Time, Death, and the Feminine

Time, Death, and the Feminine PDF Author: Tina Chanter
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804743112
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Examining Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas’s thought. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the ecstases (past, present, and future) of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. The author suggests that though Levinas’s conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger’s philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas’s philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics.

Time, Death, and the Feminine

Time, Death, and the Feminine PDF Author: Tina Chanter
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804743112
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examining Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas’s thought. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the ecstases (past, present, and future) of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. The author suggests that though Levinas’s conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger’s philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas’s philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics.

Death and the Maiden

Death and the Maiden PDF Author: Brigid Burke
Publisher: Algora Publishing
ISBN: 1628944005
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
America was certainly the big winner of World War II, being the last major country intact. Euphoria, hubris, and a naive self-confidence became hallmarks of the people. This hubris was dented a bit in the 1950s when scandals erupted around the TV quiz shows that made everyoe feel so smart, and the U-2 spy incident of 1960 that revealed Americans were being lied to by the government. The book argues that these two events began the credibility gap that engulfed the nation later in the 1960s and continues to haunt us to this day. When the War ended, the United States still had its economy, infrastructure and industry intact. Taking up where the British Empire left off, the powerful new America expanded its influence around the globe. Suddenly light years ahead of any competitor, Americans abandoned themselves to a haze of consumerism and entertainment, trusting that they were safe and could not be harmed. The contestants on the big-money quiz shows turned out to be fakes, and the respected TV executives were also revealed to be liars and cheats. Far worse was yet to come. The United States government was caught in a lie regarding the CIA’s U-2 reconnaissance planes overflying the Soviet Union. On the eve of a crucial summit meeting in 1960, the USSR knocked Gary Powers out of the sky, along with plenty of incriminating hardware and data. Moscow delayed revealing what it knew, and Washington spent ten days denying it was a spy plane, then denying that President Eisenhower was aware of it. The world was turning into a very scary place, and soon, American schoolchildren were being taught to duck under their desks if a bomb should strike. Fear began to percolate into the heart of the nation.

The Electric Woman

The Electric Woman PDF Author: Tessa Fontaine
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374717028
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A New York Times Editors' Choice; A Southern Living Best Book of 2018; An Amazon Editors' Best Book of 2018; A Refinery29 Best Book of 2018; A New York Post Most Unforgettable Book of 2018 "Fascinating." —Vogue “This is the story of a daughter and her mother. It’s also a memoir, a love story, and a tale of high-flying stunts . . . An adventure toward and through fear.” —Southern Living Tessa Fontaine’s astonishing memoir of pushing past fear, The Electric Woman, follows the author on a life-affirming journey of loss and self-discovery—through her time on the road with the last traveling American sideshow and her relationship with an adventurous, spirited mother. Turns out, one lesson applies to living through illness, keeping the show on the road, letting go of the person you love most, and eating fire: The trick is there is no trick. You eat fire by eating fire. Two journeys—a daughter’s and a mother’s—bear witness to this lesson in The Electric Woman. For three years Tessa Fontaine lived in a constant state of emergency as her mother battled stroke after stroke. But hospitals, wheelchairs, and loss of language couldn’t hold back such a woman; she and her husband would see Italy together, come what may. Thus Fontaine became free to follow her own piper, a literal giant inviting her to “come play” in the World of Wonders, America’s last traveling sideshow. How could she resist? Transformed into an escape artist, a snake charmer, and a high-voltage Electra, Fontaine witnessed the marvels of carnival life: intense camaraderie and heartbreak, the guilty thrill of hard-earned cash exchanged for a peek into the impossible, and, most marvelous of all, the stories carnival folks tell about themselves. Through these, Fontaine trained her body to ignore fear and learned how to keep her heart open in the face of loss. A story for anyone who has ever imagined running away with the circus, wanted to be someone else, or wanted a loved one to live forever, The Electric Woman is ultimately about death-defying acts of all kinds, especially that ever constant: good old-fashioned unconditional love.

Dead Time

Dead Time PDF Author: Elissa Marder
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804740722
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This book explores how modernity gives rise to temporal disorders when time cannot be assimilated and integrated into the realm of lived experience. It turns to Baudelaire and Flaubert in order to derive insights into the many temporal disorders (such as trauma, addiction, and fetishism) that pervade contemporary culture.

