Julia Kristeva’s Maternal Passions

This article critically engages Julia Kristeva’s latest work on maternal passion as an antidote to what she calls “feminine fatigue.”  Oliver elaborates, criticizes, and expands Kristeva’s view that maternity can be a model for thinking about passion and its relation to creativity and even to ethics.  She relates Kristeva’s thinking about feminine fatigue to contemporary feminism in the United States.

Reading Nietzsche with Irigaray: Not your garden-variety philosophy

My short essay on Irigaray’s relation to Nietzsche could be divided into the beginnings of six arguments: First, Nietzsche continues to hold a special place in Irigaray’s thinking. Second, Amante Marine is an important part of Irigaray’s elemental philosophy. Third, Irigaray’s insistence on depth over surface in Amante Marine points to two different ways Nietzsche has been taken up in French Philosophy, which could be characterized as the difference between surface and depth. Fourth, Irigaray’s Amante Marine anticipates the most recent direction in Nietzsche scholarship, which focuses on plants and the earth. Fifth, following Nietzsche, Irigaray suggests that we can learn lessons about sharing the earth from plants. And, finally, Irigaray’s elemental philosophy resonates with my own conception of earth ethics as responsiveness to other earthlings and our environment, which I develop in my recent book Earth and World

Kristeva’s Sadomasochistic Subject and the Sublimation of Violence

Do representations of violence incite or quell violent desires and actions?  This question--the question of the relation between mimesis and catharsis--is as old as Western Philosophy itself.  In this essay, I attempt to think through how Kristeva might describe the difference between representations of violence that perpetuate violent desires and actions versus representations of violence that sublimate violent desires and thereby prevent violent actions

Tiny Leaf Men and Other Tales From Outer Suburbia: Re-Presenting the Suburb in Australian Children’s Literature.

This paper explores how, through word and image, Tan’s Tales From Outer Suburbia challenges stereotypical representations of the suburban. Typically, suburban spaces have been represented as aesthetically bland, mundane, and ornamental. Tan takes these tropes and ironically re-deploys them anew, and in doing so undermines anti-suburban sentiment, which has dominated Australian literary and popular culture. Although the notion of anti-suburbanism in Australian fiction has been well documented, its presence in children’s literature has received far less attention. As a case study, Tales From Outer Suburbia, signals the ability of children’s literature to present more positive representations of suburbia because of its inherent commitment to the socialisation of children, which is prioritised over the tradition of anti-suburbanism

Rape as Spectator Sport and Creepshot Entertainment: Social Media and the Valorization of Lack of Consent

Lack of consent is valorized within popular culture to the point that sexual assault has become a spectator sport and creepshot entertainment on social media. Indeed, the valorization of nonconsensual sex has reached the extreme where sex with unconscious girls, especially accompanied by photographs as trophies, has become a goal of some boys and men

Kristeva's Reformation

In my brief remarks, I consider what it means to return and rebind—that is to say, the significance of the re for Kristeva’s thought.  Kristeva does not just talk about binding or birth, or unbinding or death, but rather rebinding and rebirth, suggesting that it is a retrospective return rather than an original moment that is crucial.  The most significant moment, then, is not the moment of imaginary plenitude, nor the moment of originary loss, but rather the moment of rebirth that comes through rebinding after the loss of plenitude.  Indeed, Kristeva’s insistence on re-turning suggests that there is no originary moment of plenitude nor of castration or loss, but rather a constant movement of compensation for a recurrent loss.  By emphasizing rebinding and rebirth, she underscores not the loss as cutting wound but rather the healing power of signification, always already inherent within loss.  The flip-side of separation is reattachment.  And rather than just focus on the separation or cut, Kristeva looks to that which allows us to rebind and reattach in order to create relations that sustain us.  Both unbinding and binding are necessary for rebinding.  Thus, by focusing on rebinding, Kristeva insists on the process of unbinding and binding, and the oscillation between them

Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction, A Love Story

In The Right to Narcissism: A Case for Im-Possible Self-Love, Pleshette DeArmitt opens the space for an alternative to origin story so popular with political philosophers, namely, the social contract, which assumes a rational and self-identical subject.  She does this obliquely by deconstructing narcissism as love of the self-same, or, love of what Kristeva might call “the clean and proper self.”  Like Echo interrupting Narcissus’s soliloquy of deadly self-absorbed pleasure and his solitary auto-affection upon seeing his own reflection, Pleshette interrupts the seeming proximity of self-same, the closeness of near, and the propinquity of proper by deflecting the image of Narcissus onto the voice of Echo, who comes into her own by repeating his words.  How, asks Pleshette, can Echo’s reiteration of the words of another be anything more than mere repetition or reduplication?  Echoing Derrida, she answers that it is through a declaration of love.  Echo’s repetition of the words of Narcissus take on new meaning, and allow her to express herself, and her love, through the words of the other.  After all words are words of the other.  Language comes to us from the other.  Echo becomes a self, a “little narcissist,” through an address from and to the other, through the appropriation and ex-appropriation of the other’s words.

Bandages

“The bandages signify death,” says Derrida, “the condemnation to death; when they fall away, out of use, undone, untied, untying, they signify, like a detached signifier, that the dead one is resuscitated." Like a detached signifier, indicating a metaphorical relationship between signification and the bandages.  But, when we follow the metonymy of bandages in Derrida’s Death Penalty seminar volume one, the bandages appear as the figure for figuration itself.  More specifically, they are a sign that needs interpretation; a sign that the bandages are detached from the body; a sign that the word, or sign, is detached from the thing

Tiny leaf men and other tales from outer suburbia: Re-presenting the suburb in Australian children\u27s literature

This paper explores how, through word and image, Tan’s Tales From Outer Suburbia challenges stereotypical representations of the suburban. Typically, suburban spaces have been represented as aesthetically bland, mundane, and ornamental. Tan takes these tropes and ironically re-deploys them anew, and in doing so undermines anti-suburban sentiment, which has dominated Australian literary and popular culture. Although the notion of anti-suburbanism in Australian fiction has been well documented, its presence in children’s literature has received far less attention. As a case study, Tales From Outer Suburbia, signals the ability of children’s literature to present more positive representations of suburbia because of its inherent commitment to the socialisation of children, which is prioritised over the tradition of anti-suburbanism. Typical representations of the suburb in Australian literature have been of a place on the periphery of culture. Classed neither as a true, gritty slum, nor as a place of vibrant culture, the suburb has been cast as mundane, bland and ornamental. As such, suburban living has been used as a source of comedic inquiry, or as the object of artistic scorn. In recent years, however, cultural geographers have started to explore geographies of home and with it, the suburb. In doing so, they have begun to position suburbia as a site with its own systems of significance and find meaning in those objects that seem ornamental and trivial. Using the theoretical underpinnings of cultural geographies of the home, which seek to examine rather than degrade suburban culture, this paper explores anti-suburbanism in literature written for adults in order to establish the means for a comparative analysis with children’s literature. Using a case study of Shaun Tan’s Tales From Outer Suburbia it is argued that Tan takes tropes of suburban representations, such as the tendency to ornamentalise space, and ironically re-deploys them in order to challenge stereotypes. In this way, Tales From Outer Suburbia signals the potential of children’s literature to represent culturally rich suburban lives, something that literature written for adults rarely attempts, and is met with minimal success

Cognitive Demands of Semi-Natural Virtual Locomotion

There is currently no fully natural, general-purpose locomotion interface. Instead, interfaces such as gamepads or treadmills are required to explore large virtual environments (VEs). Furthermore, sensory feedback that would normally be used in real-world movement is often restricted in VR due to constraints such as reduced field of view (FOV). Accommodating these limitations with locomotion interfaces afforded by most virtual reality (VR) systems may induce cognitive demands on the user that are unrelated to the primary task to be performed in the VE. Users of VR systems often have many competing task demands, and additional cognitive demands during locomotion must compete for finite resources. Two studies were previously reported investigating the working memory demands imposed by semi-natural locomotion interfaces (Study 1) and reduced sensory feedback (Study 2). This paper expands on the previously reported results and adds discussion linking the two studies. The results indicated that locomotion with a less natural interface increases spatial working memory demands, and that locomotion with a lower FOV increases general attentional demands. These findings are discussed in terms of their practical implications for selection of locomotion interfaces when designing VEs