Staying Alive

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margrit Shildrick
Keyword(s):  
Heart Transplantation ◽  
Organ Transplantation ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Organ ◽  
Complex Emotions ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Face ◽  
Transplantation Procedures

The field of human organ transplantation, and most particularly that of heart transplantation where the donor is always deceased, is one in which the rhetoric of hope leaves little room for any exploration or understanding of the more negative emotions and affects that recipients may experience. Where a donated heart is commonly referred to as the ‘gift of life’, both in lay discourse and by those engaged in transplantation procedures, how does this imbricate with the alternative clinical term of a ‘graft’? For recipients of donor organs, the experience of living on in the face of otherwise certain death is fraught with complex emotions, not only about the self and the now dead other, but the persistence of the other within the self. In contrast to our expectations of the feel-good narrative of the gift of life, recipients are often significantly troubled by the aftermath of the procedure, which may fundamentally challenge notions of personal identity, as well as having deep implications for our understanding of the relation between death and ‘staying alive’. Drawing on recent research into heart transplantation, I shall theorise the field through a reflection – drawing on both Mauss and Derrida – on the meaning of the gift, before moving on to consider whether a Deleuzian approach to both the assemblage and the ‘event’ of death might offer a more productive framework.

Tracing Sexual Difference

1998 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Pamela Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Difference

A reading of Luce Irigaray suggests the possibility of tracing sexual difference in philosophical accounts of personal identity. In particular, I argue that Irigaray raises the possibility of moving beyond the aporia of the other which lies at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's account of self-identity. My contention is that the self conceived in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another is male insofar as it is dependent upon the patriarchal monotheism which has shaped Western culture both socially and economically. Nevertheless there remains the possibility of developing Ricoeur's reference to 'the trace of the Other' in order to give a non-essential meaning to sexual difference. Such meaning will emerge when (i) both men and women have identities as subjects, and (ii) the difference between them can be expressed. I aim to elucidate both conditions by appropriating Irigaray's 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.'

scholarly journals The face-to-face encounter in indigenous health care: a perspective in Lévinas

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (suppl 6) ◽  
pp. 2848-2853
Author(s):  
Diomedia Zacarias Teixeira ◽  
Nelson dos Santos Nunes ◽  
Rose Mary Costa Rosa Andrade Silva ◽  
Eliane Ramos Pereira ◽  
Vilza Handan
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Health ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
The Face ◽  
Care Practices ◽  
Reflective Study ◽  
Outpatient Settings

ABSTRACT Objective: To reflect on the sensitive behaviors of indigenous healthcare professionals based on the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, to ratify completeness, equity, and humanity. Method: reflective study. Reflection: Studies have identified inadequacies in meeting the indigenous singularities. In the hospital and outpatient settings, they are diluted in the search for care. The difficulty of the professionals to admit them generates conflicts and non-adherence of indigenous individuals to treatments that disregard their care practices. In Lévinas, consciousness requires, "a priori," sensitivity to access the Infinity on the Face of the Other, which in the face-to-face encounters is presented to the Self as radical Alterity, proposing an Ethical relationship through transcendence. The freedom of the Self as to the Other is finite, as the Self cannot possess the Other, and infinite for its responsibility for the Other. Final considerations: The Self builds essence and existence in responsibility. In the Ethics of Alterity, in Lévinas, reflections are proposed that influence sensitive behaviors.

scholarly journals Ali Smith’s There But For The: Identity, Hospitality and Transcendence in the Age of Surveillance

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Andrei-Bogdan Popa
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Right To Privacy ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
Subjective Identity

