Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Pariah And The Poet: Hannah Arendt’S Alternative Reading Of Goethe’S «Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre» As A Critique Of Enlightenment «Bildung», John Macready

John Macready

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

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

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

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, …

Beyond Enlightenment: The Evolution Of Agency And The Modularity Of The Mind In A Post-Darwinian World, Derek Elliott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Working out of the social and philosophical revolutions from the Enlightenment, contemporary action theory has unwittingly inherited several Cartesian ideas regarding the human mind: that it is unified, rational, and transparent. As a result, we have for too long conceived of action as intimately bound up with reason such that to act at all is to act for a reason, leaving us with theoretical difficulties in accounting for the behavior of non-human animals as well as irrational behavior in human beings.

But rather than propose that such difficulties can be resolved by retreating to a pre-Enlightenment view of human nature, …

The Documentality Of Memory In The Post-Truth Era, Claire Scopsi

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article analyzes the documentality of memories in order to ground further consideration of memory for historical research in the post-truth era. The article compares discussions of the document in document theory to those in French historical epistemology in order to establish what is a reliable documentary source. Formerly, reliability was rooted in the paradigm of truth and the authenticity guaranteed by institutions and scientists. In today's post-truth era, these foundations are questioned. This article suggests that we consider the production of historical narratives as a design process, and that we evaluate the truthfulness of a source according to three …

Bastard Reasoning: A "Preposterous" History Of Walter Benjamin's Ideas, Vladimir Cristache

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation presents the theory of ideas developed by Walter Benjamin in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of his Trauerspiel book and thereby seeks to fill an existing gap in English-language Benjamin literature. On the one hand, it performs its task by closely reading this thinker’s early, epistemo-linguistic writings up to and including the “Prologue”: most prominently, “On Language as Such,” “The Program of the Coming Philosophy,” “The Concept of Criticism,” and the theoretically inclined sections of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” On the other, it does so by positioning Benjamin’s theory of language within existentialist philosophy and by applying his theory of …

Portraits With A Posthumous Voice: Reinforcing And Contesting Social Norms In The Heterotopic Museum And Cemetery, Matthew J. Crissey

Museum Studies Theses

Abstract

The following paper qualitatively analyzes and documents over 500 memorial-photographs/etched portraits on tombstones in ten Western New York cemeteries. This paper covers fourteen topics, ranging from religion to gang-violence. A juxtaposition of portraits exhibited within the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery with memorial-portraits on tombstones revealed heterotopic environments creating a public forum enabling the reinforcing or contestation of social ideologies. In other words, the author observed the similarities of identities and social norms publicly expressed on tombstones and gallery portraits.

A Social Constructionist approach enabled the study to examine how one social phenomenon contributes to the shaping of a culture. …

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 …

B-2 Same-Sex Marriage And The Apocalyptic Consciousness Of Seventh-Day Adventism, David Hamstra

Celebration of Research and Creative Scholarship

Arguments made for and against affirming same-sex marriage in Seventh-day Adventism rely on typical moral background presuppositions about immanent and transcendent goods identified by Charles Taylor in his philosophical genealogy of A Secular Age. Arguments made only in terms of marriage’s immanent goods have the potential to diminish the plausibility of a uniquely Adventist way of imagining the transcendent: apocalyptic consciousness focused on the immanent/imminent restoration of Eden by Jesus Christ following the second coming. Comparing marriage to the this-worldly and next-worldly benefits of divergent Adventist Sabbath-keeping practices foregrounds the availability of immanentized moral presuppositions to make sense of …

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 …

Unread: The (Un)Published Texts Of Romanticism, Marc D. Mazur

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads the unpublished texts of Romanticism not as fragments on the road to publication but as psychoanalytic “partial objects” that re-figure our understanding of the relationship between Romantic authors and publication. Against positivist interpretations of literary production that limit writing to the professionalization of the author and to a sociology of texts, Unread develops the concept of the (un)published whose parenthetical bracketing signals an unstable suspension of textual instability that is at once prior to and yet persistently remains a part of the writing of the published text. I argue that non-publication also arises from the author’s relation …

"I Have A Seat In The Abandoned Theater": Post-Foundational Subjects, Inoperative Teleologies, And The Aesthetics Of Dispossession, Averil L. Novak

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What is the nature of political ‘reality,’ and in what ways are we capable of affecting it? Who (or what? and where?) is the subject of democratic politics? Of revolutionary politics? Are they opposed to one another? The grand narratives that ‘ground’ this project and the resistances that unground them form the basis for a post-foundational analytic of the subject of politics, of identity, and of community, which constitutes a mobilization of democratic resistance as a commitment to persistent (and in some cases, relentless) contestation, interruption, and disruption. These questions are explored through the argument that modern politics is …

A Life Absolutely Bare? A Reflection On Resistance By Irregular Refugees Against Fingerprinting As State Biopolitical Control In The European Union, Ziang Zhou

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

In a legally transitory category, irregular refugees- experience a double precariousness. They risk their lives to travel across treacherous seas to Europe for a better life. However, upon the long-awaited embarkation on the European land, they are exposed once again to the precariousness of the asylum application. They are “powerless”, “with no rights” and “to be sacrificed” as Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt suggested in their respective understanding of a “bare life”, la nuda vita. In light of the administrative difficulties in managing asylum application, the European Union introduced the “Dublin Agreement”, which stipulates mandatory biometric data collection for …

