The Feeling of Being a Body: Resurrection and Habitus in Vaughan’s Medical Writings

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-147
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil

Chapter 4 articulates more explicitly than the previous chapter the way resurrection beliefs in Vaughan’s poetry function as “critical theory” about selfhood, identity, and the social world. The chapter examines Vaughan’s devotional and religious “self-help” literature and Vaughan’s translation and expansion of a hermetic medical treatise. Vaughan’s immanent corporeal resurrectionist commitment to finding the “seeds” of resurrection leads him to posit an essential core of bodily life—the radical balsam—that seeks eternal life but that is sickened when it is penetrated and rewired by the social and historical world. The goal of Vaughan’s devotional writings and medicine alike is to rewire the self so that it reduces its investment in the historical and social world by having its life directed by the essential core, a move that is analogous to his poetic search for the seeds and signs of resurrection within himself his poetry (the subject of chapter 3). This vision anticipates Heidegger’s phenomenology and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. Vaughan also describes a form of sexuality that anticipates Leo Bersani in imagining the body as socialized and yet as potentially unhinged from that social connectedness.

2012 ◽  
pp. 67-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Lambert ◽  
Eric Pezet

This paper investigates the practices whereby the subject, in an organisational context, carries out systematic practices of self-discipline and becomes a calculative self. In particular, we explore the techniques of conduct developed by management accountants in a French carmaker, which adheres to a neoliberal environment. We show how these management accountants become calculative selves by building the very measurement of their own performance. The organisation thereby emerges as the cauldron in which a Homo liberalis is forged. Homo liberalis is the individual capable of constructing for him/her the political self-discipline establishing his/her relationship with the social world on the basis of measurable performance. The management accountants studied in this article prefigure the Homo liberalis in the self-discipline they develop to act in compliance with the organisation’s goals.


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>


2018 ◽  
Vol 931 ◽  
pp. 765-769 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gennady V. Sorokin ◽  
Tatyana I. Eroshenko ◽  
Alexander V. Fedoseenkov ◽  
Alexander V. Malyshev

Today it is possible to speak about a postmodern sociology. It is based on the number of provisions reflecting the general level of social and humanitarian knowledge as well the provisions formulated on the ground of the theoretical studies analysis on postmodernism performed. In its diverse manifestations the postmodern paradigm essentially turns into an independent cognitive and theoretical-ideological entity that influences mainly the development of the already existing sociological concepts and arises their new models or modalities. The mono-city is the element of the self-organising social being fabric that is the subject of social synergies. The cognitive and heuristic element of joining social, economic and political problems and the prospects for the development of single-tooth cities can be classified as "fractal". The social world consists of many things that are the processes of formation, and in fact are fractals. The degradation of modern Russia in the social, political and economic sense is an indicator of the destruction of single-tooth cities in the conditions of the modern socio-demographic structure within the framework of the postmodern "end of history".


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>


Problemos ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-115
Author(s):  
Olga Shparaga

The key task of my text is the justification of the use of on phenomenological model of the subject designated as a “my pain and my love”. First, such subject is seen as an alternative to the transcendental subject of the classical philosophy, which is characterized first of all as a rational subject. This rational subject is capable to give himself a generally valid rule of knowledge and action. Second, the phenomenological understanding of the subject represents a certain version of the “false consciousness”, which was developed from the “masters of the suspicion” (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche). Philosophy of the “masters” was intended to criticize the autonomy and absolutely self-determination of the rational subject and show the different forms of the conditionality on the Reason. Thirdly, the phenomenological understanding of the subject is a response to the different forms of philosophical reduction of subjectivity and self-consciousness. This response is developed in this text as a discussion with Manfred Frank. The phenomenological subject is the embodied or bodily subject. This embodiment has three dimensions (B. Waldenfels): World-relation (Weltbezug), Self-relation (Selbstbezug) and Others-relation (Fremdbezug). These dimensions allow to speak about the bodily subject as a Self, which is interpreted as my embodiment to the Other. “The I as my pain and my love” is a metaphor of this form of the Self, which means, that self-comprehension originates in the feeling of the pain and of the love, that is, in the certain experience of own body and in the act of love for this concrete Other. Such experience can be designated as a process of identification. The bodily subject as my embodiment to the Other is strongly connected with different praxis of the “socialization of the body”, which are in need of the philosophical analyses and criticism. Phenomenology proposes its own direction of criticism, which intends to justify that difference of the social and cultural praxis themselves is based on the originality of my embodiment to the Other and not vice versa. Thus the explication of the originality of the Self must be connected with the analyses and criticism of the “socialization of the body”, which includes a new non-classical ethical dimension.


