scholarly journals The Worldwood of the Cinematic Image

Phainomenon ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
José Manuel Martins
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Essential Condition ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
General Relevance ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Human Flesh ◽  
Textual Support

Abstract A close analysis of the specifically cinematographic procedure in Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Dream’ Crows reveals it as an articulated and insightful philosophical statement, endowed with general relevance conceming ‘natural’ perception, phenomenological Erlebnis, mechanical image and aesthetic rapture. The antagonism between the Benjarninian lineage of a mechanical irreducibility of the cinematic image to anthropocentric categories, and the Cartesian tradition of a film-philosophy still relying on the equally irreducible structure of the intentional act, be it the one of a deeply embodied and enworlded counsciousness, in accounting for the essential structure of film and spectator (and their relation), i.e., the antagonism between the decentering primacy of the image and the self-centered primacy of perception, cannot be settled through a simple Phenomenological shift from occularcentric, intentional counsciousness to its embodyment ‘ in-the-world’ as yet another carrier of intentionality. Still it remains to be explained what is it in the mechanical image that is able to so deeply affect the human flesh, and conversely, to what features in the human bodily experience is its mechanical other, the fascinating image, so successfuly adressing? It should be expected from the anti-Cartesianism of both the early and the late Merleau- Ponty the textual support for an approach to the essential condition of passivity in movie watching, that would be convergent with Benjamin. The Chapter ‘Le sentir’, in Phénoménologie de la perception, will offer us the proper guide to elucidate what we are already perceiving and conceiving in Kurosawa’s film, where the ex-static phenomenological body of the aesthetical contemplator ‘ enters the frame’ like the Benjaminian surgeon enters the body and like the painter - and always already like our deepest levei of ‘sensing’, previously to any act of cousciousness - ‘just looses himself in the scene before him’. The Polichinello secret of cinema watching is nonetheless too evident to be seen, and that is where Phenomenological description and reduction are still required.

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Body Subject

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

scholarly journals Próbowanie świata i siebie – Montaigne i Gombrowicz

Wielogłos ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 85-122
Author(s):  
Marian Bielecki
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World

[Rehearsing the World and the Self – Montaigne and Gombrowicz] The article discusses intertextual, intellectual and poetological relations between Michel de Montaigne’s Essais and Witold Gombrowicz’s autobiographical project. The author shows that the Polish writer was inspired by the French classic’s open poetics and his concept of processual and interactional subject. Gombrowicz was also interested in more specific matters present in Montaigne’s work: philosophical praise of the body, criticism of scholasticism, opposition of the private to the public.

Maurice

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-153
Author(s):  
Finn Fordham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Homosexual Orientation ◽  
The World ◽  
Resonant Term ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Edward Carpenter

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.

The Virtual Body Is Real!

2016 ◽  
pp. 556-572
Author(s):  
Mirella Misi ◽  
Ludmila Pimental
Keyword(s):  
Computer Software ◽  
Body Schema ◽  
The Body ◽  
Motion Controller ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Technological Artifacts ◽  
The World ◽  
Interactive User ◽  
Virtual Body

Based on the studies of Don Ihde on the “embodiment relations” between the body and technological artifacts, Gretchen Schiller’s concept of “kinesfield,” and revisiting Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) concepts of “body schema” and “flesh of the world,” this chapter examines the forms of relation that are established in the bodily experience of mediadance, promoting new sensorial and perceptive experiences for dancers and for the public/participant/user, such as innovative forms of body re-presentations and new ways for the public to experience dance. Examples include intermedia performances that allow the performer to make changes to sound and light on the stage or in videos that, through cameras and software, translates movements into sound, light, or graphical patterns. Interactive user-computer software, like Wii and the Sony motion controller, allow the capture (by video) of the movement of the user transmitting it to a virtual body and environment. And dance telematics creates virtual encounters between remote dancers.

Naturalistic and Phenomenological Theories of Health: Distinctions and Connections

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 221-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrik Svenaeus
Keyword(s):  
Biological Function ◽  
Central Element ◽  
The Body ◽  
Basic Difference ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Health And Illness ◽  
The One ◽  
Taking Action ◽  
Health Theory

AbstractIn this paper I present and compare the ideas behind naturalistic theories of health on the one hand and phenomenological theories of health on the other. The basic difference between the two sets of theories is no doubt that whereas naturalistic theories claim to rest on value neutral concepts, such as normal biological function, the phenomenological suggestions for theories of health take their starting point in what is often named intentionality: meaningful stances taken by the embodied person in experiencing and understanding her situation and taking action in the world.Although naturalism and phenomenology are fundamentally different in their approach to health, they are not necessarily opposed when it comes to understanding the predicament of ill persons. The starting point of medical investigations is what the patient feels and says about her illness and the phenomenological investigation should include the way diagnoses of different diseases are interpreted by the person experiencing the diseases as an embodied being. Furthermore, the two theories display similarities in their emphasis of embodiment as the central element of health theory and in their stress on the alien nature of the body displayed in illness. Theories of biology and phenomenology are, indeed, compatible and in many cases also mutually supportive in the realm of health and illness.

