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61. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 4 > Issue: 9
Andrew Hadfield Some Current Issues in Contemporary Criticism of Renaissance Literature
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This essay provides an overview of some recent issues in criticism of early modern English literature. For some scholars the early modern period can only be understood if we accept its irreducible difference; for others, people have always been more or less the same and so reading the past involves knowledge but not a vast leap of faith. Often these differences result in scholars using exactly the same material to reach diametrically opposed conclusions, as examples drawn from the study of early sixteenth-century literature demonstrate. Debates about love and allegory also reveal significant differences between scholars who want to see erotic language in allegorical terms and those who point out that there is a danger is missing the literal reading. Debates about the nature of print and publishing, how writers perceived their careers, how texts should be edited and what methods are appropriate for the study of early modern literature are also discussed. The article does not attempt to resolve all these important debates but shows that differences often stem from diverse conceptions of what literature actually is and what it does, indicating that the importance of such arguments ranges beyond the immediate object of study.
62. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 5 > Issue: 11
Leonard Lawlor “There Will Never be Enough Done”: An Essay on the Problem of the Worst in Deleuze and Guattari
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The question confronting thought today is: what is a suicide bomber? But this question is a sign of a greater problem: the problem of the worst, which is apocalypse, complete suicide. Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida have given us the philosophical concepts to formulate this problem with more complexity and precision. Deleuze and Guattari have defined our current situation in terms of the post-fascist figure of the war machine, a figure that is worse, more terrifying, than fascism itself. Similarly, Derrida has defined our epoch in terms of a holocaust that is worse than any holocaust seen in the Bible. The problem of the worst then is so bad today that it requires that we make every effort to find a solution. The essay that follows constructs the beginnings of a solution to the problem of the worst. The solution will consist in a hyperbolic or even revolutionary gesture of inclusiveness that opens out onto an “elsewhere” that still needs a name. As we shall see however, no solution will ever be enough, no solution will ever be sufficient. There will never be enough done, said, or written in the name of what prevents the worst.
63. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 5 > Issue: 11
James Williams Against Oblivion and Simple Empiricism: Gilles Deleuze's 'Immanence: a life. . .'
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This article discusses Gilles Deleuze’s article ‘Immanence: a life. . .’ in relation to two problems. The first is the problem of empirical oblivion, or the way any record of an event involves a forgetting of aspects of that event which may later turn out to be of great significance. The second is the problem of latent significance, that is, of how events missed in the past remain latent and can be - perhaps ought to be–returned to in the future. The article argues that these problems are in fact linked. They explain in part the importance of Deleuze’s transcendental philosophy in ‘Immanence: a life. . . .’ The article concludes with a critical reading of Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Deleuze’s essay, in order to defend the position that Deleuze’s philosophy answers the joint problems of oblivion and latency by connecting actual and virtual events in novel acts that attempt to be worthy of that which must necessarily pass by creating new signs that reignite the past by transforming it.
64. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 5 > Issue: 11
Robert T. Tally Jr. Nomadography: The ‘Early’ Deleuze and the History of Philosophy
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Deleuze’s career is frequently divided between his “early” monographs devoted to the history of philosophy and his more mature work, including the collaborations with Félix Guattari, written “in his own voice.” Yet Deleuze’s early work is integral to the later writings; far from merely summarizing Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, or Spinoza, Deleuze transforms their thought in such a way that they become new, fresh, and strange. Deleuze’s distaste for the Hegelian institution of the history of philosophy is overcome by his peculiar approach to it, by which he transforms the project into something else, a nomadography that projects an alternative line of flight, not only allowing Deleuze to “get out” of the institution, but allowing us to re-imagine it in productive new ways. Deleuze’s nomad thinkers are like sudden, bewildering eruptions of “joyful wisdom” in an apparent continuum of stable meanings, standard commentaries, settled thought. The early Deleuze, by engaging these thinkers, discovered a new way of doing philosophy.
65. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 5 > Issue: 11
John Protevi An Approach to Difference and Repetition
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The essay attempts to approach some of the critical nuances of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. It takes its lead from Deleuze’s distinction between learning and knowledge. Learning implies a “depersonalization through love,” in mutual presupposition with an “encounter” that moves one to thought, while knowledge is recognition via pre-existing categories. Throughout the article, Deleuze’s encounter with Kant is the guiding thread.
66. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 5 > Issue: 11
Daniel W. Smith Deleuze: Concepts as Continuous Variation
67. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 5 > Issue: 11
Sergey Toymentsev Active/Reactive Body in Deleuze and Foucault
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The paper attempts to establish a methodological complementarity between Foucault’s and Deleuze’s accounts of the body on the basis of Nietzsche’s theory of active and reactive forces systematically elaborated in Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie. Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s physics of forces opens up two prospective developments of Nietzsche’s legacy: the genealogical critique of the historical body produced by reactive forces on the one hand and the invention of a new unknown body produced by active forces on the other. The paper shows how throughout their careers both Foucault and Deleuze pursue these two divergent yet mutually complementary scenarios respectively. Given the shared background of both thinkers, neither is complete without the other, especially when the question of resistance is at stake. Just as active force is necessarily presupposed by the existence of reactive force in the Nietzschean calculus, Foucault’s reactive body cannot exist without its own inverse, Deleuze’s active ‘body-without-organs’.
68. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 5 > Issue: 12
Colin Irvine A Land-Based Approach to Postcolonial, Post-Modern Novels
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With an eye on how post-colonial novels by authors Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o address aesthetic and environmental problems that preceded the Modern period, the intent of this essay is to emphasize how their fiction connects readers with a pre-industrial, premodern, and, strangely enough, radically new ways of thinking about books and the living world beyond them. To this end, the essay looks at this non-western literature through the lens of ecologist Aldo Leopold’s land-based ideas regarding epistemology, ethics, and ecology.
69. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Sandor Goodhart “The Self and Other People: Reading Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation with René Girard and Emmanuel Levinas”
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In the interest of moving conflict resolution toward reconciliation, theorists have turned to René Girard whose understanding of scapegoating and imitative desire acquires special importance. But Girardian thinking offers no unique ethical solution, and so theorists have turned to Emmanuel Levinas for such an account. Four ideas especially from Levinas appear helpful: his criticism of totality (and, concomitantly, his substitution of the idea of the infinite); the face as an opening (or gateway) to the infinite; the Other (or other individual) and my infinite (or unlimited) responsibility toward her (or him); and language as the dire as opposed to the dit, the saying (or “to say”) as opposed to the said, as one modality in which this openness to the other individual takes place. Combining Girard’s analysis of the sacrificial with Levinas’s analysis of the ethical may offer conflict resolution theorists an account as thoroughgoing and as old as Biblical scripture, and one to which, in the interest of moving toward reconciliation, they would do well to pay heed.
70. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Darrell Arnold Hegel and Ecologically Oriented System Theory
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Building on the views of Kant and early nineteenth century life scientists, Hegel develops a view of systems that is a clear precursor to the developments in Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general system theory, as well as the thinking of the ecologically minded system thinkers that built upon the foundation Bertalanffy laid. Hegel describes systems as organic wholes in which the parts respectively serve as means and ends. Further, in the Encyclopedia version of the logic Hegel notes that such systems are comprised of three processes: gestalt, the process of assimilation, and regeneration. In Hegel’s texts, he describes both natural and social systems as organic wholes with such systematic processes. In this paper, these processes and systems are described and it is argued that Hegel quite consistently applies views developed in the logic when describing systems. The paper shows how this parallels later developments in systems theory and goes on to show some distinctions between Hegel’s view of systems and that of later ecologically minded system thinkers.
71. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Robert JC Young Interventions: Postcolonial, Agency and Resistance
72. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Kelly Oliver Deconstructing “Grown versus Made”: A Derridean Perspective on Cloning
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In this essay, I consider what happens to debates over genetic enhancement when we “deconstruct” the opposition between “grown and made” and the notion of freedom of choice that comes with it. Along with the binary grown and made comes other such oppositions at the center of these debates: chance and choice, accident and deliberation, nature and culture. By deconstructing the oppositions between grown versus made (chance versus choice, or accident versus deliberate), and free versus determined, alternative routes through these bioethical thickets start to emerge.
73. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Johanna Drucker Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and the Poem and/as Book as Diagram
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Modern poetics takes one crucial turn through Ezra Pound’s notion of the “ideogram,” a concept that had a lasting impact through the Imagists andtheir influence. The ideogram borrows from Pound’s ideas about Chinese characters, their ability to condense complex representation into a figuredform in an economic but resonant image. By contrast, the compositional technique embodied in French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s unique work, UnCoup de Dés, can be characterized as “diagrammatic,” driven by semantic relations expressed spatially in a distributed field. This essay explores thatdiagrammatic work and it implications as a compositional technique.
74. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Paul Redding Leibniz and Newton on Space, Time and the Trinity
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G. W. Leibniz was a philosopher caught up in both the scientific and theological disputes of his day. Here I argue that a set of common concerns underlay hisengagement within two seemingly very different disputes: that with Newton over the nature of space and time, and that with Socinians over the Christian doctrineof the Trinity.First, Leibniz’s objections to Newton’s conception of space and time were linked to his objection to Newton’s model of the mind with which they was linkedbecause of Newton’s attempt to find support for his notions of absolute space and time by treating them as attributes of an infinitely extended immaterial God.Significantly, Newton had himself been a defender of the anti-trinitarian heresy of Arianism, and Leibniz’s alternative model of mindedness was in turn tied tohis trinitarian theology, as he saw the idea of three persons in one God as providing a model for human self-consciousness in which the identity of thereflecting and reflected upon thinking subject must be maintained. We can see within Leibniz’s triune model of self-consciousness the kernel of laterintersubjective models of human intentionality developed within the period of German Idealism.
75. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
Mihaela P. Harper Bewilderingly, Forcefully: Drawing the Line Outside
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This article examines the difference between two concepts of critical importance to the philosophical frameworks of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze–pleasure and desire–through the troubling and troubled figure of suicide. My contention is that, in the work of both thinkers, suicide makes legible an affirmative impulsion and a mode or tekhnē (in both senses of the term: practice and art) of encountering an unforeseeable virtuality (the Outside). Of aesthetic and ethical significance, this mode is experimental and dangerous, a frequency of passion, situated between pleasure and desire. Souci de soi (the care of the self) and a line of flight, I suggest, coincide in suicide, “an art that it takes a lifetime to learn.”
76. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
R. Victoria Arana Intimations of William Blake in On Beauty (2005): Zadie Smith's Trans-Atlantic Homage to and Critique of Boston Intellectuals
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William Blake and Zadie Smith reached strikingly similar critical positions towards philosophical trends current in their respective eras. Both excoriate those who, for selfish ends, disparage beauty and in so doing sabotage justice, love, joy and genuine freedom. Smith’s On Beauty, like Blake’s America: A Prophecy and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, indicts the reprehensible intellectual discourses of the day that undermine human happiness and corrupt the social order. Whereas Blake critiqued the rights revolutions set in motion by Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and others from a more broadly moral and future-oriented angle than has generally been recognized (as Saree Makdisi has shown), Smith wittily dramatizes that same vision through a huge range of up-to-date ideological discourses and antagonisms–many of them descended from Paine et al.–to refurbish Blake’s particular brand of radical antinomianism and to celebrate much the same optimistic spirit that Blake invested in America and Visions. Indeed, Smith’s novel anticipates and critiques ab ovo the sweepingenthusiasms that are animating current uprisings worldwide.
77. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
David A. Colón Deep Translation and Subversive Formalism: The Case of Salomón de la Selva’s Tropical Town, And Other Poems (1918)
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Salomón de la Selva (1893-1959) was a Nicaraguan writer/activist who authored many books of verse in Spanish, but only one in English: TropicalTown, And Other Poems (1918). Published in New York by John Lane–and regarded by Silvio Sirias as the first book of English verse published in the U.S.by a Latin American–Tropical Town exhibits a curious dynamic of avantgarde impulse: radically subversive in invoking counter-politics resisting U.S. colonial transnationalism, yet tending toward inherited, traditional aesthetic forms of poetry meant to legitimize Selva’s Latin American identity with an impression of authority that contiguous Modernist experimental poetries could not. Through its sympathy for the U.S. immigrant’s nostalgia for homeland, coupled with express disapproval of U.S. international affairs, Tropical Town leaves a poetic record that challenges presuppositions about the integral relationships between ethos, aesthetics, and consciousness vis-à-vis assumed understandings of what constitutes radical poetry in the Modernist moment.
78. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
Laurie Johnson Spectral Machinery (or Beyond Essence and System)
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The prospects for a phenomenology of technology have been guided in the past decade by a split between supporters of Martin Heidegger and those who subscribe to Bernard Stiegler’s critique of Heidegger. This essay proposes that both are needed for a phenomenology of what Edward Castronova calls “synthetic worlds” (large on-line environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft). Here is a phenomenology that must take into account histories of design and technical evolution to account for the particular “fantasy of disembodiment” that shapes a user’s experience of a synthetic world, forgetting the bodily engagement with hardware.
79. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
James Tar Tsaaior Postcolonial History, Memory and the Poetic Imagination: Interrogating the “Civan” Metaphor in Joe Ushie’s Eclipse in Rwanda.
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This paper, therefore, ploughs the furrow of postcolonial history, memory and the poetic imagination deploying the poetry of the Nigerian poet Joe Ushie.In particular, the paper negotiates the Rwandan genocide as a tragic foreground of the imperial process through its indulgent, artificial fixing of boundaries to accomplish its empire-building project in Africa. But beyond the colonial mediation in, and onslaught on, the cultures of others, the paper argues that African societies have also been complicit in their agonistic and violent history as the Rwandan genocide amply demonstrates. The paper concludes that a martial culture reminiscent of Civan, the warmonger, which manifests itself in private and especially public domains will only entrench intolerance, ethnocentrism, communal wars and violent death on the continent.
80. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
Lauren Berlant Affect and the Political