scholarly journals Vile Sovereigns in Bioethical Debate

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Hall

<p>In this paper, I critically assess transhumanist philosophy and its influence in bioethics by turning to resources in the work of Michel Foucault. I begin by outlining transhumanism and drawing out some of the primary goals of transhumanist philosophy. In order to do so, I focus on the work of Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, two prominent contributors to this thinking. I then move to explicate Foucault&rsquo;s work, in the early iterations of the <em>Abnormal</em> lecture series, on the concept of vile sovereignty. Foucault used the concept of vile sovereignty to critique psychiatric witnesses that had been utilized in mid twentieth-century French courts of law. Turning back to transhumanism, I analyze transhumanist discourse on the basis of Foucault&rsquo;s vile sovereignty. Transhumanists promote human enhancement in a way that rejects the body&mdash;especially the disabled body&mdash;and pose the question of what lives are worth living, as well as attempt to answer it. I conclude that because of the undeserved influence and ableism of transhumanism, it is important for feminist philosophers, philosophers of disability, and other disability scholars, who collide at the nexus of bioethical debate (especially with regard to reproductive technology and the body), to work together to intervene upon transhumanist discourse.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p><p>Keywords: bioethics; enhancement; Foucault; transhumanism; ableism</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

Ars Adriatica ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 187
Author(s):  
Marijana Kovačević

This paper paraphrases the first monographic study of the silver casket which was commissioned in the last quarter of the fourteenth century as a reliquary for the body of St Simeon in Zadar. The author of the monograph ‘The Silberschrein des S. Simeone in Zara’ is Alfréd Gotthold Meyer, an art historian from Berlin. The manuscript was written in German, translated into Hungarian and published in Budapest in 1894. Both the manuscript and the book are available only in a few copies in Croatia and this was one of the incentives for writing this article, apart from the need to introduce and evaluate one of the key works ever written on this important subject, and to do so in a more detailed manner than it had been done before. Meyer divided the material in five chapters. In the first chapter he deals with the traditions about the relic. The second chapter is a summary of the documents concerning the history of the silver casket. In the third chapter Meyer describes the reliefs on the casket and discusses their iconography, while in the fourth chapter he analyses them stylistically and attempts to reconstruct the original arrangement of particular reliefs. The final, fifth chapter is the most important part of this work, because it emphasizes comparisons between the Zadar casket and similar works in Italy and Dalmatia. The book has all the qualities of a scholarly text which is rather surprising for such an early date. Meyer pointed out a number of key notions about the supposedly different authors of particular reliefs, for example several master pieces of Italian painting and sculpture which may have inspired these authors, and he also noted the important seventeenth-century restoration on the casket. A. G. Meyer set very high scholarly standards with his work, which were rarely achieved in many subsequent publications on the casket, especially during the first half of the twentieth century.


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Joel Michael Reynolds ◽  

Awaiting execution, Socrates asks, “Is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition (μοχθηροῦ καὶ διεφθαρμένου σώματος)?” “In no way (Οὐδαμῶς),” replies Crito. While one can only conjecture whether Heidegger would agree with this precise formulation, the specter of (the corruptibility of) the body loomed large during his later years and in much scholarship to follow. Among the many scholars who have addressed the question of the body in Heidegger, nearly all agree that he—early, middle, and late—maintains that Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), not the reverse. Adducing the discussion of Sein-zum-Tode in §§51-53 of Being and Time and the role of der Sterbliche in the Bremen Lectures, I argue that this relation is instead mutually reciprocal, for Heidegger’s own accounts of the role of mortality demonstrate that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being. I term what this thinking proffers a corpoietic understanding of the body, and I conclude by discussing what light this might shed on past indictments of Heidegger’s (non)treatment of the body and on late twentieth-century attempts to think bodily difference.


Author(s):  
Richard Gruneau

This chapter examines the turn to the body that occurred in sport history in the late twentieth century, tracing its connections to the emergence of structuralism in postwar French social theory. Focusing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, the chapter argues that the “somatic turn” in sport history drew inspiration from an accompanying linguistic turn in French social theory and philosophy. As part of this discussion, the chapter discusses studies of the body in sport history influenced by Bourdieu and Foucault and concludes with some issues, problems, and implications of the somatic/linguistic turn in current historical research.


The Forum ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-709
Author(s):  
Daniel Schlozman ◽  
Sam Rosenfeld

Abstract This article pursues a developmental understanding of American parties as autonomous and thick collective actors through a comparison of four key historical actors we term “prophets of party”: partisans of the nineteenth-century Party Period; Progressive reformers; mid-twentieth century liberal Democrats; and activists in and around the body popularly known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission. Leading theories portray political parties as the vehicles either of ambitious politicians or of groups eager to extract benefits from the state. Yet such analyses leave underdetermined the path from such actors’ desires for power to the parties’ wielding of it. That path is mediated by partisan forms and practices that have varied widely across institutional and cultural context. As parties search for electoral majority, they do so in the long shadow of ideas and practices, layered and accreted across time, concerning the role of parties in political life. We analyze four such prophesies, trace their layered contributions to their successors, and reflect on their legacy for contemporary party politics.


