Making Different Differences: Representation and Rights in Sexuality Activism

This paper argues that current iterations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights are limited by an overreliance on particular representations of sexuality, in which homosexuality is defined negatively through a binary of homosexual/heterosexual. The limits of these representations are explored in order to unpick the possibility of engaging in a form of sexuality politics that is grounded in difference rather than in sameness or opposition. The paper seeks to respond to Braidotti’s call for an “affirmative politics” that is open to forms of creative, future-oriented action and that might serve to answer some of the more common criticisms of current LGBTI rights activism

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Intertwining and Objectification

In chapter four of The Visible and the Invisible, titled “The Intertwining -- The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty considers the relation between the body as sensible, which is to say “objective,” and the body as sentient, that is, as “phenomenal” body. He makes this inquiry in the context of interrogating the access of such a sensible-sentient or objective-phenomenal body to Being. “Objectivity” and the objective body, as Merleau-Ponty defines it in the Phenomenology of Perception, are to be determined in relation to experience. Objectivity requires knowing how it is possible for determinate shapes to be available for experience at all. But the possibility of determinate shapes is also called into question by Merleau-Ponty insofar as the body is experienced as a point of view on things; thus every body would experience a different point of view, even though things are given as abstract elements of one total world. Since the two elements form a system, an intertwining, in which each moment (that of a body with a particular point of view and that of things in the totality of their world) is immediately expressive of each other, objectivity would seem to be hard to achieve. The relationship between body and things, point of view and world, if the relata continually express one another, would appear to be anything but determinate and the question of how objectivity is possible remains unanswered. This essay will explore this question in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s (mis-) reading of Henri Bergson and from the point of view of Sartre’s original expression of the relation of intertwining

Dancing Tango:The Realm of Appearances

Dorothea Olkowski, ‘Dancing Tango: The Realm of Appearances’, talk presented at the symposium Performing Embodiment: Practices of Reduction, ICI Berlin, 24–25 February 2022, video recording, mp4, 27:58 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220224_7

Phenomenology and the Realm of the Sensible

Graduate students from WSFR, The Theory Centre and Philosophy are invited for this pre-conference workshop. For further info and to RSVP please contact [email protected] Dorothea Olkowski is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. She is author of Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn, Indiana U Press, 2012, The Universal (in the Realm of the Sensible), Columbia U Press and Edinburgh U Press 2007, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, California U Press, 1999, and a number of co-edited volumes including Time in Feminist Phenomenology (with Christina Schües and Helen Fielding), Indiana U Press, 2011, and Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty (with Gail Weiss), Penn State U Press, 2006. She has also published around 70 journal articles and book chapters. Synopsis: As part of the ongoing efforts to undo hierarchies of representation and dualism in our ideas about mind-body relations, theories about affect have come to the forefront in contemporary Continental philosophy. Many of them follow from Spinoza’s dual aspect monism, which in its contemporary form states that feeling is based on the activity pattern of the body-sensing brain regions. Pleasure or pain corresponds to a disturbance of molecules and atoms of the sensory system, and intensity is a measure of the amplitude of such molecular movements. In this logic of sensation, which tears apart the organized senses, sensation is a nervous wave or vital emotion; it is flesh and nerve produced when external forces act on a body, as if the body had no ability to persist or act on its own. A wave of variable amplitude flows through a disorganized body, effecting maximum violence, the violence of forces acting directly on the nervous system. This sensation is cruelty, the direct and unorganized action of physical forces upon the body. As a result, the organs become polyvalent and indeterminate with respect to their organization and function, which will alter if the external forces change. Visually, one would then see spastic and paralytic bodies, hyper- or anesthetics. The reading for this seminar takes us from a classical account of representation to its postmodern undoing in theories of affect but asks if this is an adequate account of affective life. We will then turn to Bergson’s phenomenological notion that when an obscure desire becomes a deep passion it gradually permeates more and more psychic elements. How is it that as Bergson says, your outlook on all of your surroundings has changed and that the same objects and persons no longer impress you in the same manner? How is it that we can posit a qualitative and not only a quantitative experience of sensibility? Participants are asked to read the first chapter of The Universal which can be accessed through this site

Politics: The Highest Form of Philosophy?

According to Hannah Arendt, action is the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter. From this point of view, action is the basis of political life. But, although human actions are direct human interactions, each person must have a body and senses, a sensation of reality and a feeling of realness—and do we not share these characteristics with animals? Therefore, do we have the right to claim that human interaction and consciousness of an acting self are uniquely, humanly political? For example, what if we were to maintain that language is a second-order conventionalization of the expressive body immersed in an atmosphere, assimilating and being assimilated. If this were to be the case, how then can we explain the passage from elemental life, the life we share with all living things, to the acting in and among human pluralities that Hannah Arendt identifies with the political? Kant tried to do this by separating reason from sensation and separating respect from nature’s purely physical, causal forces. This essay examines Arendt’s claim that it is uniquely the activity that passes between humans that makes it possible for humans to consider themselves political

Serious Fun? Deleuze’s Treatise on Nomadology

In Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari analyze the manner in which what they refer to as deterritorialized flows of desire, have been reduced to state, family or religious hierarchies. Matter, capital, and libido are among the flows of desire for which nature and human nature are processes of production. The author’s argue that there is really only one process of desiring-production, that now capitalism and psychoanalysis are inextricably linked, and that the former produces subjective abstract labor, while the latter produces subjective abstract libido. Thus although nothing exists outside of the socius, without its inhabitants, there is no socius: “they are strictly inseparable and constitute one and the same process of production.” This leaves one with the uncomfortable conclusion that social repression and psychic repression are one and the same mechanism, and insofar as the transition from primitive territories, to barbarian despots, to civilized capitalists, which they refer to as State power, has proceeded lock-step, that there is possibly no place else to go.

Science and human nature: How to go from nature to ethics

This presentation is part of the Beauvoir and Arendt on Science track. Both Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir address the limits of modern or classical, mathematical science for philosophy in general, and ethics in particular, and they do so in a manner that does not reject modern science, but clearly articulates its limitations. Arendt argues that by using mathematical symbols, the science of the structure of the human mind, scientists were able to free themselves from simply observing natural phenomena; instead, they placed nature under experimental conditions developed by the human mind, replicating cosmic processes but without being able to understand them. Beauvoir argues against “an upsurging as stupid as the Epicurean atom [the clinamen] which turned up at any moment whatsoever from any direction whatsoever.” In mathematical and physical terms, the clinamen corresponds to deterministic chaos, the dynamical system governed by fixed rules but oriented by a strange attractor that makes existence a moment by moment deviation, from nothingness to nothingness, where each new moment is an effect of the past but breaks completely with that past which can then be defined as nothingness. Each argues that human nature, unlike physical nature calls for a past that influences the present and future, a view of time that arises with a logic and ethics of ambiguity

Discussion

Johanna Oksala and Dorothea Olkowski, Discussion of the symposium Performing Embodiment: Practices of Reduction, ICI Berlin, 24–25 February 2022, video recording, mp4, 29:51 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220224_8