Sublime Failures

Sublime Failures PDF Author: David Martyn
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814330777
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In Sublime Failures, David Martyn argues that a return to Kant's latent "Sadianism" helps to confront the unresolved question of agency -- or how to formulate an ethic after the deconstruction of the subject -- in cultural studies theory. Acknowledging allegations of Kant's "empty formalism" and even of his proximity to a certain Sadianism, Martyn argues that Kant's ethics are valid not despite but because of their similarity to those of Sade. In close readings that address the historical and material conditions of the composition of their work, Martyn argues that the efforts of Kant and Sade to totalize systems -- of ethics, philosophy, pleasures, crimes -- must fail, but that the failure leads to important insights about ethics. The book offers philosophical and rhetorical analyses of the two authors' major works, and focuses on two related thematic fields: the economy of the gift and the materiality of writing. Stories of giving and thievery in Sade are read in tandem with Kant's elaborations about what is and is not "given" to us in the phenomenal world, and Kant's digressions on the challenges of writing a critique of pure reason are correlated with Sade's depictions of the crime of writing. A reinterpretation of the Kantian sublime then allows for an alignment of these two paradigms by showing how writing and the "gift" invalidate the teleological premises of traditional ethics. The book concludes with a critique of Lacan's essay, "Kant with Sade, " which provides an occasion to assess questions of gender, "race, " and cultural alterity.

Sublime Failures

Sublime Failures PDF Author: David Martyn
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814330777
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Sublime Failures, David Martyn argues that a return to Kant's latent "Sadianism" helps to confront the unresolved question of agency -- or how to formulate an ethic after the deconstruction of the subject -- in cultural studies theory. Acknowledging allegations of Kant's "empty formalism" and even of his proximity to a certain Sadianism, Martyn argues that Kant's ethics are valid not despite but because of their similarity to those of Sade. In close readings that address the historical and material conditions of the composition of their work, Martyn argues that the efforts of Kant and Sade to totalize systems -- of ethics, philosophy, pleasures, crimes -- must fail, but that the failure leads to important insights about ethics. The book offers philosophical and rhetorical analyses of the two authors' major works, and focuses on two related thematic fields: the economy of the gift and the materiality of writing. Stories of giving and thievery in Sade are read in tandem with Kant's elaborations about what is and is not "given" to us in the phenomenal world, and Kant's digressions on the challenges of writing a critique of pure reason are correlated with Sade's depictions of the crime of writing. A reinterpretation of the Kantian sublime then allows for an alignment of these two paradigms by showing how writing and the "gift" invalidate the teleological premises of traditional ethics. The book concludes with a critique of Lacan's essay, "Kant with Sade, " which provides an occasion to assess questions of gender, "race, " and cultural alterity.

Gandhi, a Sublime Failure

Gandhi, a Sublime Failure PDF Author: S. S. Gill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


Blackbirds RPG

Blackbirds RPG PDF Author: Ryan Verniere
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1524880752
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 681

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Book Description
Blackbirds is a dark fantasy tabletop role-playing game, Powered by ZWEIHÄNDER RPG. The gods failed us. The powerful betrayed us. Rise to meet your fate. Twelve years of war have ravaged the kingdoms of Erebos, where the great battle that would decide the fate of all has been waged. . .and lost. Now, the lights of civilization are going out. Swells of refugees have taken to the roads, desperate to find homes far from all the suffering. New constellations twinkle in the vault of the night, only to disappear if scrutinized for too long. Creatures of long-forgotten folklore once again stalk the countryside. It is a time of ill omens and unlikely heroes. BLACKBIRDS RPG is set in a dark fantasy world where a cabal of power-hungry Oligarchs has stolen godhood. Their horrific act rent the fabric of reality, allowing corrupt magic to undermine the world's natural order. And, soon, the Oligarchs themselves will return to the mortal plane and remake it as they desire.

The American Monthly Magazine

The American Monthly Magazine PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 1228

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Book Description


Sex and the Failed Absolute

Sex and the Failed Absolute PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350043796
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism. In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture. Here is Žižek at his interrogative best.