Abstract The aim of this essay is to prove that, throughout Ali Smith’s There But For The (2011), the “narrative” subjective identity (Alphen 83) accessed via the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), as well as through storytelling itself, is liable to be turned into archivable information under the pressures of a surveillance state in which its citizens are complicit. I will use this archival/narrative identity dyad as articulated by theorist Ernst van Alphen in order to investigate at length the novel’s staging of hospitality as corrupted by surveillance. I will oppose the notion of identity as information against Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), whereby true hospitality depends upon the mutual respect one person has for the absolute singularity of the other, which involves personal information and the right to privacy. As it will become apparent, these identities lose or gain agency according to the engagement of the self with a newly arrived foreign alterity. Thus, the arrival of strangers throughout Smith’s novel thematizes the scenario of hospitality in tension with the stranger as surveyor or as surveyed. The doubling of language, the self-editing of one’s discourse and the risky openness towards the Other are modes of resistance that eschew the artificial categorizations upon which the archival identity is contingent. However, the bridge from interiority to exteriority is mediation. Smith therefore develops a conception of secularized Grace that works by exploring the revolutionary potential of this very mediation and can disrupt the logic of tyrannical surveillance. Part of this approach to history and language is informed by the witnessing of the traces left on the bodies of martyrized dissidents by unjust systems at their apex. There But For The is narrated by four characters in the mediatic aftermath of a bourgeois dinner party in an affluent suburb of London that witnessed the sudden and unexplainable reclusion of Miles Garth into the spare room of his stunned hosts. The event, as well as those leading up to and following it, is recounted by a grieving nature photographer in his sixties named Mark; May, a rebellious old woman suffering from dementia; an unemployed, middle-aged Anna; and Brooke, a ten-year old girl and voracious reader. The essay will approach these characters’ meditations upon the nature of identity as split between its narrative and archival forms.

scholarly journals Algorithmic anxiety: Masks and camouflage in artistic imaginaries of facial recognition algorithms

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395171985153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia de Vries ◽  
Willem Schinkel
Keyword(s):  
Facial Recognition ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Big Brother ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Recognition Algorithms ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One

This paper discusses prominent examples of what we call “algorithmic anxiety” in artworks engaging with algorithms. In particular, we consider the ways in which artists such as Zach Blas, Adam Harvey and Sterling Crispin design artworks to consider and critique the algorithmic normativities that materialize in facial recognition technologies. Many of the artworks we consider center on the face, and use either camouflage technology or forms of masking to counter the surveillance effects of recognition technologies. Analyzing their works, we argue they on the one hand reiterate and reify a modernist conception of the self when they conjure and imagination of Big Brother surveillance. Yet on the other hand, their emphasis on masks and on camouflage also moves beyond such more conventional critiques of algorithmic normativities, and invites reflection on ways of relating to technology beyond the affirmation of the liberal, privacy-obsessed self. In this way, and in particular by foregrounding the relational modalities of the mask and of camouflage, we argue academic observers of algorithmic recognition technologies can find inspiration in artistic algorithmic imaginaries.

Face to Face, Hand to Hand: Relations of Exchange in Hamlet

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-131
Author(s):  
Emily Shortslef
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Relation ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Mutual Awareness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Sense And Respond ◽  
The Way

In this essay, Emily Shortslef reads three linked encounters between Hamlet and Laertes in Act 5 of Hamlet—their fight at Ophelia’s grave, Hamlet’s recollection of this event in his subsequent expression of remorse, and their fatal duel before Claudius—in relationship to Levinas’s conceptualization of the face-to-face encounter as the ethical relation. She shows how Levinas’s notion of the self as constituted through the encounter with irreducible and unknowable alterity makes these scenes visible as moments in which the self is called into question by the other. At the same time, in contrast to Levinas’s famously asymmetrical concept of relationality and responsibility, the relationality that emerges in these scenes—one generated by the risk inherent in fighting on stage—necessitates mutual awareness of the other’s presence, careful attunement to movement, and reciprocal gestures of provocation and response. Each character discloses himself through the way that their facing bodies sense and respond to the other’s motion. In these antagonistic but collaborative encounters between Hamlet and Laertes, Shakespeare stages a relation of exchange that at the end of the play will also enable an exchange of forgiveness.

scholarly journals The role of the Other in getting to know the self

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter Rembeczki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Practical Life

The paper investigates the role of the other in the emergence and understanding of the self both in Descartes’ philosophy and in phenomenological theories based on Descartes. For Descartes, the thinking entity is almost closed into itself, but upon close inquiry it turns out that ideas of other entities filter into its thinking and eventually influence it. Therefore, the ego’s experience of itself depends of its experience of other ideas, while the ego active in practical life is constituted through its relation to things encountered in the world. In some twentieth-century approaches the ego can only understand itself through another ego. For Husserl, the self comprehends itself as the not-Other, while for Levinas the face of the Other constitutes the self of the Ego receiving it, through their radical difference.

