首页 | 本学科首页   官方微博 | 高级检索  
相似文献
 共查询到20条相似文献，搜索用时 15 毫秒
1.
ABSTRACT

One of the under-theorised aspects of Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? is the overtly political project that underpins her discussion of a renewed conception of subjectivity. Malabou's political project is framed in radical and emancipatory terms, and yet the possibilities and limitations that stem from of a neurobiological account of politics have been left under-explored. Can we really locate in the brain a progressive politics, especially in the context of debates around mental illness, when so many groups and individuals are resistant to understanding themselves as their brains? Or is this affirmation of scientific materialism at risk of obscuring the realities and complexities of the materiality of cultural practice? In order to pursue the political consequences of her work, this paper looks to stage an encounter between Malabou's account of neuroplasticity and Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism. This is done in order to ask: do Malabou’s own critiques of neoliberal flexibility run the risk of embracing a neuro-liberalism, in which an optimism regarding plasticity, individual liberty, and compromise between the humanities and life-sciences obscures the political limitations of neuroscience as a site for political-philosophy?  相似文献   

2.
ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine Catherine Malabou’s concept of trauma, and argue that her replacement of the Freudian unconscious with the cerebral unconscious might fit adequately into a different framework from the one she proposes. Comparing her view of pathology to that of Georges Canguilhem, I propose a dimensional reading of pathology. Building on this – and by reference to metaplasticity – I ask whether one can explain the mechanisation characteristic of the new wounded mechanistically. I then look at her exchange with Slavoj ?i?ek to get at Malabou’s understanding of psychoanalysis. She seeks to realign Freud and neuroscience to resolve issues with both. As part of this shift, she introduces the term ‘the Material’ – linked to the cerebral unconscious – as an alternative to the Lacanian triad of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. She does, however, leave it underdeveloped, and I argue that this points to tensions in her theory. While her concept of plasticity runs against ideas of an isolated transcendental subject exempt from the outside, Malabou seems to literalise (or ‘corporealise’) trauma. If this is correct, then how radical is her concept of trauma, and are there ways of describing trauma that are equally compatible with her concept of plasticity?  相似文献   

3.
ABSTRACT

This article explores how breakthrough neuroscientific research regarding the Microbiome-Gut-Brain-Axis (MGBA) resonates with Catherine Malabou’s discussions of a delocalised, decentralised, plastic brain. Inspired by Malabou’s materialist methodology, as well as her confrontation of neuroscientific and psychoanalytic paradigms, the article unpacks the imbrication of symbolic and neuro-microbiological treatments of the gut and its excreta. Interlacing the thought of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein and Malabou alongside current MGBA research and critical studies of science and technology, I reveal how symbolic and microbial transmissions in early childhood development reflect a multimodal and multitemporal formation that challenges the established imaginary associated with functional gut and subject development. Secondly, I consider how MGBA research bears upon questions of difference, examining its further materialisation of Malabou’s otherness in a world without exteriority. Through this discussion I question the significance of this biological paradigm shift, as it disturbs notions of agency and the subject/environment distinction, opening to pressing ethical questions at this moment in human history. Through these varied interrogations and provocations, I provide a preliminary window into the potential of MGBA research to enable new departures for thinking the fragmentary movement of form and time underpinning Malabou’s motor schema of plasticity.  相似文献   

4.
ABSTRACT

In Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2014), Catherine Malabou argues that the current schism between innate a priori and a posteriori manufacture is symptomatic of our failure thus far to think the figure of epigenesis. Based primarily on a close reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Malabou maintains that epigenesis configures a possible line of flight beyond both the rigid prior accord of preformation and the magical inorganicism of generatio aequivoca, thereby transforming the principle of reason itself in making available for the first time the generative force proper to thought. In this paper, I aim to further clarify the process of temporal articulation by focusing on the alleged inseparability that Malabou seeks to establish between epigenetic temporality, the biological process to which it refers, and the future of the living being. To this end, I will be guided by three questions: first, why is it that only life possesses the capacity to manufacture within itself the future revelation of prior meaning? Second, on what basis can epigenesis be distinguished from automatism? And third, what exactly is the ‘newly figural’ element of life that for Malabou transforms both the principle of reason and the entire system of critique?  相似文献   

