Part I of this article advanced a new theory of humor, the Enlightenment Theory, while contrasting it with other main theories, including the Incongruity, Repression/Relief/Release, and Superiority Theories. The Enlightenment Theory does not contradict these other theories but rather subsumes them. As argued, each of the other theories cannot account for all the aspects of humor explained by the Enlightenment Theory. Part II shows how the Enlightenment Theory meets challenging issues in humor theory where other theories falter, (...) including failed humor, motivation for humor, tickling, laughing gas, and sadistic humor. Also mentioned are the Enlightenment Theory's application to literary and musical humor and the relationship of wit to humor. -/- . (shrink)

L'humour en musique n'a pas bonne presse. Labile, déroutant, anecdotique, il a été vilipendé par certains philosophes et compositeurs de la modernité – Schopenhauer, Adorno, Varèse et Boulez en tête – tandis que d'autres – Bergson, Jankélévitch – y voyaient l'expression d'une légèreté sérieuse, l'essence même de l'art. Après une période de déni, consécutive à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, l'humour musical se manifeste depuis les années 1960 chez de multiples compositeurs comme Mauricio Kagel, Gyêrgy Ligeti, Luc Ferrari, Luciano Berio, (...) Bruno Maderna, Arvo Part, Krzysztof Penderecki, Régis Campo, etc. Les quatorze articles réunis dans ce volume tentent tout d'abord d'en éclaircir les principales nuances et de caractériser les cousinages avec le comique, la satire, la parodie, l'ironie. Un deuxième temps est consacré à l'étude du rire musical, ses techniques et sa sémantique. Sans être toujours attaché à l'humour, il engendre des significations secondaires : la peur, la folie, le désespoir. La dernière partie aborde l'esthétique de la satire, qui révèle de riches intertextualités, en particulier à travers le détournement de citations. Y sont également abordés les liens qu'entretiennent l'humour et ses dérivés avec les mutations postmodernes et hypermodernes des sociétés occidentales. (shrink)

Part I of this article advances a new theory of humor, the Enlightenment Theory, while contrasting it with other main theories, including the Incongruity, Repression/Relief/Release, and Superiority Theories. The Enlightenment Theory does not contradict these other theories but rather subsumes them. As argued, each of the other theories cannot account for all the aspects of humor explained by the Enlightenment Theory. The discussion is illustrated with examples of humor and explores the acts and circumstances of humor, (...) its literary and artistic expressions, and its physical reactions. Part II shows how the Enlightenment Theory meets challenging issues in humor theory where other theories sometimes falter, including issues such as failed humor, motivation for humor, tickling, laughing gas, and sadistic humor. Also mentioned are literary and musical humor and the relationship of wit to humor. (shrink)

The question “What is humour?” has exercised in varying degrees such philosophers as Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer and Bergson and has traditionally been regarded as a philosophical question. And surely it must still be regarded as a philosophical question at least in so far as it is treated as a conceptual one. Traditionally the question has been regarded as a search for the essence of humour, whereas nowadays it has become almost a reflex response among some philosophers to dismiss (...) the search for essences as misconceived. Humour, it will be said, is a family-resemblance concept: no one could hope to compile any short list of essential properties abstracted from all the many varieties of humour— human misfortune and clumsiness, obscenity, grotesqueness, veiled insult, nonsense, wordplay and puns, human misdemeanours and so on, as manifested in forms as varied as parody, satire, drama, clowning, music, farce and cartoons. Yet even if the search for the essence of humour seems at first sight unlikely to succeed, I do not see how we can be sure in advance of any conceptual investigation; and in any case we might do well to start with the old established theories purporting to give the essence of humour, for even if they are wrong they may be illuminatingly wrong and may help us to compile a list of typical characteristics. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis, and its ensuing periods of confinement, has generated high levels of social stress on a global scale. In Spain, citizens were isolated in their homes and were not able to interact physically with family members, friends or co-workers. Different resources were employed to face this new stressful and unexpected situation (fitness, reading, painting, meditation, mindfulness, dancing, listening to music, playing instruments, cooking, etc.). Humor was one of the most frequent and widely used strategies in an attempt (...) to keep perspective, deal with the seriousness of the situation and make the day-to-day more bearable. Humor is cultural: it varies from one country to the next and is part of the idiosyncrasies of a culture. It is deemed a particularly important feature of the Spanish personality. During the COVID-19 crisis, the main means or channels of communication were social networks. Throughout the confinement period, there was an excessive flow of humorous memes concerning Coronavirus and related shared experiences during the National State of Emergency decreed by the Spanish Government. The memes draw on irony, ingenuity and creativity to make a difficult and stressful experience more bearable. In this paper, a qualitative methodology based on ethnography research is used and ethnographic fieldwork is carried out on the memes disseminated through WhatsApp during the lockdown period experienced in Spain (14 March to 21 June 2020). The memes are considered to be an example of Netlore, digital contemporary folklore, and a theoretical framework on memes and humor is presented that discusses its different functions in order to channel grief, fear and suffering or to play down specific situations. A corpus of 644 memes that have flooded social networks are categorized and analyzed to witness how the Spanish have managed to bring out their humorous and creative side in difficult times even as they have criticized political decisions, let out their frustrations, described their new “normal” lives, interacted with others and anticipated the future. (shrink)

Magic and Vegas have a lot in common. Both have a reputation for bad taste and cheap thrills, and they’ve both generally been ignored—or at best ridiculed—by the art-critical establishment. It’s fitting, then, that no city loves magic like Vegas loves magic. Today, more than one-third of its top-selling shows feature magic, and this means that no complete treatment of art and entertainment in Sin City can afford to ignore it. But what’s at risk here is more than theoretical completeness. (...) Magic provides a distinctive—and distinctively powerful—form of aesthetic experience whose appeal spans very different cultures, age groups, and historical periods. Recognizing this opens a variety of theoretical doors and raises a host of questions, among them the issue of the relationship between magic and other genres and art forms. Indeed, magic performances are often complex theatrical events that incorporate drama, humor, elements of horror, and—critically for present concern—music. While these are sometimes incidental accretions, mere presentational window-dressing for the magic trick itself, they can also be tools in the magician’s toolbox. For example, magicians widely appreciate that a joke can be good for more than a laugh: in virtue of how it shapes the audience’s attention, it can directly contribute to the success of a trick. -/- In this chapter, I argue that the same is true of music, and that magicians employ it not only to set the mood and highlight dramatic moments, but to facilitate the deception that’s necessary for the experience of magic itself. As we will see, music can frame, stimulate, and illuminate, but it can simultaneously also block and blind. No wonder, then, that it’s everywhere in Vegas, which, like magic, works only if we’re receptive to the illusions it openly manufactures. (shrink)

The exhilarating mix of humor, philosophy, fact and whimsy that marks these essays derives from more than 200 lectures Bruce Adolphe has given over most of the ...