Perpetual Change: Moving Beyond Object Dependent Identity, Lucas Waggoner

Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship

In this paper, I disassemble classical notions of identity, and propose a new mode of identity-creation through change itself. While static characteristics or categories are traditionally utilized in forming identities, the existence of change creates problems for maintaining them. Rather than continue following that same pattern of category formation, I argue that flux, and a history of changes a thing or being has undergone, can contain innately a sense of identity. I use the science fiction of Octavia Butler, the works of the Presocratic philosophers, Timothy Morton’s ecological philosophy, the communicative philosophy of Martin Buber, the writings of Hannah Arendt, …

The Mirror Of Humanism; Or, Towards A Baudrillardian Posthuman Theory, David Guignion

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis considers the relationship between Jean Baudrillard’s thought and theories of posthumanism. I argue that Baudrillard’s work is fundamentally posthuman, but that Baudrillard’s posthumanism is one that stands in opposition to main currents of contemporary posthuman theory. Most contemporary posthuman theory, I argue, focus on the dissipation of a liberal humanist subject--and celebrate its loss. Baudrillard’s thought, by contrast, suggests that the posthuman figure only arrives in the age of hyperreality and is therefore intertwined with the oppressive logic of the simulacrum. In my consideration of contemporary posthuman theory, I focus primarily on the work of Katherine Hayles, Cary …

Terrence Malick Beyond Nature And Grace: Song To Song And The Experience Of Forgiveness, Elisa Zocchi

Journal of Religion & Film

In The Tree of Life Terrence Malick poses the question of the relation between the order of grace and the order of nature in the cosmos and in human existence, a question presented through the relation of mother and father in the O'Brien family. The aim of this article is to analyze this issue and to present the role of glory in The Tree of Life as the transfiguration of nature operated by grace. Specifically, the example of forgiveness as one strand of this glory seems to be an helpful tool to understand the movie. Forgiveness, already present in The …

Musical “Covers” And The Culture Industry: From Antiquity To The Age Of Digital Reproducibility, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay foregrounds “covers” of popular recorded songs as well as male and female desire, in addition to Nietzsche’s interest in composition, together with his rhythmic analysis of Ancient Greek as the basis of what he called the “spirit of music” with respect to tragedy. The language of “sonic branding” allows a discussion of what Günther Anders described as the self-creation of the mass consumer but also a reflection on the ghostly time-space of music in the broadcast world. A brief allusion to Rilke complements a similarly brief reference to Jankelevitch’s “ineffable.”

Monuments Of The Present: The Document And Monument In Michel Foucault's Archaeology, Alexander Walker

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis interrogates Michel Foucault’s distinction between the monument and the document in his key methodological text The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), originally released in French as L’Archéologie du Savior in 1969. Foucault attempts to formulate a new form of history based on the examination of the monument, where previous methodologies had examined the document.

The thesis first examines Foucault’s theorization of this distinction and then questions the stability of these two categories through the comments of art critic Erwin Panofsky. I propose that the monument and document distinction implicates the historian in the power-relations that Foucault articulates later in …

Deep Disagreement And The Virtues Of Argumentative And Epistemic Incapacity, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

Fogelin’s (1985) Wittgensteinian view of deep disagreement as allowing no rational resolution has been criticized from both argumentation theoretic and epistemological perspectives. These criticisms typically do not recognize how his point applies to the very argumentative resources on which they rely. Additionally, more extremely than Fogelin himself argues, the conditions of deep disagreement make each position literally unintelligible to the other, again disallowing rational resolution. In turn, however, this failure of sense is so extreme that it partly cancels its own meaning as a failure of sense. Consequently, it paradoxically opens new possibilities for sense and therefore rationally unexpected resolutions.

Returning The Radiant Gaze: Visual Art And Embodiment In A World Of Subjects, Beth Carruthers

The Goose

Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century anti-ocularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other—an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises no …

Pheneticism As A Cultural And Literary Critique Of Human Interaction, Richard Dew

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 2010, Wayde Compton proposed, as an experiment, replacing the term ‘passing’ with ‘phehenticizing’ in relation to critical race theory and in conjunction with the manner in which we interpret the relationship racialized subjects possess with agents of the state. Pheneticizing, co-opted as a theoretical term from the branch of taxonomy called phenetics, when it comes to human interaction, has been demonstrated from a Eurocentric position of power from the time of European colonial expansion; through the era of the African slave trade of Europe and the Americas; into the time of American reconstruction; and persists within our current reality. …

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

Babacar Mbaye

No abstract provided.

Solicitude: Towards A Heideggerian Care Ethics-Of-Assistance, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

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 …

Preparing To Receive: On The Revolutionary Questioning Of Being And Time, Joshua Livingstone

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

From the question of the meaning of being to the question concerning technology, the theme of questioning runs through the whole of Martin Heidegger’s work and plays a key role in the development of his thought. Despite its importance, however, it is a theme that has largely been left unexplored. This thesis is intended as the beginning of a corrective to a long overdue examination of Heideggerian questioning. I give a close, inner-textual analysis of questioning as it appears in Being and Time. By following Heidegger’s explicit commentary on and implicit use of questioning, I demonstrate that the question of …

An Ecology Not Taking-Place: Analysing Ecocriticism's Move From Place And Space To Spacing And Displacement Through Derrida, Morton, And Haraway, Andrew Case

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Deconstructive readings of place-space dichotomies in ecological thinking reveal not only a repetition of the subject-object divide examined by Derrida and others, but also a spacing in between these categories. Morton and DiCaglio establish the importance of the in-between to ecological thinking and writing, and they demonstrate how literary and physical irony can reveal this spacing to the reader through an experience of displacement. By choosing to reject norms and instead linger in the spacing, individuals can enact a non-lieu-tenance that radically undermines sovereign systems, defers place, and opens up the possibility of new kinds of intimacy and community. By …

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 Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …