Browsing by Subject "Foucault"
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Item Open Access Beautiful Annoyance: Reading the Subject(2011) Ozierski, Margaret AliceThis dissertation examines the pair subject-subjectivity embedded in the problematic of the end of art, as it is figured in exemplary fashion by film and literature. The analysis examines critically the problem of the subject vis-à-vis subjectivity by opening a dialogue that allows the necessary double terms of this discussion to emerge in the first place from the encounter with selected filmic and literary texts: Jacques Rivette's La belle noiseuse and Samuel Beckett's Film, The Unnamable and The Lost Ones. These texts are analyzed on an equal footing with the thought of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who have written on both subjectivity and art. The study thus proposes a real movement - in terms and through art - that treats the metaphor of anamorphosis on the level of praxis: the image of subjectivity appears on the screen that is the filmic or literary text as the result of a passage in terms. The subject that emerges at the end of the analysis puts in perspective a certain practice of metonymic reading as renewed political potential of subjectivity.
Item Open Access Confession, Sexuality, and Desire in the Decameron(2019-06-12) Zhang, YameiThis essay discusses how in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the stories of I.1, III.3, VI.7, and VII.5 subvert the fundamentally religious and juridical activity – confession – to serve a wholly different and erotically-charged function. In these stories, Boccaccio unveils the mechanism of confession, establishes a new theology, creates new laws, and brings about a reversal of discourse, which is a possible solution to the discourse of sexuality in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. In this way, narratives in the Decameron confessions, not only rebel again the repression of sex in middle ages, which is achieved by putting sex into silence or nonexistence, but also resist the will and consensus of knowingness – Scientia Sexualis – of modern times.Item Open Access The Background to Politics in an Age of Pluralism and Polarization(2015) Roberts, Aaron BerwickA diverse variety of liberal thinkers agree that the peace, order, stability, and well-being of government and society rest upon a fundamental bedrock of shared opinion, sentiment, sympathies, meanings, understandings, beliefs, etc. They appear largely correct in making this supposition, for the requirement is built into the very logic of liberal democratic thinking. And yet, the very plausibility of such a shared political background has come into question particularly acutely for the present generation, and, in large part, as a result of the twin forces of pluralism and polarization.
The two central questions engaged by this study are: (a) is it still conceptually plausible to presuppose such a background, and if so, (b) under what terms does it make sense; in what way should this background be understood?
This study tackles this set of questions by means of a critical analysis of select and especially prominent, representative intellectual schools of the twentieth century, for which the theme of pluralism is meaningfully central: (a) John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas (as exemplars of the political liberal project), (b) Michel Foucault and contemporary North American neo-Foucauldians (of the discourse of difference), and (c) Carl Schmitt (of the reactionary politics of meaning). The three Parts of the study are dedicated to these three schools.
The guiding hypothesis of the study is the contention that political order is always already premised upon a shared political Leitkultur (guiding cultural horizon), that is, some sort of implicitly understood cultural formation, whose structure is mis-described as being either freestandingly postmetaphysical; strictly the work of completely self-transparent, pure human reason; or a subtle vehicle for pernicious normalization. As such, pluralism and polarization is always already bounded within this guiding cultural horizon. Presupposing that the three selected schools are meaningfully representative of the intellectual, pluralist alternatives available in the early twenty-first century, the critical analysis of these three schools bears out the study's central hypothesis.