Le politique et le chanteur : deux figures qui semblent bien éloignées mais que l’auteur rassemble en partant de la scène kinoise. Stratégie de subversion, culte de la personnalité, culture du clash, soutien de supporters, fonctionnement en factions : avec humour, l’auteur dresse des parallèles entre les univers musicaux et politiques pour, d’une part, souligner combien la musique porte une large part de politique et pour, d’autre part, déconstruire l’autorité du champ politique par la dérision. La dictature est ainsi lue (...) comme le plébiscite, par les masses, d’hommes de scènes, passés maîtres dans la gestion des slogans et des bonnes répliques. Les stars de la chanson, de leur côté, sont partie prenante des campagnes électorales et participent aux stratégies de marketing de la scène politique. Au-delà des jeux de rapprochement, l’article interroge la fabrication des élites, l’espace médiatique, la création des « stars » et l’usage de la parole politique. (shrink)

The title of this collection of essays refers to a tailor's mannequin that Alfred Brendel spotted in a shop window in Arezzo, a small Tuscan town. Who is this strange lady? And why is she carrying an egg on her head? What is she looking at? The mannequin was purchased and now graces a room in the attic of Brendel's house in Hampstead. Her features convey great artistic seriousness in combination with absurd comedy: the epitome of his own musical (...) and literary preferences. And so, in his delightful new collection, great masters of nonsense meet great masters of music. (shrink)

Impossible objects are those about which the philosopher, narrowly conceived, can hardly speak: poetry, film, music, humor. Such "objects" do not rely on philosophy for interpretation and understanding; they are already independent practices and sites of sensuous meaning production. As Elvis Costello has said, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." We don't need literary theory in order to be riveted by the poem, nor a critic's analysis to enjoy a film. How then can philosophy speak about anything (...) outside of itself, namely all of those things which actually matter to us in this world? In Impossible Objects, Simon Critchley - one of the most influential and insightful philosophers writing today - extends his philosophical investigation into non-philosophical territories, including discussions on tragedy, poetry, humor, and music. In a series of engaging and enlightening conversations, Critchley reflects on his early work on the ethics of deconstruction; the recurring themes of mortality and nihilism; his defense of neo-anarchism; and his recent investigation into secular faith, or "a faith of the faithless". Essential reading for artists, academics, and general readers alike, this book explores the relationship between the philosophical world and those complex and fascinating "impossible objects" which give life meaning. (shrink)

Impossible objects are those about which the philosopher, narrowly conceived, can hardly speak: poetry, film, music, humor. Such "objects" do not rely on philosophy for interpretation and understanding; they are already independent practices and sites of sensuous meaning production. As Elvis Costello has said, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." We don't need literary theory in order to be riveted by the poem, nor a critic's analysis to enjoy a film. How then can philosophy speak about anything (...) outside of itself, namely all of those things which actually matter to us in this world? In Impossible Objects, Simon Critchley - one of the most influential and insightful philosophers writing today - extends his philosophical investigation into non-philosophical territories, including discussions on tragedy, poetry, humor, and music. In a series of engaging and enlightening conversations, Critchley reflects on his early work on the ethics of deconstruction; the recurring themes of mortality and nihilism; his defense of neo-anarchism; and his recent investigation into secular faith, or "a faith of the faithless". Essential reading for artists, academics, and general readers alike, this book explores the relationship between the philosophical world and those complex and fascinating "impossible objects" which give life meaning. (shrink)

This article describes a team-taught environmental studies course called Animal Metaphors. Focusing on animal metaphors in literature and film, the course emphasizes various cognitive and perceptual biases that lead humans to place ourselves above and beyond nature, making us more likely to engage in practices destructive to the environment. Whereas the first iteration of the course underscored various ways in which humans are less rational or moral than we imagine, the new iteration shifted more of the focus to what inspires (...) and motivates humans, gives us emotional resilience, and best creates conditions for mental well-being as we cooperate and collaborate. This seemed an appropriate tack to take in an age commonly referred to as the “Anthropocene.” We thus continued to examine our status as evolved animals while also calling more attention to spiritual or ecstatic experience, music, humor, and the uniquely human ability for shared intentionality. (shrink)

Ein Mund mit zwei Ohren -- Daniil charms. Es war einmal ein Mensch ; Milieuszene : ein Vaudeville ; Anekdoten aus dem Leben Puškins ; Der Erginder Anton Pavlovič Šilov -- Alles und nichts. Zum Dada-Jahr 2016 -- Welimir Chlebnikow. Beschwörung durch Lachen ; Luftigen Luftold ; Schwarzlieb -- Die Dame aus Arezzo -- Charles Amberg. Ich reiss' mir eine Wimper aus -- Paul Scheerbart. Singende Schlangen -- Kurt Schwitters. Kleines Gedicht für grosse Stotterer -- Zu Haydns "Sieben letzten Worten" (...) -- Musik: Licht und Dunkel! -- "Winterreise" -- Hans Arp. Der Pyramidenrock ; Aus Konstellationen -- Ernst Jandl. Steinbock ; Reihe ; Hünpisch ; Wien: Heldenplatz ; Gemischter Satz -- Mein muikalisches Leben -- Christian Morgenstern. Das grosse Lalula ; Die Geruchs-Orgel ; Das Knie -- Über Humor, Sinn und Unsinn. (shrink)

This infamous book has enjoyed a lively underground reputation since its first publication in 1970. Richard Meltzer (a.k.a. R. Meltzer) took his training as a young philosopher and applied it with unalloyed enthusiasm to the lyrics, sound, and culture of rock and roll. Never before had anyone noticed the relationship between the philosophy of Heidegger and a tune by Little Anthony and the Imperials, heard the cries of agony in the Shangri Las' “Remember (Walkin' in the Sand)”, or transcribed every (...) "papa-ooma-mow-mow" in the Trashmen's “Surfin' Bird.”From Dionne Warwick to Plato, Jim Morrison to Bert Brecht, Conway Twitty to Miguel de Unamuno, Meltzer subverts high and low culture in his search for meaning, emotion, and codes in popular music. At once an earnest investigation and a crypto put-on, the book can be read for its nuggets of information and insights or for its humor. Here with Greil Marcus's new introduction, yet another generation of readers can be outraged and inspired. (shrink)

Why is humour so hard to understand? Rather like attempts to explain how music can move us, attempts to explain why things are funny seem doomed from the outset. Discussions of humour typically distinguish three kinds of theory: the incongruity theory (we are amused by the incongruous), the relief theory (humour is an expression of relief in difficult situations) and the superiority theory (we laugh to express our sense of superiority over others). In the face of genuine humour, theories like (...) these can seem pedestrian and unconvincing. F.H. Buckley’s book is, unfortunately, no exception to this rule. Coming from the superiority camp, the book defends two theses about humour. (Professor Buckley’s own word is ‘laughter’, but it is clear that he is really interested in why we laugh rather than laughter itself.) The first is what he calls the ‘Positive’ thesis: that all humour is the expression of a sense of superiority over someone else, whom he names ‘the butt’. The second he calls the ‘Normative’ thesis: that those who laugh really are superior to the butt. (shrink)

Aesthetic Pursuits is a new collection of essays from Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today, focusing on literature, film, and visual art, while addressing issues of humour, beauty, and the emotions. More than half of the essays in the volume are previously unpublished.