From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad

From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad PDF Author: Robert C. Rathburn
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816604533
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
David Daisches, Douglas Bush, Robert B. Heilman, Arthur Mizener, and William Van P?Connor are among the contributors to this volume of essays on the nineteenth-century British novel. Each of the selections has been written expressly for this book and is p.

A Theology of Failure

A Theology of Failure PDF Author: Marika Rose
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823284085
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested. Against both the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before the theology’s failure and the deconstructive theological attempt to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens up new possibilities for confronting Christianity’s violent and kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church. The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite’s uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius’s legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek's account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek's work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity.

Bodycheck

Bodycheck PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004334270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
In ice hockey, the term body check refers to a specific move to gain control. It is a blow from body to body, a dynamic clash of physical strength, which will determine the course of the game. In this book, too, the body is checked and there is physical confrontation. Not in the hockey ring, but on stage. This book deals with the body in contemporary (performing) arts. The focus is on exploring theoretical avenues and developing new concepts to grasp corporeal images more accurately. This theoretical research is confronted with the voice of artists whose work explicitly deals with the body. In-depth interviews with a.o. Meg Stuart, Wim Vandekeybus, Romeo Castellucci, Jerôme Bel reveal a very broad range of views on the (re)presentation of the body in today’s performing arts. The combination of these two voices –the theoretician’s and the artist’s -shows that research by artists and cultural scientists is perfectly complementary.

The Modern Androgyne Imagination

The Modern Androgyne Imagination PDF Author: Lisa Rado
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919805
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, as changing cultural representations of gender roles and categories made differences between men and women increasingly difficult to define, theorists such as Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud began to postulate a third, androgynous sex. For many modern artists, this challenge to familiar hierarchies of gender represented a crisis in artistic authority. Faced with the failure of the romantic muse and other two-sex tropes for the imagination, James Joyce, H. D., William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and other modernist writers of both sexes became attracted to a culturally specific notion of an androgynous imagination. In The Modern Androgyne Imagination, Lisa Rado explores the dynamic process through which these writers filled the imaginative space left by the departed muse. For Joyce, the androgynous imagination meant experimenting with the idea of a "new womanly man." H. D. personified her "overmind" as the androgynous Ray Bart. Faulkner supplanted the muse with the hermaphrodite. And Woolf became a kind of psychic transsexual. Although they selected these particular tropes for different reasons, literary men and women shared the desire to embody perceived strengths of both sexes and to transcend sexual and artistic limitation altogether. However, courting this androgynous imagination was a risky act. It often evoked the dynamics, even the specific vocabulary, of the sublime, which Rado characterizes as a perilous confrontation with and attempted identification between self and the transcendent other--that powerful, androgynous creative mind--through which they hoped to generate authority and find inspiration. This empowerment toward which Joyce, H. D., Faulkner, and Woolf gesture in texts such as Ulysses, HERmione, The Sound and the Fury, and Orlando is rarely achieved. Joyce and Faulkner were unable to silence their fears of feminization and the female body, while H. D. and Woolf remained troubled by the threat of ego incorporation and self-erasure that the androgynous model of the imagination portends. Still, their pursuit of new imaginative tropes yields important insights into the work of these writers and of literary modernism.

Error and the Academic Self

Error and the Academic Self PDF Author: Seth Lerer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023150747X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
How and why did the academic style of writing, with its emphasis on criticism and correctness, develop? Seth Lerer suggests that the answer lies in medieval and Renaissance philology and, more specifically, in mistakes. For Lerer, erring is not simply being wrong, but being errant, and this book illuminates the wanderings of exiles, émigrés, dissenters, and the socially estranged as they helped form the modern university disciplines of philology and rhetoric, literary criticism, and literary theory. Examining a diverse group that includes Thomas More, Stephen Greenblatt, George Hickes, Seamus Heaney, George Eliot, and Paul de Man, Error and the Academic Self argues that this critical abstraction from society and retreat into ivory towers allowed estranged individuals to gain both a sense of private worth and the public legitimacy of a professional identity.