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?s universe is somewhat weird, often dreamlike and hallucinatory, and
his ontology fluid and elusive. It comprises the existing, the non-existent
and even contradictory entities, the ...boundaries between which cannot always
be clearly delimited. This universe in which nothing is of the essence of a
particular being and everything is more or less something or other, resembles
the amorphous and oneiric world of Zhuangzi in which nothing is clearly
defined, while essenceless things, floating in uncertainty and indeterminacy,
literally blend into one another. The author examines what the early
Hollywood comedies of Preston Sturges and the Marx brothers can teach us
about the metaphysics and the principles at work in this complex and
intricate world.
Didroov univerzum je unekoliko neobican, cesto nalik na san, halucinatoran, a
njegova ontologija fluidna i neuhvatljiva. Ona, naime, obuhvata kako
postojeca tako i nepostojeca, pa cak i protivrecna bica, izmedju kojih nije
uvek moguce postaviti jasne granice. Taj univerzum, u kojem nista nema
sustinu posebnog bica i svaka stvar je vise ili manje bilo koja stvar, mozda
jos najvise podseca na Cuang Ceov amorfni i oniricni svet, u kojem nema
nicega razgovetnog, a stvari koje bez ikakve esencije plutaju u neizvesnosti
i neodredjenosti se doslovno prelivaju jedna u drugu. Autor razmatra sta nam o
metafizici i principima koji vaze u tom kompleksnom i slozenom svetu mogu
reci rane holivudske komedije Prestona Stardzesa i brace Marks.
Diderot’s universe is somewhat weird, often dreamlike and hallucinatory, and his ontology fluid and elusive. It comprises the existing, the nonexistent and even contradictory entities, the boundaries ...between which cannot always be clearly delimited. This universe in which nothing is of the essence of a particular being and everything is more or less something or other, resembles the amorphous and oneiric world of Zhuangzi in which nothing is clearly defined, while essenceless things, floating in uncertainty and indeterminacy, literally blend into one another. The author examines what the early Hollywood comedies of Preston Sturges and the Marx brothers can teach us about the metaphysics and the principles at work in this complex and intricate world.
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.
One of the case studies in the famous Hippocratic Corpus, or, more precisely, the treatise entitledAirs, Waters, Places, attempts to explain an unusual malady calledanandria, meaning literally ...unmanliness or want of man-hood, which was widely spread among the Scythians, a nomadic people who lived somewhere in the surroundings of what was once Lake Maeotis, now the Sea of Azov.¹ The author—it cannot be determined who the author is, Hippocrates or one of his disciples—begins by stating that a great number of men among the Scythians were like eunuchs, that is, impotent; the impotent Scythians—as a
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
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