The Flesh Made Word

Janus Head ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Carolyn M. Tilghman ◽  

Luce Irigaray's concept of the "sensible transcendental" is a term that paradoxically fuses mind with body while, at the same time, maintaining the tension of adjacent but separate concepts, thereby providing a fruitful locus for changes to the symbolic order. It provides this locus by challenging the monolithic philosophical discourses of the "Same" which, according to Irigaray, have dominated western civilization since Plato. As such, the sensible transcendental refuses the logic that demands the opposed hierarchal dichotomies between time and space, form and matter, mind and body, self and other, and man and woman, which currently organize western civilization's discursive foundations. Instead, it provides a useful means for helping women to feel at home in their bodies, and it signifies the implementation of an ethical praxis based on the acknowledgment of sexual difference. Such a praxis demands philosophical, theological, juridical, and scientific accountability for systemic sexism and, in its acknowledgment and validation of the alterity of sexual difference, it respects life in its various forms and its vital relationship with biological and physical environments.

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 90-97
Author(s):  
Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Ladeedah is an audio novella that takes place in a Black utopic space after “the improvised revolution.” Ladeedah is a tone-deaf, rhythm-lacking Black girl in a world where everyone dances and sings at all times. What is Ladeedah's destiny as a quiet, clumsy genius in a society where movement and sound are the basis of the social structure and the definition of freedom? This excerpt from Ladeedah focuses on Ladeedah's attempts to understand the meaning of revolution from her own perspectives—at home, at school, and in her own mind and body.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuel Copilaș

Using Freud and Lacan, this article proposes a psychoanalytic approach to the thrash metal band Slayer. It particularly focuses on the band’s engagement with violence and perversion. The article starts by analysing Slayer in Freudian terms, as a symptom of the discontent existing in western civilization and it advances further to using Lacan, taking into account concepts like expression, conceptualization, repression and signifying chains, among others, in order to reach the conclusion that Slayer’s revolt against present-day society is not so much a revolt as an unconscious expression of its symbolic order.


Hypatia ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 114-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Kozel

In this essay I explore the dynamic between Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as it unfolds in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). Irigaray's strategy of mimesis is a powerful feminist tool, both philosophically and politically. Regarding textual engagement as analogous for relations between self and other beyond the text, I deliver a cautionary message: mimetic strategy is powerful but runs the risk of silencing the voice of the other.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-226
Author(s):  
Yana Rowland

This paper dwells on the issue of selfhood in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Diary (1831 – 1832). It explores individuation against three major presences in the poetess’s life: her father (and family), Hugh Stuart Boyd, and literature. The employed strategy of research includes a phenomenological (interspersed with feminist touches) focus on select excerpts from the Diary which reveal the writer’s concern for Self as the recognition of the priority of a precursory Other. Observations are made on the limits of human perception, time and space as human variables, the ontological essence of interpretation, and memory as a premise for cognizing life as care. A rare example of prose-fiction in the poetess’s oeuvre, her diary could be read as an instance of simultaneous self-nullification and self-affirmation, which offers possibilities for a dialectical definition of female genius as dialogue through narrative.


Te Kaharoa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosanna Raymond

How can a body act as a tool for decolonising performance? As an artist, my body has become a powerful space for my art practice and cultural heritage to come together, the past and the present. My Polynesian body is the genealogical vessel that collapses time and space, allowing our ancestors and the atua to have a presence in the Now. I live through them, and they live through me at the point of performance. In this, I follow the Ta/Va philosophy (Mahina, Wendt, Refiti, Tavita) as it has been vigorously circulated and exchanged for well over a decade within Polynesian academic, cultural and artistic circles. With this in mind (and body), I will present a visceral experience featuring aural, visual and performative elements, weaving in and out of spoken words, both academic and artistic, to demonstrate the power of the body as a vehicle to create works of VA’rt.