Warren Zevon’s musical career, though brilliant throughout, is particularly notable for its ending: diagnosed with a terminal illness, Zevon refused a potentially debilitating medical treatment to put his remaining energy into recording another album. The resulting record –2003’s 'The Wind' – was in many ways the perfect farewell: songs of dirty, dark, uncompromising, country-tinged rock, blistering guitar solos, all mixed with intelligent, black-as-coal gallows humour. But it was also a moving farewell to his fans, a heartfelt, personal reflection on (...) his life and impending death: it begins with the words “sometimes I feel like my shadow’s casting me” and ends with “keep me in your heart for a while”. 'The Wind' ranks among Zevon’s very best and belongs in the same category as albums like David Bowie’s 'Blackstar' and Leonard Cohen’s 'You Want It Darker': works of great artists that knew the end was coming and made that knowledge musical. But though it had a particular force towards the end, death had always featured as a prominent theme in Zevon’s music. In fact, the albums that preceded his terminal diagnosis – especially 2000’s 'Life’ll Kill Ya' – have a marked preoccupation with death and dying, and many of his song’s characters (gunmen, gangsters, boxers, murderers of all stripes) either dealt death out, died, or both. -/- In this chapter, I argue that Zevon’s music and speech in his late public appearances personify an idea in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy called ‘authentic being-towards-death’. In his landmark text 'Being and Time', Heidegger undertakes a painstaking analysis of human existence. One of its conclusions is that to live a fully authentic life, we must reckon with our mortality, come to terms with it and allow this reckoning to have a transformative effect on how we live and how we think about our existence. This results, Heidegger argues, in a distinct way of being that he calls ‘being-towards-death’ and ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ in the face of death. Authentic being, which involves properly taking ownership of our lives and their meaning, cannot be adequately achieved without a serious confrontation with the fact that we will one day die. I claim that Warren Zevon’s music, with its continual engagement with death which culminates in 'The Wind', is one of the great musical manifestations of exactly this type of project. Heidegger’s writing is often notoriously abstract, but it pertains to the most fundamental issues about what it means to be human. Engaging with it alongside Zevon’s music provides a fruitful opportunity to make it concrete, better able to understand its most important aspects while providing an interesting conceptual toolkit to apply to the music of one of the great songwriters of death. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Manos HadjidakisThe Story of an Anarchic Youth and a "Magnus Eroticus"Yiannis MiralisThe name of Manos Hadjidakis is probably unknown to contemporary musicians and music educators. After all, the Greek composer achieved his international fame back in 1961 when he won an Oscar for his soundtrack of the movie, "Never on Sunday." Numerous other awards followed from England, France, Germany, and of course, Greece. After his six years in New (...) York City (1966-1972), the composer returned to Greece where he produced a wealth of diverse musical work and had a profound impact on every aspect of Greek cultural life.Through his radio lectures, the notes on the covers of his records, and his articles in a variety of magazines and newspapers, he expressed his often radical ideas without any fear, but with honesty and passion. His commentaries covered a wide variety of topics such as music, poetry, and the arts, politics and nationalism in art, music education, tradition and change, and the overall cultural problems and dilemmas of his time. The magnitude of his musical and artistic work is yet to be fully discovered and appreciated.In this paper, I will provide a biography of Manos Hadjidakis with a closer [End Page 43] examination and description of his multifaceted work. Through this attempt, a better understanding of who Hadjidakis was and the impact that he had on the musical and cultural life of modern-day Greece will emerge. I decided to use numerous direct quotes from Hadjidakis' books and interviews not only because he eloquently expresses his thoughts and ideas, but also because through these quotes one can get a clear sense of his humor, intellect, and personality. This paper may also serve as food for thought for music educators in and outside of Greece. I say this because much of his work and thought remains unknown to the general public, as well as to music performers and educators. Unfortunately, to some extent this is true even in his own home country of Greece. Even though Hadjidakis was not a music educator in the specific sense of the term, many of the things that he fought for and achieved in his life had an identifiable educational component in them. For example, before each of the performances of the Orchestra of Colors that he founded and conducted, Hadjidakis always gave elaborate lectures on the composers and on the works to be performed at the amphitheatre of the Medical School of the University of Athens. Overall, if we use the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "education" as "culture or development of powers, formation of character, as contrasted with the imparting of mere knowledge or skill,"1 Hadjidakis can be regarded as a true educator and many of his ideas have a direct implication for music education and education in general. This is what I will examine in the second part of this paper, focusing especially on his ideas on Eros and the importance of song.Hadjidakis' ChildhoodHadjidakis was born on October 23, 1925 in the city of Xanthi in northern Greece. The city was thriving due to the local cultivation and sale of tobacco. His father was a tobacco merchant and his family was initially well off and able to pay for his piano lessons. After the death of his father in 1931, when Hadjidakis was only six years old, the family moved to Athens where he attended high school at nighttime, while working various jobs during the day.During World War II Hadjidakis became involved in a number of political organizations and simultaneously took lessons in diction in order to realize his dream of becoming an actor. However, because he had difficulty pronouncing the letter "r," he had to turn his attention and creativity away from acting and in a different direction. Additionally he received some formal training in classical music, but according to his own words,[m]y relationships with formal music studies were extremely similar to my relationships with dentists; I always approached them and always left them before the end of the treatment. When I was eighteen years old I gave up [End Page 44] music and I surrendered myself to poetry. When... (shrink)

