‘The Art of Putting Oneself on Stage before Oneself’: Theatre, Selfhood, and Nietzsche's Epistemology of the Actor

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 240-253
Author(s):  
DAVID KORNHABER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Stage Performance ◽  
The Way

This article offers a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's treatment of the actor and the concept of selfhood in The Gay Science and other works as an intervention in contemporary discussions of theatrical performance and the self, particularly Philip Auslander's critique of the logocentrism at work in various twentieth-century schools of acting. It argues that rather than representing an unproblematized or underproblematized constitutive selfhood, as Auslander suggests, the actor in Nietzsche's formulations becomes a prime vehicle for communicating the necessary but impossible fiction of the self. Nietzsche's vision of theatrical performance aligns with a number of recent theories of performance and agency as well as with the ideas on selfhood put forward in the stage work of director Tim Etchells and is explored for the way in which it offers contemporary theorists an avenue for moving beyond an epistemological critique of stage performance towards a greater appreciation of the theatre's potential for radically unsettling our notions of identity.

Why Phenomenology?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Present Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Pure Intuition ◽  
The Way

This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure intuition of its subject matter, phenomenology will also be necessarily interpretative and existential. Although phenomenology is limited to what shows itself and therefore cannot pass judgement on the existence of God, it can deal with God insofar as God appears within the activity and passivity of human existence. From Hegel onward, it has also shown itself open to seeing the self as twofold and thus more than a simple subjective agent, opening the way to an understanding of the self as essentially spiritual.

David Brown's Divine Humanity

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-113
Author(s):  
Kathryn Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Primary Indication ◽  
The World ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
The Way

The contributions of this fine book are many but I will concentrate on three, before turning to several more critical remarks.First, and most obviously, the book does the invaluable service of surveying developments in kenotic christology in the nineteenth century while situating them nicely in their different contexts of origin and with reference to lines of mutual influence: continental, Scottish and British trends are all canvassed rather masterfully. Some attention, in lesser detail, is also given to the way these christological trends are extended in the twentieth century to accounts of the Trinity and God's relation to the world generally: kenosis, the self-emptying or self-limiting action of God, in the incarnation, is now viewed as a primary indication of who God is and how God works, from creation to salvation.

scholarly journals Plotinus on the Soul's Omnipresence in Body

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Gurtler, S.J.
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Unity Of The Self ◽  
The Way

AbstractIn examining Ennead VI 4[22], we find Plotinus in conflict with modern, i.e., Cartesian or Kantian, assumptions about the relation of soul and body and the identification of the self with the subject. Curiously, his images and exposition are more in tune with Twentieth Century notions such as wave and field. With these as keys, we are in a position to unlock the subtlety of Plotinus' analysis of the way soul and body are present together, with sensation structured through the body and judgment coming from the soul. The problem of the self concerns not only the unity of the self in terms of body and soul, but also how the self is constituted in relation to other selves, both keeping its individuality and sharing its experiences at the same time.

AGAINST WHITENESS: RACE AND PSYCHOLOGY IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
RICHARD H. KING
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Urban Settings ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Way

It is tempting to think that we have heard just about all we want or need to know about race. As the above quotes indicate, modern notions of race have always revolved around the faculty of vision, with supplementary contributions from other senses such as hearing, as Arendt notes in a tacit allusion to one mark of Jewish difference—the way they sounded when concentrated in urban settings. Yet two very recent works—Mark M. Smith's How Race Is Made and Anne C. Rose's Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South—have much to teach us about how race has “worked”, particularly in the twentieth-century South but also, by implication, in the United States in general. Both works assume that, historically, race is no mere add-on to the self, a kind of externality that, once detected, can be relatively easily excised. Rather, it stands right at the heart of personal and group identity in a nation where race and ethnicity continue to assume surprising new shapes and forms.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

Breeding Better Babies in the Eugenic Garden City: ‘Municipal Darwinism’ and the (Anti)Cosmopolitan Utopia in the early Twentieth Century

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Currell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Garden City ◽  
New Town ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Body ◽  
Practical Level ◽  
The Way

Showing how ‘modernist cosmopolitanism’ coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national ‘body’ were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time.

Vérités et Mensonges

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-224
Author(s):  
Erik Gunderson
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Self ◽  
Faithful Representation ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Concrete Reality ◽  
Hermeneutic Process ◽  
The Way

This is a survey of some of the problems surrounding imperial panegyric. It includes discussions of both the theory and practice of imperial praise. The evidence is derived from readings of Cicero, Quintilian, Pliny, the Panegyrici Latini, Menander Rhetor, and Julian the Apostate. Of particular interest is insincere speech that would be appreciated as insincere. What sort of hermeneutic process is best suited to texts that are politically consequential and yet relatively disconnected from any obligation to offer a faithful representation of concrete reality? We first look at epideictic as a genre. The next topic is imperial praise and its situation “beyond belief” as well as the self-positioning of a political subject who delivers such praise. This leads to a meditation on the exculpatory fictions that these speakers might tell themselves about their act. A cynical philosophy of Caesarism, its arbitrariness, and its constructedness abets these fictions. Julian the Apostate receives the most attention: he wrote about Caesars, he delivered extant panegyrics, and he is also the man addressed by still another panegyric. And in the end we find ourselves to be in a position to appreciate the way that power feeds off of insincerity and grows stronger in its presence.

Poetic Trespass

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lital Levy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Old World ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Emile Habiby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Sed ubi Socrates currit? On the Gettier Problem before Gettier

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Risto Hilpinen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Gettier Problem ◽  
Current Belief ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Gettier Problem ◽  
The Way ◽  
Forward Looking

Medieval philosophers presented Gettier-type objections to the commonly accepted view of knowledge as firmly held true belief, and formulated additional conditions that meet the objections or analyzed knowledge in a way that is immune to the Gettier-type objections. The proposed conditions can be divided into two kinds: backward-looking conditions and forward-looking conditions. The former concern an inquirer’s current belief system and the way the inquirer acquired her beliefs, the latter refer to what the inquirer may come to learn in the future and how she can respond to objections. Some conditions of knowledge proposed in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century epistemology can be regarded as variants of the conditions put forward by medieval authors.

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