Conscious and Unconscious Phantasy and the Phenomenology of Dreams

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-199
Author(s):  
Saulius Geniusas

Abstract My goal is threefold. First, building on the basis of Husserl’s phenomenology of the imagination, I will argue that phantasy is a specific type of intentional experience, which intends its objects as neutralized presentifications (neutralisierte Vergegenwärtigungen). Second, I will turn to dreams and argue that non-lucid dreams are unconscious phantasies, which cannot be conceived in the above-mentioned way. This realization will bring us to the third task. When recognized as the most extreme form of unconscious phantasy, dreams compel us to raise anew the fundamental question: what is the nature of phantasy experience? According to the perspective I will here develop, phantasy is a specific field of experience that lies between two extremes: the fully translucent mode of the as if consciousness and the thoroughly opaque mode of absorption (Versunkenheit). Most of our phantasies, both conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, are lived somewhere between these two extremes.

Author(s):  
Jacques Khalip

The final chapter reads the third-to-last line of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, “as if that look must be the last,” as an aside that asks what occurs after that last look. In a post-Waterloo poem that imagines a hallucinatory end-of-the-world scenario amidst several last things, including a kiss, Shelley explores the adjacencies opened up by his unfinished late piece. Drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, an illustration from that book by Nicolas Monsiau, and a photograph by Peter Hujar, Shelley’s poetic experiment is characterized as tacitly queer insofar as it refuses to endorse a normative politics of life, and imagines bodies and pleasures as scintillatingly regressive, inoperative, and disappearing.


Author(s):  
Sheridan Le Fanu
Keyword(s):  

‘I see, Dr Hesselius, that you don’t lose one word of my statement. I need not ask you to listen specially to what I am now going to tell you. They talk of the optic nerves, and of spectral illusions, as if the organ of...


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-395
Author(s):  
Sebastián A. Reyes Molina

The topic of ‘judicial discretion’ has been at the center of the debate on legal interpretation in the philosophy of law.1 In a general sense, ‘discretion’ here refers to the exercise of a judgment by a decision-maker due to the lack of legal constraints affecting one’s ability to decide a case. The most fundamental question on this topic is ‘do judges have discretion when interpreting the law?’ There are three kinds of answers to this query. One kind of answer states that judges never have discretion.2 Another kind of answer states that judges always have discretion in interpretation.3 The third kind of answer states that judges sometimes have discretion when interpreting the law, and sometimes they do not.4


2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Symes

Soon after he was consecrated bishop in 963, Æthelwold of Winchester (909–84) began to promulgate a series of new rules for worship and religious life in the monasteries of England. In one passage that is well known to theatre historians, Æthelwold insisted on the following performance of the Easter morning liturgy.While the third lesson is being read aloud, four of the brothersshould dress themselves.One of them, wearing an alb,should come in as though intent on other businessand gostealthilyto the place of the sepulchre, and therehe should sit quietly….The three remaining brothers …should make their way slowly and haltingly, coming before the place of the sepulchreas if they are seeking something. For these things are done in imitation of the angel seated on the tomb and of the women coming with perfumes to anoint the body of Jesus.When, therefore, the one sitting there sees the three drawing near, who are still wandering aboutas though seeking something, he should begin to singsweetly, in amoderatevoice: “Whom do you seek?”


1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron C. Noonkester

During their hegemony in world affairs, the English exported persons, commodities, and texts to regions that they absorbed into a widening pale of influence. Discussion of these ventures has consumed a vast literature. What once seemed to be a simple matter of transporting Protestantism (or convicts) into an overseas wilderness or making distant lands safe for English farming and trade now seems a matter too complex to be captured in a metaphor or an alliterative catchphrase. Yet it remains a matter of historical fascination that a relatively small archipelago off the coast of Europe not only could become the first “modern” nation-state but could then transform itself into a vast global empire, ultimately making it seem as if the affairs of this proverbial workshop encompassed world history itself. For many years, such success seemed too evident for investigation, and scholarly attention turned toward explaining how this achievement unraveled or declined. The result has been a quest for detailed precision and microhistorical reconstruction on the part of those who have adopted an “empirical,” geopolitical approach to imperialism and an outpouring of criticism from those who, on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, have penned polemical classics whose evocative, if not evidentiary, power envisioned revolution as historical destiny and a means of filling the intellectual and political void left by imperial evacuation. Their disagreements notwithstanding, however, both categories of imperial commentary display relative innocence of the paradox that imperial power represented: that, despite voluble criticism, it enjoyed eclipsing success for a time and produced effects whose mysteries continue to survive postcolonial deconstruction.


