scholarly journals Namelessness from Artaud to Beckett

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Slote
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Radio Play ◽  
Electroshock Therapy ◽  
Final Work ◽  
As If

Abstract After a period of electroshock therapy, Antonin Artaud claimed to have been able to regain his name and sense of self. The dehiscence of name and identification is reprised in Artaud’s final work, the radio play Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu. This consists of five texts, read by four people. Each text is followed by unintelligible, glossolalic screams performed by Artaud, as if Artaud were reacting against the speech acts performed by others in his name. The structure of this play suggests the predicament of Beckett’s Unnamable: an entity reacting in pain to its attempts to articulate itself in a language that is not his, but theirs.

scholarly journals Wade in the Water …’: Rethinking Adoptees’ Stories of Reunion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Blake ◽  
Leigh Coombes ◽  
Mandy Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Married Couple ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Birth Certificates ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Legal Fiction ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Birth Family ◽  
As If

n 1955, the Aotearoa/New Zealand government legislated the closed stranger adoption period. Approximately 80,000 children were constructed as a legal fiction when deemed as if born to a legally married couple. Birth family information was permanently sealed. Yet being raised in a fictional subject position and being denied access to any family of origin has consequences for all involved. After ten years of lobbying, the Adult Adoption Information Act (1985) came into effect. The power of that legislation was to overturn the strategies that suppressed adoptees’ rights to know details of their birth. Adult adoptees over the age of 20 years could access their original birth certificates, which provided a birth mother’s name. With this identifying information, reunions became possible. Birth family reunions involve a diverse range of experiences, reflecting the ways in which adoptees are contextually and historically produced. This paper reconsiders the identity implications of reunion stories using the theoretical concept of hybrid identity. The complexities of reunions are multiple, and adoptees negotiate their identities through being both born to and born as if and yet neither identity is safe. In the production of this hybrid story, it was possible to see the political and moral trajectories that enable and constrain a sense of self through the complexities of a legal context that produces binary subject positions.

scholarly journals How Do You Make Yourself a Theatre without Organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the Concept of Differential Presence

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA CULL
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Radio Play

This article provides an exposition of four key concepts emerging in the encounter between the philosophical man of the theatre, Antonin Artaud, and the theatrical philosopher, Gilles Deleuze: the body without organs, the theatre without organs, the destratified voice and differential presence. The article proposes that Artaud's 1947 censored radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. Drawing from various works by Deleuze, including Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus and ‘One Less Manifesto’, I conceive differential presence as an encounter with difference, or perpetual variation, as that which exceeds the representational consciousness of a subject, forcing thought through rupture rather than communicating meanings through sameness. Contra the dismissal of Artaud's project as paradoxical or impossible, the article suggests that his nonrepresentational theatre seeks to affirm a new kind of presence as difference, rather than aiming to transcend difference in order to reach the self-identical presence of Western metaphysics.

As-If Electroshock Therapy by Hypnosis

1960 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 225-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald W. Schafer
Keyword(s):  
Electroshock Therapy ◽  
As If

Place and Being in Shakespearean Comedy

2018 ◽  
pp. 151-171
Author(s):  
Kent Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Measurable Space ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
English Culture ◽  
Scientific Sense ◽  
As If

In Shakespeare’s comedies, place is related to identity, so that a shift in location can alter a character’s sense of self. Renaissance English culture had two different notions of space and place, a proto-scientific sense of uniformly measurable space and qualitatively undifferentiated locales in tension with an opposite sense that places could have affective or magical powers. Related to that second sense, place in Shakespeare’s comedies functions more figuratively and poetically than realistically. The metaphoric home of Shakespearean comedy is Italy, because of its reputation not only for humanist culture and cosmopolitanism but also for moral complexity and openness; imaginatively, it constitutes a place where change is possible. In that spirit, Shakespeare’s comedies often involve movement from a constricting ‘regulative’ locale to one more protean, more open to self-discovery and transformation. Those protean places may even exert a certain power, as if in another place one could become another self.

Beckett and trauma: the father’s death and the sea

2018 ◽  
pp. 23-45
Author(s):  
Julie Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Radio Play ◽  
Future Reference ◽  
As If

Shedding lights on biological episodes in Beckett’s writing, Julie Campbell in this chapter focuses specifically on the fear of diving that he experienced at six years old, which recurs from the early poem ‘For Future Reference’ to the later fiction Company, and analyses how and why it was traumatic for him. The incident, together with the shame and the sense of guilt he felt in mourning his father’s death, traumatised him. Beckett’s trauma, caused by his remorseful feeling that he had betrayed his father’s expectations, is perhaps most strongly reflected by the character Henry in Beckett’s radio play Embers. Henry is obsessed with the death of his father, who drowned at sea but whose body was not found. Henry denies his father’s death as if trying to expunge it from his memory. His distress, anger, bitterness, and confusion are expressed in his commands of his own actions and of the story of Bolton and Holloway. The radio listeners witness Henry’s inner feelings and share in his suffering.

