The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Racial Regime

2018 ◽  
pp. 44-68
Author(s):  
David Lloyd

“The Pathological Sublime” shows how Kant’s location of aesthetic experience in the subjective yet universal judgment of taste generates a concept of representation that is fundamentally racial and developmental. He labels Edmund Burke’s alternative approach to aesthetic affects “pathological,” meaning an unfree state based on sensation, fear or desire. The pathological subject is the antithesis of the ethical human who can participate in civil society through sharing the common sense that grounds aesthetic universality. Burke’s reflections on the sublime horror inspired by the sight of a black woman mark the limit of the argument for universality he bases on sensations. Where Frantz Fanon’s racial phenomenology of being seen in Black Skin White Masks dramatizes his “lived experience” of being barred from human identity, Burke’s anecdote foregrounds the anxious abyss into which the encounter with blackness throws the white subject and his representational schemas.

Janus Head ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-221
Author(s):  
David D. Dillard-Wright ◽  

Descriptions of “aesthetic arrest,” those ecstatic moments that lift the common sense subject-object dichotomy, abound in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. These special experiences, found in both artistic and mystical accounts, arise from the daily life of ordinary perception. Such experiences enable the artist, philosopher, or mystic to overturn received categories and describe phenomena in a creative way; they become dangerous when treated as the sine qua non of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic arrest, though rare in consumer society, need not be overwhelmed by the flood of information and can still provide fresh glimpses into the world as lived.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke

Deleuze's relationship to Kant is intricate and fundamental, given that Deleuze develops his transcendental philosophy of difference in large part out of Kant's work. In doing so he utilises the moment of the sublime from the third Critique as the genetic model for the irruption of the faculties beyond their capture within common sense. In this sense, the sublime offers the model not only for transcendental genesis but also for aesthetic experience unleashed from any conditions of possibility. As a result, sensation in both its wider and more specifically artistic senses (senses that become increasingly entwined in Deleuze's work) will explode the clichés of human perception, and continually reinvent the history of art without recourse to representation. In tracing Deleuze's ‘aesthetics’ from Kant we are therefore returned to the viciously anti-human (and Nietzschean) trajectory of Deleuze's work, while simultaneously being forced to address the extent of its remaining Idealism. Both of these elements play an important part in relation to Deleuze's ‘modernism’, and to the discussion of his possible relevance to contemporary artistic practices.


Author(s):  
Paul Michael Garrett

Abstract Efforts to ‘decolonize’ social work, along with the contemporary resurgence of racism and fascism, might prompt a return to the work of Frantz Fanon. Mostly focusing on Black Skin, White Masks and a recent collection, Alienation and Freedom, it is argued that Fanon’s commitment to liberation and the creation of a ‘new humanism’ was reflected in both his anti-colonial politics and in his practice as a psychiatrist. A defining characteristic of Fanon’s professional role is that he tried to imbue it with same values and progressive aspirations central to his political project. It is maintained that Fanon’s aspiration to dismantle obstacles to democracy is reflected in his aspiration to confront oppressive categories pertaining to ‘race’ and also those rooted in the ‘common sense’ of the Psychiatric Hospital. In both contexts, his political and professional contributions convey significant messages for social work and chime with the ethical commitments of the profession to promote the ‘liberation of people’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Mark Boespflug
Keyword(s):  

The common sense that heavily informs the epistemology of Thomas Reid has been recently hailed as instructive with regard to some of the most fundamental issues in epistemology by a burgeoning segment of analytic epistemologists. These admirers of Reid may be called dogmatists. I highlight three ways in which Reid's approach has been a model to be imitated in the estimation of dogmatists. First, common sense propositions are taken to be the benchmarks of epistemology inasmuch as they constitute paradigm cases of knowledge. Second, dogmatists follow Reid in taking common sense propositions to provide boundaries for philosophical theorizing. Inasmuch as philosophical theorizing leads one to deny a common sense proposition, such theorizing is stepping outside of the bounds of what it can or should do. Third, dogmatists follow Reid in focusing heavily on the problem of skepticism and by responding to it by refusing to answer the demand for a meta-justification that the skeptic wants.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Barrantes ◽  
Juan M. Durán

We argue that there is no tension between Reid's description of science and his claim that science is based on the principles of common sense. For Reid, science is rooted in common sense since it is based on the (common sense) idea that fixed laws govern nature. This, however, does not contradict his view that the scientific notions of causation and explanation are fundamentally different from their common sense counterparts. After discussing these points, we dispute with Cobb's ( Cobb 2010 ) and Benbaji's ( Benbaji 2003 ) interpretations of Reid's views on causation and explanation. Finally, we present Reid's views from the perspective of the contemporary debate on scientific explanation.


2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Michalak

Motives of espionage against ones own country in the light of idiographic studies The money is perceived as the common denominator among people who have spied against their own country. This assumption is common sense and appears to be self-evident truth. But do we have any hard evidences to prove the validity of such a statement? What method could be applied to determine it? This article is a review of the motives behind one's resorting to spying activity which is a complex and multifarious process. I decided to present only the phenomenon of spying for another country. The studies on the motives behind taking up spying activity are idiographic in character. One of the basic methodological problems to be faced by the researchers of this problem is an inaccessibility of a control group.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William Benzon

Sydney Lamb’s model focuses our attention on the physicality of language, of the signs themselves as objects in the external world and the neural systems the support them. By means of the metaphor of a cognitive dome, he demonstrates that there is no firm line between linguistic and cognitive structure. In this context, I offer physically grounded accounts of Jakobson’s metalingual and emotive functions. Drawing on Vygotsky’s account of language development, I point out that inner speech, corresponding to the common sense notion of thought, originates in a circuit that goes through the external world and is then internalized.


1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Karen Harding

Ate appearances deceiving? Do objects behave the way they do becauseGod wills it? Ate objects impetmanent and do they only exist becausethey ate continuously created by God? According to a1 Ghazlli, theanswers to all of these questions ate yes. Objects that appear to bepermanent are not. Those relationships commonly tefemed to as causalare a result of God’s habits rather than because one event inevitably leadsto another. God creates everything in the universe continuously; if Heceased to create it, it would no longer exist.These ideas seem oddly naive and unscientific to people living in thetwentieth century. They seem at odds with the common conception of thephysical world. Common sense says that the universe is made of tealobjects that persist in time. Furthermore, the behavior of these objects isreasonable, logical, and predictable. The belief that the univetse is understandablevia logic and reason harkens back to Newton’s mechanical viewof the universe and has provided one of the basic underpinnings ofscience for centuries. Although most people believe that the world is accutatelydescribed by this sort of mechanical model, the appropriatenessof such a model has been called into question by recent scientificadvances, and in particular, by quantum theory. This theory implies thatthe physical world is actually very different from what a mechanicalmodel would predit.Quantum theory seeks to explain the nature of physical entities andthe way that they interact. It atose in the early part of the twentieth centuryin response to new scientific data that could not be incorporated successfullyinto the ptevailing mechanical view of the universe. Due largely ...


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document