Blood and Convulsive Affect: Vectors of the Pulse as Sovereign Operations

2020 ◽  
pp. 166-201
Author(s):  
Sharon Jane Mee

This chapter conceptualises the vectors of the pulse as the quantities of magnitude and direction that communicate. The vector discloses the difficulty in isolating the place of the pulse, which in turn suggests the ‘putting at stake’ of self as a sovereign operation experienced in Georges Bataille’s general economy. This chapter analyses the vector in relation to the form of spectatorship that Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film Possession gives rise to. The film is remarkable for the way it relates the magnitude and directional flow of blood to a frenzy of the body in a kind of convulsive affect. Blood points to the sacrificial expenditure, or dispossession, of the self, which nevertheless produces an intimate communication or communion between characters, film, and spectator.

Divine Bodies ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Candida R. Moss

The resurrection of the body is a key place to think about who we are and which facets of ourselves are integral to ourselves. The introduction to this book places the resurrection of the body within the context of ancient anxieties about the self: What makes us who we are? It also reviews the history of scholarship on this question and traces the way that ideas about resurrection have been divorced from broader thinking about the self.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Victoria Skye

<p>The zombie is a significant cultural figure which is represented and produced as being symptomatic of and relevant to contemporary concerns about death and dehumanization. This thesis will focus on the ways that death and dehumanization are changing and being negotiated within popular cultural representations and discourses regarding zombies, particularly in Frank Darabont’s television series The Walking Dead. The thesis will consider the way in which the figure of the zombie is representative of issues and discourses that are indicative of a problematization of the category of the human, and the notion of the transcendental. This will involve an examination of the changing narratives of the body, with particular regard to consumerism and the insistence of the body as a major site of the truth and value of the self, in contrast to the horrifying bodily form of the zombie. The thesis will also examine the way that dehumanization is problematized in The Walking Dead, where the human/non-human distinction is shown to be increasingly precarious and difficult to sustain. Further, the thesis will examine how the zombie is represented as manifesting the collapse of identity, as agents become alienated from the social discourses, narratives and values which constitute and categorize the subject.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. e021211
Author(s):  
Francielly Zilli ◽  
Stefanie Griebeler Oliveira ◽  
Franciele Roberta Cordeiro ◽  
Juliana Graciela Vestena Zillmer

Introduction: The illness of an oncological disease provides experiences capable of modifying the body and the subjects' ways of life. Objective: To analyze how the knowledge of the self occurs facing the experience of illness by cancer and palliative care. Methods: This is a qualitative case study research based on post-critical theories, specifically in Foucault Studies. The participants were six patients who were experiencing cancer and palliative care, linked to a home hospitalization service. The data were collected from March to June 2018, based on open interviews, participant observation, and speech instigation through the use of occupational therapist therapeutic activities. The analysis occurred based on problematizations. Results: From the statements, different ways of getting sick were identified, from diagnosis to their approach to death, causing changes in the body, way of living, and in the perception of oneself from a life-threatening disease. Conclusion: Finally, we concluded that different ways of experiencing cancer and palliative care provided different modes of subjectivation. The lack of self-recognition was confronted by bodily changes and consequently by limitations, so the way this experience was lived reflected in the way they thought about the end of life.


2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Gurtler, S.J.

AbstractIn examining Ennead VI 4[22], we find Plotinus in conflict with modern, i.e., Cartesian or Kantian, assumptions about the relation of soul and body and the identification of the self with the subject. Curiously, his images and exposition are more in tune with Twentieth Century notions such as wave and field. With these as keys, we are in a position to unlock the subtlety of Plotinus' analysis of the way soul and body are present together, with sensation structured through the body and judgment coming from the soul. The problem of the self concerns not only the unity of the self in terms of body and soul, but also how the self is constituted in relation to other selves, both keeping its individuality and sharing its experiences at the same time.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Victoria Skye

<p>The zombie is a significant cultural figure which is represented and produced as being symptomatic of and relevant to contemporary concerns about death and dehumanization. This thesis will focus on the ways that death and dehumanization are changing and being negotiated within popular cultural representations and discourses regarding zombies, particularly in Frank Darabont’s television series The Walking Dead. The thesis will consider the way in which the figure of the zombie is representative of issues and discourses that are indicative of a problematization of the category of the human, and the notion of the transcendental. This will involve an examination of the changing narratives of the body, with particular regard to consumerism and the insistence of the body as a major site of the truth and value of the self, in contrast to the horrifying bodily form of the zombie. The thesis will also examine the way that dehumanization is problematized in The Walking Dead, where the human/non-human distinction is shown to be increasingly precarious and difficult to sustain. Further, the thesis will examine how the zombie is represented as manifesting the collapse of identity, as agents become alienated from the social discourses, narratives and values which constitute and categorize the subject.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol Varia (Articles) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Lécuyer

International audience The ghunghat is a veiling practice of North India. Its peculiarity holds in the fact that it is not linked to a religion. It reveals the social and family organisation in India, is tightly linked with marriage practices and mirrors the representations of the self and of the body. An anthropological analysis of this practice reveals its multiple dimensions, especially a social, aesthetic and sacred dimension. A comparative study between the way the veil is conceived both in India and in France will allow to rethink the veil beyond the religious and political dimensions in which it is crystalized in the French context. Le ghunghat est un voile du Nord  de  l’Inde. Il a pour particularité d’être non confessionnel. Son lien est étroit avec les systèmes de parenté, d’alliance, d’organisation familiale d’Inde du Nord, et reflète les systèmes de représentations et de constructions du corps. Une analyse anthropologique de ce voile fait ressortir ses dimensions sociales, esthétiques, et son lien au sacré. Le voile en tant qu’objet polysémique doit être repensé selon une perspective comparative qui permet de sortir des cristallisations autour des seules dimensions religieuses et politiques dans lesquelles le voile a été enfermé dans le contexte socio-politique français.


Author(s):  
Susan Leigh Foster
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  

This chapter explores improvisation during the practice of yoga as a way to consider Foucault’s concept of “techniques of the self.” It describes and analyzes the way that the thinking body and the thinking mind can improvise together to construct a corporeality that resists the docilization of the body that is exerted through advertising, fitness, and health regimens. It thereby contributes to the investigation of improvisation and the politics of the quotidian.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Annemie Halsema

In this paper, I argue for a revaluation of Paul Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity in light of what Miriam Kyselo has coined “the body-social problem” in enactivism (Kyselo 2014). It is my contention that while phenomenological perspectives upon the body and the self are considered relevant in enactivism, the hermeneutical, discursive facets are understood as a less essential facet of the self, for instance as the self’s reflexive side, that gives expression to an experiential self (Zahavi 2007: 182-184, 2014: 57-59). Yet, it is in language that the self is addressed by others and that the self reflects upon itself and understands itself. Especially in order to understand aspects of identity which are of importance for the social situation of the self, such as gender, the way we are addressed by others and address ourselves by means of language need to be taken into account.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba

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.


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