2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan A. García-Madruga ◽  
Francisco Gutiérrez ◽  
Nuria Carriedo ◽  
Sergio Moreno ◽  
Philip N. Johnson-Laird

We report research investigating the role of mental models in deduction. The first study deals with conjunctive inferences (from one conjunction and two conditional premises) and disjunctive inferences (from one disjunction and the same two conditionals). The second study examines reasoning from multiple conditionals such as: If e then b; If a then b; If b then c; What follows between a and c? The third study addresses reasoning from different sorts of conditional assertions, including conditionals based on if then, only if, and unless. The paper also presents research on figural effects in syllogistic reasoning, on the effects of structure and believability in reasoning from double conditionals, and on reasoning from factual, counterfactual, and semifactual conditionals. The findings of these studies support the model theory, pose some difficulties for rule theories, and show the influence on reasoning of the linguistic structure and the semantic content of problems.


Phainomenon ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-36
Author(s):  
Andre Barata

Abstract The discrimination between two points of view, or perspectives, in respect to consciousness, one on the first-person other on the third-person, deals with two concepts of consciousness- respectively, phenomenal consciousness and intentional consciousness (sections 1 and 2). I will accept, generally, this idea. However, I will argue that are not two, but three kinds of consciousness and typ of experience, making my point introducing the concept of different characters of experience (section 3). These characters are ‘experience’, ‘signification’ and ‘reference/object’, and when all of them occur I say that we have an intentional experience. If it lacks the last one, we have a meaningful experience, but without reference. Finally, if the only occurrence is ‘experience’, then the type of experience we live is a meaningless or mute experience. This ‘taxonomy’ allows classifying a perceptum as an intentional experience, a quale as a meaningful experience and a sense datum as a mute experience. On the other hand, it represents, as I claim, an approach much more clear, than those usually appears, to the question ‘what qualia really are? ‘ (sections 4 e 5). Moreover: it makes possible talk about objectivity of qualia, an objectivity without object (section 6).


2022 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Tong King Lee

Abstract This article is a case study on how Singaporean intellectuals articulate resistant language ideologies by enregistering the local vernacular, Singlish. The case in point is Gwee Li Sui's 2018 companion Spiaking Singlish, lauded as the first book to be written in Singlish about Singlish. It is argued that in tactically leveraging Singlish in a folk-lexicographical project, Gwee takes the vernacular to the third indexical order; and in so doing, he performs a ludic and extreme form of Singlish through which an everyday tongue turns into a fetish object. Contextualising Gwee's polemics within his tension with the language establishment in Singapore, the article highlights the ethical dilemma implicit in the celebration of languages speaking to an egalitarian ethos, suggesting that in enunciating a vernacular on the order of reflexive performance, intellectuals may inadvertently fashion it into a more elitist language than that which is spoken on the streets. (Singlish, Singapore, enregisterment, performativity, indexicality)


IDEA JOURNAL ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 98-111
Author(s):  
Emma Cheatle

The Maison de Verre (Pierre Chareau) was completed in Paris in 1932 for Dr Jean Dalsace, his wife Annie and their two young children. The front façade, a skin of glass, conceals a family home and a gynaecology clinic. Information on the building’s 1930s inhabitation is missing leaving an archival gap. Proposition: In 1933 there were two visitors. He attended the weekly Salon gathering. She secretly visited the clinic. They were lovers, the artist Marcel Duchamp and bookbinder Mary Reynolds. Duchamp’s artwork, the Large Glass (1915–23), suggests a glass premonition to their interactions. The writing or drawing out of a story of possible inhabitation is, in the end, the potential of architecture. In this account, I reconstruct the Maison de Verre’s interior as a history through modes of text and drawing that combine spatial analysis with imagined occupation. New plan drawings with theoretical and fictional text combine images, routes, passages. In the first part, ‘The Glass Look’, the building seems to survey the salon visitor (Marcel), as instances caught in glass. ‘Regarding’ positions Annie Dalsace’s mediating presence, traced into her ambiguous circulations around the upper floors. In the third part, ‘Dust’, I speculate on Mary’s visit. Searching the building as if its housekeeper, I find little to suggest she was there, just the uncertainty of dust particles. In ‘Horizontal Passages’ I follow Mary’s imagined route through the ground floor clinic and trace her body through its remainders, dust particles and smears.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 148-173
Author(s):  
Michael Vander Weele

Abstract Marilynne Robinson’s achievement in the third novel of the Iowa trilogy can be seen more clearly if measured against Erich Auerbach’s ambivalence about the novel of consciousness. Using Auerbach’s final chapter of Mimesis, on Virginia Woolf, as the horizon for Robinson’s work clarifies two points: Robinson’s work should be viewed within a novel-of-consciousness tradition that is as much European as American; and Robinson’s religious interests turn that tradition toward a more anthropological concern with the complexity of consciousness framed by the concern for justice. While Nicholas Damas’s recent essay in The Atlantic, “The New Fiction of Solitude” (April 2016), claimed that much new fiction “imagines teaching us how to be separate” and Walter Benjamin already wrote at mid-century that “the ability to exchange experiences” disappeared sometime after World War I, in Lila it is as if Marilynne Robinson set out to show both the difficulty and the possibilities of such exchange.


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