scholarly journals The Rhetoric of Madness in Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 72
Author(s):  
Claudia Cao
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
The Body ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Kathy Acker ◽  
Value System ◽  
Semantic Level

This essay examines the rhetorical experimentation of Don Quixote by Kathy Acker, starting from a theoretical concept central in the author’s thought: her search for a “language of the body”. A brief introduction to Kathy Acker’s plagiaristic poetics frames her narrative strategies between postmodern rewriting and pastiche. It shows the way in which her Don Quixote transposes the representative scheme of the chivalric quest into the contemporary value system with the aim of questioning Cervantes’ text as one of the canonical works of the Western literary tradition. The following section deepens three focal concepts of Acker’s theoretical works – body, madness, and norm – illuminating the connections between her rhetorical experimentation and the works by Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Finally, the paper will demonstrate how these concepts in Acker's rewriting of Don Quixote are strictly related to paradox, which she uses in order to actualize a “language of the body”: in the passage from the former novel to the postmodern work, madness has become the device which, from the semantic level to the rhetorical one, expresses Acker’s idea of language of the body, as an alternative and in contrast to the canonical language of the logos.  

Eternal Recurrence and the Limits of Critical Analysis

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Donata Schoeller
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Eugene Gendlin ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

AbstractNietzsche’s concept of overcoming and his analysis of traditional disembodied thinking patterns and values stand in an uneasy tension. How can anything be overcome, if it is analysed? Nietzsche himself not only seems sceptical about this possibility, but outright pessimistic. His concept of the eternal recurrence undercuts the possibility of overcoming our habituated ways of thinking, behaving and acting. Therefore, the overhuman as a concept itself needs to be overcome, as Zarathustra sees clearly in his most silent hour. This paper strives to show that feminist and phenomenological approaches are able to pick up where Nietzsche’s thinking stopped and went no further. These approaches involve a shift from an analytical to a transformational mode of thinking. This means that one not only thinks about, but is with the body. In order to explain what this method involves I turn to Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Claire Petitmengin, and Eugene Gendlin.

‘You be my body for me’

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Kellogg
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Current Shift

Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s recent exchange, ‘You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, is remarkable because in their rereading of Hegel’s famous lord and bondsman parable, rather than focusing on recognition, work, or even desire, Butler and Malabou each wonder about how Hegel contributes to a new way of thinking about ‘having’ a body and how coming to ‘be’ a body necessarily involves a kind of dispossession. Butler and Malabou’s reading of Hegel is congruent with a current shift on the left away from a liberal politics of recognition to a (post-)Marxist analytic of dispossession: a move, in other words, away from liberal ‘solutions’ of redistribution – of either goods or recognition – towards thinking through issues of settler colonialism, forced migration and empire. Butler and Malabou’s piece points towards the insight that Hegel’s parable must be thought in terms of the political history of possessive individualism, and so in terms of the history of juridically defined property relations; the history of regarding both the body and the land as property. The ‘two valences’ of dispossession, in other words, refers in fact to a logic of property relations, one between those who ‘have’ property (either land or the property of their own bodies) and those who are juridically defined as propertyless.

Medicine: Experimentation, Politics, Emergent Bodies

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Michael ◽  
Marsha Rosengarten
Keyword(s):  
Public Health Policy ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Controlled Trial ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Evidence ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Healthy Human ◽  
Randomized Controlled

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies.

