scholarly journals Psychoanalysis, science fiction and cyborgianism

Literator ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Sey
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Psychoanalytic Thought ◽  
Do So

Central to this paper is the understanding that much of crucial importance to psychoanalytic thought rests on a conception of the subject as inseparable from a history of the body a history in turn inseparable from the central tenets of Oedipus, in its turn a concept which originates in and is illustrated by literature. The paper will suggest that when recent cultural theorists, drawing on the implications of cybernetics and infoculture theory, contest the psychoanalytic notion of the subject, it is not surprising that they do so in terms of the possibility of an alternative body - a hybrid form of subjectivity between human and machine. Nor, the paper suggests, is it surprising that it should be science fiction, a genre with a long-standing concern with the possibility of such an amalgam, which supplies the key evidence for a post-oedipal theory of this "cyborg" subject. The paper concludes by speculating on the productivity of the conjunction between literature and thinking about the body, inasmuch as this conjunction attempts to establish a new anthropology of the self.

MARKETS AND CULTURES: MEDICAL SPECIFICS AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF THE BODY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 123-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Body Perceptions ◽  
Do So

ABSTRACTThe history of the body is of course contested territory. Postmodern interpretations in particular have moved it from a history of scientific knowledge of its structure and function toward histories of the various meanings, identities and experiences constructed about it. Underlying such interpretations have been large and important claims about the unfortunate consequences of the rise of a political economy associated with capitalism and medicalisation. In contradistinction, this paper offers a view of that historical process in a manner in keeping with materialism rather than in opposition to it. To do so, it examines a general change in body perceptions common to most of the literature: a shift from the body as a highly individualistic and variable subject to a more universal object, so that alterations in one person's body could be understood to represent how alterations in other human bodies occurred. It then suggests that one of the chief causes of that change was the growing vigour of the market for remedies that could be given to anyone, without discrimination according to temperament, gender, ethnicity, social status or other variables in the belief that they would cure quietly and effectively. One of the most visible remedies of this kind was a ‘specific’, the Peruvian, or Jesuits’ bark. While views about specific drugs were contested, the development of a market for medicinals that worked universally helped to promote the view that human bodies are physiologically alike.

Exploring the boundaries of rhetoric

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 793-806 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduard Bonet
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Content Type ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Development ◽  
The Subject

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how the boundaries of rhetoric have excluded important theoretical and practical subjects and how these subjects are recuperated and extended since the twentieth century. Its purpose is to foster the awareness on emerging new trends of rhetoric. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is based on an interpretation of the history of rhetoric and on the construction of a conceptual framework of the rhetoric of judgment, which is introduced in this paper. Findings – On the subject of the extension of rhetoric from public speeches to any kinds of persuasive situations, the paper emphasizes some stimulating relationships between the theory of communication and rhetoric. On the exclusion and recuperation of the subject of rhetorical arguments, it presents the changing relationships between rhetoric and dialectics and emphasizes the role of rhetoric in scientific research. On the introduction of rhetoric of judgment and meanings it creates a conceptual framework based on a re-examination of the concept of judgment and the phenomenological foundations of the interpretative methods of social sciences by Alfred Schutz, relating them to symbolic interactionism and theories of the self. Originality/value – The study on the changing boundaries of rhetoric and the introduction of the rhetoric of judgment offers a new view on the present theoretical and practical development of rhetoric, which opens new subjects of research and new fields of applications.

scholarly journals From the Internet Text: Gender, Embodiment and Ontology

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Sondheim
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Communication ◽  
Simultaneous Presence ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Extended Analysis ◽  
Entire History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Virtual Subject

The Internet Text is an extended analysis of the environment of Internet communication, an extended meditation on the psychology and philosophy of Net exchange. As such, it is concerned primarily with virtual or electronic subjectivity – the simultaneous presence and absence of the user, the sorts of libidinal projections that result, the nature of flamewars, and the ontological or epistemological issues that underlie these processes. Internet Text begins with a brief, almost corrosive, account of the subject – an account based on the concepts of Address, Protocol, and Recognition. This section “reduces” virtual subjectivity to packets of information, Internet sputterings, and an ontology of the self based on Otherness – your recognition of me is responsible for my Net-presence. The reduction then begins to break down through a series of further texts detailing the nature of this presence; a nature which is both sexualized/gendered, and absenting, the result of an imaginary site. Eventually, it has become clear that everything revolves around issues of the virtual subject, who is only virtual on the Net, but who has a very real body elsewhere. So Internet Text has evolved more and more in a meditation on this subject – a subject which will perhaps be one of the dominant modes of being within the next millennium. Finally, it should be noted that there are no conclusions to be drawn in Internet Text, no series of protocol statements or declarations creating any sort of ultimate defining or explanatory position. The entire history of philosophy mitigates against this; instead, I side with the Schlegels, with Nietzsche, Bataille, Jabes, and others, for whom the fragment is crucial to an understanding of contemporary life... It is dedicated to Michael Current and Clara Hielo.