5.
  相似文献   

6.
Abstract

This essay reads Rosi Braidotti's philosophical nomadism from a decolonial perspective with the goal of uncovering the irreducible colonial difference which underlies the Eurocentric ontological vision embedded in Braidotti's reading of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, I read Edouard Glissant in tandem with Deleuze through the notion of the ‘middle’, a key concept which grounds the three thinkers' ontology of multiplicity. To this end, I borrow Nelson Maldonado-Torres' Fanonian critique of Eurocentric ontology and show how Braidotti fails to escape from the trap of Eurocentrism due to her inability to capture the abyssal and totalitarian character of coloniality imprinted in the cry of the damné. Against Braidotti's simplistic misreading of Glissant as a future-oriented constructivist, I argue that the enigmatic trope of Relation in Glissant opens up at the middle space of groundlessness constituting the ontological edifice of the colonial subject: revealing the abyssal middle in which the ineffable experience of shared suffering never stops haunting the freeing knowledge of relation.  相似文献   

7.
How should we write about markets? What responsibilities does this writing bring upon us? This paper offers an immanent critique of ‘market studies’ scholarship, and through this a call to reflection and reformed action. Turning the intellectual framework of market studies upon itself, we come to see its texts as performative and agential. We discuss these qualities and the associated responsibilities via a reading of literature from the domain of ethnography. An auto-ethnographic sketch of market writing allows us to consider the problematic nature of expertise for market studies scholars and the agency and power of our texts. We find a dual moment of performativity from which our texts emerge more powerful than their authors. On this basis we offer a vision of critical interventions embedded in our texts, underpinned by the intellectual axioms of the market studies programme.  相似文献   

8.
The film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, provides a fruitful context for thinking about Deleuze's conceptualisation of structural transformation as a ‘presubjective’ process involving a critical and creative politics of engagement. Nina is a young dancer who has just secured the lead role in the New York Ballet's new production of Swan Lake. This role not only requires her to dance the pure and innocent character of the White Swan – a role that mirrors Nina's character in real life, and for which she is well suited – but also as the seductive and darkly erotic character of the Black Swan, a role quite alien to Nina. The film traces Nina's desperate efforts to meet the demands of this doubled characterisation. Through new forms of engagement with her peers, she enters into a ‘becoming-swan’ that frees her from the restraints and constraints imposed by her existing self. While this transformative process enables her to realise aesthetic perfection in her art, this comes at a heavy price: Nina not only is creatively destabilised, but ultimately is destroyed by the transformation she endures. By considering this work of cinema in light of Deleuze's writings on cinema, on ‘becoming-animal’, and on ‘Porcelain and Volcano’, this essay reflects upon a crucial question underlying much of Deleuze's political thought: how is it possible to privilege radical subjective and social transformation, without these structures of necessary coherence also ‘cracking up’ and being destroyed in the process?  相似文献   

9.
Abstract

This essay revisits the question of post-Shoah responses to cataclysm in light of the now-urgent question of transmission – the shift in mourning and memory between first-generation survivors and later generations. Offering a different but complementary analysis to those in trauma or memory studies, I argue that post-Shoah witness and testimony are acts of ‘irreconcilable mourning’. This sense of mourning departs from post-Freudian approaches that focus on closure. Instead, irreconcilable mourning is a non-totalising approach to loss that resists ‘redemption’ and instead necessitates an ongoing, creative, and critical response to loss. In the course of this argument, I examine first-generation accounts such as Primo Levi's and Elie Wiesel's to highlight the necessity and contingency of transmission by interrogating concepts such as the ‘unsayable’ and the remnant. I then focus on Art Spiegelman's second-generation Maus: A Survivor's Tale, bringing cross-generational questions of witness and testimony as acts of irreconcilable mourning into the fold of Marianne Hirsch's ‘postmemory’ and Edith Wyschogrod's heterological history-telling.  相似文献   

