Postmodern and Political Theory in a New Context

n/

Condição humana contra "natureza"

Adriana Cavarero: Quando o tema e a natureza humana, e quase obrigatorio acenar para Aristoteles. Na sua filosofia ja surgem duas questoes fundamentais. Uma diz respeito a propria plausibilidade de uma "natureza humana", entendida em termos objetivos e a-historicos (e, alem disso, modelada sobre o homem como paradigma abstrato e universal, ou seja – conforme observa Hannah Arendt – ficticio). Outra tem a ver com a necessidade de definir o humano com referencia ao nao-humano, que, em termos aristotelicos e por uma longa tradicao, e o animal. Hoje, o pensamento radical sobre a etica e a politica, e, de qualquer modo, o pensamento que julgo mais interessante, nao so nega que exista uma natureza humana entendida universalmente, mas tende, sobretudo, a definir o humano mais com referencia ao inumano do que ao nao-humano. Nao se trata apenas de um jogo de palavras. Assim, o nao-humano diz respeito – pelo menos tradicionalmente – ao animal. O inumano, por sua vez, alude a uma negacao do humano que e interna ao proprio humano. A barbarie de Auschwitz poderia servir de exemplo. Parece, alias, que a epoca historica inaugura uma reflexao sobre o humano que nao pode deixar de se confrontar com o abismo da sua autonegacao. E como se a natureza humana fosse uma questao que nao tem a ver com o lugar da especie humana na classificacao do mundo dos seres vivos, mas sim com o modo como os humanos desvelam para si mesmos o paradoxo da sua humanidade. Condicao humana contra "natureza"

YouTube birth and the primal scene

Motherhood has recently re-emerged as ‘material’ for artistic practice, and as a viable subject of academic research that both recognizes and extends earlier feminist assertions that the maternal is a key site for the anxious psychosocial negotiations of identity, subjectivity, equality, ethics and politics. Additionally, pregnancy and birth have graphically entered the public domain. Hundreds of thousands of short films of live birth, for instance, circulate around the globe on video sharing platforms such as YouTube, some with followings of many million viewers. Yet, how might we understand the desire to perform and spectate birth? ‘YouTube birth’ raises questions about performing and spectating birth in digital culture, and the meaning of watching our own birth with a mass public of millions of viewers. In this paper I explore these questions through revisiting the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘primal scene’. The primal scene is the Freudian articulation of the crucial role of infantile sexual and violent fantasies in structuring psychic life, linked to the loss of, or denial of, the material/maternal body as source or origin. Although within feminist scholarship the primal scene as a theoretical concept is radically out of date, it may be productive to revisit primal fantasies in the digital age, and the ways digital technologies shift our relation to ‘analogue’ notions of place, scene, birth, origin and loss. Exploring the continued place of psychoanalysis in helping to understand issues to do with origin, reproduction and temporality, I ask both what psychoanalysis might have to offer our understanding of performing and watching birth, and how a psychoanalytic configuration of the primal scene may itself need to change in relation to digital primal fantasies and technologies that function through fungibility and loss-less-ness

Narrative Personae and Visual Signs: Reading Leonard’s intimate photo-memoir. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

In this paper, I look at Joanne Leonard’s Being in Pictures and engage in a critical dialogue with an assemblage of visual and textual narratives that comprise her intimate photo memoir. In doing this I draw on Hannah Arendt’s take on narratives as tangible traces of uniqueness and plurality, political traits par excellence in the cultural histories of the human condition. Being aware of my role as a reader/viewer/interpreter of a woman artist’s auto/biographical narratives, I move beyond dilemmas of representation or questions of unveiling “the real Leonard”. The artist is instead configured as a narrative persona, whose narratives respond to three interrelated themes of inquiry, namely the visualization of spatial technologies, vulnerability and the gendering of memory. Key words: gendered memories, narrative persona, spatial technologies, photo memoir, vulnerabilit

Vozes Plurais: Filosofia da Express\ue0o Vocal

Il linguaggio, definito da Aristotele come phon\ue8 semantik\ue8, viene decostruito nei suoi due elementi, quello vocale e quello semantico. Analisi critica della de-vocalizzazione del logos nella tradizione filosofica occidentale