2021 ◽  
pp. 296-316
Author(s):  
Michal Pagis

This chapter explores the rising popularity of Buddhist meditation in Israel and the self-identity that bodily based mindfulness offers its practitioners. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork among Israeli practitioners of vipassana meditation, this chapter illustrates how in periods characterized by doubt and uncertainty, Israelis find in meditation an embodied anchor for selfhood which substitutes dependency on the social world. Through meditation practice, Israelis recede into the body, temporarily liberating the self from local social embeddedness. Yet, at the same time, this same withdrawal to the body produces universal, humanistic-based identifications. The chapter detects four dimensions in the attempt to transcend local social context: an ideological rejection of particularism, the meditation center as a space without a place, the distancing of social roles and identities in vipassana practice, and a connection to humanity at large through loving-kindness. In meditation experience, considered by practitioners as the most personal, “private” withdrawal into the self, Israeli vipassana practitioners find a universal anchor that transcends social locality.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 249-286 ◽  

The article focusses on how the body is constructed for immunology. Specifically, the complex and tangled bio-political genealogy of immunity is analysed in detail as the understanding of it hovers between social and biological discourses. In addition, the controversy between different models of the immune system is examined. The social studies of immunology conducted by Donna Haraway and Emily Martin are also highlighted. In these studies, the body-immune system is understood as a diversified heterogeneous construction consisting of components belonging to different ontological orders. The construction of the immune system does not end in the labora-tory or in the clinic. It continues in other places by other means. Nevertheless, the relationship between the body and the immune system is situational: the immune system could be completely identified with the body or be a part of it. Emily Martin’s ethnography of immune systems and Donna Haraway’s feminist anthropology provide the means for understanding how the immune system, as both academics and non-academics explain it, can be juxtaposed to and also coincide with the body and even the self,but nevertheless conform to the scale, concepts, laws and metaphors of the social world of everyday life. The immune system and immunity are assessed in terms of the physiological body and the self. On the other hand, the body as a biological “self” is abstracted from the physiological and social body, and in a sense it “lives a life of its own.” Therefore, our body is the outcome of a complex coordinating effort among different bodies: the physiological body, the one identified with the self, and the body on a different scale - the biological “self” which turns out to be “non-self” and not belong to the subject


Religions ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Federica Manfredi

European society has been described more than once as poor in shared rites of passage. The manipulation of skin seems to be an increasingly popular solution to fulfil perceived cultural gaps. Can contemporary tattoos be interpreted as tools of commemorating life events, especially in the occasion of births and deaths? This article analyses meanings associated with tattoos collected during two ethnographies in central Italy. Based on qualitative interviews and participant observation, the first fieldwork focuses on death-commemorative tattoos, while a 2020 (n)ethnography investigates birth-celebrative tattoos. Data confirm that the body is the mirror of the self and the skin works as the plastic stage where the embodiment of mourning and other emotions meets the social world. Tattoos are attempts of personalized spiritualities, where births and deaths become key-moments of existence that are elected pillars of the self. However, they are not (only) a private affair. This paper addresses the intersubjective valence of tattoos and their communicative purpose. In parallel with references related to both the self and the others, ethnographical data support an interpretation of tattoos as modern self-making strategies, applied to re-ordinate the past and to project a suitable self for the future.


Author(s):  
Rarița MIHAIL ◽  

This article touches the notion of alienation from Rousseau’s, Hegel’s and young Marx’s perspective, Althusser’s critique being its offset, which, according to, this concept stems from an abstract, metaphysical view of history and human agents’ activities. According to Althusser, alienation is indeed the humanistic expression of a back-to-origins philosophy and of lost human essence retrieval. Hence, the philosophy of contractual alienation (as a foundation of political community as per Rousseau), the interrogation of historical positivity from young Hegel’s writings and, last but not least, the alienated work critique elaborated by young Marx in Manuscripts of 1844 can be interpreted as variations around the same essential concepts of human history. In the attempt of overcoming such an undifferentiated approach, the study tries to highlight the original and particular reflection that each of these authors develop on the subject and highlights, at the same time, what they have in common, despite their differences on this theme. When we talk about alienation we always relate to a mutilated loss in the relationship with the self, with others and with the social world. Moreover, we also talk about the possibility of overcoming some of the conditions that are considered degrading for humans. In other words, this study aims to prove that not only it is not possible to reduce the alienation to an abstract and naïve humanistic notion, but that it also represents an essential landmark for understanding the impossibility of some social groups of classes to develop on the merits of long-lasting deprivation of the benefits the relationship with the self, the others and the social world can bring.


2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Reischer ◽  
Kathryn S. Koo
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  

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