My dissertation, “Love, Self-Constitution, and Practical Necessity,” offers an interpretation of love between people. Love is puzzling because it appears to involve essentially both rational and non-rational phenomena. We are accountable to those we love, so love seems to participate in forms of necessity, commitment, and expectation, which are associated with morality. But non-rational attitudes—forms of desire, attraction, and feeling—are also central to love. Consequently, love is not obviously based in rationality or inclination. In contrast to views that attempt to (...) fit love into existing models of practical reasoning, I argue that love participates in a unique form of practical necessity, different from both moral and psychological necessity, yet bearing resemblances to each. Distinctive to this type of practical necessity is a direct appeal to another particular person that cannot be delivered in third-personal terms—that is, a non-moral yet normative type of expectation on another person. This type of expectation is predominant in loving relationships, but can also make better sense of the experiences of humor and beauty, as well as attitudes like forgiveness, gratitude, and agent-regret. I treat Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the experience of beauty in the Critique of Judgment and Christine Korsgaard’s work on self-constitution as fruitful starting points for this account of love. I conclude that our loving relationships enable us to have distinctive personal selves, and provide support for this account of love by offering a complementary theory of grief. In Part One of the dissertation, I focus on two prominent approaches to love characteristic of the sentimentalist and rationalist traditions. I begin with the work of David Hume, which treats desire (understood as something like a simple impulse or craving) as the paradigmatic mental state, and emphasizes our personal and affective dimensions. Hume has the valuable insight that loving someone affects our sense of ourselves. But Hume’s view becomes unsatisfying when he claims that love is essentially enfeebling, implying that to love is to be passive toward and readily overcome by another person. While this indicates Hume’s awareness that love involves being open and receptive to another person, the problem is that love is also a demanding attitude. Hume lacks the conceptual resources to offer a nuanced view of the self, in which we can—with one attitude—be both demanding of and vulnerable to another person. Hume’s model of a desire-based deliberative process has recently been revived in Harry Frankfurt’s discussions on love and rationality. Frankfurt, however, goes beyond Hume’s picture of the self by introducing a notion of “identification,” which he offers to make sense of our apparent ability to commit ourselves decisively to certain projects or people. I argue that active powers like identification and commitment cannot be accommodated within any basically Humean moral psychology. Such abilities, and with them the possibility of love, depend on something closer to a Kantian conception of rational agency. I next focus on the work of Kant, who provides the substantial counterpart to Humean-inspired moral theories, but is not known for his insight into our emotional lives. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant divides love into “practical love”—what we experience when we are morally motivated to help someone—and “pathological love”—what we experience when we feel fond of something. But in reality, we experience love neither as a mere preference for another person, nor as something that generates the kind of demands that would be binding on any rational creature. David Velleman attempts to remedy the deficiency of Kant’s dichotomy. Velleman offers a Kantian theory in which he describes love and respect as two ends of a continuum of attitudes that it is morally appropriate to have toward people. Velleman’s view has the peculiar implication that everyone deserves the love of everyone else, and I argue that this is a fatal flaw. Like Kant and Velleman, Korsgaard characterizes personal love as involving the treatment of other people as Kantian ends-in-themselves to a heightened degree. Korsgaard, though, also contends that our individual identities depend upon our personal relationships, and I take this position seriously for the remainder of the dissertation. Ultimately, however, characterizations of loving relations as subsets of moral relations can account for the authority of the demands of love, but not its particularity. The major conclusion of Part One is that any attempt to understand love primarily on a model of practical reasoning with which we are already familiar is doomed to fail. Our experience of love calls for a theory of a unique type of practical necessity. In Part Two I take seriously the possibility that love is simultaneously inescapable (in something like the way morality is supposed to be), and yet ineluctably personal. In love, we experience an engagement with a person as essentially particular, rather than as an instance of a rational agent in general. To make sense of this direct attachment to an individual, I argue that love involves distinctive forms of expectation and disappointment. When those we love let us down, they hurt our feelings, which is not a response to a failed prediction, but nor is it a reaction to a moral insult or offense. According to Peter Strawson and Stephen Darwall, second-personal moral reactive attitudes (such as resentment) always have third-personal analogues (such as indignation). In contrast, I argue that the type of hurt feelings associated with love is a second-personal reactive attitude that does not have a third-personal corollary. I take this as evidence that the expectations involved in love are not objective in the way that the moral is objective. Nor, however, is love a matter of mere preference. On my interpretation, Kant introduces this different type of expectation in the Critique of Judgment. Whereas he characterizes moral judgments as universally communicable, judgments of beauty implicitly involve only second-personal address: I appeal to your direct experience with a particular object. This provides the conceptual space for an account of love according to which it involves a uniquely second-personal form of practical necessity. I contend that the second-personal addresses we make in love are appeals to strengthen the intimacy implicit in the loving relationship, and I identify three interrelated dimensions of that intimacy. First, those we love have the standing to interpret us in a constitutive manner. We fine-tune and make determinate the character of our concerns and interests in part by accepting the interpretations provided by those we love. In that way, the people we love have the normative power to constitute who we are. Second, we share a perspective with those we love in a way that is not reducible to or derivative of our independent perspectives. Loving someone centrally involves the activity of forming concerns together, and we do this in a mode best understood on the model of playing a spontaneous game or improvising music. Finally, being loved enables us to see ourselves as distinctive and special, because the concern those who love us have for us does not track the objective merit of our characteristics. These dimensions of the intimacy that characterizes a loving relationship reveal what it is that we appeal for in love, and how we are hurt when our appeals are rebuffed. In broad terms, this dissertation advocates the recognition of a non-moral yet normative type of expectation, which is predominant in loving relationships. Humor and beauty, too, make more sense when understood in terms of this non-moral yet normative type of expectation, as they involve appeals to others that are more than mere predictions of, but less than rational demands for, a certain kind of response. Introducing this alternative notion of expectation into the discourse of moral philosophy can shed light on other common attitudes that are clearly normative, but defy translation into objective, third-personal terms. Such attitudes include certain experiences of pride and shame, apology and forgiveness, the bestowing of mercy, gratitude, agent-regret, and perhaps a basic sense of trust we have in others. Ultimately, I situate love in respect to grief, which demonstrates my theory’s ability to make sense of related dimensions of our emotional lives. The people we love and grieve over give us a sense of who we are as distinctive, particular individuals, as the three interrelated dimensions of intimacy in loving relationships reveal. Consequently, grief is best understood as a type of practical disorientation—namely, a disorientation that involves the loss of the personal self. I present my account of grief against the type of account that would draw philosophical conclusions about the nature of love and grief from empirical psychological data alone. In particular, these data indicate that we recover quickly from the deaths of loved ones, and Dan Moller draws the philosophical conclusion that those we love fulfill certain roles in our lives and are replaceable. In contrast, I contend that while we should acknowledge the truth of the objective judgment, made in the third-person, that we will likely recover after the deaths of those we love, it does not follow that we must affirm such a claim from the internal perspective of one person who loves another. As a result, the case of love and grief supports a general claim concerning the proper work of moral philosophy, which is that the understanding of ourselves gained through empirical data is not a substitute for the normative conclusions that are revealed through first-personal reflections on our relationships. (shrink)

I remember distinctly the moment I heard “All My Loving”, the first song by the Beatles I ever heard, in 1963 when I was 10 years of age. While puzzled by the unconventional long hair of the musicians of whom I had heard rumors, the music touched me. It felt right. I got a similar feeling when I started to read Carlin Romano’s hefty book in digital format one night in Athens whilst I was attending the World Congress of Philosophy. (...) I was impressed by its rakish humor, joyful style, its warm, friendly, inspired scholarship, and the author’s passion to uncover the relevance, grandeur and vitality of the philosophizing attitude as the author saw it. The book covered many thinkers far beyond my expertise and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Professor CorlessRose DrewDo We Go from Here? The Many Religions and the Next Step. Over the years, his works examined Buddhist teachings and practices, Christian teachings and practices, Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and interreligious dialogue; more recently his focus had turned to queer dharma topics and same-sex issues.A memorial service, "We Are Life, Its Shining Gift," was held for Roger on March 10, 2007, in San Francisco. Friends and colleagues (...) spoke of Roger's life and accomplishments and his impact on their lives. There were Buddhist chanting and Christian hymns, with the service opening and closing with two musical pieces selected by Roger for that purpose: "The Swan of Tuonela" by Jean Sibelius and "The Lark Ascending" by Sir Ralph Vaughn William.Monetary memorial gifts are being received by the Society for Buddhist Christian Studies to be used in some fashion toward the 8th International Buddhist-Christian Dialogue to be held in 2009. Gifts should be sent to SBCS Corless Memorial Fund, CSSR Executive Office, Rice University MS 156, PO Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251-1892. To donate by credit card, call 713-348 5721.I was about six months into my current PhD research on Buddhist-Christian dual religious identity when I read a profile of Roger Corless in which he spoke about his own Buddhist-Christian identity (or "identities," because Roger saw his Buddhist "self " and his Christian "self " as two distinct identities). Roger immediately earned a place on my "most wanted" list, and when the time came to approach potential interviewees, I was delighted to find that Roger was eager, despite his failing health, to share with me the results of his "experiment" in dual belonging. So, last spring, I stayed with him for a few days and we talked at length about his religious thought and practice.That Roger was a remarkable man is clearly evident in his work: his wit and playful sense of humor, his sharp and inquisitive mind and vast knowledge of his subject, his intellectual integrity and concern for authenticity, and his insightful and innovative perspectives. Roger also possessed a healthy awareness of the potential for theology and "dharmology" to fail to do justice to the Christian's and the Buddhist's experience (which was what he considered to be crucial)—an awareness that was complemented by his remarkable ability to combine an intuitive, emotional response to truth and a sensitivity to the power of myth, symbolism, and poetry, with a thoroughgoing academic rigor. Sometimes he might start an essay with a song and, then, as he put it, "try to convert it into a philosophy," asking any readers who felt he had failed in the conversion to return again to the song, because, as far as he was concerned, the song would be true even if he himself had not correctly understood it. When I met Roger in person, I was delighted to find my sense of his intuitive spirituality, rich imagination, and shrewd intelligence confirmed, and was immediately struck also by his disarming honesty and humbling humility.It is a great privilege to have had the opportunity to meet Roger and talk [End Page 153] with him about his fascinating ideas. I was not always sure I fully understood them, and we certainly did not agree on everything: argue though we did about his notion that there could be more than one "Absolute," we never did come to share a perspective. But his ideas nevertheless continue to be a challenge to me and a reminder of the need for all of us engaged in dialogue to be respectful of the integrity of the religious traditions, and a warning to anyone who, like Roger, sees himself or herself as a person who, rather than simply being engaged in dialogue, is a dialogue, to be wary of quick-fix solutions to the questions and difficulties he or she inevitably faces. As far as Roger was concerned, it was better to live as an authentic Buddhist and as an authentic Christian and to accept what he took to be their conceptual irreconcilability than to accept any tidy reconciliation that might reduce both to the status of merely partial truths... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Benjamin ReduxGerhard RichterProfane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen; 271 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, $35.00 cloth, $14.00 paper.Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, by John McCole; xiii & 329 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.Walter Benjamin’s Passages, by Pierre Missac, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson; xvii & 221 pp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995, $25.00.Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: (...) Destruction and Experience, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne; xiv & 298 pp. London: Routledge, 1994, $65.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success,” writes Emerson in his 1860 essay “Culture.” 1 Perhaps at no point since the publication of Emerson’s essay has the diagnosis it advances been more relevant than today, some 136 years later, when “Culture,” at least in the methodological and political struggles within the academy, has again become the word of ambition. As in Emerson’s nineteenth-century America, those who today pursue that word most ardently also tend—in their struggle to explicate history and culture—to shy away from the persistent instability of meaning with which the texts that they take as their objects of study are vexed. In other words, they are afraid of earthquakes. For Emerson continues: [End Page 200] “There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your word, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.” 2It has become one of the methodological orthodoxies of the new contextualism, the increasingly prominent engine driving a continuing metamorphosis of what is perhaps no longer usefully called “Humanities,” to posit a relatively transparent, unproblematic relationship between a textual artifact and its larger cultural or historical context. It is precisely this complex relationship between text and culture—and the theoretical possibility of doing justice to it—that this review of four new publications on Walter Benjamin will revisit.The urgent promise to think through the complicated relationship between text and culture, between the idiomatic artifact and its historical formation, has yet to be fulfilled. How does one account for the singularity of a specific instance of signification, be it a literary text, a film, or a neon sign, articulating the relationship between it and the cultural paradigm that gave rise to it and to which it gave rise? How might one talk about a text’s historicity without forcing a hasty assimilation of it into a crudely mimetic model? One way out of the difficulty, of course, is to suppress the vicissitudes of language altogether, with an eye to hastening the assimilation of a text, seen primarily as illustrative or evidential material, into pre-established assumptions. An example of such a dissatisfactory answer can be found in the introduction to a recent programmatic publication, in which the editors triumphantly proclaim: “Thus, for example, although there is no prohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they are also not required.” 3 A marked dislike of earthquakes is at work here. What is more, the logic of such a statement goes as follows: because close reading is no longer necessary, it is dispensable, and therefore eventually no longer performed at all. One is tempted to invoke the famous language of Kafka’s chaplain in The Trial who reprimands Joseph K. for his failure to read closely: “You have not enough respect for writing and you are altering the story.” 4Such methodological difficulties only get worse when one considers the particular problem posed to scholarship by the case of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish critic, writer, and philosopher now widely regarded as one of the most significant theorists of our century. On the [End Page 201] one... (shrink)

Now that the collective death of mankind has become a possibility, no other thought can remain unimpaired. Harry Redner traces historically the onset of this acute state of Nihilism from what might be called the Faustian revolution, symbolized by Faust's pronouncement “In the beginning was the Deed.” Redner reflects on the passage of the three main Fausts, from Marlowe’s to Goethe’s to Thomas Mann’s, and this reflection serves as the dramatic metaphor for a review of the relationship of Progress to (...) Nihilism in modern civilization. Starting with an exposition of the key Faustian thinkers—Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger—the book proceeds by examining the dominant modern ideas on Man, Time, and Nihilism with reference to Foucault, Derrida, and Althusser. It focuses on Language, which is a key preoccupation of all these thinkers but has not yet been taken far enough to afford a basis for the explanation of fundamental changes in civilization. Language in its creative and destructive functions, as constituting both the conscious and unconscious of a culture, is reconceived so as to account for the hidden link between Progress and Nihilism. The author then explores sociologically the dominant aspects of Progress in terms of the ideas of Weber, Adorno, and Marcuse on Technology, Subjectivity, and Activism. Finally, an extensive literary study of the three main Fausts concludes with a coda on the future of music. In the Beginning Was the Deed is lucid and direct, tinged with wry humor. Redner represent Man in the nuclear age and reflects on that representation, seeking to comprehend our era, draw ethical and political conclusions, and explore action as a response to the threat of annihilation. (shrink)

The article deals with the determining role of the primary literary source on the Ukrainian theme in the creation of ballets. This made it possible to assert that at the junction of various arts, choreography and its special plastic form contribute to the creation of new avant-garde forms of art, thereby realizing the richest artistic potential of the direction. Based on this, it becomes clear that the relationship between literary and choreographic arts is close, because it affects the enrichment of (...) the ballet repertoire. Creating a choreographic work based on a literary background is one of the most important achievements of choreography.The artistic integrity of choreographic works forms the basis of the principle of art synthesis. The author of the article determined the important role of Ukrainian dance in creating a choreographic performance based on a literary source, because Ukrainian choreographic art is noted for its inexhaustible wealth of dance colors, emotional fervor, subtle folk humor and sincerity of performance, therefore creating a choreographic work based on literary works, especially on national themes, which is an auxiliary factor for activating the harmonious interrelationship of the specified time, space and transmitted events of the work with the means of stage and everyday dance vocabulary. The aim. The purpose and task of the article is to show the interpretation of literary works in the Ukrainian choreographic art of the 20th and early 21 centuries. Research methodology. A content-comparative method for comparing the works of researchers in different fields, the method of historicism - for researching a phenomenon within specific chronological limits, the method of generalization - for identifying the common and different points of view of scientists on the phenomenon under study. Research results: however, in the Ukrainian ballet theater of the late 50s of the 20th century, new aesthetic principles began to dominate, which were of great importance for the development of all musical and choreographic creativity. It is about rejecting prosaic plausibility as the only way to reproduce the truth of life on stage, restoring the hegemony of dance in the system of expressive means. In the ballet work of Ukrainian artists, the direction towards the heroization of the genre, the tendency towards the epic type of drama and the wide use of folklore becomes noticeable. Conclusion. In the process of working on the embodiment of a literary work or an image, the dramaturgy has the ability to change, develop, acquire specific features and details, the dramaturgy becomes alive, filled and exciting for the viewer. The ballet master’s solution to the embodiment of the literary source is embodied by the ballet dancers, who bring it to the audience with their art. The development and enrichment of choreographic art, the search for new forms, in this way, we observe in a creative union with adjacent muses, in interaction with other arts, where choreography does not dissolve in them, but while keeping its face, makes a fruitful contribution to the development of this union. The artistic integrity characteristic of the best choreographic works is based on the principle of synthesis of arts. Forms and means of dance-plastic action, principles of music-choreography dramaturgy, which allow to create works commensurate with the outstanding achievements of other arts, were formed in this experience. The key to the success of choreographic art is the mastery and development of this experience. (shrink)

