scholarly journals Politicizing flight in Edward Albee’s seascape

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Zied Khamari

In recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Many writers emphasized in their literary works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern society and underlined the idea that flight is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life. Edward Albee, for example, addressed the issue of flight in his drama, particularly the sociopolitical and artistic scopes of escape. In his Seascape, Albee presents a multifaceted perception of flight juxtaposing the social with the literary and the political with the artistic. In the postmodern political thought too, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (2005), for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from all authoritarian policies. This paper, then, seeks to examine Albee’s staging of flight from the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective in an attempt to elucidate his complex yet refined dramatization of escape in his play Seascape.

Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly

This chapter binds the book together, recapitulating its general argument, and offering pointers as to how the study relates to some contemporary questions of political theory. It suggests that a classification that distinguishes between Weber the ‘liberal’, Schmitt the ‘conservative’ and Neumann the ‘social democrat’, cannot provide an adequate understanding of this episode in the history of political thought. Nor indeed can it do so for other periods. In this book, one part of the development of their ideas has focused on the relationship between state and politics. By learning from their examples, people continue their own search for an acceptable balance between the freedom of the individual and the claims of the political community.


1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton

Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (8) ◽  
pp. 865-887
Author(s):  
Daniela Voss

Since the late 1960s there has been a resurgence of interest in Spinozism in France: Gilles Deleuze was among the first who gave life to a ‘new Spinoza’ with his seminal book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968). While Deleuze was primarily interested in Spinoza’s ontology and ethics, the contemporary French philosopher Étienne Balibar focuses on the political writings. Despite their common fascination for Spinoza’s relational definition of the individual, both thinkers have drawn very different consequences from the Spinozist inspiration regarding the relevance of his philosophy for a contemporary ethical and political thought. Deleuze draws from Spinoza an ethics of the encounter, an ‘ethology’ that is concerned with the composition of bodies on a plane of immanence. Balibar, on the contrary, deals with the modes of communication that we institute between one another and that are always effectuations on two levels at once: the real and the imaginary. Whereas Deleuze emphasizes the conception of a univocal plane of immanence, Balibar insists on a double expression of the real and the imaginary in any transindividual practice. The aim of this paper is to compare and finally assess their respective contributions to a conception of collective political action: the question of constitution of the ‘free multitude’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zied Khamari

In the recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Accordingly, the literary work becomes emblematic of a voyage of spiritual discovery and the text turns into a virtual journey beyond the normal everyday world. Many writers emphasized in their works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern life and underlined the idea that flight, with its different dimensions, is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life and circumvent the social standards and the political regulations. In the postmodern political thought, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from the authoritarian policies of the social and political institutions.


Author(s):  
S. S. Melnikov

The paper analyzes the genesis of modern political humor and determines its position in the system of spiritual relations in society. The formation of the need to comprehend social relations by means of humor during progressive transition from traditional to modern society is investigated. We note that humor is essentially a social phenomenon. A fundamental distinction between humor formed in the modern period and humor of previous times is the presence of reflexivity. New kind of humor has also dealt with political relations began to be interpreted by means of humor culture. In the course of research we found that comic interpretation of politics became feasible due to the legislative fixation of individual rights as a part of modern political culture. The emancipated personality demonstrates more complicated expectations to a political institute and experiences acute dissatisfaction as state authorities have often made decisions not appropriate to such expectations. For the individual as sovereign entity political humor became a sort of social and psychological compensation. An author pays attention to the fact that the social subject having shown such a reaction was formed during the second half of XIX and the beginning of XX centuries because of the dissemination of the print media and was named «the audience». The audience became a key agent of humorous reflection about the political institute. As a case that grounds the applicability of this theory to the practice the paper considers the example of inclusion of specific comic genre (political caricature) in the social discourse in the West and in Russia.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Gan N.Yu. ◽  
Ponomareva L.I. ◽  
Obukhova K.A.

Today, worldview, spiritual and moral problems that have always been reflected in education and upbringing come to the fore in society. In this situation, there is a demand for philosophical categories. One of the priority goals of education in modern conditions is the formation of a reasonable, reflexive person who is able to analyze their actions and the actions of other people. Modern science is characterized by an understanding of the absolute value and significance of childhood in the development of the individual, which implies the need for its multilateral study. In the conditions of democratization of all spheres of life, the child ceases to be a passive object of education and training, and becomes an active carrier of their own meanings of being and the subject of world creation. One of the realities of childhood is philosophizing, so it is extremely timely to address the identification of its place and role in the world of childhood. Children's philosophizing is extremely poorly studied, although the need for its analysis is becoming more obvious. Children's philosophizing is one of the forms of philosophical reflection, which has its own qualitative specificity, on the one hand, and commonality with all other forms of philosophizing, on the other. The social relevance of the proposed research lies in the fact that children's philosophizing can be considered as an intellectual indicator of a child's socialization, since the process of reflection involves the adoption and development of culture. Modern society, in contrast to the traditional one, is ready to "accept" a philosophizing child, which means that it is necessary to determine the main characteristics and conditions of children's philosophizing.


PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Bartra

Ecology defines territory as an area defended by an organism or a group of similar organisms with the purpose of pairing off, nesting, resting, and feeding. The defense of this space frequently brings about an aggressive behavior toward intruders and the marking of boundaries by means of repulsive chemical odors. Human beings, though they lack a precise ecological niche and are capable of adapting themselves to diverse spaces, also define territorial limits, from which emanate particular aromas that identify certain social groups. This is a question not of chemical perfumes but rather of codified cultural effusions that fill these groups with pride, even though they may, on occasion, strike others as repulsive. Many years ago, theories established that modern society impels a relentless process of deterritorialization and decodification, a process that tends to be ill regarded by ecologists, the populist left, fundamentalists, and conservatives. The proponents of this idea in the 1970s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, stated in their renowned but forgotten book Anti-Oedipus (1972) that this process would end in the liberation of “desiring machines” and the dismantling of the oppressive state, in the same way that the death of God announced by Nietzsche was to be a liberating catastrophe. It is curious that these theories should end up hermetically codified and entombed beneath the seven seals of postmodernism and deconstruction, in the territory of an insufferable and unnecessary jargon.


2005 ◽  
Vol 3 (8) ◽  
pp. 399-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Williams ◽  
Eric Taylor

The evolutionary status of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is central to assessments of whether modern society has created it, either physically or socially; and is potentially useful in understanding its neurobiological basis and treatment. The high prevalence of ADHD (5–10%) and its association with the seven-repeat allele of DRD4, which is positively selected in evolution, raise the possibility that ADHD increases the reproductive fitness of the individual, and/or the group. However, previous suggestions of evolutionary roles for ADHD have not accounted for its confinement to a substantial minority. Because one of the key features of ADHD is its diversity, and many benefits of population diversity are well recognized (as in immunity), we study the impact of groups' behavioural diversity on their fitness. Diversity occurs along many dimensions, and for simplicity we choose unpredictability (or variability), excess of which is a well-established characteristic of ADHD. Simulations of the Changing Food group task show that unpredictable behaviour by a minority optimizes results for the group. Characteristics of such group exploration tasks are risk-taking, in which costs are borne mainly by the individual; and information-sharing, in which benefits accrue to the entire group. Hence, this work is closely linked to previous studies of evolved altruism. We conclude that even individually impairing combinations of genes, such as ADHD, can carry specific benefits for society, which can be selected for at that level, rather than being merely genetic coincidences with effects confined to the individual. The social benefits conferred by diversity occur both inside and outside the ‘normal’ range, and these may be distinct. This view has the additional merit of offering explanations for the prevalence, sex and age distribution, severity distribution and heterogeneity of ADHD.


2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Schillmeier

To assume that all things we want to describe – humans and non-humans alike – can be done so properly only in terms of 'societies', requires a contrast – a momentum of cosmopolitics – to the very abstract distinctions upon which our classical understanding of sociology and its key terms rests: 'The social' as defined in opposition to 'the non-social', 'society' in opposition to 'nature'. The concept of cosmopolitics tries to avoid such modernist strategy that A. N. Whitehead called 'bifurcation of nature' (cf. Whitehead 1978, 2000). The inventive production of contrasts names a cosmopolitical tool which does not attempt to denounce, debunk, replace or overcome abstract, exclusivist oppositions that suggest divisions as 'either…or'-relations. Rather, as the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers stresses, 'the contrast will have to be celebrated in the manner of a new existent, adding a new dimension to the cosmos' (Stengers 2011: 513). Cosmopolitics, then, engages with 'habits we experiment with in order to become capable of new experiences' (Stengers 2001: 241) and opens up the possibility of agency of the non-expected Other, the non-normal, the non-human, the non-social, the un-common. 'The Other is the existence of a possible world', as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1994: 17-18) have put it. It is 'the condition for our passing from one world to another. The Other (...) makes the world go by.'


Cinesonidos ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 111-149
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Avila

Chapter 3 discusses the problematic fictional indigenista film genre. Falling under the political ideology of indigenismo—discourses advocating for the social and economic integration of indigenous populations at the beginning of the twentieth century—the intended goal of the film genre was to introduce the “indigenous experience” to urban, mestizo audiences. Cinema held a unique position in this construction, but presented contradictory messages: it neither fully promoted nor totally negated integrationist procedures through the cinematic constructions of indigenous cultures. Within these representations, music played a crucial role in not just providing adequate changes in atmosphere but also in sonically depicting the indigenous experience. The chapter focuses on two films, Janitzio (1935) and María Candelaria (1944). These films both enforce exoticist representations that moved against integrationist discourses. While the cinematic interpretations indicate that modern society attempted to integrate these communities, the exoticist aural and visual representations of these communities amplified their Otherness.


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