scholarly journals Bartleby as Subject

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 175-190
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Active Subject ◽  
Hardt And Negri ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Antonio Negri ◽  
Passive Object ◽  
Contrary Direction

Interpreting Bartleby the scrivener’s formula, “I would prefer not to,” in Herman Melville’s short story is a challenge for many philosophers, and Bartleby’s inaction also hints at a political position. The problem is how to explain this (in)action. It is unclear whether the scrivener is an active subject or a passive object. One potential solution would be to reduce Bartleby’s duality to one of its modes. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim the scrivener is a revolutionary subject; the uncertainty of his actions is regarded as a refusal. Hardt and Negri link this refusal with the next stage in the production of a new society and a new subject. Slavoj Žižek is also ambivalent about “Bartleby politics”. Although the Slovenian philosopher criticizes the authors of Empire, he still declares Bartleby a parallax figure combining action and inaction. However, Žižek did not stake out a position on the ontological status of the scrivener: is he a cunning subject and escape artist, or is he a distinction-basis of the system itself? In the contrary direction, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben propose a program for the desubjectification of the scrivener from Wall Street. Here Bartleby is not a subject, but a figure of the ontology of a transcendental source which exists before all ontic differences. The essay offers a radically different solution to the Bartleby problem. It rejects the dichotomy between the subject and object and moves toward the object-oriented theory of action and relational ontology as presented in the works of Bruno Latour. In this ontology, any actors (human or non-human) may turn out situationally to be active or inactive, depending on their position in relation to other actors.

What Happens in Vegas: Hunter S. Thompson's Political Philosophy

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-170
Author(s):  
JASON VREDENBURG
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Las Vegas ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Hardt And Negri ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Antonio Negri ◽  
The Relationship

In the forty years since its publication, Hunter S. Thompson's most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has received relatively little attention from scholars, in spite of its continuing popularity and acknowledged influence. Because the narrative is so thoroughly rooted in what Thompson called “this foul year of Our Lord, 1971,” the novel is generally approached (when it is discussed at all) as a historical artifact, a gonzo first draft of history, with its fortunes rising and falling with the counterculture of the 1960s. This article argues that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, far from being merely an epitaph for the 1960s, actually anticipates the more recent work of political theorists Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Thompson's work, like Agamben's, concerns the emergence of the state of exception and the homo sacer as new paradigms for the relationship between citizen and state; and, like Hardt and Negri, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas attempts to formulate a response to the emergence of global empire.

Taking the Woman's Part: Engendering Roman Love Elegy

Ramus ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 110-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Wyke
Keyword(s):  
Double Barrier ◽  
Love Elegy ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Active Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Passive Object ◽  
Erotic Desire

When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognised conventions for its production, according to which woman is the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia's unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’. For Amy Richlin, Sulpicia breached a double barrier, both the ‘male job’ of writing and the ‘male genre’ of elegy. With reference to Sulpicia, I also labelled Augustan elegy as ‘male-oriented verse’ that constructs a ‘male narrative perspective’. While it is evidently the case that, with the notable exception of Sulpicia, the biological sex of all the authors of Roman elegy is male, I would now argue that the genre of elegy itself is not unequivocally ‘masculine’ and that to engender elegy unproblematically as ‘male’ fails to do justice to the genre's crucial play with Roman categories of gender.

scholarly journals RE-READING MUSTANG IN THE CONTEXT OF THE IDEOLOGICAL COMPONENTS OF NARRATIVE

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 617-634
Author(s):  
Nermin ORTA
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
Active Subject ◽  
Stage Order ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Passive Object

Representation of the female body has been one of the most emphasized issues in gender debates. To refrain from reproducing the patriarchal ideology, it is important to be careful with the distinction between the body being tabooed and covered or transformed into an object of consumption under the name of freedom. The sexualization and objectification of the female body has taken place in the historical process. In many products from works of art to mass media, the woman, who is a passive object in front of the man who is the active/subject, is presented to the consumption of the male gaze. In almost every branch of art, from photography to cinema, the female body has been the object of the gaze and has been turned into an object of desire by being removed from the subject identity. Even in films that are claimed to be made with a woman's point of view and against gender discourses, the female body is sometimes objectified with elements such as the stage order, lighting, and perspective preferences. In this study, which aims to reveal how cinematographic elements can change the world of meaning, the first film of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Mustang (2015), was discussed with feminist criticism in the axis of object-body by giving examples from various art branches in terms of cinematographic preferences. As a result of the study, it has been determined that the film, which claims to have set out with critical point of view, reproduces the discourses it tries to criticize. The reason for this is that the film falls into the traps of patriarchal ideology.