Between Levinas and Heidegger

Between Levinas and Heidegger PDF Author: John E. Drabinski
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438452578
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy’s most pressing issues. Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple—and accurate—oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.

Into the Heart of the Feminine

Into the Heart of the Feminine PDF Author: Massimilla Harris
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692311448
Category : Femininity
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A Book for Women...and for Men This is a powerfully moving book that goes beyond gender roles into the soul of the archetypal feminine, exploring how it has been damaged and traumatized, and finding out how this condition affectsall of us. Written in a way that makes the material truly accessible to a wide audience, the authors' own personal and professional experiences are dynamically woven throughout the book in the form of rich and compelling stories.Massimilla and Bud Harris show how our feminine vitality can be restored by journeying into its heart and into the archetypal ruins ofthe feminine within ourselves. In these ruins, we will find the fertile ground and the archetypal motifs for healing the feminine within ourselves and our lives and renewing our capacities for strength, love and creativity.Imagine within each of us,there is a deep, powerful source for living lives of love, creativity and fulfillment...To imagine this foundation for life and the energy it produces is to imagine ourselves and our world filled with the influence of thearchetypal feminine - her passionate creativity, love and ageless knowing. Personally and culturally, this force - which lives at the heartof our lives - has been diminished and wounded until it seems to have retreated beyond the horizon, in a world filled with rationalismand an anxious search for the material "good life."

Over Her Dead Body

Over Her Dead Body PDF Author: Elisabeth Bronfen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719038273
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world'. The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs. The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.

Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas

Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas PDF Author: Tina Chanter
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271044156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This volume of essays, all but one previously unpublished, investigates the question of Levinas&’s relationship to feminist thought. Levinas, known as the philosopher of the Other, was famously portrayed by Simone de Beauvoir as a patriarchal thinker who denigrated women by viewing them as the paradigmatic Other. Reconsideration of the validity of this interpretation of Levinas and exploration of what more positively can be derived from his thought for feminism are two of this volume&’s primary aims. Levinas breaks with Heidegger&’s phenomenology by understanding the ethical relation to the Other, the face-to-face, as exceeding the language of ontology. The ethical orientation of Levinas&’s philosophy assumes a subject who lives in a world of enjoyment, a world that is made accessible through the dwelling. The feminine presence presides over this dwelling, and the feminine face represents the first welcome. How is this feminine face to be understood? Does it provide a model for the infinite obligation to the Other, or is it a proto-ethical relation? The essays in this volume investigate this dilemma. Contributors are Alison Ainley, Diane Brody, Catherine Chalier, Luce Irigaray, Claire Katz, Kelly Oliver, Diane Perpich, Stella Sandford, Sonya Sikka, and Ewa Ziarek.

The Hite Report

The Hite Report PDF Author: Shere Hite
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609800354
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
A reproduction of the classic text, unavailable now for more than a decade, with a new introduction by the author. The Hite Report, first published in 1976, was a sexual revolution in six hundred pages. To answer sensitive questions dealing with the most intimate details of women's sexuality, Hite's innovation was simple: she asked women, a lot of them, everything--and published the results. One hundred thousand women, ages fourteen to seventy-eight, were asked what they do and don't like about sex; how orgasm really feels, with and without intercourse; how it feels not to have an orgasm during sex; the importance of clitoral stimulation and masturbation; and to name the greatest pleasures and frustrations of their sexual lives, among many other questions. The Hite Report declares that orgasm is easy and strong for women, given the right stimulation; that most women have orgasm most easily during masturbation or clitoral stimulation by hand; that sex as we define it is a cultural institution, not a biological one; and that attitudes must change to include the stimulation women desire.

Feminism or Death

Feminism or Death PDF Author: Francoise d'Eaubonne
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839765151
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The passionately argued, incendiary French feminist work that first defined “eco-feminism”—now available for the first time in English Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but about life and death—for humans and the planet. In this wide-ranging manifesto, d’Eaubonne first proposed a politics of ecofeminism, the idea that the patriarchal system's claim over women's bodies and the natural world destroys both, and that feminism and environmentalism must bring about a new “mutation”—an overthrow of not just male power but the system of power itself. As d’Eaubonne prophesied, “the planet placed in the feminine will flourish for all.” Never before published in English, and translated here by French feminist scholar Ruth Hottell, this edition includes an introduction from scholars of ecology and feminism situating d’Eaubonne’s work within current feminist theory, environmental justice organizing, and anticolonial feminism.