Questions about the status of literary truth are as old as literary criticism, but they have become both more intricate and more compelling as literature has grown progressively more self-conscious and labyrinthian in its dealings with "reality." One might perhaps read The Iliad or even David Copperfield without raising such issues. But authors like Gide , Nabokov, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet seem continually to remind their readers of the complex nature of literary truth. How, for instance, are we to deal with (...) a passage like the following from William Demby's novel The Catacombs:"When I began this novel, I secretly decided that, though I would exercise a strict selection of the facts to write down, be they 'fictional' facts or 'true' facts taken from newspapers or directly observed events in my own life, once I had written something down I would neither edit not censor it ."1What does this sentence mean? When an apparently fictional narrator distinguishes between "fictional" and "true" facts, what is the status of the word "true"? It clearly does not mean the same as "fictional," for he opposes it to that term. Yet it cannot mean "true" in the sense that historians would use, for he calls what he is writing a novel, and even if he quotes accurately from newspapers, the events of a narrator's life are not "historically" true. · 1. William Demby, The Catacombs , p.93. Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor at Kirkland College, is currently working on articles on Raymond Chandler, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky and is, as well, a music critic for the Syracuse Guide. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in comparative literature on the philosophical implications of Nabokov's use of humor and terror. "Truth in Fiction" is the first article he has had published in a scholarly journal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 1. © 2018 by Olga Zilberbourg 95 Olga Zilberbourg Helen More’s Suicide My retired colleague Marguerite called to tell me of Helen More’s suicide. “Of all the sad, ludicrous things people do to themselves!” She invited me over. “Thursday night, as usual. I could use the company of younger people.” It had been about a year since I’d first been invited to these Thursdays —monthly (...) literary and musical soirees Marguerite hosted in her living room. Helen had been a regular at Marguerite’s for several decades; the two women were close contemporaries and each a celebrity in her own field. Helen was scholar of the English Romantics at the same university where Marguerite had taught Flaubert, Zola, and Balzac, and where I was now a junior faculty member in the English department. I’d heard of Professor More long before I met her: she lectured at the university from the 1960s until being forced into retirement in 2006 ostensibly due to age. She had a reputation as a militant feminist who eagerly engaged in battles about appointments and promotions, and her politics could have had something to do with it. “Are they sure it was a suicide?” In person Helen was a quiet, reticent woman with a sly, sarcastic sense of humor, and the idea that she might’ve committed suicide seemed outlandish. Vague murder scenarios floated in my mind. A disgruntled student? A male professor, passed over for promotion years ago and blaming her for his career failure? 96 Olga Zilberbourg “Yes, quite. The details are unpleasant, but do you know what she wrote in her suicide note?” “Of course she left a note.” “She said, ‘Thanks for the trip. Love to all.’” I couldn’t help laughing. “Yet when you think that having written that, she took all those pills and put a plastic bag over her head,” Marguerite’s voice broke. “Anyway, it’s not a conversation to have over the telephone. Do come over.” On Thursday afternoon, having collected the student papers after the last exam of the semester, I took the subway down to Greenwich Village. Marguerite lived on a third floor walkup, in a wonderfully spacious and tall-ceilinged apartment that back in the 1970s she and her husband had converted from a pillow factory. Since her husband’s death ten years earlier, the apartment had slowly turned into a trap for Marguerite. She suffered from arthritis in her hands, shoulders, and knees, and walking up and down the stairs became a nearly impossible exercise. She ventured out once or twice a week with the assistance of a visiting nurse. The place could easily fetch three or four million dollars, and Marguerite could use the money. Yet she was reluctant to sell. “I’d rather go without bread than without my piano and my books,” she insisted. A feeling of reverence and trepidation caught my breath as I climbed the stairs to Marguerite’s apartment. One never knew what kind of celebrity of the arts or music world could show up on any given Thursday. In her lifetime, Marguerite had known everyone, from Sartre and de Beauvoir to Picasso and Chagall. In the last few years the circle of her acquaintances seemed to dwindle, and yet still world-renowned musicians, poets, playwrights sometimes appeared among the circle of her former colleagues and students. I rang the doorbell and waited for several minutes as Marguerite crept to the door. “I’m afraid you’re my only guest tonight,” she said through the door, struggling with the lock and the knob. Finally, she pushed the door open. “Several people cancelled because of the end of the semester, and then of course, there’s the funeral. But come in, come in—we’ll talk of that later.” Marguerite led me into the living room, heavily shaded from the street and dimly lit with two floor lamps. Decorated with musical instruments, piles of books on the floor and on the low tables, and bright Olga Zilberbourg 97 modernist watercolors on the walls, the room seemed to belong to a royal palace, a vast, untouchable space. Usually Helen or one of Marguerite ’s... (shrink)

Brings together essays on the philosophy of art in which a philosophical theory of aesthetic judgment is tested and developed through its application to particular examples. Each essay approaches, from its own field of study, what Roger Scruton argues to be the central problems of aesthetics -- what is aesthetic experience, and what is its importance for human conduct? The book is divided into four parts. The first contains a resume of modern analytical aesthetics, which also serves as an introduction (...) to subsequent chapters. It also includes an essay that reviews current theories of literary criticism. The second part is devoted to musical aesthetics and contains the theoretical core of the work. Here Scruton describes the contours of aesthetic understanding, and defends the view that the object of aesthetic experience is inherently significant, even when it has no "content" that can be described in propositional terms. He rebuts the view that music is representational, and in the third part goes on to propose a theory of representation whereby to refute the suggestion that photography is a representational art. This third section also contains a study of film. The final part comprises essays relating aesthetic judgment to the understanding of culture, humor, and design. It covers many subjects, including the prose works of Samuel Beckett and the architecture of Leninism. The essays in this book form parts of a single intellectual enterprise, which is to give analytical foundations to the criticism of literature, visual art, music, and culture. (shrink)

David Lewis was ideally equipped for the venture. In his life he was a great celebrator of value, in ideas, arguments, music, history, trains, and, above all, sociability and humour. Indeed, the author suspects that, in his own life, desiring and valuing, and valuing and desiring, were intimately connected. Lewis rejects accounts of the valuing attitude in terms of judging to be valuable, taking to be valuable, believing to be valuable, or even experiencing as valuable. Conditional relationalism would have a (...) better fit, he thinks, with his underlying pluralism, which is tied to a lively sense of the delightful and devilish variety among humankind. The author finds Lewis's account of value congenial in many respects. He was fortunate to have had the chance to discuss some questions of further development with Lewis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Play, Laugh, LoveCynthia Willett’s Challenge to PhilosophyMegan CraigIt is an honor to respond to Cynthia Willett’s work, which has been an inspiration for me personally as well as a crucial corrective to the biases and blind spots of Western philosophy. Reading her entails reviewing some of the most basic features of one’s life: the place you call home, the people you live with, your mother or primary caregiver, the (...) words you utter, the other animals you love or ignore, and local conditions for justice, for play, for laughter, and for art. Her four major texts, all of them ethical, confront irony, motherhood, social justice, and animals. Because it would be impossible to deal comprehensively with the ways in which Willett has challenged and strategically sabotaged philosophy, my remarks here will focus on her most recent book, Interspecies Ethics, which expands several aspects of her early work on irony and laughter and her groundbreaking research on affect in Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities.Interspecies Ethics is a brave and joyful investigation into the possibilities for camaraderie and justice among and between animal species. The book is moving in its descriptions of animal behaviors and sharp in its critique of philosophy’s implication in the chasm between human beings and other animals. Willett’s text is also ingenious in its performative aspects. She devotes much of her attention to the comic and to laughter, in spite of the grave subject matter she tackles and a final chapter devoted to J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. She not only enjoins us to consider other animals’ capacities for laughter and humor, she tells jokes. Her first chapter, “Can the Animal Subaltern Laugh?” [End Page 59] (co-written with her sister) revolves around a Colbert Report episode relating to monkeys and ends with the phrase “ jello and porn” (probably the first-ever invocation of these terms, together, in a philosophical text). Willett’s humor recalibrates the expectations we have for philosophical prose and expands the resources we might use when philosophizing. Additionally, in laughing along with Willett, we are already exhibiting our animal natures. As she writes, “Waves of laughter lower defenses and mock the borders of subjects and groups, exposing these borders as more porous than they might have been thought” (Willett 2014, 79). In the spirit of forging a community of the laughing, Willett begins her thinking about animals not from the perspective of pity, shame, or horror at what we do to them, but from a celebratory glee in animal life.In this essay, I will stress a few of the themes running through Willett’s work and pose three questions for further discussion. These relate, in order, to interspecies contact, playgrounds, and to her reading of Disgrace.Contact EthicsWillett is concerned with the world we share with other animals, with our common lots and the blurred edges of our differing bodies and habitats. Her book invites an awareness of the tragic fates of so many animals, but also the ridiculous, comical, and joyous aspects of our overlapping animal natures. Her emphases fall on playfulness, laughter, and musicality—traits she observes across animal species and that challenge human exceptionalism. Interspecies Ethics continues Willett’s ongoing project of reimagining the conditions for ethical life. Rather than an ethics based in infinite responsibility, one premised on sympathy and the recognition of mutual suffering, or an ethics rooted in the internalization of a universal law, Willett envisions an ethics grounded in “call and response,” which she describes as “discourse ethics across species” (Willett 2014, 27). For her, “discourse” means an initial, preverbal, rhythmic participation in the life of another creature. This is a far cry from the rational discourse ethics associated with Habermas. Instead, she sees call and response ethics as a tentative, playful exchange that challenges accounts of language, reason, and rationality. It also corrects Levinasian response or alterity ethics by reminding us that “responding to alterity is not [equivalent to] living with those other creatures” (Willett 2014, 9). In a way, Willett’s vision of ethics entails normalizing and extending the Levinasian face to face encounter to see what happens when we face... (shrink)