The Missing Piece

Divine Bodies ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Candida R. Moss
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Scholarship ◽  
The Way

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.

scholarly journals Affective Aporetics: Complementary Contradictions in the Interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche

PhaenEx ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 121
Author(s):  
NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
The Self ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
Place Holder ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship

In 1971, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter introduced his study of Nietzsche as an investigation into the history of modern nihilism in which “contradiction” forms the central thread of the argument. For Müller-Lauter, the interpretive task is not to demonstrate the overall coherence or incoherence of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but to examine Nietzsche’s “philosophy of contradiction.” Against those such as Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith and Martin Heidegger, Müller-Lauter argued that contradiction is the foundation of Nietzsche’s thought, and not a problem to be corrected or cast aside for exegetical or political purposes. For Müller-Lauter, contradiction qua incompatibility (not just mere opposition) holds a key to Nietzsche’s affective vision of philosophy. Beginning with the relationship between will to power and eternal recurrence, in this paper I examine aspects of Müller-Lauter’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction specifically in relation to the counter-interpretations offered by two other German commentators of Nietzsche, Leo Strauss and Karl Löwith, in order to confirm Müller-Lauter’s suggestion that contradiction is indeed an operative engine of Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed contradiction is a key Nietzschean theme and an important dynamic of becoming which enables the subject to be revealed as a “multiplicity” (BGE §12) and as a “fiction” (KSA 12:9[91]). Following Müller-Lauter’s assertion that for Nietzsche the problem of nihilism is fundamentally synonymous with the struggle of contradiction experienced by will to power, this paper interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction in terms of subjective, bodily life (rather than in terms of logical incoherences or ontological inconsistencies). Against the backdrop of nihilism, the “self” (and its related place holder the “subject”), I will argue, becomes the psycho-physiological battlespace for the struggle and articulation of “contradiction” in Nietzsche’s thought.  

scholarly journals Historical development of linguistics’ bibliography in Russia (1860-2013)

Bibliosphere ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
V. V. Goncharova
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
The Body ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Slavic Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rich Information ◽  
Subject Areas ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Norms ◽  
Further Development

The interdisciplinary character of the science of language causes great difficulties in bibliographic support in this field. The object of bibliographing in linguistics is not only literature on the language, but also a variety of linguistic resources, which represent a special object to study a branch of linguistics - lexicography. Bibliography of linguistics is the least studied field by specialists among humanitarian bibliographic complexes. The paper first studied the array of domestic bibliographic sources for more than 150 years; the most significant of them are shown. The subject of research is national bibliographic resources in the linguistics field. The objective is to characterize the historical development of the linguistic bibliography in Russia. To achieve this goal we had to solve a number of tasks: identify existing sources for ongoing historical research; to trace the history of forming bibliographic sources, bibliography of bibliographies of linguistics; to form and analyze the body of bibliographic materials; to characterize the problematic areas in the bibliographic software of linguistics. Using the bibliometric analysis it was studied an array of bibliographic products published between 1860 and 2013, the dynamics of bibliographic resources formation was determined, the degree of bibliographic support of some topics and issues in linguistic science and prior directions of their development were revealed. The main results of the study should be considered: 1. The nuclear of fundamental indices on general and applied linguistics is singled out in analyzed literature sources covering the period 1918-1977, as well as in Slavic linguistics for 1825-1981. The complex of current and retrospective bibliographic products was formed and replenished in the country in 1963-1988. 2. The largest share of bibliographic sources in linguistics is presented by book and article bibliography (over 70%), many of which remain bibliographically unrecorded and unused. 3. The following subject areas of linguistics are considered to be bibliographically supported: inter-linguistics, culture of speech and language norms, lexicography, linguistic geography, linguistics regional geography, onomastics. 4. An obvious need to continue the index or database of bibliographic aids in the field of linguistics over the past 50 years is marked. 5. Further development of the linguistics bibliography is impossible to imagine without creating an electronic guide on the bibliographic resources of linguistics, which would reflect the diversity of bibliographical resources and provide their rich information potential for professionals and remote users

Willemijn Ruberg, History of the Body

Somatechnics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-455
Author(s):  
Danielle Kinsey
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of

In search of possible causes of mass extinctions

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Hallam
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Mass Extinctions ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Steven Spielberg ◽  
Geological Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Cretaceous Period ◽  
Land Vertebrates

When the subject of extinctions in the geological past comes up, nearly everyone’s thoughts turn to dinosaurs. It may well be true that these long-extinct beasts mean more to most children than the vast majority of living creatures. One could even go so far as to paraphrase Voltaire and maintain that if dinosaurs had never existed it would have been necessary to invent them, if only as a metaphor for obsolescence. To refer to a particular machine as a dinosaur would certainly do nothing for its market value. The irony is that the metaphor is now itself obsolete. The modern scientific view of dinosaurs differs immensely from the old one of lumbering, inefficient creatures tottering to their final decline. Their success as dominant land vertebrates through 165 million years of the Earth’s history is, indeed, now mainly regarded with wonder and even admiration. If, as is generally thought, the dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous, that is something for which no organism could possibly have been prepared by normal Darwinian natural selection. The final demise of the dinosaurs would then have been the result, not of bad genes, but of bad luck, to use the laconic words of Dave Raup. In contemplating the history of the dinosaurs it is necessary to rectify one widespread misconception. Outside scientific circles the view is widely held that the dinosaurs lived for a huge slice of geological time little disturbed by their environment until the final apocalypse. This is a serious misconception. The dinosaurs suffered quite a high evolutionary turnover rate, and this implies a high rate of extinction throughout their history. Jurassic dinosaurs, dominated by giant sauropods, stegosaurs, and the top carnivore Allosaurus, are quite different from those of the Cretaceous period, which are characterized by diverse hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, and Tyrannosaurus. Michael Crichton’s science-fiction novel Jurassic Park, made famous by the Steven Spielberg movies, features dinosaurs that are mainly from the Cretaceous, probably because velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus could provide more drama.

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