Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Language After God: Nietzsche, Lacan, And The Sinthome Of Tragic Wisdom, Dylan J. Hughes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the “sinthome” and Friedrich Nietzsche’s tragic philosophy of self-overcoming are deeply complementary theories of linguistic subjectivity, each describing the transformative potential of a kind of art at the centre of the inherently symptomatic experience of language. Lacan’s final seminars reimagine the psychoanalytic symptom as the potential site where each subject might forge a sinthome: a singular structure of creative agency in the experience of desire and truth. Nietzsche’s tragic philosophy works to uncover the problematically aesthetic and creative character of reality, suggesting that one must affirm and cultivate such creativity in order …

A Queer Politics Of Imperceptibility: A Philosophy Of Resistance To Contemporary Sexual Surveillance, Andie Shabbar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis journeys through a series of events to develop a concept of “imperceptibility” as a mode of resistance to contemporary sexual surveillance. The events I examine include biometric recognition of gender and race at airport security checkpoints, the heteropatriarchal colonial surveillance of Indigenous peoples at Standing Rock, various protest actions, and the political potentials of glitch art. Exploring their unexpected points of connection, my goal is to bring into view acts of resistance against sexual surveillance that already operate below and above the threshold of everyday perception.

The project advocates for a philosophy of resistance that underscores the political …

The Event Of Blues Music And The Effects Of Technology On The Artistic Event, Adam Rejak

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The goal of this dissertation is to find out whether or not blues music is an event. I explore what constitutes a musical or artistic event in modern times and to see how this has changed in relation to earlier periods. I also identify its essential formal elements. I divide blues music into two categories, namely, its technical playing qualities (the micro) and its historical changes (the macro). This division frames the entire project and illustrates that in order to discuss an artistic event, we must account for both its technical and historical aspects. I examine several theories of the …

Subjectivity, Passion, And Mystical Intuition: Nietzsche's Early Writing, Joseph Leivdal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

For Nietzsche, the subject is aesthetically creative, meaning that the subject is a dynamic process of self-transformation that involves not only the subject’s sense of self, but the meaning of their world. In my first chapter, I look at "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" to show how Nietzsche deconstructs rationalist epistemology in order to show that knowledge and meaning are an aesthetic activity. In my second chapter, I look at "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" to argue that Nietzsche sees creativity as a passionate, sublime overflow, a rupture with the present that artistically …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

The Tapestry Of Memory, Kathryn M. Lawson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Rationality points to the complete annihilation and end of a life when the body perishes, and yet when a loved one dies we continue to experience that person in a myriad of ways. The focus of this thesis will be a phenomenological exploration of the earthly afterlife of those we have loved and lost. By positing the subject as always intersubjective and as temporal in nature, this thesis will investigate how we continue to create and interact with the deceased upon the earth. In the introduction, this work will be placed in the context of the phenomenological tradition. The first …

Method And Metaphor In Aristotle's Science Of Nature, Sean Michael Pead Coughlin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a collection of essays exploring the role of metaphor in Aristotle’s scientific method. Aristotle often appeals to metaphors in his scientific practice; but in the Posterior Analytics, he suggests that their use is inimical to science. Why, then, does he use them in natural science? And what does his use of metaphor in science reveal about the nature of his scientific investigations? I approach these questions by investigating the epistemic status of metaphor in Aristotelian science. In the first essay, I defend an interpretation of metaphor as a type of heuristic reasoning: I claim that Aristotle …