Author(s):  
Irina Aristarkhova

1. Matrix = Womb. 2. The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here, even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth ... that you, like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste or touch. A prison for your mind. A Matrix. (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) 3. What is Matrix? Simply ... the “big Other,” the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. (S. Zizek, 1999) What is Matrix? In the past years, the notion of the Matrix has become dominant in figurations of cyberspace. It seems as if it is the most desirable, the most contemporary and fitting equation; however, its gendered etymology is rarely obvious. On the opposite, the gender of the matrix as a notion and term has been systematically negated in such disciplines as mathematics, engineering, film studies or psychoanalysis. It is necessary thus to explore and critique the Matrix as a most “fitting” metaphor in/for cyberspace that has conceived it (cyberspace) as a free and seamless space very much like the maternal body (Aristarkhova, 2002). The challenge today, therefore, is to reintroduce the maternal as one of embodied encounters with difference, to recover the sexual difference and gender in the notion of matrix with reference to cyberspace and information technologies that support it.


Hypatia ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
Robyn Ferrell

This paper argues that the slogans “A Woman's Right to Choose” and “The Personal is the Political” typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.Let us say that the problem is violence. At its most naive: how can the sexual relation, which is supposedly full of love, be violent?I mean the sexual relation in its resonances and ambiguity—to indicate the relation between the sexes, and the relation between lovers. In no way can the relation be confined to love, either heterosexual or homosexual, since it is often a contest. It cannot be reduced solely to a social relation, because in one of its aspects it addresses the most intimate subjectivity.In a certain feminist lifestyle advocacy, those women who are in same sex relations avoid sexual violence by avoiding men, and those who are in heterosexual relationships strive to find the “right kind”—that is, relationships of respectful and supportive love—rejecting all signs of aggression, from sexist disparagement and emotional cruelty to sexual humiliation and physical assault, as “abuse.”Strangely, this dichotomy does not explain the proximity of passion and aggression, whether in love between men and women or in same-sex relationships between feminist women. As rational counsel, it resists the important sense in which the erotic is, and is even valued as, the excess of the rational. And as an analysis of the oppression of women it defeats itself, for to insist on masculinity as violence itself, and/or on the sexual relation as properly governed by reason, seems to miss the point of both love and feminism.Stranger still, feminisms, which set out to address and redress the oppression of women, have become rivalrous themselves. Are these aggressions a legacy of the intellectual world they must take place in (but if so, why is the academic world so full of passion, when it so thoroughly divorces ideas from affects?). Have we overlooked an aspect of the relation between sisters? Feminism has not addressed the question of aggression in feminism as anything more than contamination.Perhaps, after all, the thing that feminism has not yet successfully addressed is love. The “battle between the sexes” has not rendered the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. As a species of theory, feminism has relished the rigor of distinction and has not found it easy to tolerate the proximity of opposites.And yet, in evoking the body, some feminisms approach closer to this difficulty. It remains to take up the relation between the body and the concept more thoroughly, in order to find out whether sexual difference could ever be philosophical.


1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brewin

Arnold Toynbee was Director of Studies at Chatham House from 1924 until his retirement in 1954. His fame rests on two monumental projects to establish a global perspective. The Annual Survey each year reviewed the world as a geographical whole, selecting four or five themes for special treatment. It was not an edited volume. The Study of History put Western civilization in the context of a historical survey of all previous civilizations. Quite apart from his considerable journalistic output, the thirty-four volumes of the Survey and the ten volumes of the Study show how seriously Toynbee had taken a schoolmaster's injunction ‘first to see your subject or your problem as a whole’. Toynbee believed that a global perspective in terms of both time and space was of practical use.


altrelettere ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cosetta Seno

Anna Maria Ortese is considered today as one of the greatest women writers of all times. This essay analyzes her contribution to Italian Women’s Literature within the context of her relationship with two major waves of the Italian Feminist Movement: that of the 1970s, centered mainly on the idea of equality, and that of the 1980s, centered on the idea of sexual difference. While writing her  autobiography Il porto di Toledo Ortese became aware that the very experience of reality, centered on sexual difference, had to be reassessed and, consequently a new feminine language had to to be conceived. The contributions made by Ortese in Toledoproved to be invaluable in the creation of a new feminine language, distant from the Lacanian symbolic order and capable to express the experience of reality in a new and unique way.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 227-270
Author(s):  
Fekete J. Csaba