scholarly journals Modernitetens modsigelser. Konfigurationskonflikter og samfundstænkning i Grundtvigs »Om Mennesket i Verden«

1998 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
Henning Eichberg
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

Contradictions of Modernity. Conflicting Configurations and Societal Thinking in Grundtvig's »The Human Being in the World«A Worm - a God. About the Human Being in the World. Ove Korsgaard (ed.). With contributions of Niels Buur Hansen, Hans Hauge, Bosse Bergstedt, Uffe Jonas and Knud Bjarne Gjesing. Odense Universitetsforlag 1997.By Henning EichbergIn 1817, Grundtvig wrote »Om Mennesket i Verden« which can be regarded as a key to the understanding of his philosophy and psychology, but which is difficult to place in relation to his later folkelig, societal engagement. A recent reedition of this text together with some actual comments by Grundtvig researchers is an occasion to quest deeper about this relation.However, it is not enough to ask - as Grundtvig research has done for a long time - what Grundtvig wanted to say, but his text can be regarded as a document of how modem orientation in the world is characterized by conflicting linguistic and metaphorical patterns, which sometimes may tell another story than intended.On the one hand, Grundtvig's text speaks of a lot of dualistic contradictions such as life vs. death, light vs. darkness, truth vs. lie, God vs. devil, human fall vs. resurrection, body vs. spirit, nature vs. history and time vs. eternity. In contrast to the author's intention to produce clarity and lucidity - whether in the spirit of Christianity or of modem rationality - the binary constructions give rather a confusing picture of systematical disorder where polarity and polemics are mixed, antagonism and gradual order, dichotomy and exclusive either-or, paradoxes and dialectical contradictions. On the other hand,Grundtvig tries again and again to build up three-pole imaginations as for instance the threefold human relation to time, space and truth and the three ages of spiritual seeing, feeling and conceptualization resp. of mythology (childhood), theology (youth) and history (adult age). The main history, Grundtvig wants to tell in his text, is built up around the trialectic relation of the human being to the body, to the spirit and to itself, to the living soul.The most difficult to understand in this relation seems to be what Grundtvig calls the spirit, Aanden. Grundtvig describes it as Aandigt Samfund mellem Menneske og Sandhed, »the spiritual community between the human being and the truth«, and this may direct our attention towards samfund, meaning at the same time association, togetherness and society. Aanden is described by threefold effects - will, conscience and faith, all of them describing social relations between human beings resp. their psychological correlate. The same social undertone is true when Grundtvig characterizes three Aande-Livets Spor (»traces of spiritual life«): the word, the history and love. If »the spirit« represents what is larger or »higher« than the single human being and what cannot be touched by his or her hand, then this definition fits exactly to society or the sociality of the human being. Social life - whether understood as culture, social identity or folk (people) - is not only a quantitative sum of human individuals, but represents another quality of natural order. Thus it has its logic that Grundtvig places the human being in between the realms of minerals, plant and animal life on the one hand and the »higher« order on the other, which can be understood as the social existence.In this respect, the societal dimension is not at all absent in his philosophy of 1817. However, it is not enough to state the implicite presence of sociality as such in the earlier Grundtvigian thinking before his folkelig break-through. What was the sociality, more concretely, which Grundtvig experienced during the early modernity? In general, highly dichotomous concepts are dominating the modem discourse as capitalism vs. feudalism, materialism vs. idealism, modernity vs. premodemity, democracy vs. absolutism or revolution vs. restoration; Grundtvig was always difficult to place into these patterns. Again, it might be helpful to try a trialectical approach, transcending the dualism of state and market by civil society as a third field of social action. Indeed, it was civil society with its farmers' anarchist undertones which became the contents of Grundtvig's later folk engagement.

scholarly journals Embodiment as First Affordance: Tinkering, Tuning, Tracking

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Spatz
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Primary Site ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
Realist Ontology ◽  
Privileged Site ◽  
Primary Medium