Antonio Negri

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Diran
Keyword(s):  
Critical Distance ◽  
Middle Voice ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Antonio Negri

Agamben describes his posture as a reader as one of seeking a text’s Entwicklungsfähigkeit, or capacity for elaboration.1 In examining Agamben’s practices of reading, we can attend to the opposite phenomenon: the counter-elaboration that a text, in having being read by the philosopher, performs upon Agamben’s own thought. This reciprocal elaboration might constitute a paradigm for Agamben’s use of reading, according to his own idiosyncratic definition of use as an event in the middle voice, in which (according to a definition of Benveniste) the subject ‘effects an action only in affecting itself (il effectue en s’affectant)’ (UB 28). With this definition in mind, we could say that Agamben effects a text (he writes) only to the extent that he is also affected by another text (he reads). This is why Agamben’s position as a reader proves particularly important to any assessment of his work, quite aside from the problem of influence or intellectual genealogy. For this same reason, however, assessing Agamben’s relation to Antonio Negri – a figure with whom, by most measures, he is at odds – poses an unexpected challenge: how can Agamben’s thought be a use of Negri? Answering this question means not only assessing the critical distance between the two thinkers, but also taking this distance as a measure, in the Spinozan sense, of mutual affection.

Light and Sensitivity: Love in the Time of the Daguerreotype

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Czeczot
Keyword(s):  
Male Gaze ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Sensitive Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Passive Object

The article deals with the love of Zygmunt Krasiński to Delfina Potocka. The point of departure is the poet's definition of love as looking and reads Krasiński's relationship with his beloved in the context of two phenomena that fascinated him at the time: daguerreotype and magnetism. The invention of the daguerreotype in which the history of photography and spiritism comes together becomes a pretext for the formulation of a new concept of love and the loving subject. In the era of painting the woman was treated as a passive object of the male gaze; photography reverses this scheme of power. Love ceases to be a static relationship of the subject in love and the passive object – the beloved. The philosophy of developing photographs (and invoking phantoms) allows Krasiński - the writing subject to become like a light-sensitive material that reveals the image of the beloved.

Menelusuri Bentang Alam Dalam Karya Sastra Yang Bertema Lingkungan Alam

Jurnal KATA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Nanny Sri Lestari
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Space Communications ◽  
Story Structure ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Media Space ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject

<p>Sebuah peristiwa, dalam kehidupan manusia, dapat menjadi inspirasi bagi penulisan sebuah cerita. Pengarang, sebagai bagian dari masyarakatnya, mengangkat relung-relung kehidupan manusia, ke dalam sebuah cerita. Namun harus dipahami, bahwa pengalaman pengarang dalam kehidupannya sehari-hari, juga mempengaruhi subjek yang ditulisnya. Saat ini tidak dapat dipungkiri lagi, bahwa teknologi komunikasi yang sangat canggih, telah mempengaruhi perkembangan karya sastra. Media penulisan karya sastra, tidak lagi melalui media cetak seperti kertas tetapi sudah melalui peralatan modern yang sesuai jamannya. Namun demikian ragam karya sastra prosa, seperti cerita pendek, justru mampu mengisi ruang media kommunikasi tersebut. Dua orang pengarang, yang menulis cerita pendek di media masa, berusaha mengangkat isu tentang lingkungan. Isu yang diangkat, lebih menekankan kepada masalah lingkungan alam dengan mengangkat isu tentang pohon sebagai bagian dari kehidupan manusia. Tujuan penelitian ini, untuk menelusuri struktur cerita pendek yang mengangkat isu lingkungan dalam jalinan ceritanya. Untuk memenuhi tujuan penelitian, langkah awal dari penelitian ini, adalah melakukan pendekatan struktur cerita, yang kemudian dikaitkan dengan pencarian makna cerita tersebut. Sering sekali di balik sebuah cerita ada pesan yang ingin disampaikan kepada masyarakat pembacanya. Bentuk pesan tersebut tersirat, dalam jalinan struktur cerita pendek tersebut. Pesan yang disampaikan, dalam kedua cerita pendek tersebut,  adalah pesan tentang lingkungan alam, yang  saat ini tidak pernah diperhatikan oleh masyarakat. Dengan alasan, kebutuhan ekonomi yang sangat dominan.</p><p><em>An event, in human life, can be an inspiration for writing a story. The author, as a part of his society, lifts the niches of human life, into a story. But it must be understood, that the author's experience in everyday life, also affects the subject he wrote.</em><em> </em><em>Today it is undeniable, that highly sophisticated communication technology, has influenced the development of literary works. Media writing literature, no longer through print media such as paper but have been through modern equipment that fit his era.</em><em> </em><em>However, the variety of prose literary works, such as short stories, is able to fill the media space communications. Two authors, who write short stories in the mass media, try to raise issues about the environment. Issues raised, more emphasis on the issue of the natural environment by raising the issue, about the tree as part of human life. The purpose of this research, is to trace the structure of short stories, which raised environmental issues in the composition of the story. To fulfill the purpose of research, the first step of this research, is to approach the structure of the story, which is then linked with the search for the meaning of the story. Very often, behind a story, there is a message to be conveyed to the readers. The form of the message is implied, in the composition of the short story structure. The message conveyed, in both short stories, is a message about the natural environment, which today is never noticed by society. The message conveyed, in both short stories, is a message about the natural environment, which today is never noticed by society.</em></p>

