Long Term

The contributors to Long Term use the tension between the popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitments and their durational aspect. They consider commitment in all its guises, particularly relationships beyond and aside from monogamous partnering. These include chosen and involuntary long-term commitments to families, friends, pets, and coworkers; to the care of others and care of self; and to financial, psychiatric, and carceral institutions. Whether considering the enduring challenges of chronic illnesses and disability, including HIV and chronic fatigue syndrome; theorizing the queer family as a scene of racialized commitment; or relating the grief and loss that comes with caring for pets, the contributors demonstrate that attending to the long term offers a fuller understanding of queer engagements with intimacy, mortality, change, dependence, and care. Contributors. Lisa Adkins, Maryanne Dever, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Scott Herring, Annamarie Jagose, Amy Jamgochian, E. Patrick Johnson, Jaya Keaney, Heather Love, Sally R. Munt, Kane Race, Amy Villarejo, Lee Wallace

Working the Self: Truth-Telling in the Practice of Alcoholics Anonymous

This article interrogates twelve step practice within Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) from the perspective of Foucault’s later work on governance, truth-telling and subjectivity. Recent critical studies of addiction tend to view self-help cultures like that of AA and related twelve step programs as integral parts of contemporary power/knowledge complexes, and thus as agents of the modern “will to knowledge” that Foucault often engages with. In line with the widespread Foucauldian critique of governmentality, addiction self-help culture is thus conceived as one that primarily reproduces abstract, neoliberal norms on health and subjectivity. The argument put forward in this article aims to upset this framework attending to a number of features of twelve step practice that, arguably, bear striking resemblances to Foucault’s later discussions of ethics, care of self and truth-telling. In this, it is suggested that a close study of AA practices, might interrupt assumptions about contemporary addiction discourse and its relationship to issues of truth and power often reproduced in Foucauldian critiques.

Plotinus on Care of Self and Soul

Plotinus’ philosophical project includes an important Socratic element. Plotinus is namely interested in both self-knowledge and care of soul and self. In this study I examine how through his interpretation of three passages from Plato (Timaeus 35 a, Phaedrus 246 band Theatetus 176 a-b), Plotinus develops an account of the role of care in his ethics. Care in Plotinus’ ethical thought takes three forms. First of all, care is involved in maintaining the unity of the embodied self. Secondly, situated in a providential universe, our souls – as sisters to the world soul - take part in the providential order by caring for ‘lower’ realities. Finally, Plotinus develops an ethics of going beyond virtue, a process which involves care for the higher, potentially divine, self.

Risk

Chapter 4 theorizes flexibility in relation to neoliberal discourses of risk. The beginnings of neoliberalism in the 1970s are marked by a significant shift in capital’s relationship to risk, from risk-aversion to risk-seeking. The emergence of British South Asian dance in the 1980s roughly aligns with this late twentieth-century rise in risk-taking. This chapter examines how neoliberal demands for risk echo and intersect with British multiculturalism’s expectations on South Asian dancers to display virtuosity, speed, and versatility. Together, they create conditions of physical pain and economic precarity for racialized dancing bodies. Dancers’ bodies, however, are not merely inscribed by neoliberalism and multiculturalism. South Asian dancers use choreographic tools and other bodily tactics to gain creative control over their bodily labor and continue to circulate within a competitive British dance economy in ways that are safe and pleasurable. Drawing on Talal Asad’s notion of “pain as action,” this chapter demonstrates how British South Asian dancers intentionally and strategically respond to demands for risk-taking and flexibility through small, seemingly insignificant corporeal tactics, such as enduring pain, modifying choreographic tasks, and practicing care of self and care of others.

Model of subjectivation in the philosophy of Pythagoreans

This article presents the analysis of the philosophy of Pythagoreans, dedicated to the search and conceptualization of the ideas of subjectivation. The goal of this research is to provide general characteristics to Pythagorean model of subjectivation, which was only partially described by M. Foucault in the writings on Ancient Greek “care of self’. The work employs the translated sources, in form of separate fragments of the compositions written by Pythagoreans, as well as a number of analytical works of Russian and foreign scholars. Considering the narrowness of available materials, the author does not intent to provide a comprehensive overview of the ideas of Pythagorean School, but emphasizes their special stance on subjectivity and personal becoming through a combination of spiritual practices. The scientific novelty consists in the attempt to describe the general ideas of Pythagoreans in the field of ethics, as well as formulate the Pythagorean model of subjectivation to fill the existing gams in M, Foucault’s works of later period. The following conclusions are formulated: it was established that not only ethical, but also political saturation of the history of Pythagoreanism is on par with the Socratian-Platonic model, characterized by Foucault as politically oriented (for example, thanks to analysis of “Alcibiades”); the four key techniques of self-care were derived and systematized; it was demonstrated that unlike Stoicism, Neo-Pythagoreanism did not adapt its doctrine in the field of ethics, and thus, did not receive due reflection in Hellenistic period of development of the “culture of self”.

SEXUALITY IN A CONTEXT OF SPECULATIVE POSTHUMANISM: HUMAN-POSTHUMAN RUPTURES AND DISCONNECTIONS

In this article human-posthuman ruptures and disconnections both in comprehension and in practices, as well as the possibility of epistemological contingency contemporaneously are investigated. This means that an epistemological ruptures and an ontological disconnections of sexuality both differ from one another, and also join together. Since ancient times both sensitive and sensible practices of sexuality were considered the best mode to concern to sexual care of self. It has shown that, in relation to sexuality, a correlation of epistemological discontinuity and continuity is possible. Sexuality, which is actualized with the help of both natural, vital and death, annihilative drives, fits into the context of onticology as a posthuman ontology. Being connected with the thermodynamics of infinitesimal vital parts, anonymous strange strangers, singularities, it turns out to be especially awesome. Such a mode of sexuality is not necessarily reproductive; rather, it unfolds in the fluid space of non-presence and at the same time determines this space. It emphasizes that that the cos mo‑illogical becoming of posthuman leads to negentropy or extropy as vitality. Following this position, the foucaultian conception of the care of self mirrors lacanian graphs of sexuation in a context of object-oriented ontologies in comparison with philosophies of presence. It is recognized that this is the sexuality of the productive disconnection and the pleasure cosmic dissolution. This article concludes by illustrating that the mode of sexuality of Speculative Posthumanism is contingent with the Libidinal Materialism or Vital Posthumanism in a context in which the sexuality of Wide Human Descendants (WHDs) is thought to be oriented to that which is pleasure and is differentiated.