The stereoscopic veil

2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-52
Author(s):  
Penelope Haralambidou
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Brick Wall ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Careful Inspection ◽  
Female Nude ◽  
Philadelphia Museum Of Art ◽  
Final Work ◽  
As If

At the back of a dimly lit room at the north-east wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art the visitor may, or may not, discover an old, weathered Spanish door. Approaching this unlikely sight, a concealed view behind the door becomes noticeable as a result of light emanating from two peepholes. The act of looking through them transforms the unsuspected viewer into a voyeur and reveals a brightly lit three-dimensional diorama: a recumbent, faceless, female nude, holding a gas lamp and bathed in light is submerged in twigs in an open landscape where a waterfall silently glitters [1a, 1b]. The explicit pornographic pose of the splayed legs and the exposed pudenda is dazzling. On careful inspection, this startling view is only possible through another intersecting surface; between the viewer and the nude stands a brick wall on which an irregular rupture has been opened – as if by a violent collision – making the scene even more unsettling. Defying traditional definitions of painting or sculpture Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic final work is a carefully constructed assemblage of elements, with an equally enigmatic title: Etant Donnés: 1°la chute d'eau, 2°le gaz d'éclairage… (Given: 1st the Waterfall, 2nd the Illuminating Gas…), 1946–1966.

A Lens for an Eye: Proust and Photography

2012 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Future ◽  
As If

Returning to a famous scene in A la recherche du temps perdu when the narrator sees his grandmother as if his eye were a lens, this paper takes seriously the objectivity attributed to photographic vision in order to trace its consequences for our sense of self. I argue that objective sight is traumatic not because it reveals the future nonexistence of things, but because it reveals the continued existence of things in our absence, signaling thereby the contingency of the perceiving subject.

Making Sense of Self-Deception: Distinguishing Self-Deception from Delusion, Moral Licensing, Cognitive Dissonance and Other Self-Distortions

Philosophy ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias L. Khalil
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Moral Licensing ◽  
Ex Ante ◽  
Narrow Definition ◽  
As If

AbstractThere has been no systematic study in the literature of how self-deception differs from other kinds of self-distortion. For example, the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ has been used in some cases as a rag-bag term for all kinds of self-distortion. To address this, a narrow definition is given: self-deception involves injecting a given set of facts with an erroneous fact to make anex antesuboptimal decision seem as if it wereex anteoptimal. Given this narrow definition, this paper delineates self-deception from deception as well as from other kinds of self-distortions such as delusion, moral licensing, cognitive dissonance, manipulation, and introspective illusion.

At Play in the Field of Possibles

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-84
Author(s):  
Richard M. Zaner
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Core ◽  
Reflective Awareness ◽  
Vital Element ◽  
As If

AbstractThis essay focuses on questions central to Husserl’s essential methodology, specifically his notion of ‘free-fantasy variation,’ which he regarded as his ‘fundamental methodological insight.’ At the heart of this ‘vital element of phenomenology’ is what he often terms ‘as-if experience’ thanks to which anything whatever (actual or possible) can be considered either for its own sake or as an example of something else. Further analysis explores the act of exemplification, the act of feigning (termed possibilizing) and the shifts of attention and orientation that ground free-fantasy variation. Exemplification and possibilizing are then examined in daily life to discern what makes the complex act of feigning at all possible. An examination of the phenomenon of upsets (of what is typically expected) brings the core sense of possibilizing to light. A focus on the dramatic force intrinsic to these experiences, and the essential place of reflective awareness inherent to them, makes apparent how the rudimentary sense of self begins to emerge, and there follows an analysis of this self-referentiality of possibilizing. The analysis then concludes with a brief examination of Husserl’s so-called ‘zig-zag’ method of constitutive phenomenology.

scholarly journals Wade in the Water …’: Rethinking Adoptees’ Stories of Reunion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Blake ◽  
Leigh Coombes ◽  
Mandy Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Married Couple ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Birth Certificates ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Legal Fiction ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Birth Family ◽  
As If

n 1955, the Aotearoa/New Zealand government legislated the closed stranger adoption period. Approximately 80,000 children were constructed as a legal fiction when deemed as if born to a legally married couple. Birth family information was permanently sealed. Yet being raised in a fictional subject position and being denied access to any family of origin has consequences for all involved. After ten years of lobbying, the Adult Adoption Information Act (1985) came into effect. The power of that legislation was to overturn the strategies that suppressed adoptees’ rights to know details of their birth. Adult adoptees over the age of 20 years could access their original birth certificates, which provided a birth mother’s name. With this identifying information, reunions became possible. Birth family reunions involve a diverse range of experiences, reflecting the ways in which adoptees are contextually and historically produced. This paper reconsiders the identity implications of reunion stories using the theoretical concept of hybrid identity. The complexities of reunions are multiple, and adoptees negotiate their identities through being both born to and born as if and yet neither identity is safe. In the production of this hybrid story, it was possible to see the political and moral trajectories that enable and constrain a sense of self through the complexities of a legal context that produces binary subject positions.

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