scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 2-4
Author(s):  
Ragnild Lome ◽  
Johan Fredrikzon ◽  
Jakob Lien ◽  
Solveig Daugaard ◽  
Per Israelson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Ex Nihilo ◽  
Finnegan's Wake ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

It started with curiosity: The name of the French philosopher seemed to pop up here and there, while we were working on dissertations and postdoc-projects. Not just, as we already knew, in the works of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler and German media historians like Bernhard Siegert and Erich Hörl, but also in books and articles by John Durham Peters, Elisabeth Grosz and Yuk Hui. Simondon seemed to be relevant when discussing the question of technology in the Anthropocene, digging into neo-cybernetic trends within critical theory, understanding New Materialism and challenging AI-philosophy. What was it about this French philosopher that could inspire so many different thinkers and fields of thoughts? We soon realized that we did not know very many people who had worked with the ideas of Simondon, and thus, set forth to produce some texts on him. With this issue, we do not intend to give a comprehensive introduction to Simondon’s philosophy. What we hope to do, is to offer a handful of reflections upon how to use Simondon today. We do this by publishing an article on the politics of problems in the thinking of Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, written by Stefano Daechsel and a three-part interview on Simondon’s oeuvre with Yale-professors Gary Tomlinson, John Durham Peters and Paul North, conducted by Johan Fredrikzon. In addition, we have pieced together a few editorial texts: An overview of interesting articles and books on Simondon that we came across as we edited this volume, and a brief vocabulary of Simondonian thought. The article and interview provide several answers to the question why Simondon is a relevant thinker today. Gary Tomlinson argues that Simondon offers key insights to evolutionary studies: He is able to bridge the gap between cultural and evolutionary biology. This is due to the Simondonian understanding of culture, Tomlinson argues, as something that arises in evolution and also shapes it. ”We were toolmakers before we were human”, as Tomlinson writes in the article ”Semiotic Epicycles and Emergent Thresholds in Human Evolution” (Glass-bead.org, 2017), which he quotes in the interview. Furthermore, Simondon flirts with what John Durham Peters calls neo-Thomism, a view of the history of technology that is not transcendental, nor teleologically determined or based on an idea of progress, but that is nevertheless intelligible. As John Durham Peters says in his interview: ”Thomism gives you a potential of the world as an intelligible totality, much like James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake: a vision of the world as a knowable whole.” Simondon’s philosophy according to Durham Peters is ”Aristotelian in the sense that nature has a structure which in some ways corresponds to the structure of understanding (…), the processes by which nature works and the processes by which technology works are analogous”. Most importantly, Simondon identifies possible strategies for resistance. Studying technology is necessary for us to act as political individuals, Stefano Daechsel argues in his article on Simondon and Deleuze. ”[T]here is an urgency to Simondon’s call for a technical culture that would foster a ‘genuine awareness of technical realities (…)’, such an awareness of technology ‘possesses political and social value’.” We need to delve into the technical realities, not in order to liberate ourselves from technology, but in order to modify and gain some kind of agency as technological beings. With reference to Robert de Niro’s character in Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil (1985), Paul North also reflects upon the agency of the individual through the figure of the tinkerer: ”The kind of freedom where you can do anything, like ex nihilo creation. Simondon wants nothing to do with that. It is the middle person, the one who can take an invention and actually make it into a form of life, bring it in line with the milieu and allow each to change the other, that is interesting for Simondon.” Toward the end of the interview, North claims philosophy of technology today is looking for new resources in order to comprehend the world we live in. Mazzilli-Daechsel begins his article by stating that we need a way out of our politics of defeatism today. Simondon is a useful source to go to, in both regards. We hope this volume demonstrates that. In addition to the section on Simondon, this issue of Sensorium Journal features two reviews, on the recent complete transcript of the Macy Conferences edited by Claus Pias and two books in the series “Understanding Media Ecology”. We hope you enjoy your reading!

Deleuze and Italian Thought

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 495-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felice Cimatti
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Giacomo Leopardi ◽  
The One

The tradition of Italian Thought – not the political one but the poetic and naturalistic one – finds in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze a way to enter into the new century, the century of immanence and animality. In fact, Deleuze himself remained outside the main philosophical traditions of his own time (structuralism and phenomenology). The tradition to which Deleuze refers is the one that begins with Spinoza and ends with Nietzsche. It is an ontological tradition, which deals mainly with life and the world rather than with the human subject and knowledge. Finally, the text sketches a possible dialogue between Deleuze and the poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, one of the most important (and still unknown) figures of Italian Thought.