What accounts for the apocalyptic angst that is now so clearly present among Americans who do not subscribe to any religious orthodoxy? Why do so many popular television shows, films, and music nourish themselves on this very angst? And why do so many artists—from Coldplay to Tori Amos to Tom Wolfe—feel compelled to give it expression? It is tempting to say that America’s fears and anxieties are understandable in the light of 9/11, the ongoing War on Terror, nuclear proliferation, and (...) the seemingly limitless capacity of science to continually challenge our conceptions of the universe and ourselves. Perhaps, too, American culture remains so permeated by Protestant Christianity that even avowed skeptics cannot pry themselves from its grip. In _A Consumer’s Guide to the Apocalypse,_ Eduardo Velásquez argues that these answers are too pat. Velásquez’s astonishing thesis is that when we peer into contemporary artists’ creative depiction of our sensibilities we discover that the antagonisms that fuel the current cultural wars stem from the same source. Enthusiastic religions and dogmatic science, the flourishing of scientific reason and the fascination with mystical darkness, cultural triumphalists and multicultural ideologues are all sustained by the same thing: a willful commitment to the basic tenets of the Enlightenment. Velásquez makes his point with insightful readings of the music of Coldplay, Tori Amos, and Dave Matthews and the fiction of Michael Frayn’s _Copenhagen,_ Chuck Palahniuk’s _Fight Club,_ and Tom Wolfe’s _I Am Charlotte Simmons._ Written with grace and humor, and directed toward the lay reader, _A Consumer’s Guide to the Apocalypse_ is a tour de force of cultural analysis. (shrink)

A Pulitzer Prize–winning dance critic teaches us to appreciate—and enact—grace in every dimension, from the physical to the emotional. Grace has long been taught as essential to civilized living. The Three Graces—goddesses of charm, beauty, and creativity—exemplify ease and harmony with one another and the world around them. But what has happened to this simple, marvelous concept of being at ease in the world? With warmth, humor, and an ever-perceptive eye, Sarah L. Kaufman sifts the graceful from the graceless, (...) celebrating heart-catching moments of physical elegance in sports, movies, dance, fashion, and music; rare sightings of celebrity grace; the secrets of gracious hosts; and grace found unexpectedly, in the kitchen of a high-end restaurant and among strippers in a basement bar. Kaufman’s thought-provoking reflections on these physical and social acts of grace offer hope for even the clumsiest, most awkward among us. Guided by the muse of Cary Grant (with further inspiration from Smokey Robinson, Roger Federer, Nelson Mandela, Margot Fonteyn, Amy Purdy, Beyoncé, and others), Kaufman illuminates the importance of grace in the small moments of everyday life. In The Art of Grace, she inspires us to walk taller, spend time on unnecessary kindnesses, and celebrate the grace notes in our lives and those of others. (shrink)

Like Alice following the white rabbit into a topsy-turvy world where the laws of logic don't apply, subversive thinking unearths the mysteries behind the mundane. Tracking the White Rabbit is a fascinating, original work that invites us to use depth psychology to challenge our deepest assumptions about world politics, theology, social norms, everyday speech, and usual ideas of sex and emotion. Raised in an environment of McCarthyism and rock-and-roll, Jungian analyst Lyn Cowan shows readers-through provocative essays on memory and homosexuality, (...) music and the art of cursing-that we can flip our ingrained attitudes on their heads and achieve a better understanding of our cultural landscape. America has been plagued by a flattening of its psychic life, Cowan argues, exhibited in the escalating need for external stimulation and the distrust of intense emotion. With humor and insight, she confronts the "isms" that entrap our imaginations (capitalism, fundamentalism, feminism, sexism, antisemitism, communism) in order to unearth a more soul-serving culture. Encouraging us to mine the creativity of spontaneous imagination, this psychology brings dramatic new ideas and themes into focus, breaking down barriers and yielding fresh perspectives on some of the more pressing individual dilemmas of our time: abortion, gender, language, homosexuality, and victimization. (shrink)