10.
In this paper, I contest the analytic relevance of the term ‘eurocentrism’ to the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation by examining a distinction between ‘place’ and ‘space’. The clash of these two concepts is explored in a controversial review of Gayatri Spivak's latest book by Terry Eagleton. I argue that Eagleton's understanding of Marxist theory implies an intellectual placed at the centre of a sphere of cognitive sovereignty, and that his critique of Spivak consists in suggesting that, by removing herself from this centre, she has rendered her own discourse unintelligible. In contrast, Spivak, as (in part) a poststructuralist, emphasises space over place. I discuss the gains and losses – as well as the dangers – involved in such an emphasis, and conclude by insisting that poststructuralism cannot be a universally applicable meta-theory, but is in fact ideally suited to attesting to the place in which it finds itself.  相似文献   

11.
ABSTRACT

Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, and the subsequent liberalization of the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly, Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming. Today Macau attracts more than 30 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. This article analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was created by a Hong Kong biopharmaceutical company, and designed to appeal to Chinese gamblers in Macau. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation, including calqulation, hedging, arbitrage, and portfolio management. LIVE Baccarat is a biopolitical apparatus of subjection of a post-socialist Chinese homo economicus, a form of ‘human capital’ which Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self.’ This subject not only plays a remunerative role in Macau’s gaming industry, but conforms to China’s macroeconomic goals to engender ‘quality’ citizens equipped to support a domestic consumer market which may supplant the unsustainable production-for-export regime that drove the country’s initial post-reform development.  相似文献   

12.
Abstract

This essay reads two differing conceptions of subjectivity in Frantz Fanon's work as corresponding to a shift in subjective orientation in certain moments of crisis, from what I term a unified individual – the subject of psychoanalysis – to a dispersed subject, the frenzied participant in collective activity. I believe that such a potential duality within the subject is best adopted when analysing Fanon's oeuvre, as well as when examining a subject's behaviour as participant in forms of unstructured collective protest such as rioting. Whereas the unified subject of psychoanalysis best expresses the consciously self-reflective individual in society, the dispersed subject expresses a subjectivity operating in excess of individualism. This dispersed subject acts collectively, as an object moving in tandem with other objects, without individual reflection. I argue that this shift comprises the initial spark of insurrection suggested in Fanon's work, the moment in which he sees the people pitched ‘in a single direction, from which there is no turning back’; and what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the explosive moment of ‘conflagration’. The two subject positions between which the subject shifts exist as two potential sides of every subject and comprise the ‘Manichean’ world in which Fanon's subject is entrenched.  相似文献   

13.
Abstract

This article problematizes the theoretical assumption of communication-as-symbolic that delimits the way identity is theorized. I argue that deconstructing identity requires moving beyond the symbolic construction of social categories, and instead focusing on how a perceptual and embodied subject is constituted through communication. Informed by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenologically driven approach to critical inquiry, I present a multimodal approach that reveals how perceptual subjectivity and the reflexive body are constituted within, and constitutive of, the symbolic mechanisms of social construction. Utilizing various examples pertinent to intercultural communication, I theorize cultural identity through the perspective of communication-as-embodied.  相似文献   