Rhythm

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lexi Eikelboom
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Philosopher ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Theoretical Category

This book argues that, as a pervasive dimension of human existence with theological implications, rhythm ought to be considered a category of theological significance. Philosophers and theologians have drawn on rhythm—patterned movements of repetition and variation—to describe reality, however, the ways in which rhythm is used and understood differ based on a variety of metaphysical commitments with varying theological implications. This book brings those implications into the open, using resources from phenomenology, prosody, and the social sciences to analyse and evaluate uses of rhythm in metaphysical and theological accounts of reality. The analysis relies on a distinction from prosody between a synchronic approach to rhythm—observing the whole at once and considering how various dimensions of a rhythm hold together harmoniously—and a diachronic approach—focusing on the ways in which time unfolds as the subject experiences it. The text engages with the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara alongside thinkers as diverse as Augustine and the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and proposes an approach to rhythm that serves the concerns of theological conversation. It demonstrates the difference that including rhythm in theological conversation makes to how we think about questions such as “what is creation?” and “what is the nature of the God–creature relationship?” from the perspective of rhythm. As a theoretical category, capable of expressing metaphysical commitments, yet shaped by the cultural rhythms in which those expressing such commitments are embedded, rhythm is particularly significant for theology as a phenomenon through which culture and embodied experience influence doctrine.

scholarly journals Indigenous Water Rights in Comparative Law

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-402
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Macpherson
Keyword(s):  
Human Population ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Water Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
Poor Management

At the end of the 2015 Academy Award-winning film The Big Short, which explores the origins of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a caption notes that the Wall Street investor protagonist of the film who predicted the collapse of the United States (US) housing market would now be ‘focused on one commodity: water’. Water is sometimes described in popular culture as ‘the new oil’ or ‘more valuable than gold’. It is predicted to be the subject of increasing uncertainty, competition, conflict, and even war, as increasing demand from a growing human population and development meets reduced supply as a result of poor management, overuse, and climate change.

scholarly journals Sobre a produção de subjetividade na atual sociedade do espetáculo

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Augusto Peixoto Junior
Keyword(s):  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Antonio Negri

O presente artigo tem como objetivo retratar a atualidade do conceito de sociedade do espetáculo tal como formulado por Guy Debord, buscando avaliar algumas de suas repercussões junto ao pensamento filosófico- político contemporâneo. Neste sentido, consideramos inicialmente a concepção de sociedade de controle tal como proposta por GUIes Deleuze, para em seguida investigarmos suas conexões com as concepções de Império e Multidão tal como propostos por Antonio Negri e Michael Hardt. Por último, discutimos os pontos de vista de Giorgio Agamben sobre o espetáculo contemporâneo e suas repercussões no que diz respeito à singularidade dos processos de subjetivação. Com esse percurso nos propomos também a avaliar as possibilidades de resistência aos usos da mídia por parte do poder dominante.

scholarly journals OSIP DYMOV AND CHARLES BOVARY (THE INTERTEXTUAL STRUCTURE OF CHEKHOV’S SHORT STORY THE FIDGET)

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 187-205
Author(s):  
Sergey A. Kibalnik
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Value Orientation ◽  
Medical Community ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Anna Karenina ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Medical Scientist ◽  
French Novel ◽  
The Subject

A. P. Chekhov's short story The Fidget (1892) is an abridged hypertext of G. Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary (1856). The article undertakes a detailed comparison of the characters who occupy a similar place in the narrative and figurative system of these two works: Osip Dymov and Charles Bovary. Both of them are doctors, but Chekhov's character seems to realize the untapped potential that was laid down in the character penned by Flaubert. He is no longer a failed doctor, but a talented one, with all the qualities required to become an excellent medical scientist. Thus, Chekhov does not merely stand up for the medical community, which he is no stranger to. Thanks to this, the story of the Russian writer transforms into a polemical interpretation of the classic French novel. In Flaubert's Emma's imaginary search for the meaning of life, which explains her two adulteries in Madame Bovary, Chekhov seems rather inclined to see the selfishness and lack of responsibility that destroy her family and lead to her own death. It is not by chance that Dymov, rather than Olga Ivanovna dies as a result of her own similar behavior in Chekhov’s short story. At the same time, Chekhov's text is also a polemical interpretation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873–1877), which was created as an explicit hypertext of Flaubert's novel. In the short story, Chekhov's critical reinterpretation of these two works is clearly based on a kind of “folk” morality of the Ant from the canonical Krylov fable The Dragonfly and the Ant (1808), which is clearly referenced in the title and text of the story. The intertextual structure of Chekhov's story is examined in the article primarily as a system of its pretexts, some of which relate to it in unison, and others-dissonantly. At the same time, the former are the object of polemical interpretation, while the latter are the subject of stylization and value orientation.

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