L’art, entre jouissance et utopie selon Emmanuel Levinas

This text aims to show how, in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the moment of jouissance is constitutive of the selfhood of the ego and conditions the very possibility of a sensitivity to the other man, and so the possibility of the ethical relation itself. These considerations on the enjoyment invited us to think artistic creation and poetry as a way to respond to anesthesia of our sensibility through knowledge, which is a characteristic of western thought for Emmanuel Levinas.

On Technical Alterity

This commentary introduces the notion of “technical alterity” in order to address the following questions: is it possible that technical objects can become “others” in analogy to Levinas’ ethics and can this relation provide solutions for the subject in the Anthropocene? According to Levinas, the human subject’s only break from having to be itself is in the consumption and enjoyment of things. Objects constitute thus an “other” that can be consumed, i.e., appropriated and be made one’s own. But, in times of the Anthropocene, where the entanglement of human and non-human actors becomes increasingly obvious and intricate, and a question of survival for human beings in the face of the climate crisis, it is necessary to develop a relation with non-human actors that does not reduce them to mere means to an end. This ethical relation with technical objects relies upon an epistemic act, since technical objects precisely do not have a “face” in the Levinasian sense. Technical objects as “technical others” have therefore—in light of Simondon’s philosophy of technology—to be invented.

Ethics in Jacques Lafitte’s Mechanology

This article argues that the most widely disseminated reading of Lafitte’s writings, which aligns his proposals for ‘mechanology’ with cybernetics, overlooks the broader ethical and social project to which he hoped his ideas would contribute. It is shown that the purpose of mechanology articulated by Lafitte was the development of an ethical relation to machines, a theme he developed in his later publications. It is argued that Lafitte’s position resonates with positions taken by contemporary works focused on the renewal of a critical approach to the philosophy of technology, particularly those that seek to transform the relationship between humans and the natural world.

El Otro No-Humano y el Coronavirus

The global Coronavirus pandemic originated out of a wet market in Wuhan, China. Thus, this virus is the product of the market conditions that lacked any sort of ethical considerations.Among the most ingrained dogmas in most human beings throughout history is the idea that mankind has non-human beings at their disposal to do with them whatever humanity’s will might dictate. The ethical relation is suspended during the interaction with animals and thus humans are allowed to torture, harm, imprison, and kill animals for scientific experiments, entertainment, or to satisfy hunger or a craving. Through the levinasian concept of transcendence, this article will propose Otherness as a category of Peter Singer’s utilitarian critique of factory farming. The current virus is proposed to be the result of a system that subsumes the non-human Other as matter to be manipulated and ignores any sort of ethical responsibility.

El Otro No-Humano y el Coronavirus

The global Coronavirus pandemic originated out of a wet market in Wuhan, China. Thus, this virus is the product of the market conditions that lacked any sort of ethical considerations. Among the most ingrained dogmas in most human beings throughout history is the idea that mankind has non-human beings at their disposal to do with them whatever humanity’s will might dictate. The ethical relation is suspended during the interaction with animals and thus humans are allowed to torture, harm, imprison, and kill animals for scientific experiments, entertainment, or to satisfy hunger or a craving. Through the levinasian concept of transcendence, this article will propose Otherness as a category of Peter Singer’s utilitarian critique of factory farming. The current virus is proposed to be the result of a system that subsumes the non-human Other as matter to be manipulated and ignores any sort of ethical responsibility.

Challenges of nursing care in psychosocial rehabilitation: a study from the constructionist perspective

ABSTRACT Objective: To identify the nursing staff’s difficulties in providing care in psychosocial rehabilitation to CAPS users. Methods: Qualitative study based on constructionism. Sixteen members of the CAPS nursing staff participated in the study in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The data collected in the interviews and observations were organized in Nvivo software and analyzed based on thematic content. Results: The difficulties identified were: the territorial violence that imposes a silence to the actions of CAPS, low user education as a barrier to protagonism, impaired family adhesion, the technical-conceptual discomfort of nursing in acting in the crisis and material and human of CAPS dismantlement. Final considerations: The challenges consist of overcoming staff exhaustion; however, they do not prevent nursing from betting on the possibility of protagonist care. Therefore, such care is dimensioned by the clinical-political-ethical relation in constant negotiation with the territory.