Sacrifice in Jewish Tradition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Weddle
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Redemptive Suffering ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Tikkun Olam ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Temple

After Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70CE, Jewish tradition reimagined animal sacrifices as devotional acts, such as prayer, fasting, and study of Torah, as well as giving up individual desires to fulfil God’s will. Rabbis interpreted the story of Abraham’s binding Isaac for sacrifice (the Akedah) as the model of absolute obedience to divine commands (mitzvoth) and as the basis for the election of the Jewish people to bear witness to the one God. Their commentary, however, included the horrified reaction of Sarah’s scream to the news of Abraham’s act, ending in her death, indicating dissent from sacrifice as religious ideal. Rabbinic tradition transferred the site of sacrifice from temple to synagogue in rituals of High Holy Days, to the family table in Passover and Sabbath rituals, and to the individual will in submission to Torah. In the mystical teaching of Kabbalah, God sacrifices to create the world and Jews are called to sacrifice to redeem the world (tikkun olam). Such vocation of redemptive suffering was called into question by the Holocaust, and some contemporary Israeli poets refer to the Akedah in expressing misgivings about calls to sacrifice in defense of Israel.

The Technocene or Technology as (Neo)Environment

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agostino Cera ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Nominative Case ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
Conditio Humana ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract: While putting forward the proposal of a “philosophy of technology in the nominative case,” grounded on the concept of Neoenvironmentality, this paper intends to argue that the best definition of our current age is not “Anthropocene.” Rather, it is “Technocene,” since technology represents here and now the real “subject of history” and of (a de-natured) nature, i.e. the (neo)environment where man has to live.This proposal culminates in a new definition of man’s humanity and of technology. Switching from natura hominis to conditio humana, the peculiarity of man can be defined on the basis of an anthropic perimeter, the core of which consists of man’s worldhood: man is that being that has a world (Welt), while animal has a mere environment (Umwelt). Both man’s worldhood and animal’s environmentality are derived from a pathic premise, namely the fundamental moods (Grundstimmungen) that refer them to their respective findingness (Befindlichkeit).From this anthropological premise, technology emerges as the oikos of contemporary humanity. Technology becomes the current form of the world – and so gives birth to a Technocene – insofar as it introduces in any human context its ratio operandi and so assimilates man to an animal condition, i.e. an environmental one. Technocene corresponds on the one side to the emergence of technology as (Neo)environment and on the other to the feralization of man. The spirit of Technocene turns out to be the complete redefinition of the anthropic perimeter.While providing a non-ideological characterization of the current age, this paper proposes the strategy of an ‘anthropological conservatism,’ that is to say a pathic desertion understood as a possible (pre)condition for the beginning of an authentic Anthropocene, i.e. the age of an-at-last-entirely-human-man.

Strolling in Tel Aviv: Setting Up and Breaking Down Boundaries in S. Yizhar'sPreliminaries(Mikdamot)

AJS Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88
Author(s):  
Dvir Tzur
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

The article discusses the image of Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city, as it is described in the novelPreliminariesby S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky), one of Israel's best-known authors. In this novel, which engages with the question of home and borders, borders function as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they define home and create a circumscribed place for the protagonist and his family. On the other hand, the novel dwells on the urge to cross borders and shatter the distinction between home and the world. In this regard, Tel Aviv is sometimes described as a pleasant, “normal” city, yet at other times it is written as a perilous place—since it divides between Jews and Arabs. Tel Aviv is also the place where one can imagine a great future or see a concealed history. It is a total urban experience, encapsulating the individual.

scholarly journals LEXIS AND PHRASEOLOGY, VERBALIZING CONCEPTS OF WOMAN AND GIRL IN A.B. KAITUKOV’S WORKS

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Р.Г. ЦОПАНОВА
Keyword(s):  
Mental Content ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
The Other ◽  
Contextual Analysis ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
First Time

Целью данного исследования является определение ментального содержания лексики и фразеологии, вербализующей концепты женщина (сылгоймаг) и девушка (чызг) в произведениях осетинского писателя А.Б. Кайтукова. Научная новизна связана с тем, что впервые на языковом материале произведений А. Кайтукова выявлено ментальное содержание указанных концептов. Актуальность данного исследования в том, что, благодаря описанию языкового содержания концептов женщина (сылгоймаг) и девушка (чызг), читатель, с одной стороны, вводится в мир национальной лингвокультуры, содержащей информацию о менталитете народа, с другой стороны – дается характеристика индивидуальных особенностей языка писателя. В работе использованы следующие методы исследования: семантико-стилистический, методы концептуального и контекстуального анализа языковых единиц в художественном тексте. Поставлены следующие задачи: определить номинативную плотность концептов женщина и девушка; раскрыть ментальное содержание лексики и фразеологии, вербализующей названные концепты; указать когнитивные признаки исследуемых концептов; охарактеризовать лексику и фразеологию, объективирующие названные концепты как средство создания идиостиля писателя. В результате работы дана характеристика концептов женщина и девушка в произведениях А. Кайтукова в аспекте лингвокультуры и в рамках идиостиля писателя. The purpose of this study is to determine the mental contents of the vocabulary and phraseology that verbalize the concepts of woman (sylgoymag) and girl (chyzg) in the works of the Ossetian writer A. B. Kaitukov. The scientific novelty is connected with the fact that for the first time the mental content of these concepts will be revealed on the language material of A. Kaitukov's works. The relevance of this study is that due to the description of the linguistic content of the concepts woman (sylgoimag) and girl (chyzg), the reader, on the one hand, is introduced into the world of national linguoculture, containing information about the mentality of the people, on the other hand, a characteristic of the individual features of the writer’s language is given. The following research methods were used in the work: semantic and stylistic, methods of conceptual and contextual analysis of linguistic units in a literary text. The following tasks were set: to determine the nominative density of the concepts woman and girl; to reveal the mental content of lexis and phraseology, verbalizing the named concepts; indicate the cognitive features of the studied concepts; to characterize the vocabulary and phraseology that objectify the named concepts as a means of creating the idiostyle of the writer. As a result of the work, a description of the concepts of a woman and a girl in the works of A. Kaitukov is given in the aspect of linguoculture and within the framework of the writer's idiostyle.