How Sense-phenomenal Theory of Personal Identity Might Legitimize Racism

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-190
Author(s):  
Maduka Enyimba ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Discrimination ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Physical Features

The major concern of the problem of personal identity gravitates around the question of whether a person’s identity is located in the mind or in the body. Scholars have developed different theories such as survivalist and physicalist criteria among others in response to this question. In this paper, I engage with the theory of sense-phenomenalism as an aspect of the physicalist criterion of personal identity to show how it might legitimize racism and colour-branding. Sense-phenomenalism is a body-only model of personal identity that holds that an individual’s identity is determined by the physical features sensually perceptible by other humans in the society. I argue that sense-phenomenalism by reposing a person’s identity on his/her bodily traits might foster social discrimination, deepen the dichotomy between the self and the other and enhance the fabrication of justifications for the denial of individual’s rights.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–95)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bernasconi
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Face

In the 1930s Levinas helped to introduce the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger to the French. Subsequently his work attained classic status in its own right for his attempt to explore the meaning of ethics from a phenomenological starting-point. In Totalité et infini (1961) (Totality and Infinity, 1969) Levinas locates the basis of ethics in the face-to-face relation where the Other puts me in question. My obligations to the Other are not contracted by me. They not only precede any debts I incur, but also go beyond anything I could possibly satisfy. In later works, most notably Autrement qu’être (1974) (Otherwise than Being, 1981) Levinas explores further the preconditions of this account, most especially by investigating the I that was said to be put in question in the encounter with the Other. In analyses that stretch phenomenology to its limits and beyond, Levinas finds alterity within the self.

Feeling ‘Like a Work-Girl’: Class, Intimacy and Alienation in ‘The Garden Party’

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Face ◽  
Upper Middle Class

This essay argues that ‘The Garden Party’ confronts us with the uncanny intimacy and alienation created by class relations in the upper-middle-class household at the turn of the century. The consequences of protagonist Laura Sheridan’s desire and failure to transcend what she calls ‘absurd class distinctions’ (288) are well established in Mansfield criticism, and psychological readings of ‘The Garden Party’ often consider how the working class Other influences Laura’s developing subjectivity. In this essay, I draw upon similar psychological frameworks to examine how ‘The Garden Party’ deals with the idea of working-class selves – not just Others. I contend that, though it does not render the inner lives of its working-class characters, ‘The Garden Party’ still raises important questions about the selfhood of the Other, and the uncanny, sometimes abject, sense of the Other within one’s self.Through a series of uncanny parallels between middle and working-class life, ‘The Garden Party’ collapses the distance between Laura and the working class. As it does, it confronts us with questions about what it means to stare the working class Other in the face – as Laura stares into the swollen, grief-stricken face of Scott’s widow – and to realize that the Other is at the core of the self.

Theatre of Witness: Passage into a New Millennium

1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (47) ◽  
pp. 266-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Malpede
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Feminist Theatre ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Face ◽  
Women In Theater ◽  
New Millennium

Karen Malpede's monologue, ‘Baghdad Bunker’, whose origins in an experience of vicarious empathy she describes in the following article, was first performed by Ruth Maleczech at La Mama in June 1991. It subsequently became the centrepiece of Malpede's play Going to Iraq, about life in New York during the Gulf War. Later, in The Beekeeper's Daughter, she addressed our lack of empathy in the face of ‘racial cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. Here, Karen Malpede uses both this latter play and a play by the dissident Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder, Snakeskin, as examples of an approach to writing and experiencing plays she calls ‘theatre of witness’ – in which the witnessing imagination affirms connections ‘based upon the human capacities to experience compassion and empathy for the self and for the other as powerful, motivating forces’. Karen Malpede is a widely performed and published American playwright and director, currently with the Theatre Three Collaborative in New York, where she also teaches at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her People's Theater in America (1972) was a seminal study of its subject, as was her Women in Theater (1984) of the feminist theatre aesthetic.

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