The object of study in the article is the Russian culture of the post-Soviet period. The subject of the study is the well-known rock band "Gaza Strip", which is considered as a cultural phenomenon that has influenced Russian culture as a whole. This band was created by the author-performer Yuri Klinskikh (creative pseudonym – Khoy) in the late 1980s in Voronezh. The band soon became super-popular, with virtually no media promotion. The band ceased to exist in 2000 due to the (...) death of its leader. But as shown in the article, Khoy's work has not been forgotten, it has largely grown into Russian popular culture and is still in great demand. The author makes an attempt to understand the reasons for this. The research is based on the study of numerous newspaper notes about the band, interviews with Yuri Khoy, books about the "Gaza Strip", lyrics of the band, as well as on the author's own memoirs. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time the creativity of the "Gaza Strip" band was subjected to philosophical reflection. An attempt has been made to understand the reasons for the popularity of this band and the demand for its work a quarter of a century after the death of its leader. Several reasons have been identified that determined the success of the band. The music of the Gaza Strip has found a completely new niche in the Russian music market. Due to its expression, it meets the psycho-emotional needs of adolescents. The use of obscene vocabulary contributed to the scandalous fame. At the same time, the swearing in most cases serves as an organic means of reflecting the social environment in which the lyrical hero of Hoy's songs is located. Apparently, the main ingredient of the band's success is the widest range of topics covered in the songs, as well as the presentation of material understandable to a wide audience, including through humor. At the same time, despite the obscenities in the vocabulary and artistic images, the humanistic pathos is obvious in the songs of the band. The combination of the primordial folk linguistic and cultural elements, the bearer of which was Yuri Klinskikh, with fashionable musical trends gave rise to a curious phenomenon that exists in three dimensions at once – counterculture, grassroots, folk culture and "big", nationwide mass culture. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 128.1 (2007) 133-137MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reviewed byLiba Taub University of Cambridge [email protected] A. Huffman. Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher, and Mathematician King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xvi + 665 pp. Cloth, $175.Diogenes Laertius described Archytas of Tarentum as "the one who rescued Plato by means of a letter, when he was about to be killed by Dionysius," adding that "he was also admired (...) among the multitude for every virtue" (Lives of the Philosophers 8.79, trans. Huffman, 256). Archytas is known to historians of ancient philosophy for his connection to Plato, although the precise nature of the relationship is, as Huffman explains, not entirely clear. Archytas' work on mathematics and harmonics and his thought experiment regarding the limits of the universe have attracted the attention of scholars particularly interested in history and philosophy of science. But prior to this volume, there has been no book-length study of Archytas of Tarentum (as Huffman notes, O. F. Gruppe's Über die Fragmente des Archytas und der ältern Pythagoreer [Berlin, 1840] was not concerned with understanding Archytas' thought but with arguing that no authentic fragments survive). Huffman's work will serve as the definitive study of Archytas.Overall, Huffman presents a very carefully considered account of Archytas' life, his work, and his influence. The study is meticulous in its detail, and Huffman writes engagingly and with humor. Furthermore, the merit of the volume is not confined to its usefulness for understanding Archytas and the history of Pythagorean thought. The subtitle of the volume—Pythagorean, Philosopher, and Mathematician King—only hints at the wealth of topics dealt with in the book. Through his detailed commentary, Huffman has produced a study that will be valuable for historians of philosophy, science, mathematics, and music who are more generally interested in problems such as the geometrical duplication of the cube and the division of the tetrachords in harmonics. Huffman's commentary engages closely and critically with the literature, providing an up-to-date review of relevant scholarship as well as fresh interpretations of some of the material. His thorough treatment of numerous issues and problems will be a valued resource for readers and encourage further discussion and study.Huffman's study of Archytas is divided into three parts: the first consists of several introductory essays concerned with "Life, writings, and reception," "The philosophy of Archytas," and "The authenticity question." The second part is devoted to the genuine fragments, and the third to the genuine testimonia; both of these provide the texts, translations, and very detailed and enormously useful commentary. One appendix deals with spurious writings and testimonia; another focuses on Archytas' name.As Huffman explains, the texts usually regarded as spurious far outnumber those that are thought to be genuine: only about one-hundred lines of text attributed to Archytas and printed in Diels-Kranz (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (6th ed. [Dublin and Zürich, 1952], henceforth DK) are usually regarded as genuine, while over twelve-hundred lines of almost certainly spurious texts are [End Page 133] collected in H. Thesleff, The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period (Åbo, 1965). Huffman, who clearly describes his criteria of judgment (97–100, and in the relevant portions of the commentary), accepts basically the same canon of four fragments as DK, although, as he explains, for somewhat different reasons, and he supplements the testimonia with some overlooked by DK. Tackling the problems posed by the "hodgepodge" of Attic, Doric, Lesbian, and Epic forms preserved in the manuscripts, Huffman has adopted the general approach of DK, only printing the Doric forms when they are found in manuscripts or strongly suggested by manuscript readings (xiv).Archytas was renowned in antiquity for a number of reasons. He was credited, controversially, with having intervened on Plato's behalf in order to rescue him from Dionysius II of Syracuse. He was also elected stratēgos numerous (arguably seven) times in Tarentum. And he was credited with having offered solutions to problems in geometry and harmonics, as... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

Aetiological poetry tends to be mature poetry in both a literary and a political sense. Interest in antiquarian lore belongs in general to a poet's middle and later years when youthful and audacious quests for what is avant-garde and anti-establishment have yielded to conservatism and a desire to preserve the past. Propertius and Ovid both turned to aetiological poetry after a long apprenticeship in amatory ‘nugae’ which enabled them, like their predecessor, Callimachus, to embellish their work with a diversity of (...) artistic devices founded on considerable poetic skill and literary experience. With this, a vital ploy to engage the sympathy of a sophisticated audience, went the poise and urbanity with which the aetiological poet found humour in the pose of earnest researcher, in the naivety of primitive cult and in clever literary adaptations. Moreover, dedication to a form of writing essentially nationalist and conservative encouraged a tone of patriotic pride and allusions, even compliments, to the ruling powers. In the light of such considerations we may examine Ovid's account of the ‘Ludi Megalenses’. The ‘Megalensia’ furnished Ovid with a goddess who had enjoyed fame and even notoriety in the pages of Roman literature. In addition to showing a poetic and neoteric interest in the orgiastic elements of her cult and the alien music of her retinue Roman poetry could reflect too the awe and reverence inspired of old by the Great Mother and expressed in the Greek poets, whom Lucretius claimed as his sources in his powerfully beautiful excursus on Cybele worship. Again, Cybele's importance in Rome had been augmented by her Trojan origins, concerning which a canonical Augustan theology had been established by Vergil in the Aeneid. (shrink)

Two themes run through Kierkegaard’s authorship. The first defines existential requirements for “becoming human”—reflective honesty and earnest humor. The second demarcates the religious phenomena of sobriety when human becoming suffers insurmountable collisions. Living with existential pathos teaches the difference between the either/or logic of collisions and the both/and logic of development and transitions. There is a difference between self-transformation and a progressive individual and social development. In the developmental mode self experiences gradual progression or adaptive evolution; in the self-transformative (...) mode self undergoes qualitative upsurges, leaps, gestalt switches, musical key transpositions of becoming in individual and social evolutions. Each individual in every epoch begins at the beginning. The author traces the movements of becoming in their parallel dimensions, drawing a fork through Kierkegaard’s writing. The first leads through the existence spheres of his pseudonymous authorship. The second intensifies the movement on the spot and in the moment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

This book extends Alfred Schutz’s “On Multiple Realities” by describing the provinces of meaning of play, music, religious ritual, and African-American folkloric humor. Throughout these provinces, the author traces two themes: resilience and responsiveness. In resilience, individuals or communities run up against obstacles, imposed relevances, which they come to terms with, or give meaning to (in phenomenological parlance), by modifying, evading, overcoming, or accepting them. Responsiveness emerges from Schutz’s idea of making music together, which the author takes further by (...) analyzing the mimetic encounter with the other and the asymmetries in listening to music, and, especially, by showing how the features of the cognitive style of music as a province of meaning affect sociality, disposing us to be more vulnerable and attentive to each other’s non-conceptual, musical meanings. This text appeals to upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students as well as to faculty in philosophy. (shrink)

Aesthetic Pursuits is Jerrold Levinson’s newest collection of essays and is marketed as a complement to his 2015 volume Musical Concerns. Whereas Musical Concerns was comprised exclusively of essays on music, Aesthetic Pursuits consists of essays on a variety of topics. As the broad title suggests, these topics are relatively disparate and wide-ranging, including issues of film, humour, literature, beauty and the emotions. All the essays, with one exception, were written after 2006 and offer a view into Levinson’s (...) thinking over the last decade. As a result, the collection features a more critical engagement with contemporary aestheticians than his previous volumes. (shrink)

This contribution is an attempt to integrate the notion of conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 1998; Fauconnier and Turner 2002; and Fauconnier and Turner 2003) and Linda Hutcheon’s (1985) view of parody as a form of repetition maintaining a critical distance, through the analysis of a multimodal Internet meme. The case study chosen is a parodic music video of the Knack’s classic hitMy Sharona, showing the absurdity in everyday life during the times of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study is thus (...) based on two conceptual paradigms: Blending Theory and Pragmatic Studies of Parody. (shrink)

Among numerous songs written by Wasowski and Przybora for the tv and radio show Old Gentlemen’s Cabaret two: Piosenka jest dobra na wszystko from the Fifth Evening of the Cabaret and Mambo Spinoza from the Eighth Evening might be considered autothematic. They represent an idea of ‘a song about a song’ — a common theme or motif in Polish popular music. In reaction to ideological degeneration of different forms of mass entertainment between 1949 and 1955, Wasowski and Przybora decided to (...) ‘redefine’ a song, writing these two pieces full of humour and allusions. (shrink)