An utterly dark spot Bozovic, Miran; Zizek, Slavoj
2000., 20100525, 2000, c2000.
eBook
Slovenian philosopher Miran Bozovic's An Utterly Dark Spot examines the elusive status of the body in early modern European philosophy by examining its various encounters with the gaze. Its range is ...impressive, moving from the Greek philosophers and theorists of the body (Aristotle, Plato, Hippocratic medical writers) to early modern thinkers (Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, Descartes, Bentham) to modern figures including Jon Elster, Lacan, Althusser, Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen J. Gould, and others. Bozovic provides startling glimpses into various foreign mentalities haunted by problems of divinity, immortality, creation, nature, and desire, provoking insights that invert familiar assumptions about the relationship between mind and body. The perspective is Lacanian, but Bozovic explores the idiosyncrasies of his material (e.g., the bodies of the Scythians, the transvestites transformed and disguised for the gaze of God; or Adam's body, which remained unseen as long as it was the only one in existence) with an attention to detail that is exceptional among Lacanian theorists. The approach makes for engaging reading, as Bozovic stages imagined encounters between leading thinkers, allowing them to converse about subjects that each explored, but in a different time and place. While its focus is on a particular problem in the history of philosophy, An Utterly Dark Spot will appeal to those interested in cultural studies, semiotics, theology, the history of religion, and political philosophy as well.
Diderot on Nature and Pantomime Bozovic, Miran
The European legacy, toward new paradigms,
08/2018, Letnik:
23, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The article examines Diderot's view of the inconstancy of nature and its corollaries, the most obvious of which is the recognition of the impossibility of philosophy and natural history. For, if ...everything in nature is in a state of flux, no theory can keep up with its changes, reflect on them and capture anything more than an isolated moment. Diderot's conception of nature has important consequences for his aesthetic theory. If the goal of the fine arts is to imitate nature, and if everything in nature undergoes constant change, does it not mean that art-no less than philosophy and natural history-is also impossible? By focusing on Diderot's novel Rameau's Nephew (1805), I argue that the lesson of the numerous mimes its eponymous hero performs in the novel is that the dynamics of nature can perhaps only be captured by mime rather than on canvas or in stone, both of which, as Diderot puts it, can represent only a fleeting moment.
Although his main interest was in moral and political philosophy and legislation, it is through the panopticon and the theory of fictions that Jeremy Bentham made his most powerful impact on modern ...thought. The panopticon was brought to the attention of the wider public in 1975 in Michel Foucault’s famedSurveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, and Jacques-Alain Miller’s brilliant article “Le Despotisme de l’utile: La machine panoptique de Jeremy Bentham”; and the theory of fictions was “rediscovered” in 1932 by C. K. Ogden in a book entitledBentham’s Theory of Fictions. It is the panopticon and the theory
For Lacan, love’s most sublime moment occurs when the beloved enacts the metaphor oflove, when he substitutes his position of the lover for that of the beloved object and starts to act in the same ...way the lover has so far acted. In short, it occurs when the beloved returns love by giving what he does not have. To love isdonner ce qu’on n’a pas, to give what one does not have. Who, then, is the lover, and who the beloved?L’aimant, the lover, lacks something, he is the subject of the lack, the desiring subject; furthermore, he does
According to Malebranche, ideas and sensations are not caused in our minds by bodies or sensible objects themselves, but rather by God, who in the presence of bodies affects our minds with the ideas ...of these bodies.¹ When we look at a body, God affects our minds by means of the idea of this body and modifies them with a sensation of color. In looking at a material body, what we immediately see is an “intelligible body” or an “ideal body,” whereas the material body itself is incapable of acting upon the mind and is therefore invisible and insensible. That
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