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Biopolitics Of Climate Change: Carbon Commodities, Environmental Profanations, And The Lost Innocence Of Use-Value, Emanuele Leonardi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The analytical core of this study is the historical development of the relationship between nature and the capitalist mode of production. In particular, we aim at shedding light on the process through which the “grammar” of ecological crisis (and consequently of its possible solutions) turned into an exclusively economic one. In addressing this issue we discuss the successive problematisations of the environment that took place since the emergence of biopolitical governmentality (late Eighteenth century). Following Foucault's intuition, and supplementing it with aspects of Marxist analysis, we argue for a profound transformation – based on a crucial leap of abstraction – …

Securing Populations: Foucault And The Cartography Of Natural Bodies, Andrew A.T. Grant

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The concept of biopolitics tends towards universal applicability and thus analytical impotency. By examining Foucault’s lecture seminars that address this concept directly and indirectly, this project aims to delimit its coordinates for future use. To do so, I begin by looking at the way biopolitical discourses on the population constituted liberal governmentality in the eighteenth century. This analysis will be supplemented by a cartography of the surfaces on which biopolitics emerges before and within liberalism, affecting its formation. I will therefore map out the formation of two objects that characterize modern biopower: the ‘natural’ body of the individual and the …

Shame And The Sharing Of Existence, Noel A. Glover

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract: Our aim with this project is to re-animate shame, to argue that there are in fact two kinds of shame experience. The first, primary shame, refers to the exposure of the self by the primordial other, a moment prior to the interpolation of judgment and morality in which the self apprehends its object state before the other, fixed within its gaze. Primary shame is the revelation that I am insofar as the other sees me. Secondary shame, on the other hand, is the mobilization within the pale of society of this originary exhibition of self. Secondary shame is …

The Cruelty Of Reading: Reading And Writing In The Works Of Friedrich Schelling, Marc D. Mazur

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Friedrich Schelling has re-emerged in Anglo-Saxon philosophy as a singularly important figure in Germand Idealism, not as some mediate figure in between Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Because Schelling's works resist being subsumed into a univocal or systematic articulation, they instead invite a reading, in the sense developed by Jean-Luc Nancy, that itself is transported to the writing of his texts. In order to show the auto-immune character of Schelling's writing, this thesis will turn to Schelling's First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), and the unfinished …

In The Fullness Of Time: M. M. Bakhtin, In Discourse And In Life, James C. Hall

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The phrase “the fullness of time” touches upon one of M. M. Bakhtin’s most consistently upheld tenets; for Bakhtin, philosophical and everyday utterances rely on their historical embeddedness for the material and concrete reality from which they draw their meaning and through which they are conditioned, inflected, and re-evaluated. In his very last work Bakhtin stated that all meanings are in continuous evolution. In this thesis the attempt will be made to interpret Bakhtin’s corpus by concentrating particularly on the movement of historical and philosophical becoming, the art of responding to philosophy and the events of everyday life, and the …

Antropofagia And Constructive Universalism: A Diptych, Aarnoud Rommens

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study proposes a rethinking of the word-image relation through an examination of Joaquin Torres-García’s Constructive Universalism (ca.1934-1949) and the Brazilian Modernist movement of Antropofagia (1928-ca.1934). By placing both in the close relation of a ‘diptych,’ I argue for a new reading of Torres-García’s visual work as well as a different understanding of Antropofagia.

In the first part of this work, I argue, through a close reading and viewing of Torres-García’s work, that the constitutive instability between word/image has been overlooked in favour of, on the one hand, an appropriation in terms of a ‘deviation’ from the canon of Geometric …

Ruining Representation In The Novels Of China Miéville: A Deleuzian Analysis Of Assemblages In Railsea, The Scar, And Embassytown, Kristen Shaw

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This work explores the social and political potentialities of body-assemblages in China Miéville‘s novels Railsea, The Scar and Embassytown. Using the theories of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, my analysis focuses on the manner in which assemblages within these texts resist unification and reification under representational frameworks and forge new identities based on an ethical appreciation of difference, fluidity, and creative self-actualization. Whereas representational schemas privilege supposedly ahistorical, transcendent, and cognitive-based iterations of identity divorced from material contingencies, the assemblages at work in Railsea, The Scar, and Embassytown instead focus on embodied-knowledge and fluid, emergent notions …