The Inherent Link between Gender and Sexuality: A Queer View to the Portrayal of Women in Herland, Things Fall Apart, Bombay Brides, and The Winner Stands Alone

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-22
Author(s):  
Suparna Roy
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Gender Trouble

Stevie Jackson and Jackie Jones regarded in her article- Contemporary Feminist Theory that “The concepts of gender and sexuality as a highly ambiguous term, as a point of reference” (Jackson, 131, ch-10). Gender and Sexuality are two most complexly designed, culturally constructed and ambiguously interrelated terms used within the spectrum of Feminism that considers “sex” as an operative term to theorize its deconstructive cultural perspectives. Helene Cixous notes in Laugh of Medusa that men and women enter the symbolic order in a different way and the subject position open to either sex is different. Cixious’s understanding that the centre of the symbolic order is ‘phallus’ and everybody surrounding it stands in the periphery makes women (without intersectionality) as the victim of this phallocentric society. One needs to stop thinking Gender as inherently linked to one’s sex and that it is natural. To say, nothing is natural. The body is just a word (as Judith Butler said in her book Gender Trouble [1990]) that is strategically used under artificial rules for the convenience of ‘power’ to operate. It has been a “norm” to connect one’s sexuality with their Gender and establish that as “naturally built”. The dichotomy of ‘penis/vagina’ over years has linked itself to make/female understanding of bodies. Therefore my main argument in this paper is to draw few instances from some literary works which over time reflected how the gender- female/women characters are made to couple up with a male/man presenting the inherent, coherent compulsory relation between one’s gender and sexuality obliterating any possibility of ‘queer’ relationships, includes- Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Bombay Brides (2018) by Esther David, Paulo Coelho’s Winner Stands Alone (2008) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall apart (1958).

scholarly journals El discurso de la insubordinación femenina contra las leyes del patriarcado: puntos por resolver

2021 ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Diana María Ivizate González
Keyword(s):  
Judith Butler ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Las Mujeres

En este artículo se analiza lo que hemos dado en llamar “el discurso de la insubordinación femenina”, a partir de un conjunto de autoras contemporáneas cuyas obras sustentan una intención transformadora de la interpretación psicoanalítica y social que se ha hecho de las mujeres a lo largo de la historia. Las autoras que constituyen el centro de nuestro estudio son: Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Carole Pateman, entre otras. En segundo lugar, se realiza un contraste entre el discurso de las autoras estudiadas y las fuentes filosóficas y psicoanalíticas que lo inspiraron y provocaron (Rousseau, Locke, Filmer, Freud), con el fin de esclarecer qué puntos quedarían por resolver en el debate feminista y cuál es su vínculo con la realidad social que estamos viviendo. Desde el punto de vista lingüístico, proponemos un análisis trans-disciplinar de los textos (basado en las ideas aportadas por Norman Fairclough) para añadir, si cabe, nuevas interpretaciones que puedan abrir un nuevo camino al entendimiento de la situación de las mujeres en el momento actual.

scholarly journals ADOLESCÊNCIA, SUBJETIVIDADE E QUESTÕES DE GÊNERO NO TEATRO DE MARK RAVENHILL

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-39
Author(s):  
Fabiano Fleury Souza Campos
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
And Gender

A partir da análise estrutural, focada, sobretudo, nos personagens da peça Shopping and Fucking (1996), escrita pelo dramaturgo britânico Mark Ravenhill, evidenciamos uma relação incomum entre os elementos formadores desse trabalho teatral e as discussões sobre subjetividade, gênero e sexualidade voltadas para os adolescentes, nos dias atuais. Os contornos dos personagens dessa peça desestabilizam certas noções pré-concebidas sobre a individualidade e a corporeidade, por exemplo. Para a nossa análise, apoiamo-nos sobre os apontamentos de teóricos dedicados tanto ao teatro, como Pierre Sarrazac e Elinor Fuchs, quanto à sociologia e política, como Judith Butler. A peça por meio do discurso agressivo e a violência direcionadas ao corpo dos personagens é capaz de abalar as certezas e a moralidade previamente determinadas de seus espectadores.YOUTH, SUBJECTIVITY AND GENDER IN MARK RAVENHILL’S THEATER Abstract: from the structural analysis, focused mainly on the characters of the play Shopping and Fucking (1996), written by British playwright Mark Ravenhill, our study shows an unusual relationship between the elements of theatre and the contemporary discussions about subjectivity, gender, and sexuality among adolescents presented in this play. The contours of the characters destabilize certain preconceived notions to individuality and embodiment, for example. Our analysis are supported, for instance, by theater theories developed by Pierre Sarrazac and Elinor Fuchs, and sociology concepts implemented by Judith Butler.  Through aggressive discourse and violence directed to the body of the characters, the play is able to shake the certainties and moralities previously found in Ravenhill’s viewers.Keywords: Ravenhill. Contemporary British Theater. Adolescence. Subjectivity. Gender. 

