When the Gods Speak: Oracular Communication and Concepts of Language in Sophocles

Oracles in Sophoclean tragedies are consistently misunderstood, not because the gods speak in out-and-out lies, but because they communicate in a decidedly non-human mode that appears to violate the unwritten rules of effective human conversation. I use pragmatic linguistic theory to examine how oracles are misunderstood, since pragmatics is concerned precisely with these unwritten rules—how context, inferences, and implications complement the basic semantic content of language. These non-semantic elements are conspicuously absent from oracular communication, which leads to misinterpretation. I examine how the liminality and strangeness of oracular speech afford Sophocles the flexibility to explore the different components of language. Oracular speech—precisely because it is not bound by the rules of “normal” speech—offers a context in which pragmatic principles can fail and artificially constructed miscommunications can “break” pragmatic rules. By exploring the limits of communication and miscommunication, Sophocles illustrates exactly those guiding principles that underlie effective communication.PHDClassical StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138792/1/apistone_1.pd

Nomadic Passions: Encounters with Difference and Troubling Affect in the Novels of Jean Rhys

This thesis addresses the largely unchallenged assumption that the passivity of Jean Rhys’s protagonists is a dysfunctional limitation of agency. It proposes that Rhys’s critique of oppressive forms of power is at the heart of a passivity which is in opposition to dominant ways of being and thinking. It is argued that in Rhys’s four later novels there is a textual insistence on both the positive value of difference and the potentiality of difficult feeling. The study rethinks the value of Rhysian negativity using the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze as a presiding framework along with contemporary feminist theory, especially the work of Sianne Ngai and Sara Ahmed. Deleuze’s celebration of difference and his theorisations with Félix Guattari of minor literature and affect are used to interrogate the complexities of Rhys’s style and narrative strategies, and to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of her use of passivity as subversion and her exploration of becoming in the modern world. The thesis analyses how Rhys’s navigation of passionate dissent and morbid affects challenges the values attached to the less powerful and posits an alternative to the conventional quest for happiness. Focusing on failure, a textual death drive and the problem of female transmission, the study identifies in Rhys’s later four novels a preoccupation with the limitations of the literary text, and contends that her work conducts a ‘libidinal mapping’ which addresses the problem of complicity. It is argued that a search for the conditions of communality spans these novels. Deleuze’s intensive reading method is used to think through what emerges in Rhys’s inscription of difficult connection in numerous fraught scenes, and the thesis questions whether, ultimately, danger and negative affect attend or in fact permit the possibility of self-making for the emerging subject

Active Materials

What is an active material? This book aims to redefine perceptions of the materials that respond to their environment. Through the theory of the structure and functionality of materials found in nature a scientific approach to active materials is first identified. Further interviews with experts from the natural sciences and humanities then seeks to question and redefine this view of materials to create a new definition of active materials

Active Materials

What is an active material? This book aims to redefine perceptions of the materials that respond to their environment. Through the theory of the structure and functionality of materials found in nature a scientific approach to active materials is first identified. Further interviews with experts from the natural sciences and humanities then seeks to question and redefine this view of materials to create a new definition of active materials

Logic of Experimentation

"Beyond interpretation: a proposal for experimental performance practices Logic of Experimentation offers several innovative and ground-breaking perspectives on music performance, music ontology, research methodologies and ethics of performance. It proposes new modes of thinking and exposing past musical works to contemporary audiences, arguing for a new kind of performer, emancipated from authoritative texts and traditions, whose creativity is propelled by intensive research and inventive imagination. Moving beyond the work-concept, Logic of Experimentation presents a new image of musical works, based upon the notions of strata, assemblage and diagram, advancing innovative practice-based methodologies that integrate archival and musicological research into the creative process leading to a performance. Beyond representational modes of performance—be it mainstream or historically informed performance practices—Logic of Experimentation creates an ontological, methodological and ethical space for experimental performance practices, arguing for a new mode of performance. Written in an experimental style, its eight chapters appropriate music performance concepts from post-structural philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and technology studies, epistemology and semiotics, displaying how transdisciplinarity is central to artistic research. An indispensable contribution to artistic research in music, Logic of Experimentation is compelling reading for music performers, composers, musicologists, philosophers and artist researchers alike.

Cultural Anxieties and Institutional Regulation: Specialized Mental Healthcare and Immigrant Suffering in Paris, France

This dissertation looks at specialized mental healthcare expertise in France as a lens through which to address the institutional management and representations of cultural difference in France today. By specialized mental healthcare centers, I refer structures that provide culturally-sensitive mental health services to immigrants specifically. I identify and explore three contemporary expert approaches: namely, transcultural psychiatry, clinical medical anthropology, and ethnoclinical mediation. By providing a genealogy of specialized mental healthcare institutions, and by construing them as meta-discursive nodes --that is, as points of encounter between state, institutional, and individual ideologies--I provide an analysis of the cultural anxieties, contradictions and double-binds that arise from the opposition between a regulative, universalist republican ideology, and a field of expertise which strives to promote culturally-sensitive mental healthcare for immigrants. I argue that, as a product of the conflation of the immigrant issue : la question immigrée) and the social issue : la question sociale), immigrant suffering : Sayad, 2004) has become a medium that problematically couches immigrants\u27 difficulties -- whether they relate to mental health pathology or structural problems--in terms of cultural difference. As a result, generic cultural representations of immigrants are uncritically reproduced, making it difficult to identify and address the structural inequalities that do engender suffering

Psychotropes: Models of Authorship, Psychopathology, and Molecular Politics in Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick

Among the so-called “anti-psychiatrists” of the 1960s and ‘70s, it was Félix Guattari who first identified that psychiatry had undergone a “molecular revolution.” It was in fact in a book titled Molecular Revolutions, published in 1984, that Guattari proposed that psychotherapy had become, in the de¬cades following the Second World War, far less personal and increasingly alienating. The newly “molecular” practices of psychiatry, Guattari mourned, had served only to fundamentally distance both patients and practitioners from their own minds; they had largely restricted our access, he suggested, to human subjectivity and consciousness. This thesis resumes Guattari’s work on the “molecular” model of the subject. Extending on Guattari’s various “schizoanalytic metamodels” of hu¬man consciousness and ontology, it rigorously meditates on a simple ques¬tion: Should we now accept the likely finding that there is no neat, singular, reductive, utilitarian, or unifying “model” for thinking about the human subject, and more specifically the human “author”? Part 1 of this thesis carefully examines a range of psychoanalytic, psychi¬atric, philosophical, and biomedical models of the human. It studies and re¬formulates each of them in turn and, all the while, returns to a fundamental position: that no single model, nor combination of them, will suffice. What part 1 seeks to demonstrate, then, is that envisioning these models as differ¬ent attempts to “know” the human is fruitless—a futile game. Instead, these models should be understood in much the same way as literary critics treat literary commonplaces or topoi; they are akin, I argue, to what Deleuze and Guattari called “images of thought.” In my terminology, they are “psycho¬tropes”: images with their own particular symbolic and mythical functions. Having thus developed a range of theoretical footholds in part 1, part 2 of the thesis—beginning in chapter 4—will put into practice the work of this first part. It will do so by examining various representations of authorship by two authors in particular: Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. This part will thus demonstrate how these author figures function as “psychoactive scriv¬eners”: they are fictionalising philosophers who both produce and quarrel with an array of paradigmatic psychotropes, disputing those of others and inventing their own to substitute for them. More than this, however, the second part offers a range of detailed and original readings of these authors’s psychobiographies; it argues that even individual authors such as Huxley and Dick can be seen as “psychotropic.” It offers, that is, a series of broad-ranging and speculative explanations for the ideas and themes that appear in their works—explanations rooted in the theoretical work of the first part. Finally, this thesis concludes by reaffirming the importance of these authors’s narcoliteratures—both for present-day and future literary studies, and beyond. For while Huxley and Dick allow us to countenance afresh the range of failures in the history and philosophy of science, they also prom¬ise to instruct us—and instruct science—about the ways in which we might move beyond our received mimetic models of the human

Differential desiring practice- A path into a Deleuze inspired literary discourse

Drawing on Deleuze’s and Deleuze-Guattari’s differential and A path into a Deleuze inspired literary discourse in Difference and repetition and The logic of sense; Anti-Oedipus and A thousand plateaus and their engagement with literary texts in Kafka: Toward a minor literature; Proust and signs and Masochism: Coldness and cruelty, I unfold the following problematic in this thesis: What Deleuze (and Deleuze-Guattari) inspired critical practice can be theorized which allows the reading of works that resist interpretative representational practices? Proposing the differential, the libidinal, the schizoanalytic, the symptomatological and the simulacral as schizoid processes of discursive dissociation, this thesis theorizes and develops such a practice. More specifically I unravel and explore, theoretically and practically, the strands of what I term a differential desiring practice. Further I demonstrate the usefulness and power of this differential desiring practice, engaging first with Duras’ work as schizoid and liminal processes of event and becoming; and second with Carter’s work as schizoanalytic and parodic processes. Overall this thesis presents differential desiring practice as a reading and writing practice marked by thematic and stylistic schizodicity and discursive dissociation. Such a presentation not only opens a new path into a Deleuze inspired literary discourse by reappraising Deleuze’s and Deleuze-Guattari’s differential and schizoanalytic project, but puts forward a productive model for working with recalcitrant literary texts.Doctor of Philosoph

On Musical Self-Similarity : Intersemiosis as Synecdoche and Analogy

Self-similarity, a concept borrowed from mathematics, is gradually becoming a keyword in musicology. Although a polysemic term, self-similarity often refers to the multi-scalar feature repetition in a set of relationships, and it is commonly valued as an indication for musical ‘coherence’ and ‘consistency’. In this study, Gabriel Pareyon presents a theory of musical meaning formation in the context of intersemiosis, that is, the translation of meaning from one cognitive domain to another cognitive domain (e.g. from mathematics to music, or to speech or graphic forms). From this perspective, the degree of coherence of a musical system relies on a synecdochic intersemiosis: a system of related signs within other comparable and correlated systems. The author analyzes the modalities of such correlations, exploring their general and particular traits, and their operational bounds. Accordingly, the notion of analogy is used as a rich concept through its two definitions quoted by the Classical literature—proportion and paradigm, enormously valuable in establishing measurement, likeness and affinity criteria. At the same time, original arguments by Benoît B. Mandelbrot (1924–2010) are revised, alongside a systematic critique of the literature on the subject. In fact, connecting Charles S. Peirce’s ‘synechism’ with Mandelbrot’s ‘fractality’ is one of the main developments of the present study

Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology

This edited volume presents papers on this alternative philosophy of biology that could be called “continental philosophy of biology,” and the variety of positions and solutions that it has spawned. In doing so, it contributes to debates in the history and philosophy of science and the history of philosophy of science, as well as to the craving for ‘history’ and/or ‘theory’ in the theoretical biological disciplines. In addition, however, it also provides inspiration for a broader image of philosophy of biology, in which these traditional issues may have a place. The volume devotes specific attention to the work of Georges Canguilhem, which is central to this alternative tradition of “continental philosophy of biology”. This is the first collection on Georges Canguilhem and the Continental tradition in philosophy of biology. The book should be of interest to philosophers of biology, continental philosophers, historians of biology and those interested in broader traditions in philosophy of science