scholarly journals Consciousness as claiming: Practice and habit in an enigmatic world

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1120-1135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Rose
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Analytic Work ◽  
Material Practice ◽  
The Face ◽  
Jean Laplanche

There has been increasing interest in recent years on the non-cognitive nature of human existence. Self-conscious thought and reflective action are no longer seen to be the defining feature of the human condition nor an anchor for social life. On the contrary, material practice and habitual engagements are the abiding mechanisms by which everyday life is sutured. One of the consequences of this perspective is its abbreviated conception of human consciousness. In the literature on habit and practical engagement, consciousness is conceptualised primarily in terms of self-perception and awareness. The aim of this article is to put forth the thesis that human consciousness is not just an awareness of the self – it is also a ‘claim’. Drawing upon the psycho-analytic work of Jean Laplanche, the paper argues that consciousness emerges as subjects reckon with existential problems that are as imminent to everyday life as the concrete problems and practical tasks. In this framing, consciousness emerges as a desire to claim oneself as a self in the face of problems that exceed our practical capacities. Consciousness is a claim in the sense that it marks a desire to be a self-standing, self-possessed subject, within a precarious and enigmatic world.

Great Freedom and the Concept of Awareness

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-181
Author(s):  
Alex Norman
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Great Freedom ◽  
True Location ◽  
The Face ◽  
Individual Existence ◽  
Short Courses

Great Freedom is new socio-religious movement centring on the teachings of American Candice O’Denver. It teaches that Awareness – the space of individual existence observable between thoughts and emotional responses – is the true location of individual identity for all human beings, and the beginning point for acceptance of the self. The group, which was founded in 2003, conducts meetings and short courses at which the teachings are promoted and described in detail. The group’s website (www.greatfreedom.org) also hosts many written publications, audio, and video teachings free to the public. The core of the Great Freedom teaching revolves around the explanation that the human condition is one of frustration, angst, and constant searching for psychological and emotional relief, though not because such things have become ‘uncoupled’ or ‘free floating’. Instead, Great Freedom argues that these sensations arise in the face of a lack of knowledge about the permanent comfort available in Awareness. Modern life is understood to have become saturated and overly self-improvement oriented, implying that happiness and wellbeing are states to be searched for. The realisation of the nature of Awareness is believed by the group to bring psychological relief. This belief is examined in light of David Lyon’s (2000) argument of a shift in the parameters of religious thinking and engagement towards ‘secularised’, individuated, and highly subjective modes, and that modern religiosity is bricolage in response to the postmodern fragmentation of identity. Following from this, Great Freedom is read as a response to an understanding that modern life is highly saturated, in Kenneth Gergen’s (1991) sense, and, as Anthony Giddens’ (1991) notion of a ‘project of the self’ intimates, overly self-improvement oriented.

Foucault, Bourdieu and the Field of Irish Sexuality

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Inglis
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Individual

Sociological analysis of Irish sexuality has been notable for its absence. This paper examines the contribution which Foucault's theory of sexuality as a discourse of truth and apparatus of power makes toward elucidating key issues in the history and contemporary field of Irish sexuality. Although Foucault provides good insights into the constitution of a hermeneutics of the self within different ethical regimes, his analysis of sexuality is inadequate when it comes to explaining how sexuality operates in everyday life and the individual struggle to attain power and position in social life. In this respect, the paper turns to the work of Bourdieu and examines the field of Irish sexuality in relation to his concepts of habitus, practice and capital.

scholarly journals Contesting Captive Spaces: A Reading of Emma Donoghue’s Room

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 786-793
Author(s):  
Ankita Das ◽  
Rajni Singh
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
The Common ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
Made In

Experiencing space in its entire manifold is extremely indispensable to human existence. Our everyday life, social and personal relations and idea of the self are somehow defined by space. However, owing to its ambiguous nature space might not always add a smooth dimension to one’s life. Analysing the mesh of complexity and anxietylying underneath the common understanding of space, an attempt is made in this paper to study Emma Donoghue’s Room.Through an examination of its central characters, Ma and Jack, the essay seeks to highlight the trauma borne out of changing spaces.

The Self of the Camera

2016 ◽  
pp. 240-250
Author(s):  
Gilbert Ndi Shang
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Sense Of Coherence ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Face ◽  
Cyber Space ◽  
Facebook Usage ◽  
Privileged Class ◽  
Media Practices

This chapter examines the revolution in self-representation across the cyber-space engendered by the advent of new interactive social medias. It argues that in the attempt to face the challenges of self-imaging in everyday life and in an era where discourses of “identities in flux” have become the norm, photographic trends on Facebook usage seek to portray a sense of coherence of the self through popular media practices. In this dimension, the new media spaces have provided a propitious space of autobiographic self-showing-narrating through a mixture of photos/texts in a way that deconstructs the privileges of self-narration hitherto available only to a privileged class of people. The self (and primarily the face) has thus become subject to a dynamic of personal and amateurish artistic practices that represent, from an existentialist perspective, the daily practices of self-making, un-making and re-making in articulating one's (social) being.

The Annihilated Self

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
Great Chain Of Being ◽  
The Face

The devout life literature requires the self to see itself as nothing—but what does this mean? The dialectic of being and non-being has a long history in Western metaphysics, but in the wake of the Copernican revolution nothingness is no longer a relative element in the great chain of being but something more absolute. With the help of Fénelon’s proof for the existence of God from human imperfection, it is shown how the devout self is figured as suspended between being and nothingness, dependent entirely on God for being. In this situation, Descartes’s assurance regarding the ontological basis of human existence is unsustainable. Yet even in the face of annihilation, the soul may still love God and practise a grateful acknowledgement of God’s good gifts.

scholarly journals Disabled Everyday Life in the Context of the Concept of Social Labeling

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 179-197
Author(s):  
Iwona Banach
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Social Labeling

The article deals with issues related to the perception and positioning of people with disabilities in the current space of social life. It was pointed out that the conditions and possibilities of everyday human existence and access to everyday spaces, regardless of the level of fitness, constitute an opportunity to normalize interpersonal relations based on a democratic order.

Power of Darkness: Narrative and Biographical Reflexivity in A Series of Unfortunate Events

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-212
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH BULLEN
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Project Risk ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
High Earning ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
Children’S Exposure ◽  
Central Claim

This paper investigates the high-earning children's series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in relation to the skills young people require to survive and thrive in what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Children's textual culture has been traditionally informed by assumptions about childhood happiness and the need to reassure young readers that the world is safe. The genre is consequently vexed by adult anxiety about children's exposure to certain kinds of knowledge. This paper discusses the implications of the representation of adversity in the Lemony Snicket series via its subversions of the conventions of children's fiction and metafictional strategies. Its central claim is that the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of A Series of Unfortunate Events} models one of the forms of reflexivity children need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to empower them to undertake the biographical project risk society requires of them.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

Being Numerous

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Language Poets

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

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.

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