14.
ABSTRACT

Social media is abound with women writing about consumption goods and practices associated with femininity and heterosexual nuclear family life, such as being married, dressing, cooking and home decoration. This article examines how the housewife ideal can be an attractive identity in the 2010s and, drawing on the post-humanist performativity by Karen Barad (2007), it maps the material-discursive agencies that enable the re-emergence of this figure. Building on in-depth interviews with women who refer to themselves as influencers and bloggers, and visual and textual analyses of their Instagram-accounts, including links to sponsors and comments from followers, the article analyzes how the tensions between these women's real lives and their cyber lives, become meaningful in this technological culture. The breaking of boundaries between human and non-human resulting from digital technology has re-configured the housewife role by transforming boundaries between intimate and commercial practices. By focusing on the three areas: Transforming the feminine body, Transforming Intimacy, and Entrepreneurial femininity the article shows how agency emerges from within transforming practices of body, intimacy and entrepreneurship, intra-acting within this new housewife phenomenon. In doing so it discusses the negotiations and space for agency these women thought that digital technologies provided for them.  相似文献   

15.
Abstract

This paper critically examines the questions of agency and subject‐formation in Judith Butler’s book Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). The article problematizes Butler’s defense of agency and argues that her theorization of the subject (however in‐process) as individuated and differentiated from the other involves an economy of le propre (the proper, property, ownership) that establishes the self as a Gestalt totality that must be symptomatically, i.e. narcissistically and aggressively, defended. In contrast to Butler’s ‘account’ of ‘oneself’ I proceed to offer a non‐humanist, non‐individualist, non‐Oedipal perverse model of the subject that rejects the ideological demand of Gestalt totality of identity and destabilizes the borders between self and other. In such a model of perverse personhood there is no identifiable and coherent ‘one’ for which to give an ‘account’.  相似文献   

16.
Abstract

Based on the theoretical concepts of imagined communities (Anderson, 2006), public sphere (Habermas, 1962/1991), and muted groups (Kramarae, 1981), this essay looks at issues of identity and identity formation of the largest European minority—the Roma, or Gypsies. The essay argues that, similarly to the European identity project, the Roma are actively building a transnational identity without abandoning national identities. Although this model can be a valuable blueprint for increasingly globalizing societies, it is neglected as a possibility because of Roma's marginal social status. Further exploration of self-organized Roma identity-construction is advised.  相似文献   

17.
ABSTRACT

Drawing upon the lived experiences of 35 female sex workers (FSW) in Kathmandu, Nepal, this article explores the performativity of sex work–mother dual identities. Performativity presents a way to rupture proscribed singular identities of being a sex worker and highlight agency through the act of expressing dual identities. Global South research has established a link between mothers’ vulnerability and the likelihood of sex work becoming the means of livelihood. Thematic analysis highlights performativity of the dual identities as well as highlighting agency of FSWs to navigate economic necessity, stigmatized societal conditions, gender inequalities, and motherhood through performativity of dual identities.  相似文献   

18.
Judith Butler's work on performativity takes an explicitly Foucauldian approach to politics. The economic performativity literature, in comparison, has been criticised for failing to foreground power. This paper uses a case study of market creation in UK marine fisheries to suggest, after Butler, ways in which a Foucauldian analysis of the exercise of power can inform our understanding of economic performativity.  相似文献   

19.
Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistleblower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics.  相似文献   

20.
In recent years, significant studies of finance have explored, on the one hand, the ways in which a specific financial theory might act as a ‘performative utterance’ which through its use makes itself true and, on the other hand, the ways in which discourses and practices of finance might act as continuous performatives that constitute key categories of finance and the financial subject. On first glance, the idea of self-actualising financial theory might seem closer to J. L. Austin's original conception of the performative utterance. However, in this article, I argue for the need to reclaim the Austinian heritage for the broader and more generic understanding of performative finance as well. In this sense, I suggest, a return to Austin reveals the importance of maintaining a focus not only on the potential performance of financial theory, but also those discourses and practices of finance that make up the deeper layers of performativity. I use questions about the role of financial engineering in the sub-prime crisis to illustrate that it is only through a conception of performative finance as self-actualising theories and as discourses and practices that the often obscured layers of financial engineering in society can be fully understood.  相似文献   

设为首页 | 免责声明 | 关于勤云 | 加入收藏

Copyright©北京勤云科技发展有限公司  京ICP备09084417号