Drawing on the generous semantic range the term enjoyed in early modern usage, the book argues that person as early moderns understood it was an "experimental" phenomenon--at once a given of ...experience and the self-conscious arena of that experience.
While the plays of classical France achieve an unprecedented scenic perfection, what ultimately distinguishes classical drama is its unique awareness of its literary properties: the canny excavation ...of its resources as the site, instrument, and product of a concerted act of writing. But this self-conscious literariness also bears witness to the era's corollary awareness of the predicament in which even great art works stand as the occasion and counterpart of a critical, often ironic act of reading. In "inventing," that is, creating and discovering, the text as a vehicle of self-determining authorship, the "grands classiques" simultaneously invent the key critical insights shaping the methods we ourselves bring to bear on the poetic monuments they have left us. The literary monument thereby becomes its own "indiscernible counterpart," deliberately engaging what, in theory, ought to escape it--the deconstructive "other" only another contrives to see.
The matter of mind Braider, Christopher
The matter of mind,
c2012, 20121231, 2017, 2012, 2012-12-31, 2017-01-23
eBook
"What influence did René Descartes' concept of mind-body dualism have on early modern conceptions of the self? In The Matter of Mind, Christopher Braider challenges the presumed centrality of ...Descartes' groundbreaking theory to seventeenth-century French culture. He details the broad opposition to rational self-government among Descartes' contemporaries, and attributes conventional links between Descartes and the myth of the 'modern subject' to post-structuralist assessments. The Matter of Mind presents studies drawn from a range of disciplines and examines the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, the drama of Pierre Corneille, and the theology of Blaise Pascal. Braider argues that if early modern thought converged on a single model, then it was the experimental picture based on everyday experience proposed by Descartes' sceptical adversary, Michel de Montaigne. Forceful and provocative, The Matter of Mind will encourage lively debate on the norms and discourses of seventeenth-century philosophy."--pub. desc.
My aim in this essay is to take seriously the idea that the activity of criticism entails a distinct form of thinking. I develop my argument through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze's and Félix ...Guattari's What is Philosophy?, a text in which the two authors look back on their life's work to interrogate fundamental aspects of their shared discipline. For my purposes, to pose and answer the question "What is criticism?," two components of the book's project seem especially important. The first is that it is not just a book about philosophy but about thinking, and about the specific practices that characterize different forms of thought. Deleuze and Guattari hold up philosophy alongside science and art as three ur-forms of thought. Significantly, these three forms of thought can be seen to serve as the three major coordinates marking contemporary debates about criticism. What happens, I want to ask, when we subtract from criticism its affinities with these other practices of thought? What remains of criticism once we identify its specific differences from science, art, and philosophy? My claim is that the distinctiveness of critical thinking can be found precisely in its difference from these three other major practices. Secondly, What is Philosophy? is a book designed to interrogate the doxa of its authors' discipline. In a similar way, the aim of my own essay is to push against the institutional doxa of "critical thinking" by drawing out the virtues of a genuinely critical thinking.
Drawing on the generous semantic range the term enjoyed in early modern usage, Experimental Selves argues that 'person,' as early moderns understood this concept, was an 'experimental' phenomenon-at ...once a given of experience and the self-conscious arena of that experience. Person so conceived was discovered to be a four-dimensional creature: a composite of mind or 'inner' personality; of the body and outward appearance; of social relationship; and of time. Through a series of case studies keyed to a wide variety of social and cultural contexts, including theatre, the early novel, the art of portraiture, pictorial experiments in vision and perception, theory of knowledge, and the new experimental science of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the book examines the manifold shapes person assumed as an expression of the social, natural, and aesthetic 'experiments' or experiences to which it found itself subjected as a function of the mere contingent fact of just having them.
Students of seventeenth-century French drama offer oddly truncated readings of Jean Rotrou’s
. Fascinated by the play within a play in which the eponymous saint is converted to a Christian martyr’s ...faith by performing a Christian martyr’s role, scholars focus on acts 2 through 4, where the play in question is rehearsed and staged. However, overlooking the frame in acts 1 and 5, where the subject of the interior play is chosen and the problematic consequences of the actor’s conversion are laid out, obscures Rotrou’s true theme, which is neither of those conventionally ascribed to him: the staging of the martyr drama’s soteriological lesson or, in more secular wise, a baroque celebration of theater’s demiurgical powers of illusion. Rotrou reflects instead on the motives behind period reluctance to stage tragedies that draw on recent events, in particular the religious civil wars of the preceding century. Albeit in the discreetly displaced form of a martyr story set in imperial Rome, the play enacts the violent disorders associated with religion itself and so, by extension, the virtues of the new secular order that theater embodies.
The essay develops the implicit dialogue between the aesthetic theories of Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. The key to the dialogue is recognition of the underlying ontological grounds of the two ...philosophers' respective systems of aesthetics and of their different yet related reasons for turning to aesthetics in the first place. I argue that we reach a deeper grasp of what at once links and opposes Diderot and Kant by unpacking the ontological as well as aesthetic stakes of Michael Fried's classic portrayal of the rise of an aesthetic of "absorption" in eighteenth-century France - a phenomenon to which Fried's central period guide is the new-model art writing featured in Diderot's Salons. Where Fried interprets the "absorptive" pictorial effects of painters like Chardin, Greuze, or Vernet as laying the ontological foundation of modern art, the author claims that the prior condition for this transformation lies in the ontology of the modern itself as a whole. The consequences of this revision of Fried's insight are then worked out by linking Diderot's Salon criticism to the metaphysics of sense perception articulated in the Lettre sur les aveugles, and both to the way the contrast between scientific "limits" and metaphysical "bounds" in Kant's Prolegomena illuminates the German's motives for the aesthetic turn he takes in the Critique of Judgment. The result is to show that Diderot and Kant represent twin horns of the same historical dilemma addressed less from antithetical than from dialectically complementary sides.
PDF
