenon of modern terrorism calls into question the essence of modern democracies and their systems of information, based on the distance between vision and event.


Symbolic Violence As Subtle Virulence: The Philosophy Of Terrorism, Jonathan Beever Sep 2011

Symbolic Violence As Subtle Virulence: The Philosophy Of Terrorism, Jonathan Beever

Re-visioning Terrorism

Jean Baudrillard’s semiotic analysis of violence leads us to understand the form of violence as three-fold: aggressive, historical, and semiotically virulent. Violence of the third form is the violence endemic to terrorism. If violence has been typically understood as of the first two types, terrorism should be understood as the virulence of simulacra. The conflation of these types of violence explains the failure of militaristic responses to terrorism. This paper will explore Baudrillard’s conception of symbolic violence as the virulence of signs and help us come to terms with the semiotic foundation of terrorism.