Artistic Spaces for Rebuilding Social Fabric

2019 ◽  
pp. 251-277
Author(s):  
Andrea Del Pilar Rodríguez-Sánchez ◽  
Alberto Cabedo-Mas ◽  
María Elisa Pinto García ◽  
Gloria Patricia Zapata Restrepo
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Emotional Stability ◽  
The Body ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
The Individual

This chapter analyzes the theoretical concept of social fabric, as well as the damage which armed conflict has caused it and how art can contribute to rebuilding it. Affective and symbolic characteristics of art, engaging the body, and the act of collective interpretation-creation may provide the conditions required for the necessary intangible and tangible factors to rebuild a social fabric damaged by war. Artistic spaces, as shown by a case in Colombia, can be an important place to generate, especially, intangible factors which keep the flow of social fabric active, such as values and beliefs, sense of community, confidence, and emotional stability of the individual and the group.

Precariousness, kinship, and care: Becoming human in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096798
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.

Written by the Body: Evolutions of Embodiment in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

MELUS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-174
Author(s):  
Audrey Ng
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Post Traumatic Stress ◽  
War Veterans ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
The Woman Warrior

Abstract While much has been written on embodiment and autobiographical narrative strategies in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1975), little critical attention has been given to these aspects in her latest foray into poetry, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2011). The materiality of bodies in her characters No Name Woman and Fa Mu Lan are altered across the two works in ways that reflect and engender a change in cultural necessities for peace. The female avenger's body evolves from a weapon that addresses wrongs through violence to the embodiment of Kingston's striving for a happy ending, on the page and also in reality, thus implicating her work with war veterans. No Name Woman's suicide changes from an embodiment of vengeful female subjectivity that is concomitant with biological destiny to an occasion of communal reconciliation. In tandem, Kingston's reappropriation of her portrayal of the swordswoman Fa Mu Lan in The Woman Warrior shows a progression from a soldier's aggressive filiality to patriarchal norms to a woman's act of self-violence that addresses the reality of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) prevalent among war veterans. If life writing, as narrative psychologist Jerome Bruner argues, is capable of constituting identity and shaping future reality, Kingston's work of intersubjective remembering and community building through autobiographical narratives that constantly position the body at the intersection of public and personal identities has positive implications for her peace project.

A Wojtyłian Reading of Performativity and the Self in Judith Butler

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Franks
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Divine Power ◽  
John Paul Ii ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Power Of God

Abstract Drawing on Hegel, Judith Butler argues that the subject is the product of its desire for subject-ion. The subject, its gender, and even the sexed body itself come into being through reiterating or parodying preexisting norms and discourses of power (“performativity”). Butler rejects the realities of substance and a fixed human nature that would limit the possibilities of performativity. I summarize and assess Butler’s proposals, highlighting both the value and the drawbacks of her theory. I then show how John Paul II’s understanding of meaning and of the body as tasks takes up what is positive in Butler. He escapes the pitfalls of her thought, however, by retaining both metaphysics and revelation. He argues that the subject exists as substance or suppositum, which defends it against the encroachment of power. He also insists on the importance of human nature, which makes the human person to be the kind of substance who can form herself through the God-given task of creative action directed toward meaningful self-gift. Lastly, John Paul II emphasizes that the divine power of God enables the person to transcend the power dynamics of the culture of death.

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