This article begins from a discussion of philosophical realism and the turn towards close analysis of skilled material practices that characterizes many recent critical interventions. I examine the roots of this turn and suggest that skilled practice is a privileged site for the enactment and testing of realist ontologies. However, I question the extent to which realist thinkers have emphasized practices in which materials outside the human body are central over those in which embodiment itself is the primary medium of practice. Thinkers of realist ontology, I argue, have neglected embodiment as the primary site of an engagement with the fine-grained detail of the world. In contrast, I propose that realist ontologies developed through reference to technological engagements not only apply equally well to embodied practices but actually find their original and primary manifestation there. The body itself is the ‘first affordance’ and the site at which questions of realism and objectivity are first encountered and resolved in practice. I illustrate this point by considering how three modes of material engagement — tinkering, tuning, and tracking — manifest in embodied practices ranging from dance and sport to those of everyday life. I conclude by emphasizing the continuing political importance of embodiment as first affordance and its crucial place as a ‘fragile junction’ between ecology and technology.

scholarly journals Embodying Asceticism: Masculinity, Manliness, and the Male Body in Muḥammad al-ʿArabī al-Darqāwī’s Majmūʿ Rasā⁠ʾil

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 128-154
Author(s):  
Brittany Landorf
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Material World ◽  
Hierarchical Relationship ◽  
The World ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
Corporeal Body

Abstract This study examines the logics of masculinity, manliness, and the corporeal male body in shaykh Muḥammad al-ʿArabī ibn Aḥmad al-Darqāwī al-Ḥasanī’s (d. 1239/1823) Majmūʿ Rasā⁠ʾil (“Collection of Epistles”). It argues that al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil constructed a prescriptive pious masculinity defined by mastery of the body and self, practical acts of ascetic devotion and humility, the hierarchical relationship between a Sufi master and his disciples, and the denigration of normative masculine virtues and behaviours. While al-Darqāwī instructed his followers to practice tajrīd, or divestment from the material world, and to eschew the habits of the men of murūʾa, this act did not seek to completely transcend the masculine body. Rather, his understanding of prescriptive pious masculinity was centred in embodied ascetic acts which created an analogous relationship between the physical act of purifying the corporeal body with the disciplining of the self (nafs). Mastering the body and the self, al-Darqāwī wrote, would lead to both growing near to God as well as, importantly, his Sufi followers’ mastery over other men, their wives and children, and even the natural environment. Al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil highlight the tension between Sufism as a spiritual and mystical path that seems to transcend gender hierarchies with its imbrication in epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies shaped by a masculine way of being in the world.

scholarly journals MF Husain’s Hindi Autobiography Em. Ef. Husain kī kahānī apnī zubānī

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Consolaro
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Cultural Artefact ◽  
The World ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Subject

Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the body as a socio-cultural artefact and the exterior of the subject bodies as psychically constructed, and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic identities, in this article I introduce world-renowned Indian painter MF Husain’s verbal and visual autobiography Em. Ef. Husen kī kahānī apnī zubānī as a series of sketches of a performative self, surfing the world in space and time. Bodies and spaces are envisioned as “assemblages or collections of parts” in constant movement, crossing borders and creating relationships with other selves and other spaces. People and places become a catalyst for manifestations of the self in art – MF Husain being foremost a painter – and eventually also in literature. I look for strategies that MF Husain uses in order to construct or deconstruct the self through crossings and linkages. I try to investigate how the self is performed inside and outside private and public spaces, how the complex (sometimes even contradictory) relationship between self and community is portrayed, and how this autobiography does articulate notions of (imagined) community/ies, nationalism, transnational subjectivity, nostalgia.

Johannine Arch-Intelligibility

2019 ◽  
pp. 273-305
Author(s):  
John Behr
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Of John ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
The World ◽  
Michel Henry

Chapter Six opens up Part Three of this work, devoted to the reading of the Gospel of John given by the French Phenomenologist Michel Henry. This chapter begins by exploring the phenomenology of life developed by Henry, not that which appears in the world, but that which is prior to the world and only known in the immediacy of its pathos, the self-affectivity of the experience of living. The condition of our self as living ones is Christ himself, the First Living One, in whom the life that is the Father is engendered, so that, as Henry quotes Eckhart, ‘God engenders me as himself’. Identity in pathos (suffering is the experience of suffering, it doesn’t appear elsewhere by another means) grants truth, unlike the horizon of the world, in which something only appears as other than itself, torn from its own identity, rendered dead (for life, Henry reminds us, does not appear in the world). According to Henry’s analysis, this pathos of life constitutes the flesh, as phenomenologically distinct than the body; the latter is how we appear, externalized, in the world, the former is how we experience ourselves in the self-affectivity of the pathos of life. This then enables Henry to provide a more sophisticated understanding of Incarnation, not as the appearing of the Word of God within the world, but rather as the Word of God giving us access to life by sharing in his own flesh and his own pathos. The chapter finishes by considering how Henry reads Scripture, especially John, not against the horizon of the world and its history, but as an invitation to life with its own intelligibilty or ‘arch-intelligibility’.

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