scholarly journals Pyotr Chardynin’s The Idiot as a Phenomenon of Creative Reinterpretation of Dostoevsky’s Novel

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 34-42
Author(s):  
Anastasia Ryabokon’
Keyword(s):  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Main Protagonist

The essay explores the artistic and expressive features of the world's first film adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, directed in 1910 by Pyotr Chardynin. The author substantiates the degree of influence of one of the most important philosophical concepts of the novel that of a split in the human personality on Russian national consciousness at the beginning of the 20th century. The analysis of the figurative system of the film shows that its semantics and the images of its characters were ahead of its time and, therefore, deserve closer critical attention.In the The Idiot the idea of Dostoevsky about a human beings separateness in the world is revealed in the four main characters Prince Myshkin, Parfyon Rogozhin, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya who are not complete, full-fledged personalities but separate components of a harmonious human personality. These characters, like puzzle pieces, possess mutually complementary qualities. Thus, Prince Myshkin, the bearer of the highest spirituality, is contrasted with the earthly and passionate Rogozhin. And the images of Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya are connected, respectively, with the images of Heavenly Love and Earthly Love. If the characters of the novel could unite with each other in love and harmony, the world would get a complete harmonious person, like the one created by God for the Garden of Eden. However, such a merger seems impossible within the limits of earthly existence. In Dostoevsky's novel the individual parts of the soul could not unite into a harmonious whole. Egoism, passion, pride and imperfection of human nature do allow the protagonists to unite and lead them towards personal disintegration.In Russian national cinema, Dostoevskys idea of human beings separateness undergoes a number of transformations. The changes introduced by Pyotr Chardynin into the film adaptation of the novel mostly relate to the image of the films main protagonist Nastasya Filippovna, whom the filmmaker associates with a dying Russia. Chardynin also transforms other protagonists. Prince Myshkin is the only carrier of the highest spirituality, while Nastasya Filippovna, Aglaya and Rogozhin are earthly and passionate. At the end of the film, Nastasya Filippovnas murderer Rogozhin, dressed in a Russian folk costume, sobs at the bedside of the dead tsarina, while heavenly prince Myshkin who was not accepted by her in her lifetime, comforts the sinner. Chardynins film transforms the idea of a split in the human personality into the idea of the Russian separateness from God, the internal split within the Russian world and, as a consequence, that worlds inevitable death.

scholarly journals Zarathustra’s dance: Nietzsche’s creative aesthetic

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erzsébet Lamár
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
World View ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Ascetic Ideal ◽  
The World ◽  
Metaphysics Of Presence ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
New View

Nietzsche criticized the tradition of Western metaphysics (based on the principle of representation, the duality of subject and object of representation, the metaphysics of presence as Derrida puts it) and its language use. In place of this he presents a world view he calls Dionysian: it is a possibility of cognition in which the individual disappears and the tragic subject is merged with archaic substance in an experience that eliminates the dualism of appearance and reality. Nietzsche claims there is a basic tension between life and cognition in Western metaphysics, but this is a symptom of the ascetic ideal which manifests itself in illness and in wanting nothing. Instead the ascetic ideal a new kind of sensibility is necessary which affirms life and gives rise to a new view of the world and to new values. Deleuze claims Nietzsche’s philosophy has three basic tenets: evaluation, affirmation, and the superman as a new way of life. He adds that “Nietzsche attributes such importance to art because art has already achieved the whole program.” The paper shows that Nietzsche’s aesthetics is a creative aesthetic, a selective ontology based on the principle of double affirmation. The paper argues that Dionysus is the one who returns to Nietzsche eternally, and together with him haunts the idea of creative aesthetics, a key element of the idea of eternal return.