A kastélyok, paloták, kúriák, „várkastélyok”, várak – vagyis a főúri lakóhelyek – elsősorban profán építészeti műfajt képviselnek, azonban funkcionális sokszínűségüket és komplexitásukat jól reprezentálja, hogy többségük szakrális rendeltetéselemeket is befogadott. A házikápolna a világi főúri lakóhelyekben az otthoni vallásgyakorlás legfontosabb színhelye, amely a 19. század közepéig jellemzően a főúri vallásosság szimbóluma volt. A házikápolnák térkompozíciója a liturgia egyszerűsített változatára specializálódott. Ugyanakkor a főúri, valamint a köznépi együttes jelenlét funkcionálisan differenciált, tagolt téralakítást eredményezett. A 18. századi példák nagy belmagasságú, karzatokkal kialakított, boltozott csarnokterei késő középkori hagyományon alapulhattak, ugyanakkor korabeli jellemzőjük, hogy közvetlen udvari bejáratuk révén nyilvános liturgiára is alkalmasak voltak. A házikápolnák diszpozíciója a 18–19. században rendkívüli változatosságot mutatott. Az 1850 előtti példáknál az épületen belüli térkapcsolatot a főúri oratórium-karzat biztosította, amely jellemzően a férfi lakosztály felől – annak földszinti vagy emeleti elhelyezésétől függetlenül – volt megközelíthető. Az időszakban volt példa arra, hogy a kápolna a női oldalon helyezkedett el, és volt példa a két lakosztály közötti diszpozícióra is. A nagyvonalú, attraktív kialakítású nyilvános kápolnák mellett kisebb, helyiségsorba illeszkedő, lakosztályokon belülre pozícionált magánkápolnát is gyakran létesítettek a korszakban. A 19. század közepétől a házikápolnák hagyományos funkcionalitása megmaradt, de elhelyezésükre jellemző volt a tulajdonosi lakosztályoktól távolabbi, esetenként a vendéglakrészekhez az épületszárnyak végén kapcsolódó, tehát az elsődleges forgalmi terektől kieső, „perifériás” diszpozíció, de előfordult a központi társasági terek monumentális csoportjához történő hangsúlyos kapcsolódás is.Summary. Castles, palaces, mansions, fortresses – namely the noble households – are elements of the profane architectural genre primarily, but their functional diversity and complexity are well represented by the fact that most of them have sacred functions as well. The home chapel of the secular noble households can be considered as the most important venue for religious practice at home, which was a typical symbol of the noble religiousness until the mid-19th century. The spatial composition of the home chapels was specialized to a simplified version of the liturgy. Nevertheless, the joint presence of the nobility and the common folk resulted in a functionally differentiated, articulated space form. The 18th-century examples of vaulted halls with high ceilings and galleries could have been based on a late-medieval tradition, but they were suitable for public liturgy as well through their direct courtyard entrance. The disposition of the home chapels was very various in the 18th and 19th centuries. As for the pre-1850 examples their spatial connection within the building was provided by the noble oratorial gallery, which was accessible from the male apartments typically, regardless of its layout in ground-floor or upstairs. At the same time there were also some examples of a chapel on the female side, and between the two apartments as well. In addition to the generous, attractive public chapels, also smaller private chapels were often built within the apartments at that time. From the middle of the 19th century the traditional functionality of the home chapels was preserved, but it became typical that the location of the chapels was rather away from the owner apartments, in some cases connected to the guest apartments at the end of the building wings, which meant a “peripheral” disposition to the primary paths of usage. Besides, there are examples to an emphatic connection to the monumental group of central social rooms.


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