2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Érica Danielle Silva

Filiando-nos aos pressupostos teóricos de Michel Foucault, tomamos como objeto de reflexão o sujeito deficiente, inquietados pelas estratégias e mecanismos linguístico-discursivos que promovem a (in)visibilidade da pessoa com deficiência na/pela histo?ria. Neste texto, objetivamos compreender a monstruosidade do corpo como um dispositivo do olhar cujas técnicas são moldadas e atualizadas de acordo com o investimento político dispensado ao corpo deficiente em condições de produção específicas. Para tanto, levantamos as condições de existência dos discursos que constituem a monstruosidade do corpo deficiente até o século XIX e discutimos, a partir de enunciados efetivamente produzidos, como esse regime do olhar produz sentidos em condições de produção outras.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Sujeito com deficiência; Monstruosidade; Memória discursiva; Análise do Discurso.ABSTRACT Following the theoretical assumptions of Michel Foucault, we take as the object of reflection the disabled people, disquieted by the strategies and linguistic-discursive mechanisms that promote the (in)visibility of disabled people in/for the history. In this text, we aim at understanding the monstrosity of the body as a device whose techniques are molded and updated according to the policy investment dispensed to the disabled people in specific production conditions. Therefore, we raise the living conditions of the discourses that constitute the monstrosity of the disabled body until the nineteenth century and discussed, from statements actually produced, how this lokking regime produces senses in other production conditions. KEYWORDS: Disabled people; Monstrosity; Discursive Memory; Discourse Analysis.


Literator ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
N. Meihuizen

Through the agency of Daimonic desire, Yeatsian spiritualism repeats empirical existence. In positing a desire that extends beyond the limits of individual human life, Yeats denies the definitive value of an exclusive finitude, such as that perceived by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (1974). If Yeats, involved in a qualified manner in an aspect of Foucault’s analytic of finitude, is a modernist, he is related to that type Fredric Jameson calls the “anti-modern modernist” (Jameson, 1991:304), the modernist who reacts against modernisation. In discussing Daimonic desire, then, it is congruous with a reading of Yeats to do so both from the perspective of the empirical realm of the “dying generations”, and the spiritual realm of the “artifice of eternity”. In the first case the Daimon can surely be understood as a manifestation of the Zeitgeist, but how do we understand the spirits in the second case, who have transcended the ultimate limit of finitude, death itself, and who thus rock the three Foucauldian cornerstones of finitude – life, labour, and language, “marked by the spatiality of the body, the yawning of desire, and the time of language” (Foucault, 1974:315)? Clearly, for Yeats, life is not limited by death; labour is not limited by a somnolent desire; and language is not confined within the span of a single life.


1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (03) ◽  
pp. 92-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Neumann ◽  
H. Baas ◽  
R. Hefner ◽  
G. Hör

The symptoms of Parkinson’s disease often begin on one side of the body and continue to do so as the disease progresses. First SPECT results in 4 patients with hemiparkinsonism using 99mTc-HMPAO as perfusion marker are reported. Three patients exhibited reduced tracer uptake in the contralateral basal ganglia One patient who was under therapy for 1 year, showed a different perfusion pattern with reduced uptake in both basal ganglia. These results might indicate reduced perfusion secondary to reduced striatal neuronal activity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-96
Author(s):  
Sørina Higgins

In his unfinished cycle of Arthurian poems, Charles Williams developed a totalizing mythology in which he fictionalized the Medieval. First, he employed chronological conflation, juxtaposing events and cultural references from a millennium of European history and aligning each with his doctrinal system. Second, following the Biblical metaphor of the body of Christ, Blake’s symbolism, and Rosicrucian sacramentalism, he embodied theology in the Medieval landscape via a superimposed female figure. Finally, Williams worked to show the validity of two Scholastic approaches to spirituality: the kataphatic and apophatic paths. His attempts to balance via negativa and via positiva led Williams to practical misapplication—but also to creation of a landmark work of twentieth century poetry. . . . the two great vocations, the Rejection of all images before the unimaged, the Affirmation of all images before the all-imaged, the Rejection affirming, the Affirmation rejecting. . . —from ‘The Departure of Dindrane’ —O Blessed, pardon affirmation!— —O Blessed, pardon negation!— —from ‘The Prayers of the Pope’


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