scholarly journals Aggiornamento of anthropology: Bridging the border between nature and culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 731-750
Author(s):  
Natalya N. Rostova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Space Objects ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Form ◽  
Human Death

The article analyzes modern western projects to update anthropology. The projects are united by the idea of the end of human exclusiveness, which is a modern form of the concept of human death. According to idea of the end of human exclusiveness, a person has no ontological privileges in the world, and he must be thought of as a part in the totality of other parts of the whole — nature, space, objects, etc. It is possible to allocate four forms of the realization of this idea: overcoming the oppositions “nature-culture”, “man-animal”, “man-technician”, and “man-objects”. In the article the first form of this idea, projects of anthropology beyond nature and culture, is analyzed. Within the framework of these projects, two tendencies are observed — naturalization of man and anthropomorphization of the world. Both directions are investigated on the example of works, on the one hand, of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, on the other, Philippe Descola and Ernesto B. Viveiros de Castro. Schaeffer’s anthropology becomes anti-anthropology the moment he starts speaking of man in the language of evolutionary biology. Man fits them into an evolutionary process, within which the cause of a person’s actions appears beyond him. The anthropomorphization of the world is based on ethnographic data on the so-called “primitive peoples”. If naturalism concerns the reduction of the anthropological to the biological, then here it is possible to speak of an intellectual forgery. Descola and de Castro identify the ideas of weak philosophy on the bases where the life of the mystery community is constructed. In this case, the mystery is described in social categories, and the exotic content of representations of the studied peoples serves as an argument for the chaotization of our own ideas. The author of the article believes that modern anti-anthropologists are trying to interpret the truly human, contained in mysteries, in terms of the inhuman.

Death and Mastery

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Y. Fong
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Drive Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
The One

In this masterful and enlivening study of the ways in which the concepts of death and mastery have been elaborated in Freudian and post-Freudian social theory, Ben Fong has given us the means to think about human nature and human community now, under conditions of advanced capitalism, without succumbing to the scientism of the new neurobiology or to the social constructivism of recent historicist social and cultural theory. The argument turns on the ambiguity embedded in the notion of mastery: on the one hand, the capacity to engage creatively with the world, to master the tasks of living a historical form of life; on the other, the temptation to enslave, to compel others to exercise this competence in one's place. Fong is able to analyze with remarkable lucidity a complex array of individual and social phenomena by fleshing out the imbrications of these twinned responses to what Freud called the drives' demand for work. Fong makes abundantly clear that drive theory and social theory are strongest when thought together.

To the Prerequisites for the Formation of an Egocentric Picture of the World: at the Intersection of Physics and Metaphysics

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-1) ◽  
pp. 210-232
Author(s):  
Sergey Myakinnikov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Physics ◽  
World Picture ◽  
Scientific Representations ◽  
The World ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
Physical Organization ◽  
Environmental Relations ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Universe

The article considers the most general prerequisites for creating a new model of the ecological picture of the world, which is characterized by the comprehensiveness and completeness of coverage of various aspects of the study of the relationships between man and nature. For its formation, it is proposed to use an ecological version of the worldview-methodological platform, called ‘postholism’ by the author, which is able to coordinate the one, whole, many and singular, unique in (among others) the environmental relations of man, society and nature. This allows us to eliminate the methodological shortcomings of the reduction to the individual (merism), to the whole (holism), to the one (onecentrism) of human worldview orientations in the nature of naturcentrism, anthropo(socio)centrism, technocentrism, theocentrism. Such categories of philosophy as ‘reality’, ‘being’, ‘otherness’, ‘non-existence’, ‘being’, ‘nature’, ‘matter’, ‘physical’, ‘metaphysical’, and ‘spiritual’ were important tools for constructing a picture of the world of ecocentrism. They were refined and correlated with the latest achievements in quantum physics, astrophysics, cosmology, as well as reflexed based on extra-scientific representations of ancient cultures and religions. Physical, as well as metaphysical features of nature and man are briefly discussed. Nature is represented at various levels of physical organization (micro-world, macro-world and mega-world) and outside of physical dimensions. These dimensions presumably contain the ‘metaphysical’ content of nature. In them, the objective ‘spiritual’ of the universe, deified by man, is allowed. This does not exclude the pantheistic presence of metaphysical transcendence, estimated as ‘nonexistence’, ‘nothing’ for the reality of man within nature. Man himself is positioned as one whole of physical and spiritual existence, serving as a semblance of a Single Whole of nature. In conclusion, a list of the main environmental invariants of the world picture is given in comparison with the proposed picture of the world of ecologized postholism − ecocentrism, the advantages of which are emphasized. The Universe and quantum-field reality, along with the Earth, become components of the All-unified Whole authentic home of the ‘ecos’ of man. Further conditions and prospects for the direct development of this model are discussed.

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