Becoming-Flashdrive: The Cinematic Intelligence of Lucy

An important but easily forgotten moment in the history of film-philosophy is Jean Epstein's assertion that cinema, more than merely thinking, has a kind of intelligence. If it is a newfound conception of rationality that is needed for any contemporary ethical relation to the world, as thinkers from Reza Negarestani and Pete Wolfendale to feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks have espoused in their respective neo-rationalist projects, then cinema as a thinking thing must be interrogated in its relation to reason. A somatophilia of purely affective and phenomenological approaches in film theory alongside micropolitical injunctions to undermine common-sense and liberate one's desire in extremity can fall limp in view of such calls for universal thinking around rationality. To understand cinema's specific form of intelligence, this article will explore Luc Besson's Lucy (2014) as an instance of how film is able to represent intelligence. Besson's film provides a site where Western cultural anxieties and assumptions around intelligence are manifested. This will allow an explication of contemporary approaches to intelligence in philosophy whilst confronting these discourses with the insidious problematics of gender and race that undergird the film. I argue that Lucy shares many of its ambitions with the emerging vectors of thought associated with the neo-rationalist perspective in its engaging with a rethinking of universal values and the Promethean possibilities of human action. Reading the film through these philosophies will help position the ethical stakes it sets up, but also to distinguish it from a trend of contemporary “posthuman” films that it finds itself in company with. While it is certainly true that posthuman themes, as well as transhumanist fantasies, seem to permeate Besson's film, this article will incorporate another neologism, taken from neo-rationalist thinkers, in order to emphasise moments that can be productive from the standpoint of a philosophical account of intelligence: “rationalist inhumanism.”

John Clare and the Language of Listening

This essay examines the representation of listening in a number of Clare's 1832 poems, paying attention to the language used, including prepositions, ideophones, verb forms, dialect and literary allusion. It considers how listening locates and is located in his poems and argues that in ‘The Fernowls Nest’ literary allusion is an especially appropriate language for describing the poem's strangely displaced sounds. It proposes that Clare's listening is alert and responsive to different aural perspectives, that it is compound and reflexive, and especially attuned to moments of aural ambiguity, when the boundary between self and other, subject and object becomes blurred. Such moments offer a mode of ethical relation to the natural world that resists the politics of representation John Barrell has associated with the eye in loco-descriptive poetry. 1 If the particularity and multiplicity of Clare's poems offer an alternative to the visual mode of control and possession associated with the prospect view, the distinctive forms of listening we find in his poems, and, in particular, his attunement to aural ambiguity, represent another kind of resistance to the aesthetic expression of human ownership and control over the natural world. Listening in Clare is thus a form of environmentalist poetics.

Thinking Small

This chapter understands modernist close reading in an expanded sense, as an open-ended practice of attention to the look and feel of things. This practice is not exclusively directed at literary texts. Rather, it is a way of seeing that takes a wide variety of phenomena—from a poem to a fiddler crab—as lifeworlds to be read. Close reading, understood in this manner, is less a specific strategy than an ethical relation. Sensitive to variations and valances of difference, elisions and silences, the close reader cultivates patience as she learns to listen for the intermittent and the unexpected. The chapter examines two works that exemplify close reading’s imaginative possibilities: marine biologist Carson’s 1955 book, The Edge of the Sea, and literary and cultural theorist Roland Barthes’s 1977–78 seminar at the Collège de France, The Neutral.

The Ethical Demand

This book concerns the nature and basis for the fundamental ethical relation between human beings. Beginning from the fundamental example of trust, it is argued that this relation arises from our interdependence and mutual vulnerability, which then gives us power over the lives of other people. It claimed that in this situation, there arises a demand to care for the other person. This demand is characterized as silent, radical, one-sided, and unfulfillable, as it cannot be satisfied by just doing what the other asks; requires us to act unselfishly; is non-reciprocal; and should not be experienced as a demand. As a result, the demand is distinguished from ordinary social norms, which lack these characteristics, though it is argued that there is a relation between these two levels, as legitimate social norms should ‘refract’ the ethical demand. It is also argued that in order to make sense of a demand of this sort, we must see ‘life as a gift’, rather than treating ourselves as the sovereign grounds for our own existence. In understanding the ethical demand in this way, it is suggested, we can make sense of Jesus’s proclamation to love our neighbour in purely human terms, though at the same time we may have to go beyond a scientific picture which operates with a clear distinction between fact and values, and treats determinism as a basis for rejecting moral responsibility.